Casually leveling an alt on Grobb and keep running into bots stuck running or swimming in circles. Either under a dock or just running in place. Keep seeing them, figured I’d start recording.
There’s another one under the ratchet boat docks, I mind controlled it off the boat and watched it swim back to the dock. It’s been over an hour and its still swimming in circles under the dock.
{Removed}
I’ll check back later tonight to see if they are still there.
Pretty crazy how blatantly obvious this is happening on massive servers and nobody is around to police it.
I was a GM on Pservers back in the day. Just flying around the world on invisible, nobody had any idea I was watching them. Was easy to catch hackers and botters. Not sure how these bots are making it to level 30+ with these behaviors. A simple mind control putting them out of bounds requires handheld intervention because the bot just can’t figure out that its stuck under a boat dock.
Thing about bots are - they’re not banned on the spot after being reported.
Blizzard investigates how to detect that specific bot/s, how to implement a solution to break the bot without breaking the game, investigate and builds a list of those using the bots, and will then ban them in a mass ban wave.
The reason for this is simple - don’t give the botters or bot makers any indication they’re in the ban hammer reach before getting dealt with. Otherwise, they’ll just make changes to avoid further detection.
But what you did on the private server is night and day, and ultimately while fun for you, was also incredibly inefficient. The number of players/bots you would have had would be very minor compared to the entire population of players/botters that Blizzard deal with.
While they could deal with them individually on the spot, their processes are in place for reason.
Other people breaking the rules does not excuse you for doing so as well. Please remove the player’s name from your post. That constitutes harassment, whether it’s a bot, a cheater or a legit player. Doesn’t matter.
This forum is one for players to assist other players. It is not a contact point for the staff and neither reports nor feedback is collected from here. Yes, you may see our SFAs posting around, but they have no part in addressing reports, investigations, sanctions, etc. Neither do they relay anything that is posted here. You’ve done what you need to do in reporting folks. If you want to share those videos, then send them to hacks@blizzard.com They don’t belong here. Blizzard works on their timetable, not ours.
Yes, well, when you were on an illegal server it is unlikely that you need to be able to provide evidence for any action you take so that during an appeals process other folks on the team could confirm that action.
“I saw them, they were botting”, as easy as that would be to do, just isn’t good enough because mistakes are made and the goal is to do what we can to deal with those who may be exploiting, without also negatively impacting legitimate players as best as we can. So those investigations often take a good deal more than visual verification.
So to answer the original question, not botted as not accepted, any more than any crime is simply accepted in the realm world. It takes time though, more than we’d like, but that is sometimes the cost of being as thorough as we can be.
If you encounter someone who you believe is botting, please use the right click report option to report them. If you have video evidence, please send that to hacks@blizzard.com. We do use videos in our investigations, though not as verification specifically but to as a confirmation steps to help in the investigation.