In Classic I constantly saw fishing bots in Feathermoon Stronghold, I reported all of them and within a week they were gone, were they banned or did they just all move to a different place?
I believe that the BG situation will get better now that DK’s have the original restriction back in place. The DK bot population will dwindle then disappear.
You’re asking for something that can’t be done, there’s evidence from Blizzard but you think they’re lying and we can’t get the information ourselves without having access to their computers. So you’ve put yourself in the position where you win no matter what.
Okay but why would they lie, what’s the need to lie? If it’s to keep people playing, them saying that they’ve banned 120k bots isn’t going to change many peoples minds since the majority are already aware of the botting situation.
What’s the reason they’re lying, stop being cynical for a second and actually think about why.
The thing both can be true. They can ban 120k bots and they can still be rampant in BGs. I doubt they lied, but you always have to parse what and how they say it.
Such as keep in mind that they did this 120k ban across Classic and WoTLK so we have no idea on the breakdown. I’d imagine WOTLK is where the money is for them, but I have no idea. Even if we assume bulk was banned in WOTLK that may actually mean it was only 80k or 100k over here and not actually 120k for us.
Blizzard’s handling of bots is absolutely god awful bad and it shows that if this amount of banning can’t even be felt by players then they are failing at their job.
Exhibit A:
This is not a feather in the cap for Blizzard. I used to report bots back in Cataclysm when I did lots of ore farming and they would go offline AS I WAS STILL FARMING. A week delay to get a bot is a full week of farming gold they transfer off the account.
During Classic there was a bot in Felwood that took me a few trips to realize was a bot. I started reporting him whenever I saw him and he was a running joke in trade chat because it was so obvious. Honestly he was always online whenever I checked and was active for weeks from my perspective so who knows how long he really was.
I think that’s gonna be server dependent. They locked character creation on a lot of servers but bots still ran rampant on yhem as far as I’m aware. This makes me assume they had a lot of accounts ready to go when necessary that were grandfathered into the server. The new restriction is the same situation where I’m sure any existing DK on an inactive account will still be usable when they fire it up.
Eventually yes they should dwindle, I guess it’s just a question of how long does it take to do so.
Why does anyone lie? We see it every day. Turn on the news and you’ll see it on a daily or even a hourly basis.
I have no idea why they would lie or anyone else. If I could answer that, they would not lie.
They have every incentive to lie, and zero incentive to tell the truth. They make money off of bots, it’s in their financial interest to both keep the bots subscribed and to calm actual players’ rage about the bot situation to keep them subscribed. Besides, what exactly where you expecting them to say, the truth?
Because the truth is either 1 of 2 options… 1. They’re profiting off bots and giving the middle finger to players wanting the bots gone by lying and condoning botting. Or 2. That they’re genuinely fighting valiantly against the bots that they also hate, but despite having literally billions of dollars at their disposal, manage to be so completely and hopelessly bad at their jobs as to appear completely ineffective. Malicious or incompetent are the only two possible reasons here, and no company is going to publically admit to being either, given the stock price implications that would follow.
The actual people who fighting the bots are following corporate policies that they probably have negative opinions about and I’d wager they are understaffed to handle. We should be careful to really never blame the actual employees for not doing their job, this is entirely driven by people above them.
And the thing is the bigwigs don’t care either way, they’ll crunch the numbers and if they think it’s more profitable to let the game be riddled with bots than spend the money fighting them they’ll go that route. Same logic gets used when they approve to launch a “playable” game and hotfix the problems later. See cyberpunk.
They won’t allocate the appropriate resources to combat them, but will argue their team does as much as possible and that’s technically(ish) true at that point. They just never have to tell people that they declined to hire additional staff or increase the budget.
So for the team it’s a Jim Carrey answering prayers in Bruce Almighty situation. They can’t keep up because the devoting resources to handle this are financially unappealing to them.
