Question for Blizzard; Why do you allow botting? It is OBVIOUS you allow it

[Clownirl-living-flame]

It is sadly quite obvious that botting is in fact allowed.

A player can run his monster-killing software for 30 days straight, recieve 100’s of reports, and has zero consequences. There is multiple proven examples of this, and I just don’t understand how and why you accept this embarrassing handling of an issue, it is literally 100-percent that you allow it, because these bots pay a subscription, where is the damn integrity Blizzard?

I remember last classic launch, I was witnessing this myself, and it was honestly one of the main purposes I quit, seeing a 5 bot group run into Stratholme for MONTHS, entire guilds reporting them, NOTHING happening. And now I just ran into this video, it is still a problem these many years later?: Youtube “Madskillzzhc “Why I Became ‘The Bot Hunter’ on Hardcore - Blizzard Failed Us!””

Clearly you allow botting, and clearly your report function is disabled?

Where is the integrity? Embarrassing.

(Edit; Yes I know, they ban in waves, ONCE a year, utterly useless. It requires ONE blizzard employee, to view reports, and go remove these insanely obvious bots, that recieves hundreds of reports, it would fix 90%+ of the problem, yet they decide to do nothing.)

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

Bots generally tend to come back once they’re banwaved with slightly different names. That is why people perceive as nothing being done against them.

In case of fraudulent cards, they may chargeback costing the merchant more including the money that was taken back as well.

Cheating reports are factually looked over.

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

/dev: Vanguard x LoL

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:

Banwaves Are Smart

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.

@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.

[Perudor-lakeshire]

Blizzard is banning in waves.

Why they wait for the wave for the bots to reach their break-even point we don’t know, but maybe they have technical reasons for that.
But yeah…we can point out that - whatever reason it is - it’s useless if the bots can reach the break-even point before they get banned because that won’t stop the creation of new bot accounts.

[Clownirl-living-flame]

Ban waves? once a year? Sadly useless.

The reality is, one Blizzard employee, looking at “botting reports” could easily go around manually banning 90%+ of them, but they just dont care.

Don’t throw this “its hard to fix”-card, they could make it way better, with very little effort.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Clownirl-living-flame

Ban waves? once a year?

As you appear to have not read the Blizzard quote:

@Kaivax

We ban tens of thousands of bots a week.

@Clownirl-living-flame

The reality is, one Blizzard employee, looking at “botting reports” could easily go around manually banning 90%+ of them

Even if they “manually” ban them, it would immediately alert botters so they would simply recreate them right away.

@Saneko-ragnaros

Bots generally tend to come back once they’re banwaved with slightly different names.

[Clownirl-living-flame]

Classic takes a long time to reach 60, and to actually make it profitable for the bots to do, imagine those “obvious hunters” getting banned by level 36, because they recieved 20-50 reports during their level 1-36. Once again, one employee, all it takes.

“We ban tens of thousands of bots a week.”

This is clearly false, when its the same bots(characters) running for a year straight, I would gaurentee you hes lying, none of that data is from Classic.

[Perudor-lakeshire]

Better attempt against botting will be to NOT offer a dark portal pass next time TBC Classic comes out (so in one year from now).

Those free high lvl characters were a massive catalyst for botters.

Besides that I don’t think they gonna win this war against botting anytime soon. If they really tried hard for it they would come with some extremely aggressive anti cheat tool that is scanning all your computer processing. That - maybe - would end botting or at least bring it down a lot.

But some people have data security concerns about such Anti Cheat tools.