The people who believe that bots don’t exist are the same ones who think the earth is flat.
I just watched someone on youtube running a bot script and showing the character movement on the screen. Yep, they don’t exist alright.
As for the actual ban waves, maybe maybe not. What I can say is I was killing the same bots over and over for HKs while ranking. One day a few of those bots disappeared, then the next day a few more. Within 4 days all of the free HKs were gone. Do they create new accounts and start again? Yep.
Cheaters will always cheat. Botters will always bot. Ban waves happen, sure, but that will never truly stop the ebb and flow of this cycle. You will always see bots, or cheaters, because that’s what they do, and outside of extremely drastic measures to ensure that person never returns, there’s no stopping this.
Anyone who believes otherwise, that A) bots don’t exist and B) Blizzard only cares about the botting account’s money, needs a harsh reality check.
This is the real source of the problem. Doesn’t matter if you ban the bots if the people running them can just make a new account and keep playing with the same bot.
Maybe Blizzard should hire assassins instead of GMs.
Even when they do ban, the same people make new accounts the next day, and go back to botting. It has virtually no effect on the botters but it looks good. IP bans in this case are the only real choice… except that’s not likely to really do anything, as they probably use dynamic IPs.
Back in the golden age of WoW, Blizzard had GMs in-game and who could take care of them on a case by case basis. Not only do they not have the funding for it anymore (even though WoW is arguably more profitable than before), the GMs they do have are usually outsourced and not on location and thus can’t actually get in game and do GM things.
I can see someone making a trash junk email address but how does one who got banned from banning pay for another account with the same billing information?
Still your billing information is basically a form of identification. If you ban an account for botting then allow the same billing information to create and pay for a new account the same week…
Last night in Hinterlands on Netherwind, I could not kill the bots fast enough before to keep them all dead. One would res and resume farming before I could get them all dead.
Blizzard simply does not care. I mean they don’t need any special software to detect this. They have Chinese pet names, they move like robots, they follow a more or less fixed pattern between spawns. I report them but I don’t believe blizzard has any motivation to fix this problem.
I can tap the mob they’re heading to, they will kill it without complaining. I can send my pet at them and they fight the pet and ignore me. The mages are also equally terrible and easy to spot.
Literally if Blizz had one person take one realm for 2 hours a day and go to all the zones, they could immediately spot these accts and ban them. There are not that many classic servers. You could take care of them all in a couple of days.
I’ve been grind-leveling a rogue and killing mobs in Arathi. I ended up at the troll village where there are some level 32 to 35 mobs and one of the bots was there (standard hunter with a gibberish name with a pet with a Chinese name.) I figured out that if I pull something in his area, even though I aggroed the mob he would still target and help kill it. He’d then try and loot because it didn’t realize it was my target. I did this for a little while and since he was level 35 and I only level 29, he was a great help.
Its worth banning the bots permanently because first it removes that gold from the economy and thats good. Second it makes the player base happy and that is also also good. Happy players are the kind of players that stick around. Happy players are the kind that tell their friends how much fun they are having, resulting in new players who also have the opportunity to have fun.
If you have a problem like bots and cheating in a video game this makes the regular players on average unhappy and they will turn away from the game, overall allowing cheating is a net loss for blizzard if they care about only money because unhappy players will not stick around forever like happy players do.
In the past week I have received whispers from 6 gold selling sites. They spam whisper. Inlcude a gold selling site. They impersonate Blizzard Customer Service very badly trying to direct you to their site. Site is likely infected with all kinds of stuff to try and steal your account if they can’t outright get you to give them money or use their service.
