Earlier this week, on Tuesday, we launched the largest (at the time) banwave in Hearthstone’s history. Then again, on Wednesday, we launched the largest (at the time) banwave in Hearthstone’s history. Then again, today, we launched the largest banwave in Hearthstone’s history. In total, over half a million bots died this week. It’s an ongoing fight, but we’re gunna keep beating them back.
Ok, this is pretty huge…this shows how BAD the bot problem is.
Read that tweet twice if you need to.
Record bot ban ever. The very next day they beat the record again.
Then, THE VERY NEXT DAY AGAIN they beat the record…
I don’t know how they fix the problem. They fix it, but it’s so huge…it just comes right back
Banning a bot account that has already completed its Arena run accomplishes nothing. They’re not fixing the problem, they’re just making a meaningless number go up.
Even if it hasn’t completed its arena run it does nothing.
New account and go next. They can’t possibly ban every account every day, and we’ve already started having collateral damage. This is unsustainable.
I know they’re working on a more sustainable idea, but so far, it doesn’t look promising. The idea is terrible.
Why not go straight at the source of the demand? Locate the streamers buying the arena runs and try to take them down legally, if possible, if only to shut them down
The percentage of bots lost to bans, prior to sale, does impact botters where it matters, in the wallet. Of course, they’ll adjust by running the bots for a shorter period of time, so that more survive, but then their product becomes lower quality. At some point lower quality will create lower demand, and supply will match. They’ll never be zero bots but with effort there can be fewer.
That’s very true though.
Make it so you can buy packs in the shop for an Arena ticket, straight up, and disable the retire option in Arena. Stretches out the bot life cycle, gives Blizzard more time to ban.
Instead of banning like there is no tomorrow they need to raise the costs for the botters.
I’m not saying to not ban bots. Just that If they not change the problem in the base and by consequence change how arena runs work the bots will never stop.
It isn’t about what is correct or wrong anymore but about make the entire thing economically unviable.
Another option is to just remove the Gold entry option for Arena. Pay to play only. That’d kinda suck and kill the “go infinite” dream, but with as many bots as Americas has that dream is already dead, and it’d save Ranked.
That’s pretty much what they did with Diablo 3. Eventually just concede to the botters who were farming gold and just delete a game mode. (BTW for the record it wasn’t the real money auction house but the free gold auction house that destroyed the pre-expansion D3 economy. Because botters.)
Eh, that’s not a block so much as a new hoop to jump through. Of course, so is the idea I had about disabling the retire option. A bot can do anything that a human player can, faster than a human can, so the only question is how much time does Blizzard need to detect them and ban them before they finish their lifecycle.
I liked the above Schyla’s idea about blocking new players from entering arena for, say, 3 months. That’s an awful amount of time for a botting account to work for nothing. Maybe even make it so they have to log-in periodically during the course of those 3 months for it to count.
I believe that would be a great solution because new players have nothing to do in arena in the first place. It’s for their own good not to enter that with 0 skills and knowledge about the game and play against either an arena-only player or a botted overpowered deck.
They shouldn’t ban bots. That’s a losing proposition in the way Hearthstone is setup.
They should quietly label these as bots and track them. Only allow these bots to play other bots creating a dichotomy, a game for bots and a game for real players.
One key thing to enforce is, never let any resource like money transfer from a Botting account to a non Botting account. Any such transfer of resources that goes through labels the recipient as a bot themselves.
How is this different than just banning them? Well, the bots won’t know if Blizzard knows they are bots or not and will continue grinding the game earning resources. That is, the botters resources (compute time, grinding time, etc) will be dedicated to an entirely wasted effort, but they won’t know it. So they will happily continue doing the useless things they normally do, be while the rest of us will be bot free.
What I described above, has been used in many different contexts to absolutely cripple malicious users of any system. At this point it’s the recommended way to deal with bad actors. Never inform them you know and just let them proceed unaware, while you hamstring their efforts and simultaneously have them waste resources.
Just to clear up, the reason why there are bots in Ranked is because some people want to buy accounts on the black market that have godlike Arena decks. The bots farm XP in Ranked, the gold is used to draft Arena decks, any deck that isn’t godlike is immediately retired and they spend the gold to try again. After the account is purchased, a single Arena run is played with it and then it’s discarded like a disposable glove.
You have never played against a single bot that is more than one week old†. Their lifecycle is shorter than that. And of course transferring resources from one account to another is impossible.
† I’m kinda guessing, but I know that bots retire at most 300 Arena decks before they settle on the one that they actually sell, usually less. Any account with more than 30 runs goes on the Arena leaderboards and you can check out the bottom of the ranks yourself, and you’re not going to see anything less than 0.03. So imagine how much time it takes to farm 5000 gold if you played 24/7 without food, bathroom or sleep. That’s about how long at most a bot farms XP.
Unfortunately I’m not aware of the exact mechanism by which bots work. I’m venturing a guess it works as
Account is started as a Botting account and bots for a long time gathering resources.
Once enough resources on account are gathered bot is sold for real money, let’s say eBay or whatever the hell botters use.
A real player starts playing the account, maybe different formats like arena and spends resources unabashedly to craft god drafts or the equivalent in whatever the format is (ie rejection sampling.)
If my understanding above is correct, then there is a flip side to this where Blizzard is able to detect that that account has botted at some point.
Their procedure now is to ban them.
What I’m saying is… Why?
Just label the account as having botted once and put it in “bot jail” without notifying the account.
No need to work with IRS or any govt.
Look, I’m not describing anything groundbreaking here. This is the standard way to treat bad actors in any community and has been widely employed successfully in other games and contexts.
For some reason Blizzard loves to make the hunting of the bad actors and their punishment very public. It’s a mistake to do that if you actually care to get rid of bad actors, but if you want to make waves or show how "hard"you work it’s great.