Is there any ray of hope that blizz is doing anything against bots?

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Hey there. Short info about myself I played WoTLK to MoP and stopped with the WoW Killer Draenor back in the days.

Now my friendgroup and I came back for Cata. The nostalgia hits good and I am having a lot of fun so far with one HUGE issue.

There are so many fkng bots on my server it’s ridiculous.

I see a sh*tton of Dungeon Bots (PalaTanks Botanica Dungeon) but those were common back in the days aswell - not saying that’s fine but at least I know about them

The sheer amount of farming bots in the Cataclysm areas are abhorent.
Trying to max my herbalism is a challenge in itself - to even find flowers before a bot is so hard it’s laughable if it wouldn’t be so sad.

There are (at least) 8-12 Bots flying around 24/7 in Hyjal, Uldum and Twighlight Highlands to farm flowers to no end.
Is this on every server or was my choice of server just super unlucky?!

What happend? Is this normal? I thought New World was hot garbage bcus it was/is Bot riddled through and through

If this kind of stuff is the todays standard I won’t even farm gold to buy the tokens because the price gets artificially ramped up bcus of blizzards incompetence to ban them. I have waited over 2 months to see if something changes or they ban them in waves only to get dissapointed.

Now that I vented a bit I really wanna know if that is happening on every server?

In the time i wrote this post i reported 13 other bots farming in Twighlight Highlands by just sitting on one spot…

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Generally every game has forms of cheating infestations, as you noticed in New World it is also prevalent at the Blizzard Platform.

They do try to do something about it but they tend to come back (near immediately) after banwaves.

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Bots pay a sub and Bots farm gold
Real Players who play the game a lot usually buy gold
Real players also usually have more than one sub
Cheap gold keeps those players happy and invested in the game.

bots are good for blizzard.

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Well if that is truly the case then my new spark for World of Warcraft will sadly end very soon and probably my whole guild aswell because I am not supporting someone with money that is not interested in the quality of their product and neither do my friends.

Pretty disappointed because I really thought that I won’t have that issue that was everywhere in New World here aswell. Guess it is time to say goodbye to modern MMORPGs completely

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  • With fraudulent or stolen cards* which if charged back causes merchant losses. Or stolen accounts and so on.
  • You don’t need to buy gold to play the game.
  • You don’t need more then one sub to play the game. The fact is also that MB assistance is banned so having more then one sub is unlikely.
  • Cheap gold means lower gold purchase power, causing an inflationary problem.

If we infer that players do buy illegal gold, to get cheap gold, which increases the botting problem then get posts like these screaming for Blizzard to take action it is actually a net negative for Blizzard, meaning bots are bad for Blizzard.

I haven’t seen anyone honestly, but according to some statistics gaming fraud with cards has decreased on a yearly basis but is still prevalent:

Therefore I think your desinformation that it doesn’t exist is blatantly false. Why would the goldsellers from all games they bot or sell currencies illegally at, just for WoW not use fraudulent or stolen CC’s? This is such a weird take. You didn’t even include any source where you even think that they don’t use this method.

For example in another F2P game Valorant & League this is explained in more detail why it is so difficult:

The botting problem is prevalant in all games/MMO’s, not just WoW. If there was a solution there would be one by now.

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz:

You may suggest any methods you may think of through the ingame feedback box but it is not likely that it will be groundbreaking new suggestion.

Source.

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How many times do people have to correct you on that? Stolen creditcards paying for bots was a thing 15years ago, these days botting is an actual business, the monthly sub is nothing compared to the amount of cash you make so why would you risk credit card fraud when you can do it completely legal?

However yes, the main motivation behind not dealing with bots isnt that bots pay sub money, its that they would have to hire people so they can constantly ban bots/work on better anti cheats, and sadly for blizzard people dont wanna work for free.

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This is an article about overall fraud in the gaming industry, you cant just imply that because online fraud exists a significant amount of bots are paid with stolen credit cards. Frauds are illegal (hence the name FRAUD), botting / selling gold isnt, your article is pointless in that regard. Using this article, you could also pretend that normal players are using stolen credit cards to pay for their sub

I think you misunderstand me on purpose, ofc it exists, but

makes it sound like blizzard makes close to no money from bots which is again, wrong. We dont know how much they lose exactly, but it seems like its not enough to care about if they dont wanna get rid of the problem

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I searched up bot issues to see if I was seeing an isolated incident of botting. It’s a bit worrying google had this as the top result posted 2 hours ago.

