Broseph, they DO NOT have the man power to do anything that would even put a small dent into botting operations.
Activision isn’t going to spend the $$$$, it’s just not happening in today’s economy.
What might curb botting in NA: Not allowing other countries subscriptions allowing access to the servers. They are paying ~$3 for a sub. And it doesn’t require a game package.
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hey so its been almost a year, i’m back once again to say that adding the limit was an absolutely lazy and stupid way to combat botting. Thanks for ruining my SFK farming on my main. Surprised it wasn’t reverted, what an out of touch company.
I am glad to hear this. However, on Azuresong, I have repeatedly reported a group of hunters in Silithus that are consistently using key duplication software to allow unfair farming of resources. The same hunters appear daily, over and over, despite multiple reports.
Good, now do something about the scammers using WeakAura scripts to scam folks out of gold/items by abusing the 5ms batching window while offering victims nothing in the way of recompense.
Terrible company with anti-customer policies.
Weekly reminder that this update was absolutely lazy and out of touch with the playerbase. Bots already have a hundred accounts, you only hurt legitimate players.
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/who rogue blackrock depths
Does this include the Pvp farming today?
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So glad this was lifted for TBC, it was a LAZY and stupid ‘‘fix’’ to botting or whatever and didn’t even do anything other than annoy real players. Please never bring it back and instead invest money into actually banning bots instead.
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Hi,
My account was falsely suspended in this recent ban wave. According to the email, this was not taken lightly and the evidence was reviewed at least twice before taking this action. Having no idea why I had been suspended for 6 months, I appealed the suspension as requested. The GM who reviewed my case replied stating that the evidence had been (once again) reviewed, was indeed valid and that my suspension will be maintained. The ticket was summarily closed with no additional information and I was threatened with additional sanctions if I opened another ticket to discuss further, as this would constitute a violation in itself. I had little confidence in this process, and I knew I was innocent, but that single review was the end of the line as you offer no further appeals or remedies for affected players.
And then I received an email several days later stating that - woops - the suspension was in error. Pleasantly surprised as I was that my decades old account was not being unjustly closed, I have to wonder why it took 4 independent reviews to overturn this action. I am wondering what a GM actually does when performing an appeal. Do they just look and confirm that your antihacking utility did indeed find an event? Do they dig into the event to differentiate between a false positive and a true attempt to cheat or bot? Do you happen to have statistics on how many of these suspensions and bans end up being overturned after you determined that they were levied at innocent players?
Suffice to say this was a very negative experience. Every step of the way I felt ignored and unheard. Every response was copy and paste - even the variables were often left as “GMINPUT”. No information was ever provided, only assurances that the evidence has been checked and double checked at every step - and as such no additional appeals will be entertained. A quick search shows that this experience is not rare, that the appeal process is almost universally pointless, and that many of these suspensions are never overturned.
For the first time in my life, I reported a company to the BBB. The most painful part of this experience is that I have had nothing but reverence and love for Blizzard for decades. I salivated over every release, as there was no better gaming experience for a mac user and it wasn’t even close. It’s makes me truly sad how much distance there is between this memory and the present reality.
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Pretty much word for word the exact same experience I’m in the middle of except they haven’t gotten to the woops part where they admit they screwed up and restore my 17 year old account plus two others yet. The most frustrating part of it is that I’m not even sure I was banned for Multiboxxing and I can’t get any clarification about it.
The first notice said I was perma’d for hacking: “Account Action: Account Closure” “Offense: Exploitative Activity: Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks)” and of course assured me that they’ve carefully reviewed the relevant evidence and they don’t take this action lightly and yadda yadda and other BS. After my first appeal the email I received actually says “Your fellow players reported you for cheating. This includes actions like botting, and exploiting game mechanics.” and my perma was changed to a 6 month suspension. The reply to the second appeal was pretty much get lost and for the third they added and don’t come back to the get lost. In the third I asked for clarification as to whether the action was taken with regard to multiboxxing or whether it was something else because I’m not even sure how to approach it and they pretty much confirmed that they just straight up can’t be a**ed with me.
I know they’ve made changes to the ToS regarding input software but the thing is that I’ve been multiboxxing for years and never used any of it. I originally started multiboxxing with two accounts back around the time of the MoP prepatch because back in the original 2004 retail launch I ground a Holy Paladin to level 60 (back when there weren’t enough quests to get to 60) and I never wanted to do it again. For BC I alternated Pally and Hunter back and forth with one accumulating rested XP while the I quested on the other and that worked okay, but when Wrath launched I didn’t even level my Paladin. I think he got to level 63 before I quit and just played my Hunter for the entire xpac.
After a June 2010 heart attack knocked me out of the game for a while I tried to come back for Cata and got my Paladin caught up from 63 to 85, but the first heroic I tried to heal (SFK) proved too much. I’m proud to report that nobody died, including me, but by the end I was literally sitting in a puddle of sweat and it was clear that I wasn’t ready yet. Sometime around the MoP prepatch was when I was finally able to come back to the game and when I decided to add a second account and transfer my Hunter to it so I could just drag my Paladin around to save time levelling. By this time I was working 7 day weeks to get through medical bills and defaulted student loans and I simply didn’t have time to do every quest twice.
