I remember like going over to Runescape and seeing and reporting like 200-400+ Blast furnace bots. I took a week to like report hundreds of them.
Half of them got banned, Prices skyrocketed for a few days. I could buy my ores for cheaper and sell my bars for more.
But lo and behold…
3 days later… They were back, with 4-7 bots for each one banned, like a swarm of cockroaches.
It was like a rat infestation. Even though they banned hundreds of them. The bot makers just made 4-7 more for each that got banned.
I wouldn’t be surprised if perhaps the same could happen here. They might be 80% certain someone probably is a bot.
If you ban a false positive, A bot loses nothing. A human loses it all.
A real human might lose months or even years of progress to a machine ban mistake, or even lambast you for horrible pr on a 1 in 1000 chance, per player reddit post. I guess it could make sense. A lot of players blatantly seem like bots. But investigating might be work/expensive technology blizz might not have.
Would you want to spend 1 hr to confirm and ban each bot that might take a person 5 minutes to replace with 100 at a time, created by scripts? Even if you ban 1000s, it’s not uncommon for each banned bot to just be remade 7x, even if they’re banned in troves.
But even a basic speed bump
Like (Win 3-5 unique tavern brawls to unlock arena) OR spend a dollar anywhere to unlock Arena/X early could work.
- It won’t stop ALL botting. But even some minor trivial task a human won’t mind, that a botter can’t automate can do a lot to speedbump botting.
o In runescape this was quests, in other games with trading you could do 4 hours of manual playtime to slow Gold selling mules down.
o But Hearthstone’s Tavern brawl system would already be a fit.
- Brawls already pretty random, something programmed bots are bad at.
- It gives weekly rewards people should do anyways.
- And even if they made a bot for each brawl, blizzard could completely forget to re use it anyways or break everything ( somehow). Until their programmed deck just rotated out of standard.
- Ideally, a good speedbump is one that barely effects a real player, but is incredibly annoying to bot owners.
Ex bottish(?) behaviors:
o Robotically ignoring tech card effects. (Ex: Never clearing watchpost, attempting to play cards blocked by tech cards like watchpost/drake.)
o Extremely bizzare, repeated odd behaviors, by deck, not by player.
- ex: Multiple classic bots would freeze on doomsayer/taunts. Silence it, THENspending 4 cards to deal 6/7 dmg, play a doomguard, attack face, and clear board, wipe, and die.
o Robotic mouse movement: They might snap to cards, hover for 2s, set 1s-2s delays between each motion, etc. Or jump card to card without mouse movement in between. Not like a human moving a mouse, but a script teleporting across the screen. )
It’s stuff that’s easy to spot for a human. But programming something to detect it is always easier said than done.
Nobody wants to lose TO a bot and think it was their mistake.
But i kinda half wonder if a lot might have posted a “I HATE LOSING TO STUPID, OP, PAY TO WIN GARBAGE!” thread instead had it been a human instead of a bot.
Those threads used to be everywhere, but then they disappeared and replaced with “I HATE fighting BOTS!” threads instead. I do think they’re kinda annoying, but not really hair pulling either. Bots tend to not be too interesting to fight, many of them are just aggro, but they tend to be easier / softer wins, if you can counter aggro.
(Rope warrior was a stupid deck, good riddance)
But 4 armor rope warrior, that was the stupidest bot by far imho.
Not even for WR, but for roping 5-7 turns straight. They just wasted time, most obnoxious deck.
The fact a FEW rope warriors even OCCASIONALLY climbed to d5 by frustrating opponents to death on winstreaks was just somberly hillarious lmao.
It’s a deck that literally couldn’t win. All it could do was annoy opponents into conceding. Roping each turn to the full timer, and gaining 4 armor each turn.
Mercs might not have been the best mode, but GOOD riddance to rope warrior when it came out. People can afk pve and i don’t really care tbh. At least they don’t hold people hostage roping in pvp lmao.
I’m not sure if official bots are the best solution
But even successful and *highly popular games like fortnite have done it.
IDK if it’s right, but they’re a big gaming company and probably know and keep player metrics for playrates on stomp VS GET stomped.
If someone kills a few “players”, and feels “good” at the game, it’s easy see them be more likely to stay, (vs eager to ragequit if chain Stomped, killed 18 times in a row, and danced upon.)
A decoy duck gets real decks to land.
Nobody wants to play a dead game or BE THE fodder. But everyone wants to stomp, get big kills, and feel good.
IDK game psychology, it’s not my field. But i wouldn’t be surprised either if blizzard either gamed bots on purpose. or just didn’t want to spend money to effectively solve it, even if they easily could.
Before the bot flood, it wasn’t unheard of to see 4-11 minute ques in classic/wild/ probably twist. After bots, even 1:30-2m can be rare now, even at like top 100 ranks ques USED to get 4-20 minutes awful.
(Summary)
- Bots might be like insect infestations. Ban 20, and 100 more will come out to replace them.
( They might learn what the banned bots did, and what the ones who got away didn't. )
- A good way to annoy bots, but barely affect humans might be “Speedbumps”, like “Win 2-5 weekly tavern brawls to unlock ranked/arena”.
o Ex: Making 100x 2$ arena bots would become win 500 tavern brawls, with a month of risk /manual labor.
o It can still be manually bypassed. But throttles / adds tediousness to bot churners.
- Potential ‘decoy’ effect(?): Players might quit when stomped, but stay when winning.
- (Ex: If a new player’s first game was “winning”, they might be more likely to play another game, than IF they lose 4-12 in a row with only commons, and ragequit. )
Tl;dr attempt
*(of above ^)
- Bots are like a infestation.
- Maybe speedbumps to throttle bot owners?
- Could Bots act like decoys?
o Ex: [Easy wins → stay] vs [Curbstomped → Ragequit, Leave]