They only ban bots when they have to. When they absolutely must ban some bots to maintain the bare minimum appearance of integrity… and they keep trying to push that line of integrity lower and lower.
Wowhead’s founder just came out and said he estimates the bot population to be about 20% of subscriptions. That’s 20% of revenue going to Blizzard’s benefactors that they would have to sacrifice ‘for the good of the game’… a concept which the owners of Blizzard’s parent companies simply do not care about. Unlike the Blizzard that existed when WoW was created, its new owners now care about one thing and one thing only; money.
Put it this way… imagine if McDonald’s did some research and found they could make their food significantly better and healthier without raising prices, but it would mean an instant 20% drop in revenue with only a chance that sales increase enough to compensate. There’s not a chance in hell their board members would ever take that risk because when you become a huge ethereal coporation you stop being in the business of making a high quality product with a secondary effect of making a decent amount of money, you instead join the business of ‘making as much money as possible no matter what sacrifices that entails’.
TLDR; Blizzard lost its Tegrity and is not interested in getting it back.
I think its just that they did a cost:benefit analysis and found they’d be losing more money by banning them and losing the subs than they’d make from hiring GMs to fix it. And that’s the solution is hiring a few GMs to monitor things and ban bots, AKA paying a salary. Most players aren’t quitting over it even if they don’t like it.
Its absolutely terrible integrity for a company of their size, but activision is all about profit margins at any cost.
We would have to get an honest response from every quitting player to know for sure. I think every player has their limit. A game full of bots appears to be a dead game to someone who is not always playing with a dedicated group. To some players, being surrounded by bots feels more lonely than if their character was the only one visible. Worse, it makes them feel as if their experience should have no value to a real person, since bots are used to extract that value. Do you see what I mean? The bad feelings that come by seeing bots does push real players to the point of quitting. More players leaving gives more space for more bots, which then exceeds the tolerance of the next players that quit. The cycle proceeds until only a small number of botting players populate the server. This happens in every MMORPG I have played.
Not to mention that its impossible to quantify the number of people that thought about playing Classic, but opted not to “because I heard the game was ruined by bots”
That’s true, but those players are invisible to activision and they seem to have taken the stance that they don’t care about their long-term reputation or game integrity, just the immediate bottom line. But that’s what blizzard has been for a while, the post vulture capitalism shell.
Yeah, I’ve actually met a few of these kind of people in another game I play. When I mention Classic I got responses that were variations on “meh, no thanks, I thought about trying it but it’s nothing but bots and exploiters.” It’s difficult to defend the game since it’s mostly true. Pity, but there it is. This is the prevailing reputation of WoW and especially Classic.
Everything here is speculative. People reading should take it with a grain of salt. Just because WoWHead said “20%” doesn’t make them right unless they produce evidence to the back of their claim, which, as of writing, you didn’t provide any.
If someone encrounters a bot, in real time, on their server, they feel compelled to let the entire community know it is a problem, which is backed by emotional judgment.
The gold boting platform is no doubt a problem, but this platform isn’t isolated to just World of Warcraft. It is in all MMORPGs, in some form. It isn’t realistic for Blizzard to waste resources on a small percentage of bots profiting from their player base, because you won’t truly get rid of them 100%.
Supply and demand. As long as you have players wanting to buy gold, you’ll have bots providing the gold. Plain and simple.
“Startuptim” is a well known troll on these forums and others. I’m sure you can just do a search and you’ll find about 100 of his troll multibox threads on the classic forums alone. He feeds off the attention he gets from the forums… and I’d expect his reddit post is no exception.
So not saying there’s not potentially something going on… But this guy is so far from credible it actually hurts your case.
Its not even Wowhead. Its a guy who allegedly (and I cant emphasize that part enough) used to be involved with them early on… and has recently gone mostly off his rocker gauging from his posts. Seriously… don’t take my word for it. Do a search
And from doing a quick google search… He tries to capitalize off his claims of being the “wowhead founder” in pretty much every post he makes (including one from a couple years ago trying to get “recruit” people for a “wowhead competitor…”) but there’s absolutely no evidence of that anywhere. “Startuptim” doesn’t appear at all until a couple years ago when he registered “startuptimcom” and “cpucorescom” within a few months of each other.