This pattern remained until classic was announced. By far my favorite memory from this game will always be healing on my critadin in vanilla and I was probably more excited than anybody when classic was announced. Much more excited it seems than my friends from vanilla who had no inclination to return for it. So now I was staring at two problems. One was trying to find a guild who would allow me the flexibility to recreate that vanilla experience by critadin healing the way I did back in the day. The other was that I was then and still continue to be working 7 day weeks. My health problems and the bills that resulted from them are long gone, but my sister is a single mother of two boys the older of which has an autoimmune disorder and seems to invent new allergies every other month (my sister has had to move apartments twice in the past few years because they simply became unlivable for him) and the younger of which was diagnosed T1D.
Multiboxxing solved a lot of problems for me, firstly finding a healthy way to blow off stress whenever I had free time to play. For Classic I decided I wasn’t going to do the traditional find a guild, dungeon/raid etc. Been there, done that, don’t want the drama. Instead I added a third account and decided to see how far into the content I could get with three Paladins, one of each spec.
I’ve been playing games like WoW, ARK, and Rust on my three screen, 5760x1080, Eyefinity setup for a long time. Originally I was running the two WoW clients full screen and used Alt-Tab to switch between them, but for Classic I set it up so I had one window per monitor (still on a single Eyefinity desktop) and then I’d simply move my G600 mouse side to side between the three windows… simply doesn’t accurately describe manually controlling three characters at the same time like that, but the concept was simple anyway.
I managed to get pretty far into Strat, though the Scarlets in live side proved problematic without any CC, and I was able to complete my charger quest all the way up to the final stage in Scholo where the trash groups proved too much. I’m pretty sure I could have cleared Rattlegore’s room and completed the final battle but with the trash pulls having shadow priests grouped with mobs that fear, knock back and mana burn I wasn’t able to advance far enough into the instance to try. The point is that this is how I decided to enjoy my time in WoW. Doing all of this manually, finding ways to balance controlling all three Paladins, was the perfect fun challenge I needed to blow off steam.
I knew about the changes to the ToS regarding multiboxxing software but I didn’t worry about it because I’ve never used any, the whole point was to see how far I could get playing three Paladins manually. To automate anything would have defeated the purpose of doing it. The closest I ever got were a few simple /follow party1, /assist, and /invite macros that I made within the game client. I use the default UI and I only run utility addons like AtlasLoot, Titan Panel, and Questie. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not sure I could even have used any software that passed key presses to multiple clients because I was running different specs and abilities on each of my Paladins, but I don’t really know how that works and it’s something I never wasted any time looking into because I never had any intention of doing it.
Fortunately there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel for me. My sister’s oldest finished school and got hired at a law firm. He’s starting at the bottom but they gave him $32k with excellent benefits, and the youngest has been calling iRacing on YouTube and producing a Monster Jam podcast since before he turned 18 in February and in the past few months has picked up paid contracts calling eNASCAR races on Twitch. We had finally just about worked our way through it. I had almost reached that light and then Blizzard drops this nonsense on me…
Edit: Sorry for the rant, I needed to get it out
Edit 2: 63 should be 73. Only one correction is actually really good for a 3 am rant
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bumping for warcraftlogs
Thanks Kaivax.
I love seeing the regular wave of blue posts (and that we can actually interact with each other on). This interaction is important.
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Sounds like to me you’re late to the party, and you want to save face to help ease out your wow token by banning your competition publicly. Some of us aren’t stupid, and we get the purpose to this post.
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Sah brah jag sah
If only we could do something about the “bots” who respond to tickets these days. Nothing like writing an appeal that references things in the ToS only to have a canned response directing you to things in the ToS…
I remember the days when GMs would whisper you in game to discuss things, even appear in front of you, make jokes…treat you like a valued customer. Now it’s like calling a call center where all you get is “I’m sorry sir we can’t help you” and no option to escalate.
But hey, doesn’t matter because you’re saving money, amirite?
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Thank you!
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The GMs that we get when we submit tickets today - are downright horrible. They’re nasty people who are flat out nasty to you, have terrible tone + give zero F-s about you or the time and money you’ve put into your account.
Let’s talk about their “heuristics” now. I would be willing to bet that they work something like this:
If a player gets X reports for Y within time period Z ban/flag them.
But wait, what if an entire guild reports people? Ah, it probably checks for that. So - try it sometime with a discord of guildless/random guild people or a streamer’s channel. See what happens. Can test it out + see if that’s how it works.
I betchya it is.
Why is it probably this? Because blizz’s dev team is downright bad. That’s why. Need proof? Here - Here’s the proof that they don’t have actual technical leads or architects working for them: Thinking that “limiting instances to 30 per server per realm” is a solution to botting? LOL. No, I don’t think so. Botters do their thing across multiple servers. This “fix” won’t stop botting - it will just timeshift it. Boom. Idea is dead and proven a sound failure. If they had actual talented engineers working for them - this “30 per realm” limit would never have even been an idea on the table - the logic behind it is so flawed it’s sad.
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So many exploits never were addressed or fixed…maybe curved but never fixed. Is this just an arm of the democratic party? All talk no bark.
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we fixed work sexual harrassment boys. well done!
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