I agree that all botters deserve the same fate but regardless of why they do what they do, they’re all still ultimately doing the same thing. Some, as you said competitive, can do them for the same reason the casual ones are.
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They get it though. When a banwave hits it aims to wipe potential alt accounts that can be tracked back to main cheater account beside anyone who are detected to use it. It doesn’t matter if cheater was on the leader board or not.
Collecting all this data and updating the signature hashes is not a work of minutes but days to weeks when we are talking about a large audience. Banwaves always aim to wipe the majority of cheaters at ONCE, so lest cheater community can not warn cheat developers to renew the cheat signatures or warn other botters across the internet like discussing them threads like this usually do. There is a reason developers tell you to not name-and-shame or talk about banwaves, as informing everyone about Blizzard’s actions just help the cheaters. Any thread that is derailed from main topic for long, or fail to oblige this simple rule about being discreet of any moderation gets pruned.
Trying to hand out individual bans will alert the cheat developers, so anti-cheat software will be outdated and ineffective in an instant to a few days. That will only benefit cheaters even more and whoever defends this idea should be approached with suspicion and doubt.
Suggesting artificial intelligence to do it, is another deal of unrealistic wishes for walking on the clouds. Some system like artificial intelligence has to be trained first on models, as they only consist of problem solving algorithms. Also you have to create complex exception just so it can be accurate. This is NOT better, efficient nor more accurate than allowing your anti-cheat to detect it.
You can not allow a subservient chat algorithm to handle bans and solve problems without models and exceptions. Instead of dealing with its nature, you can wipe everything with anti-cheat banwaves, free of worrying about artificial intelligence acting on its own or falsely claim detection when exceptions are not met. Such model will be costly to rent copyrights or develop from scratch for a decade old unmonetized game.
To add, macros are gray area at some games and those are sometimes provided by gaming accessories itself. Some companies even allow them, or turn to other direction just so they can have sponsorship from gaming accessory hardwares on their conventions or esports meetings.
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Where did you gather this information?
Wrong. Several companies do this already and with success. The issue here is the lack of caring.
Tell that to Sierra.
While I’d certainly agree that there are problems with AI anti-cheat, the issue here is that it is better than your traditional anti-cheat. The reason for this is that your anti-cheat is checking for obsolete techniques.
This isn’t to say that most people still don’t use older cheats, but modern cheats do not run on the computer. It doesn’t matter if you use kernel level anti-cheats, you’re not going to physically detect them. The only way is to check patterns. Does the player play 22 hours a day, 7 days a week? Yes, they’re a cheater. But you’re not going to find any cheating software on their system. Does the player always know where to go? Yes, then they’re using a maphack, but even if you do a perfect screen capture of what’s sent to the screen, you’re not going to see anything.
And yeah, I understand the reason for ban waves, and not to ban immediately, but I also feel that’s a thing of the past. Modern cheating needs to be handled with modern techniques.
Unfortunately, there is no real solution here. And there never will be one. The best you can do is slow the bleeding, but it’s always going to be impossible to stop. The reality is that legitimate competition with any online game is over. Not just Diablo, but every online game. And that’s a reality we’re going to have to come to grips with. Some people just don’t realize it yet.
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There are still issues, such as false bans. People have run speed runs demonstrations of how quickly they can get banned from AI anti-cheats, even though they’re 100% legitimate.
The bottom line is, for any anti-cheat, there still needs to be some level of human component. And that’s going to be hard with a game like Diablo 3 that’s in maintenance mode.
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Oh yeah, there are. No system is perfect nor will it ever be. There are systems out there with track records for being very good, which contradicts what Naksiloth said. He knows this, which is why he didn’t answer me.
Yes, there will need to be some human interaction however, there needs to be competent human interaction, which is something Blizzard is not known for.
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Modern techniques are viable for competitive games that are monetized to bring profit, while being plagued with wide variety of cheats. Diablo 3 is neither; no matter how hard one denies it, or claim how many hours they have wasted on the game. It is a game made for having fun and implemented name lists for the sake of longevity and replay value. By no mean players supposed to take a name list this seriously to announce ban waves for warning cheaters in the guise of “hating” them.
