The core strategy that they settled on for the bot problem was having users flag and then after enough flags a human takes a look. They are stubborn and they don’t want to adopt any other strategy because that might be difficult. By “ramping up efforts” all they really mean is that the human taking a look part is now taking less time and having less quality control so that they can ban more flagged accounts per day. “Ramping up efforts” doesn’t mean that they’re working smarter and it definitely doesn’t mean that they’ve developed a new strategy. Just the old strategy, but faster and more recklessly.
I think at this point Blizzard is at least aware of the bot lifecycle and understands that they need to act fast or it doesn’t matter. I think they honestly want to solve the bot problem because they want a monopoly on selling Arena runs for real money. But this new understanding doesn’t make them want to innovate new methods, it just whips them into a frenzy of bans with low quality control. I think they’re going to keep getting worse until they get class-actioned by wrongfully banned players.
I think a gold cap would help. Daily/weekly xp limits might work as well.
I see a situation where it flags accounts that have played more than X hours straight and then caps their gold or stops it completely for a period of time.
It shouldn’t be hard to identify botting behavior in their data and attack it.
Also, I have seen way less bots yesterday and today, so something is working.
It’s possible to play 8+ hour continously without noticeable breaks. Like you can play on a Tablet. Order food on your phone. Keep playing while you are picking up your food and paying the delivery guy. Play while you eat your delivered food. For bio break you just take the tablet you are playing on with you to the bathroom and play while sitting on the toilet taking care of business. Not that people would normally do that but you can’t rule out with 100% certainty that nobody will do that.