How big a problem is botting? You could triple the number of active bots, and 98.5% of the playerbase wouldn’t notice or care. Or, you could eliminate botters completely, and the same 98.5% of the playerbase wouldn’t notice or care.
If there were no botters at all, how would you play this game any differently than you do now? And If almost all other players botted, how would you play differently?
So, yeah, not that big a problem.
Botting doesn’t change the way that you or me ‘press buttons’. It changes the perception of achievement, rarity, difficulty, etc.
Posts like yours are a disservice to players that would enjoy competing on leaderboards that are not rife with automated play.
And to the poster in this thread saying ‘you forget about no lifers’ - no, we forget nothing. There is a massive difference between no lifing and botting.
We know that botting doesn’t directly affect game play. But it does have its affects. Affects like causing others to join them when they see those botters getting away with it, along with other such things.
Without bottrers things could very well be different from a game play point of view. Think of it, no botters in any of Blizz’s games. That could mean that the hacks team wouldn’t be needed to handle cheaters. Sure they would still be there to handle anyone that would dare to hack into Blizz’s servers. Then Blizz might be able to spend more resources on making their games even better.
Think of what this game could’ve been if it never had any cheaters. We might have an endgame with more do to than this small endgame. We might’ve even have way more viable builds to play with as well.
This is a problem when we have leaderboards.
Either eliminate the competitive aspect of this game, or the cheaters.
We can’t have both.
If they banned all bots, you’d be 20% higher in the leaderboards.
Then what? You wouldn’t be more/less powerful. You wouldn’t be #1. Your friends/family/guildies wouldn’t care at all. Zero. Just imagine you’re 20% higher and revel in your self-glory. We can all agree that we shouldn’t be complaining about things that don’t matter, so why are we?
It does matter. It may be inevitable but it’s still unfair. Besides, what kinda player wants to skip the rewards of the gear grind by having a robot do it for them? Without that the game is just a paragon grind, which isn’t remotely fun. Then you log in to do some pushing with your ill gotten gains and push a legit player off the LB? Eff that guy.
That’s simply not true. If all bots were banned then anyone could play hard and achieve the #1 rank. At that point it’s a game of pure grit and meritocracy versus today where it’s actually physically impossible.
I don’t agree that cheating doesn’t matter.
I’m playing a game right now called “do something important,” where the goal is to do something important. Instead of doing something important, I’m responding to this statement and pretending that it was important. That’s cheating, but in the end, all that happened was that I wasted a little bit more time explaining it to you and I didn’t really get the prize I was expecting. Should I be punished?
… though on the other hand, since I’m pretending to be a winner, I guess I can reward myself with dinner on my way home.
See in WoW classic, people have recently been caught cheating and interestingly enough, it matters… because those people have an unfair advantage over other players. It’s the kind of advantage that affects how others play the game. It affects competitions, races, PvP, and the social structure of thousands of people on a server (or beyond). It affects the very core of what WoW provides.
Here, the only advantage is ordering in a list, which I mean you can just inspect the page source with Chrome and rearrange them however you please. You can put your own name on the top ten if you wish. Take a screenshot and show your friends. There. Your cheating is more powerful than their cheating.
Again, in the end, nobdy cares. Zero. People. Care.
Right, but that’s the same thing as “when you grow up, you can be anything you want to be.” In theory, that’s technically correct, but in practice, you end up being only what you achieve. There are only a certain number of slots in a human lifetime for President of the United States, for example, and not all of them who want to be there are going to get there.
You’re not going to be #1. Not. Going. To.
Finally, it all falls back on cost. As you have chosen to play a game that funds its creators only once, you get what you get and you should be happy there’s any service at all, let alone a list. The fact that you haven’t picked another game to play likely already means you feel like you have a bargain game that is superior to other options. Be happy with that, or not. Spin your wheels in the forums about bots, or not. In the end, if you choose to be upset about your place on the leaderboards, I very highly doubt it would stop with bots, even assuming that could be fixed.
Hmm, well that’s not true, obviously.
Right. Tell me your place on the leaderboard and I’ll tell you exactly how much I care. I invite literally everybody to say something different.
Go ahead. Say you’re #1. I won’t even check. I’ll just believe you. I’m the easiest mark in D3. Tell me all about how long and hard you grinded-out those two million paragon levels.
Doesn’t matter. People still care about botters.
Right, but the thing is that you apparently didn’t read what I had typed, because I wasn’t talking about whether or not people cared about botters. Obviously people like you exist and I’m trying to find out why.
You’re saying no one cares about cheating… when they do.
I play solo and ignore leaderboards. It’s not a problem to me at all. I play for my own pleasure - I don’t game to expose myself to other people and their pathological malfeasance. Those who do have only themselves to blame.
Whats that?
Those that don’t have their heads in the sand should be ashamed of themselves.
The reality is that very, very few players are genuinely affected by botting. But at least 10 times that number like to pretend they are, as in “I’d totally have a high spot on the leaderboard if Blizz would run a banwave. But as it is, I don’t even push as high as I could because botters.”
Outside of a few friends and clanmates, every other player/character in the game could be bot, and it would make no difference to me. If Blizz suddenly upgraded Warden to be uber powerful and successful, and stopped all botting overnight, again, what difference does it make to my game? None. Zero. And it would be the same for the vast majority of D3 players the world over. Oh, wait, with the botters gone, I could rank in the high 700’s? WOW! I’d be sure to post that on Facebook and add it to my CV for my next job interview. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that?
And I would actually be top 10 on every solo board if only Blizz would take their damn responsibilities seriously and restore fairness and integrity to the leaderboards (hey, no sniggering at the back there!) by running regular banwaves. Sure, my current GR clears don’t show it, but they’re only low because botters, you know?
No, but they can farm tons of paragon and obtain phat lewt while the botter works so that they can go home and clear GR120+ solo
The people who take leaderboards/competition seriously do care
As I’ve already said I care, this claim is demonstrably false.