In case there is an artificial software anti-cheat model or cheating software empowered with artificial intelligence, I am willing to bet that Diablo 3 doesn’t fit the bill, nor worth such effort. As for artificial intelligence itself, it can be limited or be avoided like any other anti-cheat if it is not given proper permissions. Nobody likes an artificial intelligence at kernel level access either; that conflicts with many user rights for privacy, increase load and make you question the intentions of company. That would be utterly pathetic to even try such system without things developing properly; which can take years.
If human resources needed to supervise artificial intelligence then anti-cheat also require it and it does not take you a long time to set exceptions as it doesn’t go out of its way beside arranged and detected signature lists. When you trust artificial intelligence, the exceptions will disrupt its flow and it will be prone to make mistakes or false flag accounts which can take years to train and fix. It need live models for learning and you do NOT have that luxury in this industry. If people get falsely banned, that will bury the popularity of game, fast.
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This sounds cool and all, but it is not what they are doing.
This is what they are doing.
There has only been 1 or 2 seasons where they have done a mass, comprehensive ban wave. Most the ban ripples you see are when they select a number of the top cheaters and ban them, making it look like a ban wave has occurred. They are only banning the most obvious and egregious botters and have never banned anyone for THUD as far as I have seen.
The smart botters make sure to keep the account time to 12 hours a day or less. Not pushing until after the ban ripple has occurred is another main strategy. I’ve had multiple botters on my flist over the years that were perfectly fine after those ban “waves”. One guy had about 10 seasons worth of botting before moving on to D4. As for the LB’s many seasons have had a ban “wave” were several of the top 8000+ plus paragon guys went poofed, only to have several 8000+ paragon guys back on the top spots the next week.
It is cool to think Blizz is in this big arms race with the cheaters, but in reality, they are only cherry picking the most obvious ones each season for optics.
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That aligns with the time where they declared that Seasons will be on repeat which clearly indicate that game is shelved. I bet they only did those superficial banwaves instead deep cleaning because all these threads about banwave being “late”.
As I have said it’s not a quick process to access, detect and array data of millions. The anti-cheat they use, activate at random intervals at client computers and this mean, it will take a long time to snapshot the system background to check when they are using cheats. If you demand a swift banwave, you are not actually doing yourself any favors. From another perspective, perhaps that is what you are hoping for; that Blizzard would do a sloppy job at it by pressure so you can push on your botting alt after ban ripple faded. Wouldn’t know.
There must be a catch to that. You just said there have been deep detailed banwaves yet he avoided them all in its entirety by keeping his activity low? Really? Because if that was the trick I guess not a single person would be left, not using cheats in this game. He isn’t sparing you all the details and why would he anyway? I may give a guess about what was happening but that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to hint at it here. Funny thing is, he could be bragging about not playing this game for 12 hours per day to impress you when he exactly does just that.
That is another question why do you even have those people in your friends list. I had quite a few friends who turned to botting later but they all got banned. Does your friend still “bot” on D4 and still active?
Botters have alts and spare copies. This is also why they don’t schedule a banwave early in Season. As doing so, is just trying to write on the surface of a lake. If you really need to do that you wait until the end of the year, when lake is frozen.
Along the next two to three weeks, following the banwave, botters will buy their spare copies and farm back to the same spot; resetting everything to square one. This is also another reason why Blizzard schedule their banwaves late and this is what botters gamble on.
How do you know they were for sure?
Ummm no. Definitely no. They have not done a comprehensive banwave in over 20 seasons. They did a couple in the first 5-8 seasons of D3 and that was it.
Ouch. Nice accusation. I don’t cheat plain and simple. Never botted. Never used THUD. As active as I am telling Blizz to get off their tails and be a little proactive in policing their game, you would know this.
No catch. Read above. The couple of comprehensive ban waves were in the first 5-8 seasons. The players I am referring to have been from S10 and beyond. This is the reason I know they aren’t doing comprehensive ban waves as the most egregious of the cheaters ran free for 6-10 seasons. And, yes, he did keep the account time to around 12 hours a day.
Yes, really. The problem is, you are commenting on this subject with incredibly limited and biased knowledge. You can’t combat your enemy unless you know your enemy. If you talk to enough cheaters, they will tell you that the dumb ones get caught (plays an obvious inhuman play time or is tops the LBs too much).
The four or 5 people on my flist that eventually ended up botting all started as legit players. This is when I played with them. Over the years, they got tired of the grind and switched to running bots most the time. This is when I stopped hanging out with them. I kept them on my flist, so whenever those “Massive ban wave!!!” threads would go up, I knew those people had no idea what they were talking about. This on top of the fact that within a few days of several of the “big ban waves”, there were 8000 paragon 20+ hours a day back in the top spots.
