Reported bot

[Salleen-firemaw]

7 days ago i reported a bot and he is still online. it shows that blizzard dont care about botters

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

It could be either he’s not a bot, in queue to be investigated or investigated and marked for a banwave.

What could also be is that they’ve already been banned but simply return with a slightly different name to the area appearing like the original reported bot wasn’t actioned. I see that occur sometimes too.

[Zugkek-firemaw]

I’ve seen you parroting this “returning to the same area with the same or slightly different name” nonsense before. The level of copium is unreal. Botters, literally use virtual boxes, proxies and vpns to hide the machine hardware identity and IP, they are not dumb. These are literal businesses running hundreds of WoW clients at the same location. You think they somehow have an attachment to their in game names?

I have reported bots and invited other players in the area to a group to come help me report them too, the bots got 10+ reports in one night and then I added them to my friends list to monitor them to see what happened. They are not banned and it has been over a week.

This place is bot infested dump and nothing is being done. Right now, every zone has 10+ herb/mining bots running around on their mounts constantly. Anyone who has had experience botting can spot them a mile off. To realise how big the issue is, all you have to do is visit the AH to see the price of everything is garbage because all markets are saturated with a constant flood of bot items.

Literally, if I had GM powers I could spend 1 day and ban nearly every bot on this server. I was a volunteer GM on a p server for a while and that place was bot free. They never even reached level 60, as they were always banned before they even got that far. These bots are not hard to spot. The majority of bots on this are hunters so all you would need to do is .kill their pet and see how the players reacts to realise if they are a bot. The rest are mostly mage gathering bots, and if you spam dispel their frost armor they instantly reapply it over and over until they oom, again, not hard to determine if they are a real player.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Zugkek-firemaw

“returning to the same area with the same or slightly different name”

I’ve personally reported a certain classic advertiser, multi-game currency seller everytime I came onto the realm. I know he was banned, because everytime I reported them, I would also ignore them and they would simply return with a different apostrophe. This went on and on till about 24ish different named toons until I decided to take a break from Classic.

Even in your own comment you admitted to that they would return in your own experience:

@Zugkek-firemaw

I was a volunteer GM on a pirate server for a while

Not to mention that, the more popular a game is, the more bots there will be.

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.

[Zugkek-firemaw]

You can make all the excuses you want, but bots get banned very fast on p servers where there isnt even a irl cost associated with getting banned. If anything, p severs should have an even bigger issues as new accounts are free.

These are businesses, they need to break even and turn a profit, if you do heavily spaced apart banwaves they have time to sell gold and then turn a profit or at least break even on the sub cost. Ideally, you want their business to make a loss, to put them out of business. If you have a banwave weekly, they make zero profit and after getting defeated enough times, they won’t return. People will also then stop subbing to the bot software and the companies eventually wont have the funds to improve their software and will go out of business.

That blizz dev thinks he’s had such a big brain idea doing banwaves in 6 to 3 month ban waves, it’s honestly such a terrible idea. By letting them bot for months, bots break even on their account/sub investment and the botting software devs gets some more months of sub fees for further development. The root of the problem is they are relying on player reports auto detection methods alone rather than just hiring real people to visit the popular botting spots and ban them proactively.

[Salleen-firemaw]

Its a bot and i have him on friends list so its the same person. It shows what a **** company this is who doesnt give a **** about their costumers

[Duraace-anachronos]

Even if he is found to be a bot it will take THREE MOnths to get banned. Just enough time to buy yet another account and start over. Suts blizzard.

The ban waves are for lip service so they can be seen as “doing something” when we all know they dont care.

Was not the follow command removed?

If so, then how is it that flocks of “birds” are able to follow one single character if all accounts need to be controlled individually?

[Duraace-anachronos]

Spare me the rhotoric.

If it takes three months to get a ban, then that is too slow. The three month span is obviously there to “help” the operators to get enough gold together to make a profit and then get the ban. Rinse and rpeat.

You knowit. I know it. Blizzard, when it comes to bots gives nothing but lip service