thousands of reports zero ban
multiple support tickets even wrote email to hacks
full on 64 man guilds bot farming undisturbed for over a year now on dragonflight, i can find them in game in less than 2 mins
i think we can rule out incompetence, they are intentionally not banning them, especially how they talk at support its obvious they got told by higher ups to cease the bans, same way as they white listed cheating streamers on CoD to advertise the game
it all makes sense, destroy the economy so noone can realisticly buy gametime from gold and forced to spend real money
Blizzard knows exactly who these bot users are, and they have been dealing with them for two decades. The most effective solution they have come up with so far is to ban them in waves. The reason for this is to let the bots pile up, track their activities, and then target them all at once. By doing so, they can cripple the people behind the bots who run these services. The random nature of these bans makes it impossible for the targets to find ways to adapt to Blizzard’s strategy. The company does not want the problem to escalate any further than it already has, as bots will always be an issue. The only actual solution to this problem, though not entirely foolproof, is to have a South Korean-style local area network where every account has a singular online ID attached to it. This way, the government can trace and arrest anyone involved in illegal activity.
Correct, As per posts from the team, This is the stratagy they use. Gather as much data as possible then put out ban waves that catch thousands of bots in the net.
Unfortunatly is it a losing battle because in a very short while the bots are back with a workaround and the process starts all over.
But yeah basically the goal is to ban the program and not the user.
The damage bots cause is inevitable and self-inflicted. However, simply banning them is not the solution. Blizzard’s best bet is to make the service side as inconvenient as possible for them. The key is to find out what they are farming and why, map out the bot network and then cripple it. This way, even the end users who get banned for RMT are dealt with, leading to issues for gold sellers who are left with angry customers and have to resort to disaster recovery to maintain their business. But, if Blizzard takes a case-by-case approach, the bots will continuously adapt to their methods, leading to an inevitable arms race. While it may not be a perfect solution for everyone, it is the reality of the situation. Bungie’s example is a lesson for all. By taking legal action against those who compromised their product, they only made the issue worse. This led to more extreme measures that affected the game’s performance and still didn’t solve the problem.
It is important to understand that the strategy for banning bots has evolved over time to address the issues they have presented. However, it is impossible to guarantee a permanent ban on bots. If this is such a big issue for you, then perhaps it would be best to find another game. But keep in mind that bots are prevalent in most online games, and they will continue to exist as long as people pay for them. It’s worth noting that boting is less of an issue in the East because the government can simply arrest them.
So you appear to have made this thread complaining about bots, but you’ve yet to reply to my previous post, where you called me a clown because I said about certain things, which could be put in place to combat people using bots.
As I have experience in understanding these systems, I’ll explain it to you, so you can at least and I hope have a better understanding.
So lets go through your post.
You’ve made thousands of reports and there have been zero bans.
So, just so your know you will not be informed in every case, when a ban has taken place, upon a report you have submitted. You also need to remember that even though each report is added to a system, where the account needs to have x number of reports submitted because Warden or the other systems that Blizzard uses, starts to run an automatic search on the account, where scripts will look for the red flags to confirm that, that account is indeed a botted account.
You also need to remember that out of a 1,000 reports, maybe 100 of those are normal players, who are just farming and don’t want to reply to whispers and are just watching a movie/tv show, while flying their route to farm (yes they look like bots, but they are not).
So the system needs to avoid banning people on the premise, that you believe they’re bots.
You can write an email to hacks, but that is not the place to report bots. So those emails will end up being ignored. Hacks emails is for people who are reporting websites, cheating software and such. You should be using the correct channels to report botting activities and not trying to circumvent the system to get an account banned quicker.
You said that full 64man guild bot farm. Do you have proof? I could say that your guild Filthy Gang exploit all the content in the game. Does it means it’s true or just a random thing to say to grab attention. You should always provide evidence to your claims, because as the boy who cried wolf, people will just ignore you, when you do have actual proof of something happening.
They are indeed not banning them instantly and I’ll tell you why in a second. Support unfortunately is now machine learning and your case will only be escalated to a real support agent, if the case is not resolved. You will then be speaking with an agent who is based within the United States as they fired all the European staff to save money due to the Versailles (France) office committing tax fraud (also stealing money from it’s own employees in terms of not given them they proper bonuses) and thus Blizzard HQ shut them down.
So in terms of Call of Duty, Blizzard has nothing to do with that, so that is something we won’t cover here, as bots in WoW and Call of Duty cheaters have nothing in common.
To the point as to why they’re not banning bots instantly.
When a bot is reports, it needs to have a certain number of reports, before it’s added to a list.
