I always find these useless threads a little funny.
“Hey Blizzard, we don’t believe you and so we’re going to brainstorm botting fixes that totally ignore everything you’ve ever said about the botting situation, plz implement them.”
Can’t be a serious thread.
What have they said about botting that I’m ignoring?
Does it even matter if I waste my time digging up blue posts for you? This community has severe confirmation bias and disregards everything Blizzard says when they can’t comprehend it.
Ah, so nothing. Got it.
Like I said, useless thread.
Um. What point did I make in my suggestion that was refuted by this, exactly…?
I’m not going to hold your hand and read this, highlighting the relevant points in the post. You’re on your own now.
Ah, so none of them. Got it. Thanks for bumping my thread, friend!
They’d have to level 50 toons, then… time is key, no?
One per account… After that, once they have a level 55 on a server, they can roll a DK. Leveling a hunter, mage or druid to 55 takes minimal time. I don’t think this will slow them down enough to mKe it worth hurtinf new players.
How exactly does this make blizz more $?
There’s one important point that you missed that I’m sorry to say makes all your ideas unworkable. You need to come up with a way that blizzard can do it without using any employee time. If it could be done for absolutely zero dollars then blizzard might do it.
Hotfixes are proof that no direct monetary gain is needed to justify the use of the dev team’s time to continue developing and improving or fixing the game. And there’s also the fact that improving your game is a great way to improve the stability of its player base over long periods of time.
Also it would take less investment from Blizzard to deincentivize botting than to chase botters around trying to ban them after the fact.
Lol, thank you for the TL;DR… I have trouble focusing when I read or do anything really…
I agree completely, restrict em an shadowban em…
Only the DK restriction really matters. They basically gave everyone a free boosted 55 character which can now farm mithril in badlands without anyone playing it.
Do they use the other boosts? No, because they cost money and the accounts apparently do get banned from time to time.
Make DKs level from 1 with only icy touch until level 10. Still wouldn’t be as bad as levelling my feral druid 1-20.
Of course! I understand many people here don’t have the interest or the patience to read a novel. 
Highly disagree with that, being that botters were a rampant problem in both Vanilla Classic and TBC Classic. Also, we saw plenty of boosted botters in TBC. xD
If blizzard cared about bots, it would be as trivial as paying a handful of interns to observe new accounts that immediately bought a boost or made a DK.
Very few legitimately new players are boosting a character and immediately starting a 16/7 endless gold grind fest.
Very few legitimately new players are making DKs as their first character and chain running AV to level up.
There’s all sorts of tells to bot accounts that could at least trigger an aggressive investigation by a human, catching them in under a day.
Just giving up on the ban wave mentality would help. They’re catching some of them, but waiting months to ban them. Out of some misguided idea that banning them fast would help them improve their evasion. Commercial bot operations don’t care if they’re banned, they care about how fast they are banned.
I’m.firmly of the opinion that blizzard intentionally delays bans on bots, because they’re currently a symbiotic relationship. Gold seller pays blizzard a sub and a boost every 2-3 months, in return, the gold seller milks idiots for real money in exchange for gold that blizzard later deletes when the buyer gets their 3 day suspension for buying gold. It’s an impressive racket.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but do you realize how many people buy boosts and/or make DKs? Not only is manually watching people play a cartoonishly inefficient and unrealistic way to stop botting from happening, it would also be extremely expensive even if you paid your GMs minimum wage.
Human intervention is inefficient for this purpose. For time and money spent, as well as for how much botting would be prevented. Not to mention, you’re talking about a reactive measure, not a preventative one.
My suggestion was made specifically with realistic efficiency in mind, and it would be better because it would prevent the botting from happening rather than requiring a human to spend time banning bots after the damage is already done.
I’m not asking for a ban wave. I’m asking for a preventative measure. Those things are literally opposite approaches to the problem.
As someone else has pointed out in this thread, botters are more of a liability for Blizzard overall. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they make Blizzard SOME money, but I see no reason to think that they’re a net positive whatsoever.
How do you know they’re waiting months to ban bots?
So tldr screw over new players to make less people bot im going to go with a no on that one.