Outside of occasional banwaves, Blizzard has proven time and time again that they are largely helpless against bots. They don’t want to invest the time and resources in combatting the problem, because it would be expensive. And we all know that “the man” Bobby Kotick doesn’t like red ink… Keeping the share holders happy and getting those fat bonuses is more important than combatting cheating.
Once the field of AI both matures more and becomes less expensive to implement than it currently is, it may offer a glimmer of hope in fully automating the process of combatting this problem.
Also, one must consider that Blizzard makes money from cheaters when they rebuy the game after they are banned. So technically investing in better anti-cheat would be a negative return investment, since they’d be making less money from cheaters not wanting to rebuy the game in fear of being immediately banned again. This is basically a morals versus greed issue on Blizzards part, as there have been ways to make it more difficult for cheaters to rebuy the game… Banning hardware ID’s being a primary method.
As long as there are those that want to cheat, dealing with this problem will forever be a constant cat and mouse game.
With the wide range of reports of this problem, the game/spam bots swamping the server is likely playing a role. Packet loss between the player and Battle.net could also be a contributing factor.
From what I understand, item duping is largely a thing of the past. While there were dupe methods when the game was released, they have been largely circumvented. I’m not saying they doesn’t exist, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ways that are being kept top secret and used very infrequently to keep the method under the radar.
From PezRadar: