Ok nice. It worked for 2 days now they just made new accs running around botting in dungeons/raids/world and pvp.
When will you ban these guys? 2022? As of now no one even fears you anymore and just bots their chars even people in guilds and such.
Every idiot can detect bots by the behaviour of them / pathing / mouseover attacking and scripted actions. By now I think people would even purge bots for free if they could. You are letting this game die and its utterly pathetic.
No hope for TBC.
8million gold a month from one bot? Dude your figures are way out⊠instance farming gives about 100g/hour at best⊠24hours x 30 days x 100Gold = 72k.
Bots are a major problem but not as bad as what you stated. We need this problem fixed and filling threads with false information will make whatever if any blizz employee who reads said thread just ignore it as trash
72k x 9 months = 648,000 gold.
all it would take a botter to achieve 8 million gold is running about 10-12 bots at a time for 9 months.
Youâre not wrong! Anything scaled up is gonna do that. But I was merely asking the other dude to stick to facts so the thread will have some traction if/when it gets read by anyone who matters.
Like I have no doubt there are people who have farmed millions of gold with bots, but not 1 bot over 1month
yeah well, saying you can farm 100g per hour at best is something i would dispute too⊠200g per hour is more reasonable, since iâve seen people say thatâs about the amount they are able to farm themselves, which would mean 5-7 bots running for 9 months would be able to get 8 million gold in total, and this is assuming they donât get any valuable epic BoEs that can turn 200g in an hour into potentially 5k gold in an hour, every now and then.
As someone who has run strat countless times as a multibox trying to farm gear I can tell you that what you get from one full clear is about
35G in raw gold
8-10G in greys/vendor loot
7 shards From boss blues
Between 3-4 green weapon boeâs
Between 3-10 green armor boeâs
A blue Boe maybe once every third run or so, normally not worth selling and gets shards
10-12 stacks of runecloth.
And as a box your lucky to get one run an hour, and that gold is split amongst 5 toons.
Depending on which group I run depends on the clear time, like when I was farming bone slicing hatchets on my 4hunters/shaman group undead side would take me well over an hour to clear, when I was on my warrior 2mages/lock /shaman living was talking me about 1.25 hours per run.
Now I donât know how the bots work in the instance, maybe they can fly hack/ no clip to pull everything and just Aoe it down after but I canât imagine them being very fast clears at all. I would imagine they rely on pure blunt force trauma of grinding relentlessly at a constant lower speed.
what about righteous orbs then? those went from 15g on to 40-50g per orb on my server after the recent banwave.
mages solofarming zg are able to make about 200g per hour, thatâs what my figures were based on, they donât even need to group-bot-farm strat.
a bot (who have no qualms using flying hacks btw) can easily do the same, or do it more effectively using fly hacks.
Apologies I forgot about the orbs, which you get anywhere from 1-5 per run
How do you know they have 8 million gold?
You can pick up a VPN these days cheaper than a cup of coffee. What is banning going to do?
There is almost nothing you can really do to prevent botting without screwing over normal players too.
You could:
Increase sub price. This would increase the break-even point a bot is required to reach in a month to be profitable. Of course this is the most unlikely way of doing things, sub price has always been 15 bucks and should always stay that way.
Hire GMâs. Besides being a step backwards in our increasingly automated world, this would only serve to maybe decrease reaction time to bot reports slightly. I wouldnt wanna be one of those GMs. Id likely have to sift through hundreds of false positives since people are so emotionally charged up about the whole thing its likely they would just start reporting people stealing their herbs for botting (âIt just cant be that he reached that node faster than me, must be a bot!â).
Invest more time into an automated solution. This is the most likely scenario but it can also bear alot of dangers. Its an arms race, as soon as Blizz would improve bot detection by algorithm people would reprogram their bots to not get detected anymore. Similar to how antivirus and virus development works.
False positives are obviously always going to be a thing with automated bans.
Harsher penalties for botting. Could be used in combination with the above I guess, but there is no way to truly prevent somebody from playing if he is really committed.
More frequent ban waves. Probably the best scenario. If they did two banwaves a month it would require banned botters to essentially pay double for a month to get back into the game while also making them unable to break even until the end of month. But I dont know how Blizzard manages those ban waves internally, maybe there is a good reason they are so infrequent.
