The answer is the reward track system. In order to earn rewards, players must grind exp to level up. Because the level up system is designed to be slow and tedious, many players are incentivize to bot as a means to skip the grind.
For legitimate players, this causes fatigue of the game as they are forced to play many games making it feel like a job. This also causes them to quit the game as it becomes too repetitive and makes matches uninteresting since you are facing bots.
So how do we fix it without removing the reward track?
A suggestion is removing exp from playing matches, and solely rely on quest exp. Of course, the quest system will have to be tweaked. The daily quest can be refreshed every 8hr instead of 24 so it encourages small multiple bursts of play. The weekly quests can be 4 instead 3 quests and have increased exp values.
This way bots will not be able to grind for exp simply by just auto-playing the game for the most part. This does not solve the botting problem but it will significantly reduce it since there’s no incentive to bot 24/7 anymore.
This also helps retain legitimate players as they are not forced to grind the game non-stop. The breaks in between will lessen the fatigue player have and retain them for longer period.
Idk man, botting doesn’t seem to be a massive problem I’ve not encountered one in a long time however I’d be down making quests more rewarding compared to matches tho…
Captcha , this would be a hurdle, anything to make life harder for suspected bots, at first time register, for suspected botters on login or at random periods… alternatively
Put them in a Cornfield , basically people identified as botters in a “cornfield” where they only play against other identified botters, they stick to botting on the identified accounts because they don’t get banned so don’t make new accounts, they don’t know this happened to them either so real players never have to interact with them again.
The issue is even if you pit them against each other you are still not removing the incentive to bot, which is the tedious grind. As these bots program get more popular, more people will be trying it out. And the dilemma for blizzard is they want more people playing the game but at the same time don’t want people to bot. You can increase the number of people playing by incentivize them to actually play and not bot. As the game decline in player numbers, blizzard need all the real players they can get. This will also lower the time for match-making as well.
Yes, they bot enough gold to buy arena drafts, if the draft isn’t good enough, they retire it and farm more gold. Once an excellent arena deck is drafted, the account is sold to a streamer or a youtuber, which use it to make attractive content on his/her channel.
I was thinking, if it doesn’t exist, blizzard should implement some sort of MMR for arena. Those botted account that retire dozens of arena draft (counting as 0-3, in my book) would have their MMR extremely low.
Regular player, even those who get only 1-2 wins average on arena would have a higher MMR and not face those “super deck”.
New players would start at a slightly higher MMR then 0, perhaps 1 win average MMR and would also never face those super decks.
It would not stop botting, but at least, those super decks would only face other super deck, and leave regular players alone.