Hi Sam.
I thought this line was suspicious
“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.”
If folks would stop buying gold 100%, they would leave. But that won’t happen. I know this is an unpopular opinion, especially if you buy gold - Blizzard spending resources into dealing with this is a waste of time. The players could end the bots themselves by simply not throwing real money at these third parties.
I welcome you to take a look at Guild Wars 1. The game is still active and has a good community. However RMT (real money trading) hurts the game and creates some dark areas littered with scammers, bots, price fixers, and a ton of stolen accounts. Their support team is limited so if you were banned/account take-over - good luck getting that reversed.
It’s not just Classic that has a botting problem. Any game where players pay third parties real money invites the botting problem in the game.
I was hoping that this would help out farming for herbs - it didn’t. Its hard to not just raid log when you can’t farm for anything outside of an instance.
They aren’t necessary at all for the analytics.
They have play time by player, all that’s needed is a standard model utilized to assign a weighting criteria to outliers. I do this daily in fraud detection models - and individuals committing frauds almost always do so via obfuscation in the overall population.
I got my first black lotus yesterday. Along with ~15 Dreamfoil running around Silithus.
The bot banwave worked on Bigglesworth. Ty Actiblizz.
I commend you on your efforts. I just hope the “ban waves” start happening much more frequently. Doing it months apart doe not curb the amount of profit these gold sellers can make. I don’t have access to the data you have, nor do I think I should necessarily tell you how to do your job, but I would ask for these bans to start becoming streamlined to a regular occurrence. Maybe every week after a reset
The point of classic was to recreate vanilla warcraft, all of these end game farms pathing or not were in vanilla and were perfectly fine back then.
We want classic not the version of classic they feel we deserve. And if they truly had any issues with pathing being considered exploitative gameplay in sure they would have made it not work before launch.
The ONLY way to get rid of the bot hordes, is for players to stop paying real world money for classic gold. Simple. Shame your friends who buy gold and don’t play with them.
Ok this lockout needs to go. I can easily surpass these 30 runs doing my mara herb running and farming arena in brd. I farm for gold so i can buy flasks etc for raiding which are expensive. This lockout is affecting my gameplay and the commerce of the server. If I can’t even do any instances on other characters after I farm then what is the point. Again you are hurting legit players in your attempt to stop botting.
This, you need to detect and ban the bots well before they hit 60. That’s when they start effecting the economy.
Also the change is fine. Keep it in place. I find it extremely hard to believe, even the above average gamer comes anywhere close to the limit. If you do, well there’s other things to do…
It worked on Benediction as well, until about two hours later and all the starting zones are full of more bots. Stratholme also has bots again.
And clearly players in classic couldn’t be content with that, so instead chose to abuse the hell out of it, ruining entire economies. The vast majority of players who do not abuse and borderline exploit will be completely unaffected by this.
This is a good change, a much needed change, my only regret is that blizzard waited this long.
Flasks are expensive because every other person has a mage character running farm runs for ludicrous amounts of gold.
Excellent, now revert the daily 30 instance lockout. I enjoy dungeons and I’m not allowed to currently.
yes you are just not over THIRTY a DAY
you can farm massive amounts still just not ENDLESS which made life way too easy for bots
Where is any proof of your first sentence? Yes I’ll agree that more people are doing these farms then there was in vanilla but that doesnt mean they are ruining the economy in any way?
If anything the people that are actually effecting the economy are the open world bots that hold the market on profession items such as herbs and nodes.
The average legitimate player that is instance farming arent the ones that are cornering markets or creating false sense of shortages. The only thing the instance farmers bring to the equation is that they do make a good amount of gold off just vendor loot.
As far as I’m aware though there are already limits in effect on buying items in huge bulk quantities, so their masses of gold still dont allow then to really corner a market on anything.
Some people like to just make gold in games, to some that’s there goal. So long as they arent selling it for RWT then why does it matter?
People play games for different reasons, some like to be competitive and pvp or parse, some play casually and level a bunch of alts with friends, some people like to just grind and farm.
I see this change affecting all those player bases(except for pvp). If you are a raider looking to parse then this severely limits your ability to farm and makes things much more complicated in order to track and make sure you dont lock yourself out of raid or have to miss buffs because you dont have the resets left.
The more casual crowd that likes to level alot of alts has to plan alot more on what they want to do for that 24 hour period. If they have more then one toon looking for preraid bis they better hope it’s not a warrior shaman or a rogue or they will be waiting for their HoJ and sgc for a long time, while simultaneously locking out their other toons from being able to do 5 mans while leveling.
Then of course the people who just like to grind and farm it’s obvious they will be impacted the most by this.(aside from poor druids)
After all the dust settles it just makes resets a currency now. And I’m sorry to my guildies and my friends but farming HoJ for them or running strat life for guild orb runs just isnt worth my reset anymore.
This is a horrible change there is no benefits to it. It doesnt curb bots, it just hurts the majority of the playerbase weither they have realized it or not.
omg, thank you so much. Keep up the good work.
You have never farmed for sgc obviously
You are going to have to get in line behind the guy who wants proof that water is wet. May take a while.