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.
The account is not dead. You’re just tracking them, not banning, remember? Or now you’re also suggesting them to make a script that insta-bans them when they queue up for arena game, but not while drafting?
Do you realize what you’re suggesting? Like, a totally new hearthstone client with a hidden bot queue and a script which instabans them after drafting and before playing a single arena game
If they can make a bot jail for standard, it’s just as easy for arena.
Sure the buyer of the account can do their god draft, but then they will queue right into another god draft (since they will be in arena botter jail)
Your telling me they will be thrilled about that? Probably not they do this to stomp on the average Joe.
But let’s say they are happy with playing this way. Well guess what, they just created their own botter god draft league where to enter you have to buy a botter account. Good on them. Let them play each other to their hearts content.
That’s pretty much the state of Arena currently for everyone. It hasn’t stopped them yet.
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This is already happening, and all it does is it increases the demand for botted arena drafts, because people want even MORE overpowered arena drafts to deal with those
It’s an ego competition.
Lol. Imo that’s totally fine, because now those accounts never or at the very least rarely interact with regular Joe shmoe, ie you and me.
Let them go nuts. They have created their own god league where you buy in with real money on the black market.
Why fight it’s existence? Just seperate it from the rest of the game. A much easier and attainable goal.
It negatively impacts arena mains mostly, but also casual players with lucky drafts
And, that’s assuming you actually somehow made the hidden bot queue and pit them against each other to fix the standard problem
Either way, it’s not a complete solution. It might be better than it is now, but arena is still…in trouble.
I still think the idea that new accounts younger than 3 months can’t play arena is better, problem solved.
I imagine as in their ranking? True, occasionally you’ll queue into a god draft and get crushed, but if it happens randomly it could be thought of as an rng thrown game. Also Blizzard can entertain the possibility of retroactively amending results once you know who the cheaters are (eg think of Lance Armstrong striped of all medals in tour de France, along with most riders.)
Agreed. It definitely would be a lot of work to implement and it might have many rough edges. But better than nothing?
If this is allowed, then I prefer this solution.
Tho it’s not clear to me this would fix the Botting problem if the botters seek a different end result we don’t understand.
So depends how general a solution you want to Botting. The Botting jail is pretty general and can be applied in many contexts and games.
They don’t, because there’s no other way to profit from botted accounts
ah well, I guess they can be sold like LoL accounts to save some time acquiring some cards and starter gold, but it’s a huge risk to buy that for not much of an advantage, it might be cheaper to just buy from the shop
We’ll see what blizz got cooking, but we can all agree that the only thing impressive about the number of bots banned is the sheer amount of them in the circulation
The root of the problem is that Arena tickets can be bought via time invested in Hearthstone. Bots farm this time and then the person using the bot actively makes money when selling the account.
Essentially, free time = free arena tickets = real world money generation.
Think of it a lot like bitcoin. Mining is done for free and a great draft is like earning a bitcoin via mining.
The solution, although not one people want to hear, is to stop allowing Arena tickets to be purchased via time invested in Hearthstone.
They need to come up with a creative way where you can earn Arena tickets another way that can’t be farmed
OR
You have to purchase Arena tickets with money (obviously not a choice the player base will like)
I don’t see any other way around it. If there’s money to be made in the game, they will find a way via the economy.
If they don’t change the way Arena tickets are earned, then they simply need a complete revamp of the Arena system itself.
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The comparison isn’t against nothing. The comparison is against an account ban. There is no reason not to just ban bot accounts.
honestly the only solution is to certify accounts in some way
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All this time I thought blizz created some off tha bots. I’ve notice the names of my opponents don’t change with the upward downward ranking. The same names over and over again. How many people are actually really playing this game 4realz though. Also I’ve been noticing some BS patterns with the way the flow goes and how my cards are givin to me? I though this was suppose to be random but yet I can tell what tha pc (player) in ranked mode is about to play b4 it happens… I’ve been recording and well I’m thinking about streaming it for people that don’t get it. No way should I be able to predict how tha opponent is gonna play or what they are gonna play. It happens so much it’s like 2nd nature knowing what’s about to happen, and sometimes I feel like playing those blizz bots that tha cards “magically” change to suit me a loss. None the less with all the vamping on cards and so forth (tooo many to go through) I feel as if Shattered Stone would fit this game better. Broken game yes amongst other reasons, some plain to see and others not so much. Laters!