To provide more transparency on the actions we take against cheating and exploitation, here is an accounting of the number of actions that were taken over the last month, September 2023:
Total Exploitative WoW Account Actions in September 2023: 136014
All of these actions were for cheating or exploitation, which primarily result in permanent bans or 6-month suspensions. This number does not include other actions such as those taken on accounts with character name or in-game language violations. We continue to evolve our methods and act against these malicious accounts on a daily basis.
That’s amazing but the economy on both Retail and Wrath Classic is still an abomination from bots farming a million a day so unless you’re removing gold from the economy (like you did with boosting communities) this is doing nothing.
But end of the day bots still run rampant day to day, especially high level farming instance, which could all be wiped out without devastating the servers they are on by a single GM, even once a week eye balling the accounts.
Aren’t there only like 350k active players in classic combined worldwide? How is it even possible that 1/3 of the active accounts are being banned/actioned every month?
Absolute garbage. I killed 2500 bots today and about 20k this week. If u won’t ban era bots i will kill them non stop. For my horde players let me be. I’m killing them so much I’m getting 0 honor at this point
The amount of money those banned accounts represent is staggering.
In reponse to…
… I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that more be done here. Because, from where I sit, it looks like the problem continues to get worse. Bot accounts are not only able to get a character to level 60, they’re also able to successfully avoid detection long enough to generate enough of a return that two million US dollars is an acceptable loss for this industry!!
The bottom line is that you either want botting in your game or you don’t. If you don’t the the following is insufficient…
Blizzard’s response time for detecting exploiting accounts.
Blizzard’s actions against accounts that purchase, or have purchased, gold.
I am well aware that this is a player driven problem, but so far as we can tell, not enough action is being taken against those creating this demand.
This old tired idea that someone is going to stand there and manually ban bots is honestly so short sighted.
It’s 2023. There’s anti-cheat AI out there that can detect bots in under a second from their first movement. ATVI is being acquired by one of the most dominant AI companies in tech. If AI anti-cheat isn’t implemented in Blizzard products after the merger, customers should be asking why.
Second, literally send yourself to Whitemane and stand by any of the following instance portals and you can swing the ban hammer for hours. This will easily crush the botting population.
1 All 4 Diremaul East Entrances
2. Dire Maul North Entrance
3. Zul Ferrak Entrance
4. Stratholm Entrance
5. ZG Entrance
6. Maradon Entrance
With a weeks worth of work from a single employee you can massively reduce the bot population.
You should consider some player X,Y,Z boundary detection so that any player outside of the normal parameters is flagged for review. I recommend a flag because this way stuff like feather fall and whatnot is not gonna proc an instant ban.
It’s not even that strict when names like hitlerhc can run around on Roleplay servers that have specific rulesets. If you’re regularly triggering it, consider your input in the end result. See a lot of people on these forums who regularly lash out at random people then in other threads wonder why they get put in time out.
