Presumably by replacing it with a system that does allow for a good regular player experience. What that would be I don’t know but that would be something for the devs to work on. Obviously you don’t pull out something that major without replacing it with something equally major.
GMs don’t need to walk around, they just need to look at suspicious behavior. Accounts that spend a massive amount of time gathering and then shipping off all their gold or mats. Grouping up with new accounts and then spam-running dungeons to level them while the carries don’t equip anything. There are lots of things automation can hit with a red flag, then requires a person to investigate further to see if its minute by minute actions look like a bot and where the gold is going.
Then while that person is observing they can take five damn seconds to go through groupfinder and /4 to hard-ban all the advertiser bots that get to skate along free for way too long.
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Only one character to play with on that server, and cannot not shard other players within that server.
I’m afraid that you vastly underestimate how many scammers and botters have access to fake IDs that can pass muster from a digital image. People who buy gold and services for cash from illicit third party companies (these are companies, often not based in the US, who do nothing but work out ways to circumvent any restrictions put down to deter them) end up getting their accounts hijacked by people who are able to fake IDs and claim the account all the time.
And on the back end, Blizzard isn’t hooked in to the DMV to verify credentials (much less for all 50 states) either. Add to that that many people don’t have an ID for one reason or another, they never needed to or never could drive and just never went about going through the steps to get a state ID otherwise.
They’d end up losing legitimate subscribers and not even being able to deter botters who’d have no problems at all whipping up a fake ID at the same time.
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players had an uproar over needing a phone number to play overwatch 2, locking a server behind a ID would not end well
A GM live monitoring an area would be able to ban bots quicker then they could turn a profit. I just think blizzard profits from bots so they are unlikely to spend money to wipe them.
All bots are PvP enabled, and can be killed/looted as high-functioning NPCs/rare mobs.
All bot items are lootable on death.
ezpz
Two words.
Hell no.
Thank you.
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I wonder how much that would cost.
Retail WoW has 240 servers, each potentially having multiple shards and countless areas for bots to farm…
So lets lowball it and say at least 10 monitors per shift per server. So 2400 employees
X 24 hour coverage (3 x 8 hour shifts)…makes it 7200 employees. But you gotta have some extras to cover call-outs and prevent overtime…lets call it 8K employees
And to simplify the math, the employees will cost a paltry $20 per hour which will include wages, taxes, insurance, etc
So thats 8000 employees working 40 hours a week = 320,000 hours x $20 an hour = $6.4M a week or $25.6M a month. Likely more than they make on subs.
Heck, even having 240 people only work 8 hours a day/5 days a week comes to $768K per month. Thats still a huge chunk of their revenue and would have minimal impact in actually stopping botters
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Simple, tell the Devs and the company their ruining the game by letting it happen.
It would be absurdly less… realms don’t even function in that matter anymore.
A dozen GMs being mobile in game could ban clusters of bots at a time. Now bots might adapt in time to be less obvious but there isn’t a chance that you can’t visually identify a gathering bot in seconds.
Could likely get by with 12 people. Assuming the use of gm tools to accelerate movement. It would DEVESTATE BOTS. It is only such a problem due to how long they operate while at max level.
You do remember that they were unable to stop bots back in the early days of WoW, right? Back in the good old days of having actual GMs running around in-game…but bots and gold sellers were still everywhere.
There is no way 12 people could do it. The investigation time alone to determine if a gatherer is an actual player, multi-boxer, or botter would be to much for them.
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Not to mention how much time would be spent on Appeals if they ban real players who just happen to be farming and the GM “Thinks” they are bots cause they don’t talk to them or do anything else but a loop. I can fly a circle over and over and it would look similar but they’d have to dig very deep into heat maps to find all the slight adjustments, stopping areas, etc… to find that I wasn’t a bot. And in that time I would be banned and trying to get my account back, I probably would have left for another game losing them more money and having more players quit in the fit of unfair bans / concerns of being banned for farming too much.
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That didn’t exist and was done by a third party tool. Bots were also less numerous.
I will never get the mentality of if you can’t solve something 100% you should just do nothing crowd.
You could easily wipe out most max level gathering bots rapidly. Yes, there would still be some from compromised accounts but you would greatly reduce them.
After how I was treated by Blizz support recently and them not giving a flying heck about loyalty to the franchise. This sort of power would be abused.
The real solution is how it was done in the old days. Actual Gm’s in game, Boots on the ground, banning.
While we’re at it, may as well require some of our blood and fingerprints
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There is no such thing as a bot free server. Never has been never will be.
I think it might actually work to some degree, if it’s isolated to a couple specific servers.
But those servers would be 100% dead.
People will not want to provide ID to play on a server.
And bots largely don’t affect the average player.
If anything, they keep trade goods cheap on the AH.
To hit bots in a way that matters on servers people want to play on, you’d have to do something drastic that impacts actual players just as negative as it does the bots, which makes it entirely not worth doing (see: runescape deleting the free market for awhile).
The demand for a requirement of an ID to use the internet is as old as the internet itself.
Based on past developments with various publishers and social media networks, we can only come to the conclusion that it does not work and often even backfires.
By asking for an ID, you will limit the freedom of speech, as people will become paranoid in what they could say as that might lead to them being publicly prosecuted by the mob. Ghetto Superstar by Pras has a line about that, rapped by O.D.B.
And I’m Paranoid At The Things I Said
Wonderin What’s The Penalty From Day To Day
There is a documentary too it´s taking place in Europe / Germany, called 60 minutes, by the CBS. Is that the world we want to live in?
And let´s be honest, what did having an ID of sorts achieve in gaming so far?
You can not play OW for instance without a real phoene number and did it fix the bot and toxicity problem? No it did not, neiher will an ID for WOW. Steam is build on the system of ID´s too, certain aspects of the community you can only access if you ID yourself either by making a purchase or adding a phone number.
But if you play Lost Ark, you know there is more toxicity and botting than in any other game out there.
Botting has always been and will always be a problem. Even when they had active GMs in game it still happened, they were just more aggressive with keeping it in check.