Wowhead was in fact started by 2 guys but was sold 14 years ago before it was anything even remotely resembling the website it is now. And those two individuals were Joshua Coussard (Mysadio) and Guillaume Cournoyer (Skosiris) who are both still involved with wowhead. In fact, “Skosiris” also works for Blizzard… so I’m gonna guess he’s probably not publicly trashing his employer… And I guess it could be Coussard… but why would he decide to suddenly start trying to capitalize on his Wowhead past under a new gamertag when he already has an established one? Doesn’t really make sense now does it?
Edit: Aaaand… to add to it further. Addon developers who are way more technically inclined than I am are tearing his post apart on reddit because apparently most of his technical claims are just flat out incorrect (to the point he’s actually repeatedly misspelling the language he’s claiming to be proficient in)
That’s why they ban them in waves, not automatically.
They milk the sub money for as long as they can sustain gripe on forums and boom, ban wave, rinse and repeat.
Most for-profit businesses, even the small ones, are in it for the money. If they focus on making a high quality product, it’s usually because they hope it will make them more money. And large corporations are beholden to their shareholders, who truly only care about a return on their investment. If executives make decisions that result in less money than could have otherwise been made, they will get fired. So they really have no choice in the matter.
True, that’s the point of being in business (mostly).
That’s because high quality does not always drive high demand to compensate for the price tag, but thing is, High Quality of service is why people played Blizzard products in the past. The fact that you did not need to content with a deluge of cheating bots and hackers was kinda the point. It sure as heck was nothing to do with balance at the point of a needle or anything because they sure did not achieve that.
blizzard actually gets paid under the table by the chinese mmo farming companies. all blizzard has to do is say they are doing something. they can keep taking these monthly $75,000 payments from GONGSHENG SHENZEN GAMERGOLDHAPPYFORYOU and such. like what are we gonna do? audit them? lol
I dunno what games you’ve been playing but it certainly hasn’t been Blizzard games. Bots and hacking have been a mainstay of online games since literally the very very very first Muds. It certainly was prevalent in Diablo, WC3 and Vanilla Wow to say the least… (How long did people dupe items in Diablo? Heck there was a stretch where people were doing it in Vanilla even…)
Not to mention I played Vanilla,. I never bought gold and I’ve always been smart about my accounts. And I would get my account hacked every other month… as would most of my guildies. And when you got it back, you’d be naked with 0 gold until you petitioned to get all those restored…
I’m not saying they couldn’t do more… but let’s not act like MMO’s or Blizz games in particular have ever been a shining example of integrity.
For quite a long time actually, Diablo was a special kinda hell.
They were using the enchanting trainer in Uldaman to dupe items, and it lasted for a couple weeks. Blizzard at that time said basically and I paraphrase here “anyone duping items will be banned” And they 100% made good on that warning, I know 2 people who got banned for duping in Vanilla.
Players in Vanilla did cheat and bot, but the punishments were harsh, swift and permanent. I have a friend who was banned for “glider botting” that was the one that people used back then to farm apparently. Any way, he did get banned it took them 2 weeks before he got caught and his ban is flat permanent, so he made a new character and still plays but no longer cheats or bots even to this same day. So I feel like that it worked, permanent bans were effective from my vantage point.
When you think about it, permanent bans that require the player to both buy a new subscription and a new copy of the game (vanilla wow), that was actually worth their while to ban players permanently like that, because the players did come back and play again. Now days they don’t, im sure blizzard has its reasons, but that is what it is, and that could be something to do with how the game is now and the “hold” it has over people is much weaker?
Its impossible to really know for sure how things actually look with out having access to all the data, so I can only point to what I saw first hand.
Well, if 20% of the accounts are bots 21% will have to quit or boycott for Blizzard to more permanently address the issue?
If pservers start growing fast again, they can cite not having bots as an interesting defense, or better yet, enhancement to the IP that could give them more leverage in negotiations.