Bot infestation

Grobbulus has countless bots leveling, farming and fishing. I find it hard to believe that they are so hard to detect and stop.

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Stupid isn’t it? The new bot farming bot is very smart, do yourself a favour and /who brd for rogues at level 60 and check unguilded. You will be very suprised!

Hit the 50 player cap every time on Arugal over the weekend, but I can’t get back in these days to check again :frowning:

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It’s absolutely nuts. I’ve seen countless bots leveling through Barrens, Hillsbrad and Arathi Highlands just lately, and I spotted and messed with a couple of alliance bots in Duskwood.

Blizzard are not doing enough. It is clear that the time it takes them to get around to banning the bot accounts gives the gold sellers all the time they need to gather enough money to stay in business.

You could take a course about cyber security. Then you would know more than me (but probably still less than the experts at Blizzard).

I’m not an expert on this. But I’m an expert on computers (30 years as a software dev). Here is the basics: Computer are dumb. Computers have zero IQ. Computers have zero judgement. Computers cannot “see” anything, or evaluate a situation.

Computers can only do what smart human programmers tell them to do. And the human tells them in advance. The human isn’t there to observe the bot. The computer cannot use judgement to decide if this is a bot or player, because the computer has no judgement. The human cannot tell the computer “look and decide”, because the computer can’t look and cannot decide. Things that would be easy for a human child are impossible for computer programs.

So computers may detect some “possible bots”, but only a human can decide if this is really a bot or a player.

Considering how repetitive bots are, I have to think that software could actually spot them. It could, at minimum, flag “possible bots” and alert a GM to take a look. GMs could do the cursory investigation that I found myself doing as a player and see if a confirmed bot is part of a pattern for the realm and area of the realm where it is discovered. The Barrens bots were a lot alike, leveling the same way in the same area, often following each other along the same path. And then there were the character names they used – typically formulaic and easy to spot that way as well. There is so much Blizzard staff could do if they would just spare the expense to have a human being take a look once in a while.

Yep, Arugal is still full of bots, low level mages in Botanica being the most obvious.