They’re working on just one such option, but it will completely destroy the arena if they go through with it.
Might as well just shut the mode down
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.)
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A good start would be put a decent minimal account level to enter arena.
Like 50.
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.
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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.
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And how do you intend to do this? I don’t understand what money do you think changes hands between botting and non-botting accounts?
What’s your plan, to work with IRS? With every country which has bots IRS?
There is no money changing hands between botting ACCOUNTS and non-botting ACCOUNTS. People do it under the table
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This shows an astonishing naivete.
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.
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I should of been more specific.
Unfortunately I’m not aware of the exact mechanism by which bots work. I’m venturing a guess it works as
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Account is started as a Botting account and bots for a long time gathering resources.
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Once enough resources on account are gathered bot is sold for real money, let’s say eBay or whatever the hell botters use.
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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.
As I explained above, nope. Not a long time at all.
How do you gather resources in seconds, enough to sell off?
At the very least these bots must play for days to gather in game gold. After all f2p is time gated.
Yes. It would take days. But not weeks and not months.
Also please keep in mind that the ONLY resource being sold off is a godlike Arena deck. The accounts are a disposable, mass produced product. There is no point in taking any action against them whatsoever after the end of their lifecycle.
Yea that’s fine, then once an account has been detected as a bot, or has botted at some point, put them in bot jail.
Any way it plays out for the account, once it’s in bot jail, no body will want it. The key point here is, the operator of the bot account won’t know its bot account is tainted, so they will be risking selling unsellable goods to buyers who will eventually savy up and stop buying them.
It’s the equivalent of the us government poisoning drug supplies and letting them sell rather than destroy them in the war on drugs. It would be far far more effective but will result in many unnecessary deaths. In this case, this is a video game, so poison your drugs away Blizzard.
How do the buyers know it’s tainted and tracked? They get the botted account with the arena run and they play the run in the course of 1-2 hours.
There’s no time to do anything about it.
The reason you are seeing so many bots is that Blizzard can’t detect them before the end of their lifecycle. By the time they ban a bot, it’s already been sold and its Arena run has already been played. It doesn’t matter if they ban it or put it in your jail or whatever they want to do by that point, it’s already fulfilled its purpose and been discarded. That’s why I said that Blizzard isn’t solving anything, they’re just making number go up. They’re not banning live bots (or at least not in sufficient numbers), they’re mostly going to the bot graveyard, blowing up bot corpses and claiming them as kills.
Surely as Blizzard brings resources onto the task of sussing out the bots they will get better.
While I agree that at this time they might be too late in average, they wrote this is an ongoing battle for them, so at the very least they have the intent to catch them sooner.
If in the process of this battle with the botters, their defacto approach is to ban them, it is giving their opponent (the botters) information they can act on (once caught and banned they go create a new account and restart.) if instead Blizzard creates the bot jail and silently puts bot accounts in them, giving them the illusion they are still doing what they think they are, Blizzard is moving the battle field to the next level. Now the botters need the weigh the possiblity the account they are pouring resources into may be a dead account. This lack of informantion is a huge advantage for Blizzard.
The fact they haven’t realized this yet over the years is beyond me.
As I’ve wrote many times, this is an established way to fight bad actors. It’s also provably a better strategy if you model it in game theory.
Okay, I want you to actually try thinking. Imagine that you are a botter and that Blizzard is doing this. How would you respond?
Let’s assume for a second that it’s possible to create a bot queue and track bots and make them play each other. That solves the problem of bots infestation in standard, as well as it could prevent a few false positives, because players who get misplaced in the bot queue will realize they’re playing against the bots and make a ticket BEFORE, rather than after, getting banned.
It still doesn’t solve the arena problem, though, and I don’t believe something like this is feasible to do anyway.
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How is the arena problem different from standard? If the botters have a dead account and don’t know it and put it up for sale it creates additional risk/uncertainty in the transaction between buyer and seller.
And if economics teaches one thing, it’s that people hate uncertainty when it comes to their time or money.