Blizzard: Suggestion for Bricking New Botter Accounts

WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King Classic Discussion
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TL;DR at the bottom.

I know a handful of people will absolutely hate this idea, but hey, it’s just a suggestion. The details could be ironed out. A botter’s most profitable period of time is the moment they create a new account/characters. The more time that passes, the higher the likelihood that their accounts will have been reported by people who take notice of their exploits.

I think one way that botting could be effectively discouraged and made more difficult/risky would be to introduce a preliminary period where they would have their ability to move gold and materials in bulk severely reduced. Basically botter gridlock.

What if accounts with less than 90 days of total previous game time had restricted access to the various services and features that botters exploit the most?

  • Auction House
    Limit the number of auctions that can be posted to a certain amount per day, realm-wide.
  • Trading and Mail
    Implement a daily limit on the amount of gold and the number of item stacks that can be sent through outgoing trades and mail, account-wide. Also implement a daily limit on how much gold these accounts can receive through these means account-wide.
  • Guild Banks
    Implement a daily limit on the number of guild bank transactions (deposits or withdrawals) of gold and items in guild banks to a certain number account-wide. Also cap the amount of gold that can be moved per transaction.
  • Character Creation
    Maybe bring back the 10-character per realm limit so botters can’t exploit profession cooldowns. Maybe also reduce the number of characters that can be created account-wide.
  • Resetting Instances
    Drastically reduce the number of times these accounts can reset instances per hour, per character.
  • Death Knights
    In order to create a Death Knight, these players must have an already existing level 55+ character on that same realm, regardless of which realm it is.
  • Instanced Chests
    Implement a 30-minute debuff whenever you open a chest in an instance, and you can’t open another chest until that debuff runs out. This way a group wouldn’t be hindered from opening chests, but a solo player would have to wait the timer out.

Reminder: This would ONLY be for accounts that have less than 90 days of historical gametime.

These restrictions would be quite drastic for regular experienced players, but those people by definition probably wouldn’t be affected by this.

Basically the only “legitimate” reason I can guess why someone would have a WoW account with less than 90 days of historical game time is if they’re a new player. New players wouldn’t be significantly hindered by these restrictions because they don’t circulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of gold, or dumptrucks of crafting materials on regular intervals. The average new player probably wouldn’t notice these restrictions at all.

The only other arguably legitimate reason I can think of is if someone wants to multibox, but I don’t see why they’d need full access to these features on the secondary accounts if they’re not being shady.

This 90-day requirement would dramatically increase the cost of entry for botters, as they would have to have 90 day’s worth of a WoW sub behind them before they can start circulating their items/matierals/gold in bulk, and by that time, they will have suffered a massive decrease in throughput per WoW account they’re paying for, making botting a much more expensive endeavor.

If this preliminary period was reset every time a WoW account was banned for botting, I think we would see an astronomical decline in the number of botters overall. I think these measures might even be more effective at killing botting than perma-banning them.

TL;DR:

When a new WoW account is created, restrict its ability to move significant amounts of gold and items/materials until it has had an active subscription for at least 90 days.

Please let me know what you guys think, or if you have any ideas as to how this suggestion might be improved or added to.

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What if they just shadowbanned bots and just made a layer specifically for them with a layer specific ah too.

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Giving bots their own private layers to farm in without PvP seems like an awful idea to me. Especially since you can currently only report people for botting if you’re physically near them in the game. This would shield them from player reports and aggressive competition.

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If they couldn’t mail anything or see actual players, as well as not able to post on the same ah as anybody else besides other bots I don’t see where it’s a bad idea. Might even take a few days to realize they’re shadowbanned.

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Oh, I see what you mean by shadowbanning now. This still seems problematic to me though.

If a shadowban wasn’t permanent, botter accounts could just come back from the ban, after they’ve had plenty of time to farm with no PvP and less competition for nodes. Maybe being shadowbanned would even be the “botter meta”.

If it was permanent and irreversible, we’ve introduced a VERY big problem for people who might be mistakenly reported/banned for botting.

Let’s also remember that server resources have to be devoted to layers and auction house. So by allowing them to bot unhindered, you’re not only allowing server performance degradation, you might even be encouraging it.

At the end of the day, I think that forcing them into a sort of gridlock would be the better way because it would be impossible to circumvent the restrictions, and it would actually improve server performance where botters are most active. Shadowbans would encourage botters to do their business more discreetly, while my suggestion would probably just make them stop wanting to do it altogether because the simple math of it would make it extremely inefficient for their time/money.

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Why not just outright ban them?

