As the year winds down, we wanted to give you another update on our increased actions against unauthorized bots this year.
Since our last update in October, we’ve banned an additional 114,237 accounts for botting. We’ve now banned over 284,000 total accounts for botting throughout the year. As you can see from those numbers, we’ve been ramping up our efforts throughout the year. We’ll be continuing the fight into the new year, and we have some plans for next year that we think will address the problem at a more systemic level. As a reminder, you can continue to help by reporting suspected bots using the in-game reporting tool.
Thanks and happy holidays, we’ll see you in the Tavern and in the new year!
Yes, there are many “Authorized Blizzard Bots” in the game at various ranks as well. Idk why either. I also don’t know why we aren’t able to see our opponent’s Rank anymore. I don’t know why a lot of things with hearthstone anymore
Oh yes, actiblizz has been dumping their own bots into the game for some time now. So much so that they are being a noteworthy addition to patch notes.
My only regret is that I have but one upvote to give!
100% this. And just like before, they’ll quietly unpin this to sink to the depths of the forums like the last one when all the rampant botting still going on is pointed out to them.
For those curious about what the first post said, he’s wondering about the incentives for returning users:
“What about the return reward? What are the current return rewards? Previously, there were 1250 gold rewards, but now there are only three catch-up packs, the same as the rewards for new accounts.”
@Glimmerwort There are official “Blizzard bots” in Standard. They have names like “_____ Pants” or Grumpy Mage, etc. The biggest indicator that they’re Blizzard’s is if you can’t add them as friends under recently played.
Recently came back to the game… last night in ranked I got 8 bot farming accounts in a row. My other favorite game mode arena is overrun with barcode decks.
Blizzard is not doing nearly enough. It’s time for stronger account verification and the removal of the retire option in arena.
Getting rid of bots I think I may have p’d a little from laughing… “Getting rid of bots” that would imply Blizzard actually cared. You don’t have to lie to kick it. I’ve seen less bots on Tor. If Blizzard would focus on anything besides butchering their games, they might actually get players coming back. smh Rune Scape has more of a player base than most of Blizzard’s games combined, minus WoW. Blizzard can say they’ve blocked xxxxxx amount of accounts, we all know their full of crap. Actions speak louder than words, Blizzard.
Blizzard … … Bots are only an issue not a problem. You have bigger problems. You should spend time on fixing problems not issues.
The analogy would be - it’s like your ship has a hole and sinking, and you’re working to remove the flood water. You keep saying, “We got rid of more flood water,” and now it’s the end of the year, and we’ve removed even more flood water.
I know the team is still working on it, but good lord. I recently got back into the game after not playing for a couple years and Wild is absurd. 3/5 games at basically every level from bronze to 2000-3000 and higher legend are easily detectable bots playing even shaman.
To me what’s worse than dull, un-interactive, coinflips to determine if my deck will outdraw the totem spam, is the 10 minutes after I do win the coinflip where I have to sit through the bot refusing to concede a lost match.
I hope there is progress in detecting this type of botting or at least making it prohibitively time consuming for those specific types of bots. I’d rather do a CAPTCHA every other turn than deal with this.
Yeah, I don’t get that either. If someone is going to spend 150g on an arena run, draft, and retire, because they don’t like their deck…they should be able to. I don’t care or put stock into people being like “china is buying godlike arena decks!” if they are really that stupid to spend however much real money and in-game currency on getting a deck that they in all likelihood don’t even have the skill to pilot…who cares?
… Bots are only an issue not a problem. You have bigger problems. You should spend time on fixing problems not issues.