To provide more transparency on the actions we take against cheating and exploitation, here is a breakdown on the number of actions that were taken over the last month, August 2023:
Total Exploitative WoW Account Actions in August 2023: 145566
All of these actions were for cheating or exploitation, which primarily result in permanent bans or 6-month suspensions. This number does not include other actions such as those taken on accounts with character name or in-game language violations. We continue to evolve our methods and act against these malicious accounts on a daily basis.
And yet it feels like these ‘bans’ are not making any sort of dent in the amount of bots. Maybe you should add the WoW Token!!?! That sure will fix everything.
It is easy to post numbers when you don’t explain what is behind them.
Is that for Classic Era only (since you post them here) or for all Classic versions (Era, hardcore, WotLk)? Or does it contain Retail as well? And only EU or all regions?
I’ll just take as an exemple that paladin bot in the Badlands, it has been here for MONTHS now, it’s been reported dozens of times, dozens of times, by legit players that cross its path and get upset to see it stealing one’s farm.
And yet there it is still, blatantly and brazenly cheating for all to see, farming earth elementals around the clock.
The owner must’ve made hundreds of thousands of gold by now …
I’d like to trust the numbers you’re providing but… yeah… allow me to doubt it.
Disclaimer - its just for fun.
Lets do the math:
125k bots banned in a month.
Lets say 1 bot needs 1 minute to investigate because as the recent interview with botter claimed that bots get banned almost exclusively trough player reports and not automation. So:
125000 minutes needed to ban them all.
125000:60=2080 hours. (Rounded ofc)
2080:8 (hours in work day) =260 work days
260:20 (days in work month) = 13 GMs
This is very rough and undercut numbers
So we need 13 Game Masters who has to ban 1 bot each minute, each full working day for a whole month non-stop to ban this many bots. Im very skeptical about that… Or my math is all wrong. its 4am
So why have you made it harder to report bots in a recent update? I can no longer report characters that are almost certainly bots from the /who window. On an almost entirely empty server in WoW classic era (Zandalar Tribe EU) they are very easy to spot because there are small bands of mage bots that are online very consistently, and I have seen a group of them in action and killed them repeatedly. But now I can’t bring them to your attention unless I physically travel to the zone they are in and find them.