The only real way to get rid of bots is by closing all loopholes in the codes and that means closing the API and everything else in between. And lockdown everything and every angle. Leaving no stones unturned.
The best way to get rid of bots is to BAN them BEFORE they become profitable. But if that happened people would actually stop botting, so Blizz doesn’t. They like bots. Bots buy expansions and pay subscriptions.
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And… make multi-Boxxing bannable.
There are hardly any multiboxers left. How would it change the bot problem to ban a handful of players who are currently following the rules? Does it just make you happy inside to dream up reasons to ban other players?
On the other hand, maybe you make your living running bots, and you want to distract from your own violations.
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Are you talking about the LUA API? Bots don’t need the API, a majority of them read memory directly, the API doesn’t expose information they need, it’s already secured. They also run at kernel level since most use rootkits to inject themselves. Every process is vulnerable to these things, not just WoW.
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As long as blizzard continues to create NPC’s and Dungeon Followers… there will always be bots. We’ve/They’ve already concluded that anyone running multiboxing… can rewrite or allow someone to rewrite the code in order to create bots…
Those are legal bots since they are created by first party and not by third party from the outside. Plus, those bots are illegal and not just illegal but disruptive.
or, now… or… hear me out…
Punish bots in real time instead of letting them ruin the economy for half a year at a time then ban-waving them.
Do silly things… just randomly kill them. Wipe their inventories every 2 hours. Disable their trading. Disable their mailboxes.
It does seem about time to thin the bots again.
Yup, the API would not be enough to control bots. It’s less about loopholes in code than identifying non-human behavior. So it would be a great task for audit trail logging (movement and activity tracking) and Machine Learning to identify patterns in play activity, time, etc.
Heck, anything that’s running around 24x7 is hopefully already being tagged.
Somehow the bot developers get paid for the software, and if they ban one by one, the devs only lose the revenue from those single instances. If they ban a massive wave of bots (thousands?) the bot developers lose a massive chunk of change as many people cancel the charge on their credit card all at once. That is the explanation some ex Blizzard guy gave on Youtube for ban waves, and it makes sense.
Only thing you can do is to make people stop buying their stuffs, and you know it aint gonna happen
- Bots make up a massive portion of the Monthly Active Users (MAU) metric for the shareholders. Banning them, at least before a report period, would be counterproductive to their bottom line.
- Ban waves take too long to be enacted. It’s highly profitable to create a new account and use a bot to farm gold since they will make far more money than they ever lose, especially in classic where there’s no box price to the game. Gold generation is at an all time high. Blizzard’s answer is to create more gold sinks in the game when in reality there’s too much gold from nefarious sources and the average real player will never be able to collect that much.
- Gold buying isn’t punished enough. To deter players from buying gold they need to:
— Ban the gold seller.
— Delete all gold in the transaction from all sources, even if it’s already changed hands.
— Ban the gold buyer.
— Remove any/all achievements, colllectibles, and progress on any associated account. If you’re banned you still keep all of your achievements and collections across your Battlenet account so you don’t really lose too much if you have to make a new WoW license. - Set a generic filter in trade chat and LFG that auto bans advertisements of any kind for carries/sales of “services”
- Set a generic chat filter in LFG and the services channel that auto detects and bans any/all sales that advertise any form of 3rd party (website, discord etc…) entity to discuss payments.
- Strictly monitor the services channel as it is really just a spam haven for RMT and frauds. There’s almost no legitimate sellers in services, it’s just a wall of RMT spam that is so blatant and obvious. These people need instant account closures.
- Implement name/payment method/hardware bans on commercial use bots and sellers.
- Do better at detecting and banning VPNs as this is a main way that these mostly foreign gold sellers access US servers to cheat and sell illegal gold.
There’s so much that could be done, but let’s be real. Blizzard doesn’t want any of it. Banning bots that generate gold would kill token sales and make it impossible for people to legitimately afford things. The mass inflation would go down over night, trade goods would immediately skyrocket in price due to bots not being able to sell them anymore. It’d just be a mess.