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every bot is a sub for Blizzard

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They just buy a new account, this way they gotta figure out they’re banned first

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To be fair, I think that Blizzard has already shown that they’re not quick enough to outright ban botters early enough to negate the damage they do to the economy. That’s specifically why I’m suggesting that they cut the problem off at the source, which is to dry up the well of value people find in botting.

If you remove their ability to make massive profits in the first place, it won’t be such an inefficient and ineffectual game of cat and mouse trying to find and ban them.

This is also true. And another reason why I think my suggestion is a decent fix. This doesn’t cut off the revenue stream that botting brings to Blizzard. At least not immediately. It seems like a win-win scenario to me.

Well. Aside from the devs who will have to work overtime to implement a change like this, on top of all the other stuff they’re understaffed for.

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This. I can’t believe people actually buy the “BuT tHeY cOsT uS mOnEy” bullsh*t Blizzard puts out. You think Bobby would let jajas and anjings take money from his pocket? They’re obviously paying.

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Actually yeah, OPs suggestion makes more sense then. The botters would have to be caught first and we already see how that works out.

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Exactly.

Currently, removing bots from the game is a process that can only take place once it’s too late and they’ve already gotten some value out of it. What we really need is a system that proactively kills botting, not a reactive one.

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bumping for visibility

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I too shall bump for visibility.

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I've explained why I personally think it's an ineffective idea here (click me)
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I personally think all of these are bad ideas. If I am paying my sub (and not botting) then why should I be limited on what I can do. If I was new and had these limits placed on me I would not be coming back to pay a sub. They already stop you from doing content when you boost, this would be a bleed them dry of any potential new accounts.

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Make this account-wide. Also, have a serious cap on cancellations. Like 5 per day, or something like that.

Trading from within your account should be unrestricted.

Hmm… I think messing with this will cause more problems than it’ll solve.

When they jacked up servers, they had to lift this. Also, having multiple toons on a server isn’t the issue.

You get 1 “free” DK per account. Not an issue.

Even better - approaching a chest will automatically agro entire rooms. The pissed off mobs gain abilities that counter stealthies’ evasive cooldowns.

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Well, I didn’t mention any specific numbers or anything. Basically, it would just be limitations that stop people from using these features more than a new player is likely to.

For example, new players aren’t likely to be trading/mailing thousands of gold every single day, or trading huge numbers of item stacks. I also see no reason why a new player would need to deposit/withdraw tons of items from a guild bank.

Can you personally think of any reason why any of these limitations would hamper a new player’s experience? The only thing I can think of would maybe be the limitation on resetting instances, but that’s also something I doubt any new player will need to do in the first 90 days of picking up the game.

Super agree with this. Although I’d like to see a limitation on daily auction cancellations imposed on ALL accounts, new or not. :+1:

Oh, I specifically meant with other accounts. That’s what I meant by “outgoing trades and mail”. I should’ve been more specific there.

That may be so. Though my thinking was that restricting the use of guild banks would mitigate the issue of people “daisy-chaining” multiple accounts together to circulate gold/materials/items. There wasn’t any specific exploit I had in mind, but I feel like this is somehow an area where people would find a way to circumvent the restrictions. For example, using accounts less than 90 days old for all of the risky botting stuff, and then dumping all of their goods into a guild bank that can be emptied by an unrestricted account.

You don’t think it’s problematic that people can potentially have 50 characters on a single realm with daily material CDs like Titansteel?

I’d have to disagree with you here, as we’ve already seen that DKs have become one of the more preferred classes for botters. Any trend we see botters using en masse is probably a good place to restrict them, I think.

Not going to lie, that would be hilarious and I’d love to see it!

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Yes, because new player could be just a new account, say setting up a spouse with their own account. There is no benefit, stopping players from using in game features is not how you gain or keep subs, but or no.

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I specified new players, as in, people who haven’t played WoW before and don’t really know what they’re doing.

Anyways, I don’t really see how these limitations would be a problem for someone who has access to multiple accounts. Specifically, if the restrictions are just meant to stop new accounts from circulating thousands of gold and lots of materials/items. The only situation where I can think of an experienced player having a legitimate need to do this on a second account would be if they lost access to the first account, likely from being banned, in which case the restrictions would still not be a problem.

Hard disagree with you. I’ve outlined in pretty vivid detail that these are systems and features that bots exploit the most, and therefore, there would be huge benefits to this change. I’ve yet to see anyone make a strong case that this wouldn’t be a decent solution to a problem that Blizzard seems to think is mostly unsolvable.