The situation with bots its totally out of hand. Picking black lotus is impossible on my server (Westfall). There are hunters literally FLYING in the air casting eagle eye on all the black lotus spawns and they instantly log in a character at the lotus within like a minute of it spawning. This hunter was reported by MANY people, and yet a week later they are still flying around unchallenged. Reporting them always seems to accomplish nothing, do any of the devs actually play or care about classic? This blatant cheating and the people getting away with it seem to suggest otherwise. We pay a monthly sub, we deserve better.
23 Likes
Maybe blizzard learned to much from nost. Maybe all the bots are actually blizzard inside job…
7 Likes
Private servers were 1,000,000,000X better at dealing with bots/hacks. But then again, they cared about the game and had active GM’s.
11 Likes
Agreed. 10 char
2 Likes
This alone would solve most issues in Classic. However, that costs money, and Blizzard isn’t willing to spend money on something they don’t actually have any passion for.
9 Likes
I disagree that Blizzard has done nothing in the definition of the word.
However, boycotts are the one thing they would pay more attention to.
For example: massive boycott playing WoW the first day of Blizzcon.
Let all the nerd blogs know why, call the Forbes people, etc.
Further, pserver success against bots undermines the complex legal analysis on that front…path of exile probably smirking about this 
Path of Exilecraft anyone?
4 Likes
It’s happening in retail too. Blizzard does not care. It even looks like they layered asmongold rather than actually doing anything about it. Maybe it was just to mess with him but its not a good look.
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Can confirm, its very depressing. Funny, it was Blizzard’s stance on cheating and their iron fist VS cheaters that got me hooked on them back in the day. It was also cheating that drove me away from UT2003-UT2004 and Novalogic games…
Because it was not Blizzards impeccable game balance and quality that comes to mind, because in 2004 they were possibly one of the worst in terms of quality or quality of service, speaking specifically about bugs, connectivity, game refinement, that sort of thing, even their graphics were garbage for 2004 era and are still garbage when compared to real modern FPS games. I provide them no quarter on the game engine either, its just pure crap compared to tech of the day then and now.
Now they provide a low quality product and junk for enforcement of the rules, oh how the standard has fallen.
4 Likes
They don’t care. The game’s been out long enough that our subs are free money to them. Sad.
3 Likes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCYzb67xfMw
Recorded one yesterday, even flew off to a black lotus at the end of my video. Ridiculous.
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Holy crap!!! I just watched that video with Asmongold. I’d read that it was bad, I’ve seen a few vids showing some bots, but this, the sheer scale of it is just mind bogglingly insane. I don’t understand how something like this can be allowed to go on. How can anyone even play with that going on? Surely Blizzard is fully aware of this. How can they not be? My mind is well and truly blown.
2 Likes
lol how can they not be aware. It is clear they don’t care.
7 Likes
Yep. I’ve seen that same bot for over a month. I don’t even bother to report anymore.
I saw three today in EPL and one in Silithus doing the same thing. I’m keeping my eyes open for a good private TBC server. This is just inexcusable.
1 Like
The natural consequence of deleting most of your support staff. But its more important that they show good numbers for shareholders and Wallstreet loves it when you cut payroll expenditures. Its their favorite thing.
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This never happened, stop propagating misinformation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2019/02/12/activision-blizzard-to-layoff-nearly-800-employees/
One of the more recent ones.
In addition over the years, we’ve seen the loss of their very active telephone support, far lowered GM presence, move to automated systems, and many others.
I’ve been part of multiple companies “restructuring” and every single time those things are code for, we’re getting rid of support staff to make our controllable expenses look better on investing reports.
5 Likes
“why pay a person when i can invest a fraction of their pay for a program that will do their work almost as well?”-management
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This is the official legal document for the reduction in force that Blizzard experienced in February of 2019. There are two columns, the left column is number of positions selected for termination and the right column for positions not selected for termination; page 7 is the CS department. The only two positions cut from the CS department were a Bliz. IT Analyst and a Blizzard BI Programmer, zero actual CS.
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/401389950/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-Dh96i2zsTyPm8t95vdMf
They have more support staff now than they ever have before. You can see the number of CS staff in the WoW credits.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/absolutely-zero-customer-support/243795/51
They likely have more GMs now than they ever have. If you’re talking about the change in policy to moving away from appearing in-game, I saw it explained in a blue post that the ticket system was being massively abused by people wanting GM “appearance events”. Basically, people were wasting their time.
People do realize that the office they have in Texas is almost entirely CS/GM staff, right? They don’t even outsource their CS.
Most gaming “journalists” aren’t interested in boring ol’ facts, btw.
1 Like
Classic is all about easy $$$ revenue for Activision-Blizzard, with minimal effort. They only care about subscription numbers & bottom-line $$$, & apparently not enough paying “legitimate players” are canceling their subscriptions over the rampant cheating & botting being conducted by the paying “illegitimate players”.
Yea I just watched a dude fly hack in burning steppes to pick a lotus. It happens literally every day on my server and blizzard does absolutely nothing. Its just ridiculous how absolutely pathetic this company has become. They dont even have an anti-cheat
1 Like