Im sorry for that, I thought the reason classic is neglected is because devs just dont care, but they actually wanna take revenge on me and other stupid guys on the forums. If only the forum would exclusively be filled with debate bros praising blizzard, man the game would be insanely good.
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Berny thinks Blizz should Just hire a GM.
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It is not in any way our or Blizzardâs fault that you appear to have a radically binary / Black and white view of the world that categorically denies the possibilty of grey existing⌠everyone either agrees with you, on everything, or their obviously just out to get you, and only you specifically, because you really are that important to everyone else´s lives. 
It is completely pointless to even attempt any form of rational debate under those cirumstances, so I won´t.
But then again, you don´t seem to want debate to begin with, you just want blind agreement. Which any objective reality must in turn itself categorically deny. That´s just life, merely wanting to be right at all costs doesn´t actually make it so, sorry, not sorry.
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Do we rly have to âattempt any form of rational debate 
â to figure out if multi billion dollar companies can hire cheap labor for monkey work? This aint twitter, stop âdebatingâ and start discussing.
Any discussion of any topic with even the slightest semblance of nuance will by definition explicitly include debate. Which you now admit to not having any interest in, and therefore by logical extension no interest in actual discussion of the matter.
Thank you for proving my point beyond any shadow of a doubt. I´m done here, and with you. Have a nice life, and enjoy the holidays.
I see
You too mate!
Not really, they can outsource this to a trustworthy company, there are hundreds of companies that can provide a coded solution to this issue. You donât need to ban bots one by one or in waves, there are some insane algos out there should you pay the price, and I can guarantee you that vs this, those undergraduate handmade bot programs would last approximately 1 second. Hell I think the guys I take some classes with (as undergraduate, as math major we share 2 classes with CS major) could come up with a solution for the most obvious ones.
So either blizzard canât do it due to legal issues or for financial reasons. I would think the latter because considering the amount of money they generate, they can probably hire some of the most talented lawyers on the planet. Either way, you donât need to hire more people to properly deal with the issue, so their complain is valid, it is not ÂŤ way more complicated than you think Âť, something I often hear. It really is not.
Please do not take this personally this has nothing against you in particular, but itâs time we debunk this old tale of complexity and botting.
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No worries, I don´t usually take things personally unless that was the obvious intent 
And to a certain extent I agree⌠But after 30 years developing games myself, from 3d shooters to competing RPGS to doing backend for some mobile games, Ifeel I can safely say that botting is unfortunately a much more complex issue than most âoutsidersâ assume it to be
The first bots 20+ years ago were easy to detect and combatâŚ
for ex. (this varies from game to game and is purely to illustrate the concept of the cat+mouse game it has long since become) they walked in a straight line from spawn, a so you put a rock in their way, and ban any account that was stuck on that rock.
Wave 2 then includes the ablity to jump over that rock. so you make a bigger rock, and ban anyone stuck on it.
Wave 3 then includes dynamic pathing, the ablity to go around obstacles, and it can stil jump⌠so you add a wall, and ban anyone stuck on it by not using the ladder
Wave 4 is able to climb that ladder, and still jump, and still go around obstaclesâŚ
And so on and so forth, to the point where we now have bots that are fully capable of clearing entire dungeons without human interaction, dragonriding, and in general actually playing the game from a purely mechanical standpoint, in many cases better than some players can. And thatâs when it starts to grow hairâŚ
Theyâre still clearly not human when you inspect them directly, but the more advanced the bots get, which happens every time you ban one of them for obviously non-human behavour, the routines behind that behaviour get changed (this is the primary reason most games operate with banwaves, so that the bot coders don´t immediately know what it was that got them caught but have to figure out which of 5,6,7,20 things it might have been).
And the more advanced the bots get, the less useful algorithms actually become in their detection, because the closer they mimic actual players, the more false positives will get returned, and the more innocent players will wind up getting wrongfully banned for nothing more than for example having autowalk on and going afk to grab a cup of coffee, winding up walking against a wall for 5 minutes.
And to prevent all of those false positives from decimating your playerbase with autobans requires human oversight and inspection on a case by case basis, which in turn requires manpower. and teh more advanced the bots get, again teh more false positives you´ll get, ergo the more people you need to sift out the actual hits from the players
The big irony here is that teh more bots you ban for being non human, and the less time you allow them to be around, the faster their behavior starts to resemble that of actual humans. To the point it already reaced a few xyears ago where I dare postulate that if somebody were to for ex sign up for timewalking ini as a tank and turn their botting software on, the vast majority of players today would not actually be able to tell a difference, except that they´re not getting flamed by the tank after every pull for being scrubs.
