If it´s so easy, the why has no gamedev in the history of online gaming actually done it successfully? Maybe it actually isn´t as easy as you portray, eh?
Ot the entire industry is incompetent… judging by the rest of your post, that’s the rebuttal I expect, anyway… all just greedy and incompetent, even the people who struggled with this before live service was even a brainfart.
And get their game banned every country in Europe becasue DPLs exist and the EU-GDPR is not to be trifled with.
But hey, if the game is banned, then you don’t have to care if there are bots or not, eh?
The rest of your post is nothing but wild speculation or at best hearsay which you yourself cannot prove.
And thh OP themself can probably attest to whether this new WoW account has everysthig that his old account did… But I´m sure you have an explanation for that, too, probably that he´s incompetent… I mean, after all, he did get caught, right?
1/10, low effort trolling with little actual substance. If its all so easy, learn to code and show us all how it´s done for a consulting fee, you can easily be a millionaire in under a year.
Every metric used to catch a bot can be worked around somehow. If they look for a specific pattern (can’t be a vague pattern or it would catch a lot of real players just out farming their herbs) can be avoided by bots once they understand what the pattern is. So it’s cat & mouse. The cat pounces and catches the mouse. Next time the mouse knows not to do whatever specific thing that they did before that pounce.
I already can code. This is why i know how easy it is to solve.
Just disable the lua api or restrict certain obvious functions or make signatures its not hard.
For example functions related to forward, backward, left, right, strafe movement isn’t even restricted you can use them yourself right now if you know lua and make a very primitive bot that follows a path.
bots today are obviously more advanced by using memory editing but the principle is the same if they dont have access to the api to automate the game they cant function.
These functions should only be used internally for pathing of npcs etc.
Most of these bot programs cost like 100 dollars monthly so if blizzard takes a cut thats alot of money down the line. Creating zero incentive to remove it.
They could solve this today if they wanted to. But again they want to make money.
To get around GDPR they could properly just update their terms of service most wow players hate bots since they have been plagueing the game since forever so i doubt anyone would object lol.
The war on botting is like the war on malware, it’s a constant arms race. Since the bot / malware authors have to show their ideas in the wild before anti-cheat / anti-malware can spot them, let alone learn how to fight them, the bad guys usually have an advantage.
I’m not saying this is a reason to give up, fighting botting is an important part of game moderation, however it does make it harder than just “banning the bots”
Including you? Since you keep outing yourself as a programmer in your posts. Why haven’t you or other anti-cheat programmers solved this problem yet? The answer is very simple: A script kiddie that codes
cheat.block(true);1
And then think “yea that will stop them” gets bamboozled because all those bot workshops will just then code around it. Every single time a particular bot gets detected they will adjust to avoid detection. Everytime it gets blocked immediately they adjust so it works again. They won’t just throw up their hands in the air and say “ah well our bot gets blocked we’re out of a job” IT IS THEIR JOB to create bots, at the cost of honest players.
No game with bots has solved this problem yet.
Especially not at the same scale as WoW.
Comments like these make me wonder if you know what “cheating” means. They don’t need access to this to cheat, heck even if it were all disabled crippling regular player population they would just actually cheat using other non-access functions and we would still have the same problem.
The API is a route for authorised code (IE code blizzard writes, and addons) to access information from the game, nothing more nothing less. Most APIs require an authorisation token so won’t even provide any data unless the token is provided. (I don’t know if Blizzard does this, but it would be sensible)
Cheating involves using executable code to modify the game client to allow things that are not possible with the API alone.
The two are very different.
I don’t see what GDPR has to do with this, Blizzard collects more data (With consent) than you can imagine, in order to get important feedback about how the game is played, and of course to look for cheaters. In any case, a company “getting around GDPR” is not a good look, and will cause far more harm than botting does in terms of the game’s bottom line.
blizzard do honey traps
that means they are aware of certain bot programs and catch people botting
also
im not gonna tell you how to bot or how to get away with it, but i would assume those active bots in game are using VPN and Spoofs
and are using less invasive or predictable patterns
if i were to guess, they normally like to catch big fish rather than small fish
Congratulations, you´ve now made botting insignificantly harder and in no way impossible, and have in the process deactivated every accessibility option in the game, locking millions of players out.
Most modern bots don´t use accesibility options, the new generation of bots are made by people who are close to the cutting edge of AI coding. It also does nothing to address the plethora of bots that do not need hte game cliet to incorporate /utilize lua… This solution would have worked 20 years ago for a few months or maybe even years, but is laughably superficial in today’s ecosystem.
Every studio I know or have contacts with has every known bot installed in a testing environment and is entirely capable of keeping them out.
The probem are the ones you don´t know yet, because you aren´t going to find these using google, the only botting softwares that the public has access to are teh obsolete ones, because it helps to shroud the ones that are actually viable by duping players like the OP into using them and getting banned faster than they can blink.
No, they could not “just update their ToS”, because their ToS does not trump law, and it is explicitly prohibited to scan memory that your application is itself not using, period. If it were that simple, don´t you think that everybody and their mother would already be doing exactly that?? Oh, right, I forgot, we´re all incompetent, that´s why we don´t do it, not because it´s illegal.
The only legal option would be a Kernel level solution such as the one valorant uses… and guess what: They still have bots. And Kernel level anti cheat /anti botting measures are “controversial” at best… if you really know anything at all about coding, then I don´t have to explain why.
Pure speculation, if you have proof I´m sure you can upload it and link it.
Again, if it´s so easy, why hasn´t it been solved yet… Oh, right, because myself and thousands of my peers are all just incompetent, and in bed with the botters, I forgot again, my bad
If you really have a workable and permanent solution that won´t result in products gettin banned in entire continents, then literally every game company on earth that runs a live service game will gladly pay you 250-500k for a mere month of work as a consultant… that 3 million bucks+ in one year, 2,5 if you spend a month in Bora Bora chilling.
My employer as well as every other game company on earth awaits your submission.
Please read mine, Sanekos and Credulon’s posts and you’ll understand why none of this is true.
Fighting botting is fighting an unknown with one hand tied behind your back as you still have to have a functional product for your customers. You may feel some companies manage better than Blizzard, but it is no way a lack of interest.
Because those botters are better at botting than you and despite people thinking “oH the botting problem is easy to solve!” it actually isn’t. because botting has been a problem since videogaming in multiplayer became a thing.
Soon as Blizzard ban one bot. The botter has at least 5 ready to go again on a new account.
“Ban them right away!”
Yes again this where botters are cleverer than you as well.
Did it never occur to you that the botters are ready for the bans and are watching what Blizzard will do so they can counteract the measures and make their new bots avoid security systems?
Do you actually think every professional botter making more money in a week than most people see in a year will simply throw their hands up and say “oh well. Thats it then” when they get a bot account banned?
I’m sure everyone had a jolly good time watching that video of the “bot buster!!” but again… Every bot he “killed” was up and running again in 5 minutes.
You really want to see the end of Botting in WoW? Then you’ll never play WoW again because the only botting will be permanently stopped in WoW is when Blizzard shut the servers down.
Its unfortunately just one of those things you have to put uo with in online gaming. Like screaming thirteen year olds threatening to come to your house and commit violence, or a 40 year old man baby raging at his team because he didn’t kill a boss fast enough, sooner or later you’re going to see a bot doing bot things.
So unless you have a sure fire way to obliterate every bot and make sure they never come back, not much you can do.
(Edit. You was “you” in general, not “you” personally.)
this is so odd to me,.
why are you in a bad mood all the time?
and why everytime that something happens to someone your happy and pouring salt on their wound???
