It was also put in place to bring back the hundreds of thousands of players that quit rather than leveling from 25-40.
At least in my guild, it’s caused just as many players to come back and finish leveling their mains to 40 as it has caused those of us still playing to make alts.
Agree. It should req a lvl 40 and 4/6 Gnomer quest line. This way bots would have to at least do the content as well at end game.
Its honestly crazy that so many people think Blizzard put the 100% exp boost in solely for people who wanted to level their alts.
As though that would somehow help stem the bleeding that SoD is currently facing.
Blizzard put the 100% boost in because they’re trying to get people who quit SoD at the start of Phase 2 to come back and finish getting to 40. Your alts leveling faster is a side effect lmao.
You would think bots would be easy for blizzard to spot. But you would also think that using the AH to deliver bought gold would be easy to spot too, yet here we are.
I kind of thought it was the retail devs coming over and trying to take over, they even made aggrend post in the forums!
I think bots are a source of revenue for Blizzard and that’s why they don’t do the nuclear option and delete them all. They put on the appearance that they are fighting off the bots by banning some accounts to placate players.
My tinfoil hat theory.
SoD is seasonal, lets repeat that one more time. SOD is SEASONAL… classic was not. Stop comparing apples to oranges.
See I would believe that coming from Jagex because those bots actually try to hide. Plugins to automatically log out when they see players… Using Chatgpt to seem like they aren’t a bot. ect.
The ones here just straight up fly hack and walk the same 3 paths. Have 0 reason to be staying as long as they are.
And they wouldn’t get information if it was just a GM coming in each day to stockades. They may move but there would be nothing to “upgrade”.
What’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to a program. Humans are pattern seeking by biology, so we’re really good at seeing things that break that - to the point we can see patterns that don’t even exist.
No business can rightly afford the level of staffing needed to have people logged in watching, logging, and banning each bot 24/7. So algorithmic detection is necessary.
And moving “is” an update. The bots would shift their times to when DMs aren’t present, or reduce their active bots on one dungeon and increase them on others. If there’s out of bounds hacks available, they can travel to-from the instance without being visible… or just station a character somewhere near the entrance to collect the loot then make fewer visible trips to vendors.
You don’t need a 24/7 person. You need a couple for a shift a day.
And the detection system is doing real well if they still can fly hack in 2024.
I don’t agree with that. The bots are incredibly obvious. A handful of GMs could eradicate them quite swiftly.
You need 24/7 coverage, as bots don’t just work 9-5 jobs. If the entities running the bots run non-stop, the GMs need to as well.
3 employees per day for weekdays, 3 more for weekends is 6 employees.
Assuming each can cover an entire server, that’s 36 employees. Add in management and redundancy, let’s say 40 at a minimum.
Of course it’s unlikely to be that efficient. More likely you need 2 per server, so now we’re at 80… and that isn’t accounting for any other variables.
And I wonder how many thousands of subs they lost from the stockades being filled to the brim.
Also don’t need to worry about Wotlk/Era. Those are long gone.
So its like 7 servers.
My numbers are based solely off SoD servers in NA and are very conservative.
I just can’t o.O
Lmao that’s not the point though. I don’t care what you consider your alt. The original point of the thread was that additional characters on the same account should be whats getting 100% EXP bonus. I really don’t care about the semantics of what you currently consider your ‘main’.
The point that has been repeated constantly is that it wrecks the economy faster. They’re getting to 40 and having that impact for longer before getting banned. Lying down and dying is not the solution here.
They use stolen cards and have historically paid less. I would argue it costs them more in labour to deal with it than they wind up making.
Give me the power to ban bots and in an hour a thousand are banned. It’s not hard. Park yourself outside Stockades and go to town. Find the next spot and go to town. Go to the starting areas. See those chars named Jxppql. Little sus. Watch them for 10 seconds and see they’re running an automated script. Ban.
That’s how you do it, and Blizz has no interest in it. I’m convinced they don’t want to actually address the problem. Ban waves are a horrible method. It gives bots weeks or months to accumulate gold, sell gold, collect the profits. At the most basic level you have to make botting not worth it for them. Which means immediate bans.
This ‘we can’t give away our strategy for detection’ is complete nonsense. The bots make no effort to hide their behavior. None whatsoever.
Its pretty clear when they can defend the fact they don’t even ban when they fly hack.
P servers figure that out.
A good algorithm would pick that up fast.
No one is doing that.
The solution to the issue requires either an investment of bodies from Blizzard (unlikely), adjustment of their detection methods (probable but not fast) or faster reaction (and thus increase the effectiveness of bots their operators learn and adapt)