Blizzard just posted about actions taken against cheaters in World of Warcraft and I am glad to see them being caught. However I am not sure what we can expect to happen next. Kaivax said in their post that they were “working on further improvements to every part of the game that might address cheating issues more swiftly and completely.” What these improvements are remains to be seen, but if we are looking at something of the same nature as the 30 instance cap, we’re headed into a dark future were players are being sacrificed in a futile effort to combat the botters.
Now I would imagine that all the pro botters have already set up new accounts and are lvling up their new bot characters as most of us sleep. How can we efficiently target and get rid of them? Banwaves won’t work as they happen too seldom. By the time one is being issued the cheaters have already made enough profit for it to be worth it and just repeat the cycle. They probably even have legitimate accounts were they store most of their gold and items, so if their farming bot gets permanently banned they haven’t really lost anything except for their lvl 60 characters and some gold and items they are currently in possession of.
the strat botters doesn’t need to level new accounts because each run takes around 1 hour for them and that means that they’ll already have new instances when they’re done with the 30 runs
Pretty sure the OP refers to the most recent banwave.
Also, as I posted there:
So don’t let it fool you. This is just the regular schedule for them.
Exactly as the OP pointed out, these banwaves needs to occur much more often for it to have any meaningful impact. The way it has been handled for years in retail and now in Classic is just enough to make people say
meaning it’s enough to make it seem like they’re doing something about it, when in actuality nothing meaningful is done about it at all.
Their “heuristics” as the blue post mentioned is just the way they run through server statistics for things like gold movement and logged in hours as well as other “unnatural” metrics in order to spot outliers, the way they notice the ones getting reported too often for it to be just random “white noise” in the system, and the way they configure and update their Warden anti-cheat software.
They don’t have the instructions left in the operations manual that makes it a part of a GM’s job to manually deal with cheaters anymore. They’re just people clocking in and clocking out, not going outside of their field of responsibilities.
Kinda reminds you of the robotic arms replacing manual workers in factories, doesn’t it?
Well, that’s kinda the point. Blizzard literally made it not a part of a GM’s job anymore to do so. In favor of the heuristics analysis and the Warden software, for the semi-annual banwaves.
This is from March 11 this year. Look at the responses by people. They really only do enough to make it seem like something is being done, while not actually doing anything meaningful at all. Has been like this for far too long.
(It’s just that the “world” of retail is larger and there are a lot more instances to choose from, and they split up people into randomized cross-realm zones & shards, so you don’t notice the problem is the same over there. Not to forget the cheaters in rated PvP over the years, they were left to do their “thing” for so long inbetween the banwaves. There were also known wintraders getting season titles like glad and so on as well, so Blizzard’s policing efforts can only be described as “only doing enough to make it seem like things are being done”.)
Once a GM in legion told me that they cant even enter the game anymore and just work from some console to do services / adding items or whatever. He said that is like since mid cataclysm so doubt a GM could or would do that nowadays unless they get their main account flagged to do so with power.
It’s not like they’ve lost the ability to step into the game, but yeah, might be differences in job roles. For example, they have GMs hidden using administrator invisibility, observing world first attempts in retail.