Look at all these “real” players forming orderly queues after midnight:
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Honestly it amazes me that bot detection isn’t as simple as detecting someone running the same exact route with no deviations for hours on end.
I don’t really know tech so maybe that’s harder than I’m making it seem.
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I’ve seen bots that evade detection for over a year in-game.
They do things like insert a heal cast on themselves randomly. They also will randomize click delays. That seems enough to fool the server-side pattern checks, since this game’s client side anti-cheat essentially does not exist.
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i wonder if the people that make the bots change the route of the bots periodically when ban waves go out. blizzard staff have explained that they do ban waves for a reason. they have explained that it is a game of cat and mouse with the botters. they have explained that botting is often associated with criminal activity. they have explained many things about why the bot issue has been tough to address. would i like to see more human gms and more resources devoted to this? i guess. but i have no idea what the resources are currently and if throwing more money at the problem fixes it.
One thing i do know is that the lead developer made a post about banning a player led loot system that is allowing RMT to be laundered and is incentivizing botting. the player response? segments of the player base have been throwing nonstop fits ever since. that segment of players constantly accusing the lead developer of lying for unknown and mysterious reasons. what message does that send? the lead dev says they believe doing something will help reduce botting and the players say they dont care, they would rather have the bots so long as they can swipe. so is the players or the developers that are not trying to address botting at this point?
Ya they don’t have to do much to “avoid” detection.
When Cata came out in live everyone kept running into this thing with mining where the node was already in use. So people started explaining it off as being some issue with the zones that could be phased by questing.
Anyway I was on a pvp server and hit a pbae spell and got a hit. Damage numbers started coming up out of the ground. So since it was live I looked the player up and it was a level 30 something. Hundreds of people reported this bot… it was there at least through all of Cata.
This isn’t something that is hard to detect when you are getting reports as the player is below the Z Axis. You shouldn’t even need reports like that and the failure is epic and entirely on Blizzard.
On Lava Lash Lash the deal with Stocks was the mage groups that stood right at the portal on the steps. Was at least 3 groups early on in phase 2. Multiple with zero vowels in their names and a couple of “normal” named players. Whom later on you’d get a in game mail from advertising a gold selling site… which I hadn’t seen in a while. (the in game mail part). So I’m assuming in that case people are paying to be piloted or w/e you call it and the pilot sends the advertisement on their account.
Ya they don’t have to do much to “avoid” detection
Yep.
Wait you mean blizzard was lying when they said they’d improved bot banning mechanisms?
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It’s very obvious to players who is and isn’t a bot. What they need to do is identify a bot then track said bot and establish a behavior profile. Then apply that profile to all players and see how many match said profile, then monitor those and I’m willing to bet 95%+ are bots.
lets say that the devs do this and ban a bunch of bots. then the people programing the bots change the behavior. then what?
Then they do the same thing again. This is the same reason cyber security teams will always have work. Someone will always find a way around your “fixes”. The better the “fix” the longer it takes to get around it.
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Everything on here is only half right. These bots are actually from the old wow bot which was sued by Blizzard. Blizzard won the lawsuit but its creator released the code to several bot-focused and RMT-oriented forums which opened up the floodgates. Blizzard used to be incredibly good with its use of Warden for surface-level RAM scans but other lawsuits from other companies mainly involving anti-cheat programs resulted in Blizzard having to scale back Warden’s ability. In return, it should have focused more highly on live hunting of bots for faster bans but the way the system works is a swathing review process that wipes out bots in chunks later after the bot has already earned its worth 10x over the cost of replacing the bot. The slight deviations and changes do not alter the fact it’s the same bot for the last 10 years. Blizzard could easily detect it if they wanted to.
so you are saying they should do ban waves almost exactly like blizzard has explained they are doing and why it looks like waves.
they would have do disable addons, which would kill classic for sure. the ui just sucks
What they need is an actual anti-cheat blocking RDP and VM use. A lot of these bots aren’t even lua locker internal ones, they’re external pixelbots. The pixelbot ones are botting the RDP and/or VM window instead of WoW directly and that’s enough to prevent windows from reporting to WoW that the input is injected.
The fix is more GM’s but that would cost money.
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"the way the system works is a swathing review process that wipes out bots in chunks later after the bot has already earned its worth 10x over the cost of replacing the bot.
100%. The current system of waiting to ban in waves clearly does not work no matter how much lipservice blizzard/bootlickers gives it. There are way more bots now than there 10 years ago, and there seems to be even more bots in P2 than in P1.
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The problem is blizzard is over-relying on server-side data bans, which doesn’t work. They need to either license out a client-side anti-cheat or start staffing up their GSO team with developers to code for one.
Lua-unlocked bots are still easily locked on. Pixel bots make use of the graphical outlay itself with colors to interpret the bot’s movement. The majority of bots are still injection-based which the warden cannot detect anymore because only surface-level scanning is allowed.
I’ve seen the bot discords to inform myself of the situation. Some of the pixelbot gather and farm bots have crazy pathing UI setups now.
The video above is one actively infecting SoD en masse right now.
And my above statement still holds. But I will admit I was not aware the buddy bots were still around lol. The ban rate on pixel bots is high because it’s easier to fake out. Injections can require more than a surface-level scan which is a gray line that could get Blizzard into hot water. Where pixel bots do excel though is fifo rendered games which are becoming the norm using the unreal engine. My knowledge is several years behind I will admit since I do not make these programs anymore. Poor Unity is possibly the easiest-to-cheat series of games on the planet right now.
You mean to say the injection-based bots are whats the norm for wow.