Here comes the hyperbole…this is what got the thread deleted last time.
Sounds like you are reading the botter’s playbook.
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because i have an opinion?
If you wanna voice your “opinion” do so in General Discussion or a blog.
Those are actually done on compromised credit cards, so i doubt Blizzards gets anything.
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Because every time Blizzard finds a way to break one bot, the hackers come up with a new way to bot that bypasses the old means of breaking it. While it’s been going on for “years”, sure, it’s because it’s an arms race between the botters and Blizzard, so it’s more like “It goes on for a few months, goes quiet for a few months, goes on for a few means, etc.” and this cycle has been going on for years.
Also, why are you assuming that it’s just one ring instead of multiple rings being taken out in sequence?
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Quite the contrary, they cost us an enormous amount - between the costs of fighting them, the fees that get attached to stolen cards used - and all the ill will from players.
And just because we fight them, doesn’t mean they don’t come back. We do banwaves in the hundreds and thousands at a time. Within 2 days, or less, they come back - but we don’t stop fighting them, we continue to fight them.
As I said, until there is no longer a financial motivation to do so, these will never go away and that is 100% fully in the hands of players that give them money.
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That’s why rules that you have in place to ban an account shouldn’t apply to these bots. Any person with a brain watching their movements can tell they’re a bot. Just delete them faster!
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That’s ineffective, because it let’s the hackers and botters know that Blizz is onto them. It’s much better to find a way to for-sure break the program and remove all of the botters using that program in one fell swoop.
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You really don’t understand automation do you?
- Visual observation is not enough to ban an account. They have to have PROOF. Blizz always prefers to avoid accidentally banning real players.
- They DO ban thousands and thousands, over and over.
- Bot maker changes the bot software and comes back. Automated bots flood the area again.
- Players are poor at security so they fall for phishing schemes or get malware. Botters have thousands and thousands of passwords to accounts and buy lists of stolen credit cards from the black market.
This is a world wide criminal enterprise. Not something that can be taken down by one GM with a stick. I don’t step on ants one by one either. I kill them all at once and try to take out the nest.
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I don’t believe that for one second because you can go to Botanica at any point of the day and see them running in and out every second. If you had a guy there inspect the player and see all the same greens of a boosted 110 and they follow the same path. just hit Delete! If they’re getting deleted before they they even finish one run. I’m sure they would stop faster. But no matter what i say you wont change your methods or ways. This has been going on since the days of Ty’rs Hand with all the Rogues that instant killed you. Been 14 years and you still haven’t found a way.
Which has nothing to do with my point.
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So do you also blame Police and Law Enforcement because crime still exists and not everyone is caught, or caught as fast as you want?
Do you feel that if Police don’t eradicate all crime that you should go confront them about it and demand immediate results?
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i’m done gripping… They will always be apart of the game. No way to fix it.
Another quote from the Botter’s handbook
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I told you exactly how to ‘fix’ it. Players need to stop giving them cash.
There wouldn’t be any point of existing if there wasn’t a financial incentive from players to do so.
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To be fair, I don’t think we have the tech yet to defeat all bots in games permanently. They will always be around. It is wrong to give up though, or think Blizz would give up fighting them. That is what botters want people to think.
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Back in the day, I used to farm spider silk in Duskwood by following a regular path based upon how I knew the mobs were laid out.
Used to get whispered all the time but I never felt any obligation to respond and interrupt my farming.
More often than not, I would just disable chat windows.
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In those 14 years the bot programs have been updated the same as WoW. The bot program this year is not the same one as last year, even if they do the same thing.
Over 200 realms. This is the least efficient method to monitor it.
There is no rule that says you have to respond to a random whisper.
Edit:
There’s also no proof that if they do answer they aren’t botting.
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From another thread on why bots aren’t banned immediately. People just see the surface. They have no understanding of the actual complexity. On top of that, saying “any human can see it’s a bot” is indicating players somehow have magic x-ray powers to see the code they’re exploiting. That’s the ONLY way you know it’s really a bot and not an efficient player.
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The usual failure to grasp the scope and complexity of botting and the obsession with anecdotal evidence.
Look, if it was as simple as ‘oh, they’re taking the same path, they must be a bot’ then the bot programmers would be out of business. It’s a matter of having documented evidence of what accounts are botted and what aren’t. It’s a matter of breaking programs so they can’t come back without retooling. It’s a matter of lots of back-end stuff that players aren’t privy to.
Cyber-security isn’t a thing where there’s a magic wand that stops all of it immediately. It’s also not a thing where you can just look at some potential symptom and say ‘virus/bot/worm’! Do you assume your computer as a virus every time you run across a glitch? And WoW’s security is a level of computing far beyond what PCs deal with.
There are also considerably more bots than there are employees at Blizzard. And considerably more players for that matter. You will never see all bots eradicated, so don’t keep expecting to, for the same reason you will never see all murder, theft, or vandalism eradicated. Human (animal) nature.
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