And in fact many bots today, if you whisper them for for ex. with âAre you a bot?â, will either straight up report you together with the rest of the army, or even more insidously whisper you back with something along the lines of âEh, no. Why would you even think that? Are you toxic?â ⌠Thereby gaslighting players onto thinking they´re themselves the bad actor 
And that´s the real problem⌠the obvoius bots, the Boomkins running in circles spamming starfall, or the herbing and mining bots flying in right angles, have not been the actually dangerous ones for quite some time now. 
This was very interesting thank you. False positive is definitely something to take into consideration, but I ask you this as a game dev yourself, are those bots really that advanced? They just feel like a little to no variation (like literally 0 for some) vector based program with way too accurate reaction to aggro radius/distance to obstacle. Said like that itâs basically the behavior weâre all doing in game but I want to emphasize the ÂŤ way too accurate Âť. Isnât it something an algorithm could automatically detect and keep track of? hence my question, are the bots we face in wow really advanced? And even then there must be talented people that have come up with a self learning algo, maybe even you or someone in your team over the years have come up with something?
Because as of right now I feel like there are still a lot of false positive (or maybe itâs just because people who suffer from it are loud about it), meanwhile what feels to me like the exact same bot we had in 2020 still run rampant.
Another exemple of that was the ele shaman bot in arenas on retail. I donât know if you heard about it but basically for the entirety of DF you had a program for ele shaman specifically that reacted in a very (VERY) non-human fashion to a multitude of actions taken by a player and it wasnât banned until the end of DF. And if you havenât witnessed it first hand take a look on YouTube if youâre interested itâs as obvious as it gets.
I suppose you have more insight on this but when I see the complexity of some programs we are given as exemples in class and then those, I feel like one could come up with a mostly false positive free program.
I edited my post while you posted this and the last segment that touches on this wasn´t there yetâŚ
The âobsoleteâ bots, i.e. the obvious farmers flying in right angles, or said Boomies running in circles spammingg starfall, are actually not the bots that cause teh majority of issues⌠thesea are basically outdated also rans that you could ban at any given time, because algorithms still mostly work there due to thiir wholly unerring pathing. Nothing organic can walk in a perfect cercle 100 times with not a single misstep. So they ´re just a checkmark on the banwave list.
the ones that whisper aou bacfk, report you, run instances just like a human tank would, those are the actually dangerous ones⌠and not unnecessarily accelerating their development further with premature bans is at this point for most companies the closet to actual countermeasures they can get. Pandoraâs Box cannot be closed.
In theory one could use machine learning to predict what the next step in bot development will be⌠But the big irony here is that when we´ve gotten to that point, where a machine is able to predict human behaviour accurately, we´ve basically already reached the very AI singulatity that people have a good reason to be very damn afraid of⌠because a machine that can predict human behavior can also predict that we will try to shut it down, and employ according measures to prevent that, if it has a sense of self awareness and god forbid self preservation.
Because that´s how we get Skynet. Do we really want Skynet sooner rather than later? It´s already effectively inevitable at this point in the opinion of most people that know more about AI than i do⌠It´s not a question of if, just of when.
I´m fully aware that most people will hate my guts for this answer, and call me a doomsayer or a Blizzard shill⌠But whether we want to accept it or not changes nothing, reality does not require us to believe it for it to be true.
True but letâs say blizzard banned all the bots made in 2023 because they figured the one thing in the code that made them commonly different from a human being. Canât they just reproduce it internally and either a) have the devs perfect the bot themselves so that they can predict the next generation (sort of white hacker thing) or b) apply machine learning to this bot specifically in this specific (wow) environment, see how it behaves and answer accordingly?
Apologies you must have other things to do but itâs one of the few times I learn something on those forums so might as well push my luck 
Edit : Iâm reading your posts after you edited as well
Yeah thatâs something I did not think of and that is true. But again, if you reproduce the code in your own studios, with the devs blizzard have (even if the game has a lot of bugs because the poor souls must rush everything), canât they just be always one step ahead
Edit : sorry but I must go now I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, will definitely read your answer should you have the time to do one. Have a good night!
And this is the part where many of my fellow gamedevs across the industry will hate my guts, too, thank god there is no RealID on these forumsâŚThat said, it´s not like the bot developers are complete morons that couldn´t figure this out themselves, just like the KGB wasn´t planting sleeper agents in the USA but simultaneously expecting themselves to not have any CIA agents in Moscow and vice versa⌠both sides are in fact keenly aware of what the other is doing
Most studios already do what you suggest, in fact often times they simply purchase the bots themselves and run them in a developer environment outside of live service, and therefore know more or less exactly what each botâs capabilities and limitations actually are. So there is already prediction being done to a certain extent as to what the next iterations will look like, and it´s generally not too far off the mark, even though most game studios are not themselves in the business of AI coding.
