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.