I play on Firemaw-PVP EU and whilst completing Eastern Kingdoms Exploration, I ended up in Eversong Woods and have seen 3-4 bots in a few minutes. Considering Firemaw is Alliance dominated these bots won’t be spotted early on as no one is going to Eversong on Alliance side. I can count on one hand the number of Horde Characters i’ve seen in my 178 hours on this server (even fewer the ones who weren’t obvious alt characters of Alliance) and to see a similar number of Horde in one area can’t be a coincidence.

I wonder if the situation is similar on Gehennas for Alliance-side.

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yeah maybe the first month, Every month after that they just buy wow tokens that were bought by real players. So blizzard profits at the end.

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I am currently playing on Gehennas Horde. If you want to see bots just travel to Uldum and stay on the herb farm route for a minute. I am sadly not exaggerating when I wrote 8-12 bots per farmroute.

I maxed my herbalsim in Deepholm because there are a lot less bots there
But farming Twighlight Jasmine won’t be possible because I would have to camp a singular spot for it to actually be “efficient” - in Twighlight Highlands are way more bots - i stopped reporting them after 15 because the bots i already reported turned up again.

There is a solution to this problem. There always was but companies hate to quality control their product and pay actual workers to manually review these reports. But that won’t be happening anytime soon because corporate greed + “hey people play anyways”

It should be no secret for people that most gaming giants report system is fully automated and mostly happening when they get mass-reported

As I wrote before I was playing a good 4 months of New World. Even they have no manual review for reports despite the game being super super small in comparison.

And before someone here hit’s me with “then stop playing the game or crying” I am fully aware that this post is not causing blizz to change

It’s just a frustrated scream into the void and a bit of searching for hope.

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I don’t think Blizz is going to take any action at all against bots. On Mirage Raceway (probably on other servers as well) the bot owners even form guilds, some of them are active (and reported) since early wotlk. Blizz seems to not care at all, most likely because of the income they get from bots.

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“The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts” - Kaivax.

This doesn’t mean they are actually good at it, just that they are the least bad they have ever been which isn’t something to brag about.

The insane amount of active obvious bots at the moment is embarassing. They should be automatically detected and banned its 2024.

In my cyber sec job, I add rules to bank scam detection systems that try to pick up suspicious activity in accounts. Simple things like “trying to remove all the money from an account”, “small repetitive transfers”. It can get much more complex obviously and new rules will be added all the time when we learn from new scam attempts.

Now if you spend literally 30 seconds looking at how these bots work you will realise they are probably all using the same 1-2 bot programs. The levelling ones will always stop what they are doing to cast a heal <50%, they NEVER walk into a mobs hitbox or try to hit it in the back, they almost always walk with jagged turns probably using click to move. They always equip the same gear from quests. They never target nearby players.

The mining bots are almost always paladin or dk, some druid. Most of them either have really low level gear since they stopped questing after wrath and levelled to 85 by gathering, or they have 100% BoE gear. They always land exactly on top of a node if they can. Even just checking the average distance a character picks up a node from would show you a bot is always closer.

You can type any of:

/who botanica 80-85
/who Uldum 85
/who Deepholm 85

There is almost no reason for 85 players to be in those areas, but you will see a massive % of them are DK and Paladin. How many <100k hp 85 guildless DK and Paladins with herb and mining, who have had most of their exp from gathering do you come across in those areas do you think are actual players? The answer is none and there are hundreds of them. All of this should be autodetected like in bank transactions.

I would love if they let me be a GM and teleport around and instantly perma ban all bots. Would do it for free like the old league of legends tribunal.

There are other obvious bots on some realms. For example on Golemagg theres the same 2 bots that I have reported since release of cata that constantly relist 1 cloth at a low price to fool players into listing a stack at that price. If you list one by accident it is instantly bought. If you buy their cheap one, its instantly relisted. It doesn’t change much except annoy people, but the fact that someone has almost definitely looked at that report and disregarded it is disheartening.

Levelling a character it was always nice to see other players, but now its just depressing wondering if you are the only real player in the whole zone.

If blizzard truly wanted to get rid of bots they would add a tribunal or start auto banning them.

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i reported like 10 botanica bots a few days ago, the day after i got multiple blizzard ingame mails telling me that my reports resulted in action taken.

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Bots are also good for some players, they keep prices of herbs and ores low by oversupplying the AH. If no bots, mats prices would go thru the roof.
Bots are mostly hated by herb/ore farmers, others benefit from bots.

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yes i agree.

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