After reporting a bot

Kyzera-bloodscalp · February 21, 2022, 7:27am

Blizzard post on how they deal with bot reports:

What do we have to do to get a bot banned?

It generally isn’t as simple as “See person who looks like bot, ban person who looks like bot”. Yes, we can and have suspended or closed accounts like that, it is part of our normal practices. However, overall doing that on an individual level has very little to no impact on the overall practice.

The goal is to have the most impact we can by finding as many of those who are found to be botting as possible, while also masking our methods so as not to let the creators of those programs figure out what we may have found. It is a constant battle, and one that we care a great deal about.

The report feature itself collects data and provides that data for our Hacks teams. They run multiple investigations based on that data to accomplish a number of things.

First, would be to work to identify potential botting and exploits.

Second, would be to use those investigations to find ways to break the programs or somehow automatically detect and/or block them.

Third, to penalize those accounts found to be violating our policies.

These investigations take time. Sometimes a few days, but often several weeks. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about them, or the impact that they have on the community. This is a battle we’ve been fighting since the game launched and it likely will be part of our game as well as many others for a long time to come. We have our victories, some minor and some more lasting, but that a bot exists doesn’t mean that we don’t want to do everything we can do eject them from our game as quickly as we can.

Please continue to use the reporting system if you come across someone you believe might be botting. It does help far more than you know and it certainly is appreciated.