Of the 4 or 5 people on my flist, the only one who did get banned was one who got greedy and started botting 24/7 and pushing 4 man LBs.
Dunno how much you play, but you cannot buy another copy and be 8000-10000 paragon in a week, no matter how much you bot. Over 3 weeks into this season, the top 20+ hour a day players are around 7000 paragon, so no it is not the same botters. It is botters who were smart enough to wait until after the ban wave to start pushing their spots.
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Sorry if it wasn’t clear but I wasn’t aiming at you.
Limited. Yes. Biased? No. People hide details from outsiders. There are many rulesets for detecting cheats too. It can not be that simple as your botter friends claim, because it never was. I can’t be more obvious than that.
In my opinion, they just wanted to lull you into botting so they can use you for their amusement and laugh at you when you get banned. In reality, you know nothing about them or their methods and they are not your “friends” but a bunch of internet strangers who lied to you by omission. Also what stopped you from believing them and cheating right away if it is that easy? First wanted to check the legitimacy of it? Too soon? Joke aside, if it was really that easy I believe it would be a rampant method and everyone would cheat.
What is it that makes you believe they attempted to lull them?
If you honestly do not believe that, don’t reply.
No worries, but if you quote me, then put that in the paragraphs that follow, it did look that way.
Actually, yes. The perspective you base your arguments from is point of view of the developer. You have extremely limited knowledge of the botting side of botting and how they work, which makes your knowledge of the situation very biased.
Of course it can. You make a lot of assumptions when it comes to the Blizz side of the cheating problem. Would bet my retirement they don’t put in nearly as much effort into the cheating problem as you think.
And your opinion is wrong. It is not 1 or 2 people I have talked to over the years. It is a few dozens over several different years that are unrelated from each other. All have the same message, keep the cheat time down and don’t push LBs if you want to avoid a ban.
As far as this magic trick they have to avoid detection, why is it all the casual botters all seem to know this trick, but the high-end cheaters don’t? Simple because the “trick” is to not make it obvious that cheating is going on since Blizz only cherry picks the most egregious cheaters and has done so for many, many seasons.
You might have missed it the dozens of times I have said it, but I don’t cheat.
I gonna wager it goes on far more than you think. As I said above, the vast majority of cheaters are casually cheating. The high volume subset of cheaters is actually very small.
As for everyone doing it, many players can’t figure out how to put together a 6 piece set build, they aren’t even to the point of thinking about cheating. On top of that, most people are actually honest people and aren’t going to cheat whether it is easy or not.
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I didn’t 
Anti cheat software comes packed with rulesets and upon detection it slides a silent behavioral flag on your account. Some anti cheat software await until those flags accumulated to be 3-5 before handling a ban (ie. CS: GO had that) while some stay dormant for awaited manual banwave. It doesn’t need to be a ruleset either, if a background snapshot of anti-cheat shown to detect a known md5 hash of cheating software or some third party software reading certain memory pages, then you can get marked as well.
As far as we know Warden the anti-cheat of Blizzard activate at random intervals so, it is just a matter of time to detect those unless random intervals are set for long delays. I don’t think this is the case unless some other thing going on, either from developers or botters.
Because ensuring that player doesn’t surpass 12 hours play time is a very weak reason to kickstart the anti cheat. People play around 10-12 hours for few days non stop at the start of seasons in groups even. Why would they set this restriction to be their sole detection rule and never check background snapshots? So I really suspect cheaters have another trick.
Of course. The thing is, you are making the big assumption they are and have recently been updating Warden for a dead game making them very little revenue. Pretty sure the hacks teams efforts are being put into games that are making them money, WOW, D4, D:I, OW2, etc. The only effort the hacks team is putting into D3 is occasionally cherry picking a few cheaters at the top for optics.
The standard rule is to keep your playtime around 12 hours a day average. Sorry if that was unclear. Again, it is just a rule of thumb most cheaters use, not a hard number. 13 hours a day average you are probably still going to be alright, 20+ and on the top 50 or so on the LBs, most likely not.
Still wondering why casual cheaters all seem to know this trick, but the serious competitive cheaters do not. Reason, there is no trick. Again, they aren’t mass banning people, simply the more egregious cheaters.
