Zones are completely swarmed with bots

[Azorka-firemaw]

@Saneko-ragnaros

The rules do get enforced and botters and goldbuyers get penalised.

I know too many RMTers to believe this.

[Chrysoprase-hydraxian-waterlords]

I feel with classic we deserve active GM’s. If they want us to feel the nostalgia, GM’s who can handle the banhammer will be nice. Bots do get removed, but it takes too damned long. Please keep reporting all. It would be nice if Blizzard would let us know what they want to do about bots, because their efforts sofar are not good enough.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Azorka-firemaw

I know too many RMTers to believe this.

Well, I see RMTers make whine threads with their associated penalties on both CS forums and that is how I figure out which penalties they get. The thing is, usually after a penalty they just buy gold again up to the point of getting the account banned and restart over with the same practices. Throwing away their money, while wrecking economical damage in the process to the realm too.

@Chrysoprase-hydraxian-waterlords

It would be nice if Blizzard would let us know what they want to do about bots

They used to do monthly announcements on what they did - this was the last one:

Recent Actions Against Exploitative Accounts – December 2023

And then they still got accused of making the numbers up/lying/or not doing enough. I don’t think it was all the bots either since they keep making new ones but uh, Blizz stopped doing those.

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.

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!

[Majitani-stitches]

With how many hours it takes to level a char. A bot above lvl 40 is totally unnacceptable, hell even 30.

[Kellarw-silvermoon]

The most annoying thing is that it’s early enough in the servers life that so many bots got real names or actual words so it’s not easy to recognize bots at a glance.

[Omrat-bloodfang]

Why you people always lying? Jesus

[Belost-spineshatter]

@Majitani-stitches

With how many hours it takes to level a char. A bot above lvl 40 is totally unnacceptable, hell even 30.

Don’t worry. Blizzard care about their target audience which are bots and goldbuyers. In tbc prepatch they will give them lvl 58 boost so that bots and goldbuyers will have easier life.

[Daveyoyo-thunderstrike]

i don’t know , 3 weeks (the same 44-45 bots are farming non stop ) So i really doubt they are getting banned .

If you are for example 60 and you farming materials for raid you will see how the same bots exist for months and month without any disruption .

With this Blizzard force people to buy gold since boters remove the ability to subtain even the basics .