So lets say it needs 5 reports to trigger this system. With each trigger, they’re added to “do-to” list, which need to reach a certain number. So lets say it needs to have 2000 accounts added before Warden or their other scripted system need to start.
They do this because if they were to do 1 ban at a time, the bot creators would be able to quickly find out what is being detected and fix it and allow the other 1999 accounts to continue and not be flagged and banned. So do them in “ban waves” allows for a large number to be removed and the bot creators to take a longer amount of time to find out what was detected. This allows for more bots to be banned within a short period of time and also for the normal player not users to stop using the bot software to avoid being banned in the next wave.
So overall, yes it looks like no one is being banned, they do get removed in waves of 1000, 2000 or 10000. Blizzard will sometimes comment on this in news posts or they’ll not say anything and just continue with their day to day tasks. It’s up to players to report them and continue on with their day, if you’re become obsessed with bots and get so frustrated, then you may want to look at other games, like single player or mobile games.
Any MMO will have bots, it’s normal, why? Because people will take shortcuts, thus buying currency/items with real money. If you want to stop all the botting in online games, make it illegal. Once the money stops, the botting will stop.
People are able to get the gold need to buy a wow token. You just need to know what to do and how to do it. There are many videos on YouTube on how to make gold. You can look at the average price of WoW tokens and then judge the amount of time that you will need to put into farming/grinding to sell/create items to sell.
You can’t just sit back and think “Oh i’ll just play the game without farming gold and I’ll make enough to buy my token at the end of the month!”. Sorry that’s not going to happen, you need to put in the work to make gold, if you want to continue playing, if you do not want to pay your monthly subscription with money.
Same, I honestly don’t pay that much attention to what other players are doing in the world, like who cares?
I did get accused of being a bot once as I was farming a rare on the Timeless Isle and I always went back to stand on a little sunbeam patch on the ground.
I’ve had 1 person whisper me, when I was on my DH back in BFA, when I was farming herbs for a full day to make a ton of potions.
I just said what I was doing and they apologised because they thought I was a bot, with just flying my pattern around the area. I had Dr Gregory House to help me through those times <3
The purpose of banning bots is to lower the amount of damage they cause, not finding the most clever ways to remove your customers.
I understand that what you’re saying is their strategy. And what I’m telling you is that it’s a bad strategy. It doesn’t work - we can see that very clearly every single day. I don’t know why you’re defending it.
What they need to do is ban the buyers as well as ban the botters as quickly as they can, but they’re not doing either of those, with particular emphasis on not banning the buyers. I am personally aware of over 30 people who buy gold and not one of them has gotten as much as a warning. They’ve been doing it for years as well.
What am I supposed to do? There’s nothing I can do. They’re not doing anything effective and so wherever there’s a version of the game that is popular it immediately gets infested and ruined by bots every single time. They’re everywhere. SoD is just as bad.
I’ve experienced this game with no bots. Dragonriding really badly hurt them, and it was wonderful to experience actually being able to sell items for a decent price on the AH, but now flying is back and therefore so are the bots and they’re destroy the AH as usual.
It’s important to understand that banning is a reactive measure and can’t undo the damage caused by bots. Blizzard has a well-crafted strategy to keep bot levels within acceptable limits. This strategy effectively prevents bot users from adopting tactics that are harder to detect in the future. Despite the disruptions caused by dragon riding, boting hasn’t vanished, and it’s impossible to have a bot-free game as long as there’s demand. Blizzard’s strategy takes into account the seller’s actions in the game as well as their business logistics. It’s easy to think that the strategy isn’t working just because bots are still around, but you have no idea how Blizzard is dealing with them. If you did, the bot users would know too. Blizzard could be more invasive in their approach, but that would ruin your game experience even more than an influx of crafting materials on the auction house.
You’re not going to get a method which makes you happy. This is their strategy after 20 years of experience in dealing with them.
It can if you react fast enough and ban them before they do their damage. The darn things all spawn in literally a single location. It’s not that hard.
Also, please use paragraphs. I try not to focus on these sorts of things in my reply but you’re literally critting me with a wall of text.
Then they analyse why they were banned and adapt, making it more challenging in the future for you to ban that’s why you wait. So they get as little valuable data as possible. You are asking for a short-term solution, which will worsen in the long run because you play the game now. Blizzard has to think about the product over a more extended period.
You can read my response just fine, paragraphs are for separate topics on a continued subject. I only spoke about the blizzard strategy on the banning of bots which should be one paragraph. I’m not going to create a new paragraph every three sentences for you.