go to elwynn forest, it is currently flooded with 270k level 6 mage bots farming boars, and everything else in sight, impossible to level right now. they need to do more than just banning. im getting tired of this
For real im horde and its flooded on a daily with hunters just skinning for raw gold.
You would think they would proactively flag new accounts after the ban, in order to get a head start on investigating them for the next ban wave…
Not blindly investigating reports and banning them after the bots have been actively farming for a month.
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What if there are more bots than regular players?
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I hear all this, but see none of it. At least to the scale mentioned. I play late though, maybe the bots are sleeping.
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If they were 270,000 accounts created with stolen credit cards and Blizzard had to give the 4 million dollars back, they’d be pissed enough to do it…
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There was someone in another thread on this topic claiming to be a (non-Blizz) game dev who explained the banwaves are intended to line up with PayPal chargeback windows to nuke the accounts of bot providers.
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Bots don’t pay for subscriptions.
Stop thinking this.
You are wrong.
Stop it.
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You just look with your own eyes.
If they did it good job but hard to believe.
4m thrown away is a joke though XD
They do now, well once a year at least but the tokens they buy are still being bought by someone else to begin with.
It’s so unbelievably easy to get on top of this problem it hurts my head seeing how blatant the bots are.
Lets look at 2 recent examples: A botter running 384 Wow clients across 9 screens. This will almost certainly be paid for by 1 credit card or 1 paypal account. Probably 1 IP address too. No normal players put hundreds of WoW accounts on one payment method. Instant obvious red flag to ban a major botter.
Or the lines of bots running to a tree then fly hacking at low level. Put a very simple Z axis detection "if player.position z axis=> 200 AND player.level below flying level then BAN AUTOMATICALLY PERMANENTLY. A level 5 can not fly up in the air only a fly hacking bot noclipping a tree. Entire lines of bots would fly straight into the fly hack detection and be forced to buy another account within 2 minutes and not to mention remake their entire bot software to not hit the trigger.
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No tokens in SoD though, so you’re talking about multi-flavour bot accounts.
No wories that like 10% of bots.
Also they created new accounts already
So you think bots only have characters in SoD?
They bot in retail and buy game time in retail which also gets them SoD gametime with tokens.
They can also do it in Wrath.
They probably have millions of gold to buy tokens with.
They are not paying for anything.
They did not lose 4m, nor did Blizzard give 4m back. If your account is hacked/compromised, that is you problem, Blizzard is not going to refund you because you were not smart enough to keep your accounts safe.
Further, if the accounts were setup w/fraudulent credit cards, etc, it is likely those funds would have been charged back anyway.
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This. Additionally, even if the accounts being banned were all legitimately paying for subscriptions, losing $4M from accounts that don’t contribute any money to the game outside of subscriptions is easily supplanted by active accounts that not only pay for a subscription, but WoW tokens, paid services, etc. Obviously there’s no WoW token in Classic(though there is in Wrath Classic), but it’s a moot point when one subscription gains you access to all forms of the game. $4M in subscriptions is rather meaningless when that’s pretty easily made up by enough MAUs that will interact with some sort of paid service on a semi-regular basis.
And before someone wants to be a wiseacre: Q4 2023 just ended a week ago, Q1 2024 will end March 31. You can view the quarterly reports when they drop and see the MAUs and revenue numbers from Blizzard games. If you say this isn’t “good enough”: Please point me to a time when Blizzard has given a live subscriber count, that updates in real time, because this is what’s being asked for when you say “show proof that these many accounts were banned.” (Not to mention that lying about these numbers is kind of a horrendous idea for a publicly traded company.)
No, new change forces you to pay once a year at least.
Yep this… should of been implemented many years ago, but blizzard has the excuse of “we wanna figure out the program their using first…” no, just no blizzard…
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Welp losers keep buying gold.
If there is a market for it, bots will never go away. I do not know what the solution is. Im thinking Blizzard should just have its own gold market and sell gold directly to the players.
They keep buying it, might as well. If you buy from blizz at least you can gaurantee safety for your account etc.
Will people cry pay to win? Yes, but guess what these antisocial gamers who buy gold anyway dont care.
They are selfish. They care nothing for the integrity of the game, all they want is instant gratification so they can then cry to blizzard that they are board and want more content.
Im over it.
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Not really. This is the equivalent of shoving your finger through a Cheerio. Even the most remedial detection system will immediately shut down 384 active accounts coming from the same IP or with the same credentials for payment. You don’t need to be a grand master among IT specialists to see 400 people entering a building all at once through one doorway, all moving in lockstep.
Noclipping and flyhacking doesn’t necessarily need third-party software to accomplish a feat; you can still clip through walls in Stormwind to get underneath it, something you could do since 2006 at the very latest. (By which I mean, I did this in 2006.) Same with getting into Hyjal when it was on the map in vanilla. Hell, with there being logout skipping and death skipping still in the game - to the point that there are add-ons that show you where you’ll spawn if you do a logout or death skip, and leveling guides utilize these skips - it’s completely feasible that wonky software interactions could trigger something like a Z-axis determinator.
That having been said, I don’t disagree on flagging this. I disagree on an instant perma-ban. If something flags this and the activity that follows the flagging is obviously not a human player, then yes, you can manually issue a perma-ban. However, this is a never-ending arms race between game devs trying to prevent bots/hacks, and software devs creating new, harder to detect bots/hacks. In fact, this arms race has been going on for just under two decades in WoW at this point. This is something that literally any video game that has any form of cheat/bot detection takes part in.
Could Blizzard do better? Definitely. But you’re making assumptions that don’t align with the truth of the matter, when it’s not nearly as cut-and-dry as you’ve claimed.