There are even fishing bots on Spineshatter EU

[Hølymøly-gehennas]

h ttps://imgur.com/a/MpdQUYq

This “guy’s” been here for at least 3 hours straight.
Lvl 20 hunter, grey shirt, grey boots.

So, bots tagging your quest mobs, bots taking your mining nodes, bots taking your plants, bots farming raw gold and destroying the economy, bots crashing the fish market, bots everywhere …

Are you gonna do something at some point ?

How hard is it to get rid of them, you realise we’re paying a monthly subscription for this game, right, so it MIGHT be appropriate to hire actual GAME MASTERS for this kind of things, I don’t know … ?

Bobby still needs a 4th yacht perhaps ?

[Rykkudo-gehennas]

Are fishing bots new to you?

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Hølymøly-gehennas

How hard is it to get rid of them

Not hard, its just they tend to come back once the botters realise they got banwaved.

@Hølymøly-gehennas

so it MIGHT be appropriate to hire actual GAME MASTERS for this kind of things,

There’s a dedicated team for it where regular GM’s won’t have to deal with it.

@Hølymøly-gehennas

Bobby still needs

Late joke is late, we’re in the Microsoft Era already.

Since this topic 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!

[Kellar-spineshatter]

The bot situation is crazy on Spineshatter, I play in the early hours of the morning and every spot that isn’t populated by players is populated by bots.
Like Tanaris desert full of hunters killing all the mobs and skinning them and avoiding stuff required for quests like the ogres and bugs.

[Etly-spineshatter]

Plenty of 20+ level bots in Tanaris, Feralas. Just type /who Feralas 20-20. But what can you do? If you gank them they’ll report you and you’ll be banned. Bots have power. Blizzard does not care.

[Ynotnaked-gandling]

So I wonder, since 2019:

What percentage of characters is bots?
What percentage of non-bots is goldbuying?
What percentage of topics on this forum is about RMT and botting?

Perhaps it is about time to accept dat Blizzard is unable or willing to solve these issues.

[Kellar-spineshatter]

It’s profitable for Blizzard, People who buy gold are the “whales” of classic wow.
They usually have more than one account and pay for all the stuff on the store.

[Haerman-living-flame]

@Saneko-ragnaros

There’s a dedicated team for it where regular GM’s won’t have to deal with it.

and noone ever saw or heard of any of these people.
It’s like having a secret police that does absolutely nothing; no bite, no bark, no point…
Blizzard just doesn’t care enough about the issue, because they don’t want to spend money to lose money, simple as.

[Sajuuk-lone-wolf]

@Ynotnaked-gandling

What percentage of characters is bots?

Too much.

@Ynotnaked-gandling

What percentage of non-bots is goldbuying?

Too much.

Blizzard. Don’t. Care.

[Tommywiseau-sulfuron]

This game has become a moving corpse, only fueled by the dark magic of RMT.
Bobby is the Necromancer.

[Juily-blackmoore]

I just drowned one with MC next to Azshara and reported over 10 on my journey to level 40 on 2 characters. These bots are not everywhere but quite common. I implore everybody to assist in the fight against these people.

[Hølymøly-gehennas]

Here is what I found in the Hinterlands, south of the Horde camp.

h ttps://imgur.com/saZX0xQ

Lol …

[Eiterbella-mirage-raceway]

amazing!

[Ironhorns-nekrosh]

@Hølymøly-gehennas

h ttps://imgur.com/saZX0xQ

https://imgur.com/saZX0xQ
Try using preformatted text instead - it’s easier for us to use It’s the </> formatting thingy (or CTRL e)
… but this sure looks fun.