Your appeal is open, Aoxin. The only thing I can really tell you, it wasn’t for trolling.
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My account was banned too yesterday and i received no e-mail, no reason. Opened appeal.
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The botter isn’t there anymore. The one that I saw for 3 months, but there is another there already 
reported him. It’s probably the same person on a different hacked acct. I put him in the water for a half hour and stole all his hides for a half hour or so.
Something different needs to be done with the botting ban waves. The people that are using it as income in China or whatever have accounts that are ready to go right away when their other acct gets banned. It was the same guy because the path was exactly the same. Crazy stuff.
What?
Not just that. They buy accounts using stolen credit cards. If you have a solution for preventing this, all online gaming companies would be interested. The problem isn’t limited to WoW.
Doesn’t have to be the same guy, just someone with the same bot.
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No idea, but the ban waves don’t really do much to stop the people that are botting for $$ from China or what have you.
Yah I know. But I would do maybe a 3-5 man team that specifically looks at botting flag/reports and just personally go in and check them out. I don’t know if they have a budget for this type of thing, but if they did something like putting active reps on just the botting flags it might be a better idea than just doing it in waves, essentially giving a botter a few months to bot before they have to get another acct. And again, I don’t know what type of budget they have for that kind of thing, or if it’s even a department there, but if botters knew they were getting banned real fast maybe it would curtail it more than someone out there botting 3 months without being banned.
It might not be the same guy, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same path, the guy was there yesterday after not seeing it in the morning, and that’s where the banned botter was farming. So no, I am not sure if it was the same, but I believe it probably was. There is normally one bot in that area skinning. I had never seen a second bot there so I just assume it’s probably the same guy on a diff acct. I could be wrong though.
They have a team. I would say it is probably more than 3-5 people. They use the logs. They aren’t going to ban anyone because it “looked” like they were botting. Finding a programmatic way to find bugs is more efficient than manually looking for them. Manual finding is a waste of manpower.
Having ban-waves more often would not lessen the number of bots. Every time Blizzard breaks a bot, or finds a way to detect it’s use, and does bans of accounts that used it, the bot makers update their botting software. All banning more frequently results in is the botting software getting upgraded more frequently.
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It’s not really useful to say “Do something different” than offer nothing up as something different. More to the point, there isn’t a magic wand to stop such, so being vague on what to do won’t do much to stop it.
They’re not going to have the workers that’ll ban on the spot, given the fact that’ll just tip off the bot makers. It isn’t some random person who’s doing this. They have a large network whom they can make new botting softwaer. Just hitting them on the spot will only tip them off to the fact that they’re being watch and use that to their advantage.
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How good do you think you are at spotting bots? Just curious… There are some (like the ones that mount and go into different areas for like ore) and then you have a skinning one like I have been messing with that just runs the same path over and over. I lure him over to the water by pulling a mob close to me and then killing it and looking it leaving corpse to skin. Then of course he starts running over there, and then I do another, and another until he’s in the water. He will run against a wall for a while and then turn a bit and run into another wall. Then some guy will get on it an hour or so after and move him back to the start point.
Those are the bots that would be easiest to kill. They would have to update the bot to look less like a bot if it was based on an employees eyes who has probably seen tons of bots and knows what they all look like.
Just an idea. No big for me because other than messing with them they don’t really bug me like they bug other people.
It doesn’t matter. If I see a bot I report it. Then I move on. I don’t get obsessed with seeing if it is there every time I log on. So you have found a way to play with them. That’s fine. Knock yourself out. I’d rather do more productive things with my game-time.
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I am not here to argue with you. I was just stating that I think more can be done to combat bots. Don’t take this convo into a rude exchange.
Like what? You’ve given no ideas.
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I was just curious. Not trying to argue with you. I skin in the same area which is why I mess with him. Gives me something to do. I don’t go out and search for them.
The CS forum isn’t a place for feedback, much less for ideas on how to combat bots. More to the point, this place is like a front desk, so it’s rather a moot point to bring the topic here. If you want to offer your ideas, you can put it on the general forum or through the in-game system.
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Just to add for future searches:
Botting is a multi-BILLION dollar industry. They don’t do it for fun; they do it because people buy their services, and in the process of doing so, give these criminals (yes, they’re criminals) their account and payment info. The Botting Mafia steals that info, and use it to make money (and lure more people into the trap of using their services).
An industry this size has the resources to fix code as fast as it’s discovered. These aren’t folks sitting in their Mom’s basement; it’s highly organized. And they affect more than just WoW. They’re scammers - they will go where the money is, and the money is Gamers.
Until Gamers stop giving them money to cheat their way into goods they didn’t earn, the Botting Mafia isn’t going to leave WoW alone. Blizzard does its best to educate players and provide tools to secure their accounts, but 75k bot bans later, Gamers will still fall for scams or buy ‘illegal’ services.
Edit to add: simple things like ‘blocking anything coming from X Country’ is useless. VPN’s exist to bypass that. Knocking out one or two bots here and there is about as effective as an Anti-Malware software only dealing with two lines of the Malware code, instead of closing the whole vulnerability. It’s a complicated issue, and one that even Governments can’t just push a button to fix. (Read up on Cybercrime and how hard it is to combat)
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the problem isn’t Blizz, its the playerbase. If people stopped buying boosting services, gold, gear, mounts etc with RMT then the market would dry up and the bots would largely go away. But as long as theres a market the criminals will cash in on it
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How can I prove I don’t buy those services, should I send Blizzard my bank statements? I’m really confused about this. My appeal was denied and no information was given. The last time I bought gold was in 2017, BY SELLING A WOW Token. I have been legitimately farming gold the past few weeks on my own, with no programs. I mean the only way I can prove that is if my chat logs are pulled up, they can see me talking with friends and guildies while doing so.
This is incredibly frustrating and I’m not getting answers, only vague “information was disclosed in the initial E-mail” corporate responses, also the I cant find this elusive message as to why I was shut down.
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They don’t take outside info into account when dealing with account actions. If you wish to have them take another look, you can appeal again.
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I did open another appeal, but it feels like it’s going to go nowhere like the first one. I don’t know what I did wrong, just because I’m not working and on summer break doesn’t mean I’m botting.
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You can try again until they said no more appeals on the matter will be looked at. From the sounds of it, you were told the reason for the ban from your edit. But nothing really can will be gain from posting on the forums on the matter, other than maybe a blue resending the email.
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I’m going to keep trying until I get an answer, I really don’t know why I was targeted. I hope they do SEND the email because I never received one. I wasn’t told why I was banned, I have no idea. I want to open up another account but I don’t want it getting shut down if I herb farm again.
Well I’m not really getting anything from submitting tickets, next best thing is to post on the forum until someone can help. =\
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