Just remove leveling from the game at this point if you don’t fix botting.
Its completely crushing to level to 65-67 whatever and see bots doing the same quests as you in outland and beyond.
That invalidates every single minute you put in the game. A bot costs 30euro/month. Can probably level 2-3 chars in that time.
Why waste 200 hours of your life when you can buy a bot then and have 3 chars at 80 while you do other stuff.
Its a slipery slope, everything becomes meaningless.
Either ban all bots instantly, or just give everything for free.
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It‘s a game. The only meaning that has is to have fun and a good time.
Apart from that it‘s a waste of time on it‘s own. Doesn’t matter what you accomplish in a game … it‘s just in a game people play in their free time
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True, but it is not an excuse for not banning bots. If you are trying to farm something and you have to compete with bots, With someone who is clearly cheating and can farm this way 24/7 without any effort. You feel stupid. Blizzard should do much more.
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You‘re right. And with the monthly subscription cost you should actually expect that. Well….
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Oh no, it seems you really don’t like this game and will be leaving now. Oh no, what a loss that will be…
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Blizz gave up on bots years ago, this is as good as it will ever get.
I wish there was a leaked memo from shareholders view on botters…“more please” something like that I think.
Im a returning player (idiot i know), but when I stopped playing it was easy to get refund for game time from paypal (maybe your bank also but a little harder that way) if you feel strongly enough about the subject.
All you have to do is explain the extent of the bot problem and lack of action from the company, how easy it is to abuse certain aspects of the game to the detriment of your play time
The bots do get to me also to be honest, they could be fixed very easily by one GM per realm like in the old days, but we are inthe situation where we have to report bots to an auto mated program and hope one AI beats the other AI, cool world eh.
When the terminators arrive? pew pew
Oh sweetie, oh you sweet little darling, you don’t realize how dumb this statement is do you?
It‘s not dumb at all.
It CAN bin easily fixed this way.
It‘s just not in Blizz’s interest
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Mess off please if you are here just for trolling and have nothing productive to add.
Yes, 1 gm per realm would be enough destroy botting by at least 75%.
The bots are rarely doing random stuff, they mostly have a number of spots/instances that are deemed most productive and are all stacked around those areas. It is ridiculously easy to figure out which ones they are at, like many videos posted with the entrance to botanica/dire maul/etc etc as well as open world spots. Anyone who played wow for 6 months can log in right now and find bots in 5 minutes of looking.
If bots are banned within 3-5 days, it becomes unproductive, and everything stops.
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Dude don’t feed the gnome troll just mute him easy
an yeah one GM, working simple 8 hour shift would remove them all, not over night, but they would achieve a very high bot purge rate…
but why pay a human when a program can do It better eh
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Its even easier with gathering bots, just AFK on a heavy mine/herbs spot in Northrend, and the level 80s druids with 200 achievments points will start moving like robots in front of you lol.
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Since you’re basically all the same bot and don’t have a brain between the lot of you, I’m just going to copy-paste the one of my replies to this moronic point of view since I can’t be bothered to rewrite the whole thing.
If you really think that 1 GM per realm can do the job, then I do feel sorry for you.
Alright this is the copied bit:
sigh I can explain this until the end of the universe, but someone new will come along and still be oblivious to reality.
You’re acting like botting is a new thing in MMOs and that Blizzard is the only one with that problem… Botting has been around from the dawn of MMOs and always will be, you can’t get rid of bots as long as there is profit in it for the botters. Private servers can deal with them better since they’re small passion projects run by donations and volunteers. You can’t have the same thing in a professional setting, there are these little annoying things called laws and giving random people GM powers cause they promise to be good is not how you do this.
I know its very popular to hate on every company that turns a profit just because they’re making money, but thats how businesses work… Blizzard has a much larger playerbase than your top tier private servers. To deal with botting effectively you’d have to station several workers all over the game world, near every dungeon, in every BG on every realm 24/7 which means you have more than 1 person working each spot in shifts. This is the only way you can effectively deal with bots. Now how many people would you need? Do some math, count all the realms, EU and US, count all the popular botting spots, count all the less popular spots and then count all the potential spots, now multiply that by 3 cause you’re not very bright and there you have the potential volume of employees you would have to hire to work 1 shift to camp the world. Now multiply that by 6 so you’d have enough people 24/7, off days, vacations and bam… bots solved… just gotta pay all of them… Does it make sense to hire that many people and still turn a profit? Is that a reasonable investment for 0 return?
Now consider… how many of those now employees are going to know or be able to recognize what a bot is? Could you tell the difference between a guy fishing while watching a move and a bot just fishing? Can you tell which players are flying to their next mining node and which ones are bots flying to the next node without following them for a few minutes? How long would you have to train these new people before they can start banning these bots on the spot? How about all the re-training you’d have to do when the botters start writing good bots?
There are far too many idiots like you who like just shout “incompetents” or “greedy” without comprehending the problem and understanding how to fix it.