It is the same as driving down the interstate with the Highway Patrol on the road. If you are cheating and driving 70 MPH, you pretty much are not going to get in trouble as the legit drivers are driving 65 MPH. Be stupid and blow by everyone at 115 MPH, that Highway Patrol is going to bust you and make an example out of you. Same thing with Blizz and cheaters, don’t be stupid and obvious and they aren’t going to waste their time with you.
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The unclear part is that your friend managed to avoid a second banwave when he supposed to push and be on leader boards after the first one. You are telling me he avoided banwaves for 10 seasons and went through some seasons where there were not one, but two and even three banwaves in total. You also tell me that there is no trick, but the way your friend tells the story contradicts with the truth. If he were to push after first banwave as he implied, he would get caught at the next; that is first. Secondly, there have been deep cleaning banwaves where Blizzard aims for those botters’ alts with only a few hours on record but your friends managed to avoid it with 12 hours gameplay daily? Sounds like someone lying here by omission; not every system is perfect but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do its job. Most likely your “friends” are doing more than limiting their play time. So while your story sounds plausible, it also bring some questions as there are loops in it.
Lastly, all these threads complaining about leader boards could force developers hand to act fast and allegedly, clear the leader boards only. Perhaps making them act quickly was part of the some botters’ plan all along. Usually setting a banwave can take longer than anticipated and you don’t schedule one just because someone whined on the web. But, if someone starts a rally and cause everyone to talk about their dedication from social media outlets and complain while bragging about their achievements in a video game, then you may attempt a ban wave to prove a point. It could be very superficial but you did what you have been asked, and didn’t waste too much on an unmonetized, decade old game.
Edit: Excuse my manners at some points and don’t take them personally.
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That’s the problem, it didn’t do its job. If someone evaded a ban and were in fact, cheating… for several seasons, the system didn’t work.
Blizzard has a bad track record of doing this. A very long time ago, I played WoW. This was during vanilla, so they had active GMs. My guild leader botted to rank 13. He openly admitted he did it. He wasn’t shy at all. He was never banned.
It takes competency, and a willingness. They’ve put out PR statements to make people like you feel like the system is working.
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I never said anyone on my flist did this.
I said there are “players” that appear on the top 10 within a week of a supposed ban wave with 8000+ paragon and 20+ hours played.
Yes.
But you are confusing facts as I never said this person pushed LB spots.
Again, you are mixing things I said. Didn’t talk to this person once they started on their bot routine. The rule of thumb routine is something I was told about by multiple cheaters over the years, not by this person. It was confirmed as I have had multiple botters on my flist not getting banned after ban waves. They kept their account time around the 12 hour a day average mark and did not push top 100 LB spots. The one time one of them did get greedy and go 20+ hours a day and was in the top 100 4 man, yes, they did get banned when the ban ripple occured.
And I never said the guy botting 10+ seasons ever pushed LB’s much less pushed after a ban wave. Again, most cheaters do not push the LB’s.
Any proof this has ever happened?
I am sure there are dumb cheaters who had all their accounts tied to the same Battle.net account and got all of them banned. I would wager most cheaters with multiple D3 accounts do not have them on the same Battle.net account.
Once again, you are assuming they are still updating Warden for D3, or even using it for D3 at this point.
So, then why are casual botters all aware of this “trick” but those competitive cheaters on top of the LBs are all completely oblivious? Seems you are grasping at straws.
No worries, it is discussion. I don’t take any of your comments personally and none of mine are meant personally either.
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They have declared ban waves at the past back at '21. By principle you don’t do that unless you are sure that you cleared every cheater and ripples have ended swiftly. Thread must have been gone by now; it was Metalhead’s first thread complaining about botters.
You have ways to track them. Those are usually sleeper bot accounts that try to act like a human and send random friend requests to trick Warden into assuming it is a human controlled account. In reality those are just idle bot controlled accounts that become active when main account got banned.
It is a miracle they still do that. If I was a Diablo series developer I would just ignore it completely or schedule my own ban waves. Not kidding.
And I simply told you that they may not be as “innocent” as you think they are. I tried to tell it quite a few times between the lines. You have to put two plus two here. Seriously, I am not grasping at anything; you insisting at not reading between my lines. I even explained how anti-cheat works, behavioral flags and all.