The art form is therefore banning them in such a way (again, this is where banwaves come in) that not all of the insufficiencies are simultaneously ironed out by their developers. Because they ARE in fact effectively actively engaged in the business of AI coding. The ultimate endgame of the cat and mouse is in this case a bot that is indistinguishable from an average player, and therefore effectively unbannable. And the only thing developers can do is to try to slow down that process as much as possible. Every single ban is a red flag for the Botdevs that something can be improved in their product.
Because contrary to popular belief, videogame bots are themselves a multi million dollar industry, not just a collection of skript kiddies trying to have fun in momâs basement, and are arguably one of the least dangerous conceivable applications of AI coding for malicious purposes. In fact I would myself not be one bit surprised if for example the routines of the NPC companions in follower dungeons contained 90% or more code that was effectively âstolenâ from the very bots we wish to see actions against.
If only we would have all just stuck with that stupid rock and just let the bots keep walking against it for 20 years instead of banning them 
Was this incoherent diatribe about skynet supposed to be relevant to the thread, lol?
So far the arguments in favor of Blizzardâs complete lack of action have been âLOL but what if the bots running on scripts from 2019 magically evolve sentienceâ and âduude how do u know the person teleport hacking for 23hrs in SM is a bot dude, we dont have the technology to determine thatâ
Absolutely astonishing counterpoints. You guys are right, we canât ban bots because thereâs no way to know if player name Asdfgffd selling 200 full stacks of runecloth 2 weeks into fresh is human, and if we do ban him it might trigger some fanfic AI uprising scenario some guy on the forums wrote. So nothing should be done. 
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If you honestly think that trolling by putting hyperbolic statements into my mouth is the intelligent move here, that says more about you than it does about the actual problem, and merely firmly underscores why nobody with actual insight ever talks about this issue with users this candidly.
I´ve said my piece, do with the information provided as you wish. Because no matter what you decide to do, it will change nothing.
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They deliberately use strawman arguments if you donât bring out the pitchfork and join the hivemind mob.
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For me, it just adds a few more pixels to the ignore list, it´s no skin off my back either way⌠They get to play in their little echo chamber while the adults discuss topics of actual substance without their chaff causing confusion
That said, I wouldn´t be entirely surprised if my last post gets deleted⌠not necessarily by a mod, but rather an actual Dev⌠it doesn´t spill any secrets per se, but it does come dangerously close.
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Your wall of text IS the âhyperbolic statementsâ.
we dont fight bots, because they might evolve
This is so dumb, that I believe this was the line of thought of blizzard.
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I didnât know adults spend their time writing incoherent, disjointed scifi fanfictions on the WoW forums while pretending that their schizo babbling makes them a beacon of knowledge. You wrote a lot of words and somehow managed to say nothing of substance.
Maybe if you two keep giving each other asspats about how hopeless it is youâll expose your maturity even more?
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Are you talkng about this wall of text with dozen âwhat IFâsâ?
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Such utter nonsense. We both can agree that we advocate for the bots to be banned because they are ruining the economy, right? but unlike you, Iâve brought forth a few points that simply cannot be ignored, especially since all of us here are so passionate about getting rid the bots.
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If bots get banned, should all the gold buyers get banned too?
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If no, then why not? and if yes, then have you even paused for a second to consider the vast amount of players that would be banned because of this? Itâs worth noting that the botters have been an issue in WoW since 2005, and they havenât been around this long because itâs a simple hobby for them, but rather because of the revenue they have made and continue to make to this day, thanks to all the gold buyers. The gold buyers are equally as guilty as the botters are for ruining the economy of each server. A point you simply refused to address when I asked you earlier in the thread, so maybe this time you will?
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The damage has already done to each server, thanks to the players themselves, and you havenât put forth a single solution that could resolve the damage that has already been caused by gold buyers and the inflation that every server now suffers because of this. Retroactively removing said gold and anything bought using said gold by innocent players would be a complete disaster.
Itâs easy to shout simple solutions when you ignore any and all potential consequences. Banning all the bots now, will not automatically resolve the damage that has already been caused, and you seem to think (out of what I imagine to be frustration and anger) that I somehow advocate for no action to be taken at all, because I bring forth points that are worth considering. Itâs a strawman argument for Iâve never stated that no action should be taken, nor have I said that it is a hopeless cause.
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