If he can ban two bots per hour who will buy new month, it is enough to pay for that GM work. I can recognize more bots in a single BG. Why, at least, not try it? It can be promoted as a bot hunter as well, with a realtime bot banned counter, so people can see Blizzard is doing something. Even if they cannot handle it, they would be profitable, and people can contact him live to instantly ban bots in BG, for example.
If they will do bots unrecognizable by normal players, I think players won’t care about them.
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Actually if you want to get rid of bots the solution would be to punish the people who buy gold. You’d need to adopt a zero tolerance position on any and all third party gold buying and implement permanent bans for anyone caught doing so. Cut off the demand = kill the supply.
Sudden huge sums of gold appearing in players’ inventories can be tracked using behind-the-scenes filters. Every such unexplained sum could then be investigated. Some of it might be from legitimate sources, but the remainder should be fairly easy to trace back to third party gold-selling sites. Naturally this would take resources and investment from Blizzard.
But it’s never going to happen. Not now, not ever.
The ugly truth is that Activision absolutely adore the bots. They are making an absolute packet from the big botting networks. They’re pumping more money into Blizzard’s coffers then you can possibly imagine. They’ll never kill that golden goose.
And that is the reason. I remember gold tracking even on pserver.
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How many people wouldn’t abuse a system where you can report people for being bots? And what happens when the bots start flooding the system? They already mass report people who farm them on PvP realms. I don’t know how botters pay for their subs, if they’re doing some shady stuff with prepaid cards or if they can get refunds but I guess it might be possible.
Sure it’d be worth a try, but I can guarantee it wont work.
And You say :
What good does that do? Look at any announcement that blizzard has done regarding dealing with bots. Full of “they’re still around” and “You’re so bad do more” comments. They’re damned if they do, they’re damned if they don’t. Why even try if you don’t get any support for trying?
Yes. Gold tracking has existed since vanilla.
But…
The big bot networks typically run hundreds of accounts. Each account pays a sub.
$$$$$$ ta-ching!
Each account buys a boost.
$$$$$$ ta-ching!
What do you think the real reason for the level boost service was? Certainly not for the stated reason of ‘allowing new players to catch-up with their friends.’ That’s bollards! Pure smoke and mirrors.
WoW tokens help incentivise and normalise the practice of gold buying until it’s regarded as a standard and acceptable part of play. The tokens threaten the big bot networks not at all, as they will simply compete and undercut. In fact WoW tokens actually help the big bot networks by creating a ‘gold buying is normal and OK’ mindset among players.
Oh, they have it all figured out.
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Seems like lot of exuse and not single good argument why not.
You can abuse the system even now, but if a real person decides if you are a bot or not, you are safe.
Again, people can see if you are a bot or not. For a false reptort, there would be a shadow mute on the report or something.
If this is true, it makes Blizzard even worse as a company. It is an absurd argument; why not
You are funny. We got one message per long time. Where is one number without any other information? And we cannot see the difference. It is good way to promote? They can share at least some statistics about banned bots (percentage per level,classic era, work, retail, etc.). It is very different if you meet someone in the game who would ban the bot who is ruining your BG at the moment.
True, but currently only mass reports work because its automated. If there is a person behind the system, they will have to check up on every case. You can’t tell if someone is a bot in 10 sec in every case, it’ll take time and work effort to find conclusive proof. You’ll need more than 1 person to take on the work load. And consider off-time hours. Wont take long to figure out the pattern of the and just bot when the bot hunter isn’t online, which alright, that can be solved by just getting like 4x more GMs per realm.
Again, it still wastes the bot hunters time, which if it benefits the bots, it will be abused.
I don’t mean the botters have a deal with blizzard, I mean people buy pre-paid cards now for less than what a sub costs and some people do talk about getting refunds for their subs. I can’t confirm or deny the validity of the claims, but could exist in theory. I agree that not doing it because something like this “might” exist isn’t a reason not to try.
True, but do you really want to give botters more info on how they keep getting caught?
Also, this is just an example of how much the players care about what Blizzard is doing. They’re giving us numbers and are met with negative feedback. I don’t think the feedback would be much better when they start releasing the numbers from bot hunters for one reason: If bots are still around, the feedback will be “I don’t think you’re doing anything, I still see bots”. Which is why going full scale bot warfare would be the only effective way to combat the bots, but it would be very expensive and include all the points I’ve brought up before. If they had the same sub numbers they did in 2008 or would see an influx of players, I could see them doing it, but as things are I’m surprised they haven’t gone free to play with a cash shop like all other MMOs.
And sure, you can bring up ethics and what not, but as you see from the popular opinion, any company who turns a profit is greedy and evil by default so it’d be wasted breath anyway.
I’m not against Blizzard trying the small scale bot hunting, I’m simply expressing points to why it wouldn’t make a difference.
It’s already too late for this particular method tbh. I have 200k and don’t do GDKPs, am i expected to be banned for engaging with the economy?