Are there really 1500+ bots in BRD? Here's a breakdown, you decide

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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DISCLAIMER: These writings are my own OPINION, that includes INCONCLUSIVE, LEADING, and CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE from SIMPLE RESEARCH that is supported with data which VARIES GREATLY based on gold prices.

Bots in BRD Spreadsheet with relevenant evidence(cannot post links on blizzard forums :frowning:) (reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/m99i64)

It’s annoying that the problem has become so bad without response from Blizzard. Sure, every now and again there’s a banwave but has the problem ever really gone away? There’s multiple documented videos of bots flyhacking to ZG and plenty of well known botted locations, yet nothing seems to ever be done long-term. After watching MadSeasonShow’s “The Ballad of the Level Boost”(link here) and being a longtime fan of Runescape’s bot detective “SirPugger”, yesterday I decided to do some research of my own.

Initial numbers were taken between 1-3pm eastern time on 3/19/21 on American and Oceanic Servers. Doing a simple “/who blackrock depths rogue” I found that EVERY SINGLE populated server has a non-zero number of unguilded Rogues parked in BRD, for what is likely pickpocket farming/botting.

I certainly cannot prove that these characters are bots or not being piloted by actual players by this research alone. But when less than 1% of the rogues in Blackrock Depths are guilded, it’s pretty damning evidence IMO. Most players would be guilded at level 60 and over 99% of the rogues were level 60 when researching. Almost all of the character names are nonsensical and are out of the ordinary or unusual(think RP-style names), while the majority of actual players have readable and meaningful or memeful names. There is also a DIRECT-correlation between server population and the number of rogues in BRD at anytime. My findings estimate that around 1.2% of the Wow Classic Population is a suspected Blackrock Depths Rogue pickpocket bot. (1509/122,758=0.012*100=1.2%)

Will this be a problem when you can boost a character? I would heavily bet on YES. The bot problem is extremely rampant and it will only be exacerbated by the introduction of character boosts with TBC. This is only ONE of the botting methods that are being used and discussed here, meaning bot numbers are likely MUCH higher than this data shows. If this method of botting paired with a character boost, the bot becomes INSTANTLY effective at generating revenue. And thanks to a method easily googled, you can make ~30g/hr on the LOW end simply pickpocketing mobs in BRD. Also our friend google will even help you find a bot to use, though you absolutely SHOULD NOT DO OR EVEN TRY THIS, as it could and will likely lead to many ways compromise your self security. I know these characters don’t do this 24hours because I compared results after 6hours and the few servers I rechecked had bot numbers decrease by about half by 10pm when I checked again. Though a good portion of the characters that were in BRD after 6 hours were also the original characters there were at the beginning of research, this might lead to further investigation.

Let’s talk about the $$$$. Since you can’t play classic in trial form, all of these characters are paying for a subscription, this is bringing in Blizzard $22,500(1500*15)per month with just these numbers and botting method alone. Certainly enough to pay a few GMs to get a handle on the problem. If these characters are making the low-end 30g/hr average and doing this 8hrs a day, that comes out to 360,000g or $14,400($7,200 at 4hrs/day), worth of gold being introduced and newly floating around in the game everyday.

When it takes say 125hrs on average to get to level58 to become effective, that’s a total of 5,125g(41g/hr125hrs) that a character could make by boosting and using those 125hrs to farm instead of level the character. This profit is certainly WAY more than what you would make leveling or even low level botting. Converting that 5,125g to realmoney$$$ that gold is worth ~$205(5.12540) at today’s prices. Though this equation becomes much more complicated as gold prices change and leveling becomes easier with tbc prepatch. However, I’d still expect 90+hrs for a lvl58 conventionally leveling, which brings the total to 3,690g a character could make in 90hrs of pickpocket botting or around $148 at todays price. When a new character boost is likely to cost no more than $60 and a subscription is $15, or a total investment of $75 for a new bot, you can see the gold farming bots will ALWAYS be winning unless they’re taken out within the first 48hours of effective botting. Obviously the amount of time to breakeven goes down as gold prices go up and vice versa, but these are today’s numbers.

For these reasons I cannot support a character boost. Would I pay for a character boost? Oh hell yes. If blizzard had great or even semi-good bot detection or a handle on the gold farmers this would be a different discussion. Adding a character boost with the game in it’s current state would likely just bring more problems. If the botting situation isn’t handled than likely the only solution will be the introduction of the WoW Token to classic, which would bring further problems like more bots and even paid carry service spamming(arena carry anyone?) that are so very popular in Retail. I honestly think all the outcomes are bad, UNLESS they fix botting. But maybe Blizzard’s big brain plan is to not caring about the bot/gold farming problem, so that they can implement the WoW token to classic and take in even more $$$$ when you buy gold for your GDKP/carry run. I’m not very thrilled with the pay-to-win direction wow classic is headed, but I’m out of breath.

