Purge the bots

[Korospo-twisting-nether]

Get them tf out of here. HOW HARD CAN IT BE. People are paying for what exactly.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

Since this subject comes back often I’ve made a sourced template with commonly asked Q&A if you want to read up more about it:

Other games like Valorant/League suffering from cheating and their countermeasures explained in detail

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz about the efficiency of banwaves

http://youtube.com/shorts/cADaFm__ApQ

I see often that people suggest that Blizzard profit off bots (Credit Fraud/Stolen accounts etc)

Do other games like Runescape or CSGO also “benefit” from allowing (aim)bots, using them for inflating sub counts or purchases?

Some accounts also get stolen with phishing methods or used with fraudulent credit cards, that incur chargeback merchant fees for Blizzard. The “paid” amount plus penalty costing Blizzard a lot more not to mention the damage the botters do ingame.

But wait “credit card fraud doesnt exist for games!!” Some people forget, that Visa stopped processing payments for Runescape because the occuring fraud was just that extreme at a certain point in history.

One of their last public numbers revealed close to 271k banned in December 2023 alone. I don’t think it was even the majority of them.

Poster mentioned fast bot instant removal problem and low currency accounts

Another poster mentioned they remove bots every few days after a report. They return ofcourse, proving that instant bot removals isn’t going to work.

Video 2 in this post mentions that the alternative to chargeback or stolen account type frauds is “currency fraud” where they pretend to be in that region and buy very low currency accounts to bot onto.

Better solutions?

There’s no game so far on a similar scale that has a solution. This problem is literally everywhere and anti-cheat development has yet to outpace the illegal bot development.

Kaivax statement on countermeasures against botting

@Kaivax

We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. It’s just one tool, though, among many. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

Source.

If you have any good ideas don’t forget to submit them through the ingame suggestion box!

[Korospo-twisting-nether]

I’m currently mining in Sholazar Basin. I’m reporting atleast one player between every node. The way they do these 90 degree turns all over the place is easy to spot. So if one GM started doing the same for one week, on each realm. That would be an awfull load of bans. Its really not hard.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Korospo-twisting-nether

So if one GM started doing the same for one week, on each realm. Its really not hard.

It is not hard, but it’s really easy for the botters to return while the proposal being manpower inefficient.

Blizzard is banwaving them on your reports, there’s very little that can be effectively done to stop a criminal enterprise.

[Korospo-twisting-nether]

People quitting the game, when they realize how many people uses bots for gathering, is inefficient. As i said, people are paying for a bad product if this continues as it has.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Korospo-twisting-nether

People quitting the game

People threaten to or have quit the game over implemented anti-bot measures anyway, for example the latest [SoD] Restricted from trading, AH, mail 30 day restriction on social features after calls by the community to take action.