Actions Taken to Address Exploitative Gameplay

[Motozone-azuresong]

Sometimes playing with cheaters can be fun because of the challenge factor but after awhile it gets kind of old. Fighting an evenly matched opponent feels more rewarding to me.

[Voidheart-earthfury]

I agree with this… If the current system is automated to watch certain behavior and they’re flagged… hopefully it’s not an automative ban

You could watch over these certain ppl who have a exceeded a threshold and from there make a decision if they’re exploitive/botting

[Johnthesmith-azuresong]

@Kaivax

Our team works around the clock, every day of the week

The problem with this is when a bot bans a bot…

Here we have a national saying going: “i remember”.

I remember Heroes of the Strom bans for “toxic behavior”. No appeals, ever.

[Kyeon-heartseeker]

Aoski, Aneilla, Aristina 3 lvl 60 rogues in greens on Heartseeker. Surprisingly when they appear in Burning Steppes 14 lvl 2/3 night elves show up camping all the Black lotus spawns? currently on a 12 straight hour stretch. Yes Multiple peeps have reported them.

[Celldwellar-benediction]

Legit question:

I really don’t think I’ll ever even get close to 30 per day, what are you doing that you would? Pickpocket runs?

[Goldseller-azshara]

So why do u even ban bots when according to your GMs buying gold is allowed anyways?

Classic WoW is Pay To Win (And You Might Not Know It)

GM confirming it is legal:
X__I have just confirmed with A GM that trading Retail Gold for Classic is allowed - #63 by Perl-anetheron

X___https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/728876914344853567/728876937967304724/uff2.png

Couple hundred Goldsellers in official forums, for months on end, no bans ever:
X__https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/de/wow/search?q=retail%20topic%3A69688

[Kyeon-heartseeker]

We are up to 12 straight hours on Heartseeker in Burning Steppes with Aoski and his 16 level 2/3 bots.

[Galeocerdo-azuremyst]

A player would have to do 2 instances per hour for 12 straight hours to reach the lockout. That leaves 12 hours for eating, sleeping, and quiet contemplation on how your WoW addiction is negatively affecting your life.

[Unusualmoon-dalaran]

Westfall Realm - Badlands - Bots
Several of us have been sending in reports over the last three days about the bots in the badlands. It is obvious that we are being ignored by Blizz. I think their accounts should be perma-banned and their gold and items distributed evenly to those who reported them. We go there to farm Elemental Earth - I paid for my mounts this way. It is totally obvious that they are bots because you can see their patterns they follow. I am calling out names on this - Hadaler & Justinken. It is frustrating to say the least. As an honest player, and one of the original WoW players (Classic) it isn’t fair to make us suffer while Blizz does a wave once in a while. I want to farm today…get rid of them so we can.

[Unusualmoon-dalaran]

Track the IP Addresses and ban their IP from creating another character. They won’t know what hit them.

[Squidza-faerlina]

Open the transfers

[Equalsthree-herod]

no way, people would destroy the economy worse than bots already do.

[Equalsthree-herod]

Blockquote Track the IP Addresses and ban their IP from creating another character. They won’t know what hit them.

VPN’s

[Trunchbull-earthfury]

Just implement wow tokens, problem solved.

[Kickpoly-bigglesworth]

You need to ban china and indonesian players from accessing other regions. Every gold farmer on my server is indonesian, admitted to selling Black Lotus, have 30 mages in strat farming orbs til they are worth 0g. do something man this is insane. ban the IP’s stop thinking about your neverending money for 5 seconds PLEASE

[Deadthings-kromcrush]

Please do something about horde que times for bg, it is horrible. I dont have time to reroll a new toon.

[Dwilf-grobbulus]

The same people complaining about unreasonable suspensions, would be here advocating “MOR EVIDENCE PLZ” if you didn’t take your time, gather evidence, and do it efficiently over time. Good job blizzard.

[Burr-bigglesworth]

KEK there are more bots than ever now

[Gankzilla-thunderfury]

@Kaivax

We’ve recently completed a round of actions against players who were found to be cheating in World of Warcraft.

We rarely communicate publicly about this, because we’ve found that describing our sources and methods can make it easier for malicious actors to work around them, but we feel that it’s worthwhile to expand on the subject today, as many players have recently asked us for more details.

Including today’s actions, over the last month in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe regions, we’ve closed or suspended over 74,000 WoW accounts that were found to be in violation of our End-User License Agreement. The majority of these were found to be using gameplay automation tools, typically to farm resources or kill enemies much more efficiently than legitimate players can.

While today’s suspensions were applied in a batch (often referred to as a “banwave”), it is a top priority for us to identify accounts that are botting and remove them. Our team works around the clock, every day of the week, and many of the suspensions and account closures over the last few months have gone out in the middle of the night, or on weekends.

Like you, we play World of Warcraft. We understand what it’s like to spot a player in-game who appears to be botting. We always want to eliminate the botting player, if it can be proved that they are indeed cheating. And that raises a big difficulty in addressing this issue – we have to prove to ourselves that the accused player is not a person who’s actually controlling a character with their hands on a keyboard.

We use powerful systems to determine if the suspected player is using an identifiable cheat, and our heuristics (which we do not outline publicly) are constantly improving and evolving. But when we examine a suspect and these measurements aren’t out of line, we have to manually gather evidence against the accused player, which can be very time consuming and complex. It’s worthwhile though, because we never want to take action against a legitimate player.

Yes, there have been cases where a legitimate player appeared (to another player) to be botting. In those cases, where a legitimate player is reported and then cleared of wrongdoing, it can be very frustrating to the reporting player to again see what they think is a bot. We’ve also seen examples where the reported player was caught exploiting the game, and was removed from the game, and then quickly returned to doing the same thing on a new account with the same character name. That’s an infuriating sight for the players who initially reported it. We greatly appreciate your reports, and we understand how you feel about this.

We’re ultimately working to unravel a challenging circumstance. Real money trading drives third parties to put an enormous amount of effort into circumventing our detection systems. As much as this is a very high priority for us, it is the only priority for profit-driven botting organizations. The bans we issue are simply a cost of doing business for them.

We’re working on further improvements to every part of the game that might address cheating issues more swiftly and completely, and we’ll continue to let you know as those next steps are taken.

Thank you very much for your feedback on these issues, and thank you for your reports!

More people are botting Classic than actual people playing Retail…

[Illystra-windseeker]

I’m wondering. Are the gold sellers considered exploitative gameplay? Every day all my toons get mail from gold seller toons directing me to a website. These toons’ names seem to be constant which suggests that my attempts to report them are pointless. If it were me, I’d figure out who they are and permanently suspend those toons, and their associated email addresses and credit card numbers. As the Arab bodyguard said in Lawrence of Arabia, “No prisoners”.