Please Blizzard fix bots before giving them the ability to instantly be effective.

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This is a boomer mmorpg. Most the players support the bots lol they aren’t going anywhere. Blame the boomers on your servers for buying gold and not respecting the GAME.

Sirpugger is amazing though I wish blizzard was anything close to osrs on handling bots and working with the community.

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So Blizz claims they dont make money off bots… they also say they listen to feedback during beta
Nothing will be done, nothing has ever been done for the entire history of the game
The furthest Blizz went to curtail bots and gold sellers was to become the gold seller.
The people in charge do not care about the game, they don’t understand the game. They fact that retail WoW is doing worse than WotLK did on launch is terribly embarrassing when you consider the amount of people in the world who have access to internet and computers has done nothing but go up. 12 million subbed in 2009 and with all the technological expansion since then they have only and steadily lost players.

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Is what any customer support representative is going to and supposed to be saying.

Show me some numbers, action, details, relevant data, ANY of the above. Be fully transparent like a real company, but that’s obviously too much to ask if they can’t handle a botting problem.

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We had a group of summon bots that went by random letter paw so like xpaw, zpaw, etc. rumor was they got banned for gold selling (makes sense).

Well less than a week later, we had the paws replaced by the funs. I managed to talk to one and they said they didn’t bot but instead shared their account with their friend, each of which played 12 hours each.

Reported that group and within two days I got an in-game mail from Customer Support thanking me for my report and saying that though they couldn’t disclose information, action had been taken on one of my reports.

Bots do get banned despite what the vocal minority thinks. But I would imagine most of these bot makers are using private scripts so they get caught far less often. And the problem with banning them immediately is they can go back and look at that data and see what exactly got them caught, especially if they implemented some sort of tripwire. Then they improve their bot based on blizzards detection method, and now blizzard has to work even harder and spend more money / manpower to combat that.

Just like I wish everyone had to work retail / food industry for like a year, I wish everyone here complaining about bots had to work in combating them for a time. And then have to deal with people like you saying they aren’t doing anything. I’m sure they love reading that.

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A couple of people were saving a little money so you reported them.

I suppose that you’re the hero we deserve.

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There’s always two sides to the arguement. Blizzard doesn’t tell us how many bots are being removed, how much gold is taken out of the economy, how many of these bots are using compromised accounts. All we ever hear is that they’re doing something about it.

Though, the evidence shows otherwise. When these bots from just this method alone make up OVER 1% OF THE TOTAL PLAYER POPULATION RIGHT NOW AT THIS VERY MOMENT, it’s a problem.

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They’ve done that in the past, people don’t care. They don’t care.

They have, multiple times. People don’t care.

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This is once in a blue moon as I’ve stated. This isn’t a regular thing, this isn’t something that’s being kept up with or the bots wouldn’t be rampant. But you’re right no one cares, blizzard doesn’t care, and the game and subs suffer because of it. Change doesn’t happen if you stand idle.

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Wow, you just love jumping to conclusions don’t you? I’m genuinely curious as to how many notifications you get on a daily basis with people responding to your troll posts.

No, it wasn’t a couple of people just saving some money. It was a bot. I joined its group with 3 characters (auto invite with LTP) and typed “123” for summons literally 50+ times (cycling between the 3 characters) and they summoned each character over and over to the same exact spot they were already at without taking the 10g requirement.

That’s not a human. If you’re doing this as your “job”, you don’t summon the same three characters over 50 times without trading any of them for gold ever. It eventually ran out of shards (I tried with a separate account and character in case I somehow “flagged” it) and then logged off.

So yeah, in that specific instance, I guess I do think I was the hero the realm deserved.

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At least one.

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So we’re you going to bother with responding to the rest of the thread or just one specific line where you could be “right”

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They’ve stated multiple times that thousands of bots are banned daily. They’ve stated multiple times that they take action against cheaters 24/7. Why would they continue to publish numbers if the people who aren’t convinced will never believe them no matter what they do?

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I haven’t read it. I’ll give it a go when I have more time and if it stirs any thoughts I’ll get back to you.

Do, please, have a lovely evening.

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This confuses me, since, other than that one post, they always claim that they only ban in waves so the botters don’t know their software’s been detected.

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There’s different bots, there’s all sorts of cheating tools and programs. They could be investigating one program for two weeks and another for a few days. The end result is there’s ban waves constantly going out and thousands of bots being banned daily.

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Except the official line, and their announcements seem to back it up, is that they only have ban waves every few months. Once a quarter, basically.

I’m not suggesting there aren’t bots and that they aren’t banning them. I’m just having difficulty reconciling the difference.

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Could you link this?

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Nope, but you could Google it.

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