Why go through all the effort and dev time for Capcha’s that don’t do anything but annoy people when they could just hire a small team of actual real humans to just fly around banning bots.
Do you realize how much money these bot farms make?
I watched the madskillzzhc video, the botting mafia where they are running 12,000 bots is making 3 million dollars on WoW alone, they are also botting in other games, That botting mafia can compete in an arms race with Blizzard and as long as they are generating the same amount of revenue, they can compete in the arms race.
I’m not saying its impossible, Blizzard can do it but it will take a very long time for the botters to give up as it makes money and that money is enough to compete with Blizzard, these people will do whatever it takes to keep the revenue stream going.
I call bs. They don’t make that much money they make chump change. Also, it’s just to scare players into not killing/reporting bots.
Rather have bots who aren’t interrupting gameplay over annoying captchas.
Well it’s a solution to a problem. I’m sorry but the state of the game is more important.
Bots have been a part of WoW for as long as I can remember and I haven’t had any issues, state of the game seems fine to me.
It’s not a solution at all. All it does is make the game worse for everyone else.
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This is… unnecessary.
- Disallow players from joining a region they are not part of
- Disallow the use of a client not ‘certified’ for the region
- Disallow players from using VPN
- Botters have their Bnet accounts terminated
- Terminated accounts have the payment option credentials blacklisted (ie block CC number, PayPal account, etc), phone number blacklisted
- Require all accounts to use a valid phone number
2: Pretty obvious they’re Chinese when the demon pet name is not of the Latin Alphabet.
3: Fun fact Blizzard doesn’t actually care if you bot. They will only ban the offending GAME account, but are fine with you making a new GAME account with the same Bnet account.
5: Very few accounts are hacked ones, because of 2FA. Plus there’s no reason (see 3). Pay legit, play illegit. - Botters make the money from shear scale; thousands of accounts, botting 24/7.
Requiring 2 step verification to login would be more effective and less of a hassle to players. It also wouldntnlead to servers becoming wastelands because Thrall keeps poping up to ask if i can complete the captcha.
this ^ its absolutely at its core a blizzard problem.
Runeacape did this 20 years ago. Bots hosts found a way around it, and it was eventually removed because it only punished real players.
I feel for you, but this is not going to work like you think it will.
Take a page out of the 2020-2024 real world playbook… Flood the economy with such an ungodly amount of gold that it drives the value of gold so far down it no longer becomes cost efficient to farm gold, thereby destroying the gold botting profits.
I read several comments concerning this topic and here’s my two cents. First of all I’ve played WOW off and on since the “game of the year” edition. With that said, I’ve also played Lost Ark a lot when it first came out. Great game until you started seeing more bots then players while questing. The only time when it was better was in major cities, but not by much. Due to the bot problem I quit playing the game, hint Blizzard… I think it’s all on Blizzard; however I think it can be controlled by Blizzard, if they truly want to do so. There are certain things that bots ALWAYS do. That’s why we players can always pick them out when we’re out and about, doing our thing. These things have NEVER changed. All you need to do is come up with a program to help you find the bots and get rid of them. First of all they are always in a group. This could be just two of them or a group of five or six. Nine times out of ten, they’re moving together. Random names that doesn’t make ANY sense, like someone hit random keys on a keyboard. Don’t belong to a guild. Usually at the same level. Usually same class with the same gear. By putting together a computer program it should make finding the bot groups a lot easier to find. Being able to track back to the ISP can shut these guys down. Even though I would hate to have to do it myself, charge a $50 deposit on new accounts that would be refunded after 30 days or can be used on the game. Gold farmers couldn’t afford to do this. Obviously the money would be forfeited if your a bot. Anyway something along these lines could help to eliminate or at least cut down the bot problem.
Look, lets face the facts. There isnt a botting problem in WoW. There isnt a botting problem in any game for that matter. There is AT BEST a blizzard problem, because they allow the bots being active long enough to become profitable. If they were gotten rid of faster there would be less bots because they would be less profitable.
But, that brings it to the real crux of the issue, they are profitable at all. This isnt really a botting problem, or even really a blizzard problem, its a player problem. Players are willing to pay for the services botters are providing, and others are willing to associate with the type of player that pays for them. And while it was still present back in the day, it has gotten dramatically worse since blizzard decided to make WoW a queue simulator instead of an RPG, because there is no community anymore. No one cares, other players are just tools to meet an end, nothing more.
If you want to solve the real issue that makes bots so prevelant, you have to address the problems that nuked the community, namely, the LFG system as a whole. Rip the entire content queue tech from the game, and then stop balancing the game for the top 0.001% who do RtWF, its stupid that any1 cares how good some sweaty no life presses shiny buttons. Balance the game for the player base, and get rid of the entire LFG system and watch the magic happen. Botting will naturally retract to a more manageable state as WoW returns to what it was always meant to be, the biggest money printing machine in human history, disguised as the most popular RPG to ever exist.
Nicely said!!! That’s why I’m playing Classic! Retail has definitely gotten worse over the years. Your soooooo correct with people who have the money and do not care about you or me and only care about themselves. Maybe Blizzard really doesn’t care about bots as long as it makes money for them… We can only hope that they DO care…
Thats the issue though. You want to rely on blizzard to care at all. Why? Most people oppose botting, so then why tolerate people who pay for botting services? My guild has a strict no botting policy, its one of the few hard rules we employ, and everyone agrees, its perma-ban on conviction, no acceptions.
If everyone who opposed botting took this approach, no1 would bot, because no1 would dare employ their services. People who pay for bot services do it for clout, for addoration, therefore the best solution is complete and total excommunication. No business equals no service. Simple as that.
Stop buying into the myth that blizzard has the power (willpower but never the less) to stop this issue. WE have the power, we the players, and only we the players. If you want to see the change, you have to stand up and act, not fall to your knees and beg.
So 25 bot druids form a raid group and farm different layers/zones to avoid this, while average people just get annoyed or flagged as a bot when they are AFK during a random bot check.
Great plan, lol
Not sure blizzard would do anything since bots also make blizzard money. They are accounts paying the monthly fee so question is will they sacrifice all that to truly get rid of bots?
Just make it impact game clients using “click to move” most bots and VERY few players use this.
Notice how bots move in a particular way, non-organic some would say… The person who created the bot used a sample with the dots every X meters… Easy to spot them, one would think easy to have a pretty good idea who is probably a bot by just looking at that setting.
Yes, some players need to use it (accessability) but most do not even know this setting is in the game.
How are people like this so clueless? Blizzard wants bots. Thats why they dont do anything to stop them.
Blizzard says they are against gold buying, yet the punishment is a joke. Do they implement anyways to stop gold buying? no. they just ban a playstyle and say this fixed the problem.