People farming accounts to 10k or whatever amount of gold and selling those. That i think is the main source for botted games.
And then probably also people botting their own account (and alt accounts) for gold,without the intention of selling.
Knowing how easy it is to ban them, do you really think that would be feasible? Who would buy an account full of gold knowing they’ll be able to play like 20-30 games before it’s banned? And then do it over and over again?
I mean, if that’s logical to you, more than what we’ve said in this thread so far, then so be it.
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I don’t think he logically thought that out at all
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i dont think they ban people in arena based on how good their decks are
They might as well because as is Arena is killing HS. Many Wild streamers do not even want to stream Wild because the bots are so overwhelming.
Well, good that no one claimed that then.
What a silly idea.
Your idea is impossible because it’s an infinite lifecycle plan. By which I mean that the purchaser buys a botted account and wants to hold onto it forever. Infinite lifecycles will never work for what we’re seeing. The only way to make obvious bots sustainable is to have a finite lifecycle. For example, the botters know that they’ll be detected and banned in about X days so they farm for X-3 days, on the X-2 day they sell the account, and on the X-1 day the customer uses the account and discards it. They make banwaves irrelevant by adjusting the bot life cycle to complete in between banwaves.
Furthermore, botters never want to sell the golden goose that lays the eggs, they only want to sell the eggs. It’s the exact opposite of that proverb about teaching a man to fish vs giving him a fish. Botters sell disposables on the black market, whether that’s gold for the Diablo 3 auction house, orbs in Path of Exile, or Arena runs in Hearthstone. They want their customers to keep coming back, hooked.
I may catch some flack for this statement but… I feel like any competitive game should require multiple ways to prove you aren’t a bot. Phone numbers. Addresses. Social security numbers. I don’t know. Something.
There is no taking competitive seriously in just about any game. Every single game has cheaters, hackers, bitters, etc. All of them.
I kinda get what you mean, but I think I’d prefer clown fiesta games without giving up that kind of info over serious games that require it. I think big tech has too much of our info already, and I’m not comfortable giving them more just so I can play a children’s game.
Blizzard is notorious for liking money. Bots are notorious for hating to spend too much money.
Normally, i’d hate this, but what if, Blizzard just gated arena access, kinda tf2/csgo style?
Ex: To access buying arena tickets using gold (Reward track tickets would still work normal, arena bots just couldn’t mass purchase)
EITHER:
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Have opened/purchased 50-100 packs. AND the account be older than a month or 2 old. (paywalling bots and/or giving more time for discovery, 50-100 packs is about one 4 month cycle, and new players shouldn’t always be doing arena either.
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Have spent 5$ within the shop or on hearthstone.
b. If the gating was too harsh to cut off arena entirely, you could just have a throttle. Like a newbie limit of 5 arena tickets a week until they passed these checks. Most casual players would never notice, it’d aim to target power users / arena gold bot users.
This would aim to offer a small speed bump for the botters. While a normal player wouldn’t be effected too much. A $ or 50-100 pack limit could offer more time for the bots to be discovered. Most players would purchase packs normally anyways so it’d be done normally within 1 expansion or one 5$ purchase.
Alternatively. Disabling the retire past 3x purchased 150g arena tickets a day still works fine. Expansion pack tickets could still be exempt, Or the first 10x retires per month. (Which should be a reasonable amount). Which they haven’t done, for some reason.
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That’s a good take. I’ve agreed to something similar in this thread and this seems like a more thought-out version.
Good job!
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Blizzard wont ban accounts which spend money. So if you bought an account filled with gold and then spend some money,then i dont think blizzard will ban it. (this is an asumption though).
We can estimate the amount of botted games used to buy arena runs and sell them.
Its 150 gold for an arena run and lets say you take the top 20% of drafts to sell which would make it 750 gold farmed for every sold arena run.
Botted accounts are new accounts and they get a lot of gold at the start quiet easiy. They do not need to play many games to get 750 gold and the games they do play they play in the ranks below rank 25.
Now i dont know how many arena runs are sold every day nor do i know how many games are botted in totall every day. But i think if you run some reasonable hypothetical numbers the amount of botted games to sell arena runs cant be more then 5% of all botted games. And if you look at the games above rank 25 then it is probably zero percent,as the new accounts will play their games below rank 25.
Scrotties argument does make some sense i can see his point. But i dont think reasonable estimates support more then 5% of all botted games is for selling arena runs. And when it comes to games on rank 25 and above it will probably be zero percent of all botted games.
With the majority of botted games probably coming from people botting their own account without intention to sell. And people farming a lot of gold with the intention to sell.
i got suspended for a week yesterday for no apparent reason unless deck trackers are now considered cheating and i’ve spent thousands of dollars. so they do ban people who pay. i’d recommend not using deck trackers just in case they’re against the rules now.
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Sigh.
97% of players spend nothing on Hearthstone. 100% of botters spend nothing on Hearthstone. And the entire point of being a botting customer is that instead of giving money to Blizzard, you’re going to their black market competition. Botters steal whales from Blizzard and this makes Blizzard very upset.
But I digress. The point is, 97% spend nothing. You want to act as if people who spend money are some kind of common thing commonly encountered that explains your personal experience, and that is just straight up impossible.
The average botted Arena deck retires 100-200 times before considering a deck sellable. This is an estimate based off of the fact that the high end/maximum is around 300 times. This can be seen by just looking at the Arena leaderboards and scrolling to the bottom. If you have 30 or more runs (including retired runs) you make leaderboards, and the weakest results are multiples of 0.03 (yes, some people buy black market Arena decks then go 1-3 lul).
They’re not banning for tracker usage, yet. There have been some indications that they’re thinking about disallowing those, but as of right now, trackers are too much embedded in the game for them to change it lightly
Also, every streamer is using them. Maybe not the part which tracks opponent decks, but some of them use that, too (it’s not like that’s worth anything anyway)
But they do that sometimes, yeah, they just occassionally issue 1-2 week silences or bans for no apparent reason. Maybe you were winning too much and people reported you out of spite?
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I have a feeling people are reporting other people as bots because of the decks they’re using.
Honestly, I’d shy away from using any of the decks that the botters use. Pirate Rogue, even shaman, etc.
Few people on my friends list have had their accounts banned and they’re very upset because they don’t use bots. They are appealing but that process is terrible.
I think they are mass banning and asking questions later. So if you get reported as a bot 3 times or so, perhaps you end up on the list as an automatic ban. Non botters will appeal, botters won’t.
This is my guess.
i don’t even see a place to appeal it to?
edit: nevermind i see it in the email i missed it the first few times i read it thanks for getting me to read it again Schyla
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If this is true it’s crazy.
Not adding restrictions such as:
Money spent, hours spent, cards owned etc etc. is insane.
Are they trying to lose their player base, or what?
And it’s not like it’s an hourly matter getting back your account. With their horrible Support system it can take days or even a week.
I mean, it has to be true, right? Or else players who are banned saying they don’t bot are ALL lying. And why would they have an appeal option if there wasn’t a chance they are banning on accident?
Yep. I just don’t get why don’t they implement this:
Surely it can’t be that much of a hassle when it concerns the future of the game.
I would be livid if my account got banned out of nowhere and when I ask for proof they can’t provide technical proof of it. Just reports obviously aren’t enough.