Youâve got one thing very right, the amount of false reports modern gaming generates is insane.
Someone ganks you. report.
Tank too slow, report.
Dps too arrogant, report.
Healer letâs you die, report.
Some beats you on a loot roll, report.
Someone annoys you in chat, report.
Until that culture dies out itâs very hard to deal with it, I mean back in the day GMâs flagged accounts for suspected botting and passed them on to accounts and billing. Which did the ban work and that still took from Then Days to weeks to get through a ticket from the time it got sent to resolution.
Recently all thatâs happened is the automated system generates a funk ton of false reports that either have to be acted on Once an account accumulated enough reports or be manually reviewed.
What do you think is going to happen? We want bots banned faster Then we only report god damn bots.
Well, one of the reasons Blizzard has used as an excuse before, is that âwhen a new type of bot is being used, we let it run free on purpose so we can collect more data on how it works.â
Basically theyâre saying they let them run free so they find out how to add that bot into the ânaughty listâ in Warden (their anti-cheat software).
As for why they let them run around for so long, has more to do with incompetence than anything else. Donât get me wrong, I donât mean incompetence by the programmers. I mean theyâve got a systemic problem of incompetence in positions to make decisions.
Steve Jobs put it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
Basically the people in charge donât have any concept of what good quality is for a player, and what bad quality is. So they make decisions not based on consumer retention or satisfaction, but rather on cost efficiency and market projections.
Blizzard doesnât have monopoly the same way Xerox did though, but if you replace âmonopolyâ with âvery large market shareâ, then the entire video describes Activision-Blizzard perfectly.
Blizzard did have GMs manually banning bots in the past. Itâs not like theyâre hard to spot either, you know? Itâs so easy, people are even making youtube videos of how easy it is. Pservers also relied on their own âGMsâ to manually ban bots.
Manual policing to enforce the rules is still better than automation. Counter-strikeâs public servers are a good example of this, with how Valve let people host their own servers. This way, people could enforce their own rules as they wanted, and good servers with good reputations naturally rose to the top because they did a good job of keeping the cheaters out. This is an effect of how enforcing the rules fosters trust in the consumer base.
Valve still had their VAC bans, but it was about as efficient at spotting cheaters as the Warden is in WoW.
What Blizzard is doing now is the direct opposite of fostering trust. Theyâre eroding trust, because they rely too much on automation. Costs much less to manage than actually dealing with the problems though, so as a corporate group, itâs not hard to see why that is.
Blizzard is a studio where the âproduct peopleâ as Steve Jobs put it in the youtube vid, are running around jumping through hoops just to do their jobs despite all the demands by the decision-makers.
Also, if you look at the amount of people they banned, what was it⊠74k this time? Letâs assume they donât use a credit card to set up a subscription for a lower monthly cost, and instead either buy tokens in retailâs AH or find some other way to pay for the accounts on a monthly basis for âŹ12.99/month. (Cheaper in the Russian client)
So adding up 74k accounts, thatâs âŹ961260. Per MONTH.
As a corporate suit, making decisions based on profit figures while not caring about the consumer satisfaction and blames consumer retention problems on other things, what decision would you make?
As I described it in that thread, the result of banwaves with large gaps inbetween still gives off the impression to the masses that âsomething is being doneâ. But the problem remains the same.
So you can imagine the thought process there by the corporate suit being something like âWell, we canât let people think we condone cheating, but they do provide a decent chunk of money every month, so letâs just do enough to make it seem like something is being done about it while not actually preventing them. That way we can still keep the profits from the regular players while also getting a little extra on the side.â.
While completely losing sight of the impact on consumer trust and subsequently the impact on consumer retention, because to them the retention problem lies elsewhere.
Because the people in charge are incapable of understanding a playerâs mindset. Weâre just money that moves and talks. Just watch the youtube link of Steve Jobs on why Xerox went down. It describes everything perfectly, which you can see signs of everywhere in what Activision-Blizzard is doing.
People should stop thinking of ActiBlizz as a corporate group with passion and ethics. Those days disappeared a very long time ago.
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