https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/cheating-and-botting/499812/5
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Oh, it won’t matter.
I just spent a good hour going back and forth with Slicy about how she’s just making assumptions based on zero evidence and more of the same old, “Blizzard just doesn’t care and if you disagree than you’re a shill and you love bots.”
I don’t get it. Like the portrait tells me she’s a level 60 Rogue wearing several pieces of T3. She’s clearly dedicated and has probably spent more time playing her Rogue than I have my Druid and yet she acts like the money she’s spending is all being wasted.
I do not understand this at all.
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Well, at least we’ve established there is a great deal of passion surrounding this issue.
How about a compromise. Since we can’t even seem to agree on the efficacy of Blizzard’s actions, or even there desire, to stop bots, what if the community took action.
If the community decided that gold buyers had no place in our community and shut them out, would that move the needle? G-kicking gold buyers. Not selling the Edgemaster’s Handguards for 5k gold to the fresh 60 with 20 hours played on their account. Stopping the GDKP runs which began as a good use of gold but have sadly been completely taken over by bought gold.
These aren’t easy measures and would be painful. They might not work. There are probably other ideas that are better. But it is important we as a community start talking about this and developing our own response because we are the ones who created this game in the first place. We made these guilds. We created these bonds that pull on us even 15 years later. And we are the only people that can stop the bots. Blizzard can provide us all the incentive in the world, but until we as a community stand up and say that we will not tolerate gold buying or those who do, the bots will continue to propagate like maggots in an open wound.
I agree that’s part of the solution. But how do you do that exactly when you’ve got billions in transactions happening daily.
Grass roots. Individual people talking about how awful gold buying is. Not just on the forums, but in their guilds. Individual people taking stands on what they believe in billions of times a day (although I think billions may be hyperbole.)
But none of that happens unless and until the community embraces it. This doesn’t work if it’s just a group of people from the forums. The only way this works is people who are passionate about it spreading that passion to others. Probably through multiple channels. Talking about the damages of gold buying. This only works if the community organizes itself and agrees on principles of what they will and won’t accept.
But that’s the power Blizzard doesn’t have. We know how much our friend’s and guildies play. We know when something smells rotten. We don’t have to police a million subscribers. We just have to control ourselves and know our friends. We just have to have the courage of our convictions to say “I will not group with this person, we all know they’re a gold buyer.” We do this every day against people who ruin our game with their other toxic behaviors (homophobia, racism, ninja looting, etc…) now the community needs to decide if we’re going to add gold buying to the list.
Or…balancing recipes or vending things bots are farming.
Btw an algorithm tracking botty behaviir isnt that tough, they just wont do it like other companies do.
Or unsub until Actiblizz holding company is finished tightening up their expenses for the Disney buyout, like I did (couple more weeks to go for me on here)
You have no idea what you’re talking about. It definitely is that tough. Thats why literally every MMO in the world has a serious bot problem. NO company has a handle on it
Others do, though
Say hi to: sony, ea, spotify, hulu, hp, amazon, netflix, fubo, time warner, universal, mgm, deutch bank, …a bunch of others.
I swear I dont script blockchain, either. Which would help in the next iteration.
Somehow I dont think the scale of “netflix bots” is quite the same as the million dollar industry driving bots in MMO’s
But as it so happens, Spotify bots are a real thing… and a real problem.
https://www.venturemusic.com/blog/streaming-bots-will-ruin-your-career
So… like I said…
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Yeah I know about Spotify. They purged thousands of songs not too long ago, using… 
___ L G __ R ___ T H M S
Care to buy a vowel? 
Yea. And Blizzard does the same using the same (BuT AlGoRiThIms !1!) daily, and in batches several times a year. And the bots adapt and evolve and the game continues…
What part of that is hard to follow??
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Different strategy used.
Spotify had the brass to hunt down suspicious transactions (listens and follows) and comparative listening behavior to catch the bots (artist using $ to play)
They proceeded to wipe the songs, confident in their TOS.
Blizzard sells you that they dont want false positives which is hilarious to hear their loyal customer base parrot The One True Way to skin a cat (in game reporting…ie…put enforcement on consumer)
Imagine if spotify left it up to legit artists to report other artists.
And you don’t think blizzard does the same? And its an entirely different problem as well which is why everyone else was discussing MMO’s before you went off on your tangent. Blizzard can and does ban bots. Then they immediately make a new account with better technology. A musical artist can’t just immediately rebrand and upload the same content… Yet it was STILL a problem.
Pretty basic stuff
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Sure they can. They do it constantly, mostly with trap, non instrumental. Thats why distributors started asking for lyrics to help catch the duplicates (spotify hustler simply rebrands using different ISRC)
Other stream platforms are battling same thing.
Btw, I appreciate your patronage on Faerlina all these months (pre DM i think?)
Thats a very very niche issue and not even remotely comparable.
You own Faerlina? I dont get it
Not a niche issue. Spotify went after the equivalent of gold buyers and flamed the equivalent of gold sellers en masse, using algorithms. The offenders complained and every account I read about eventually confessed to paying for playlists.
They caught them with transactions.
And no i dont own Faerlina, you arent the dude I was thinking of, sorry about that.
Further: Spotify admitted it was too costly to sue the playlisters (ie bots) and instead hit them where it hurt (scare customers) and changed how often they would do playlist promotion (akin to changing craft recipe)
Blizzard wont ever approach bots in WoW like this.
Show me where Spotify relies on artists reporting other artists for buying playlists to enforce their rules.
Here is the diff: spotify had an incentive to crush bots because they agreed to $$$ under the pay per song play model. Blizz gets $$ per sub and has zero incentive, and loses nothing (except subs) and in fact gains subs, when they dont employ these strategies.
Its still different because legit artists (ie the only ones who care about their reputations) can’t just rebrand and set up again. And the ones who can aren’t deterred either way.
And where’s your source on them having “fixxed” the issue? I worked very adjacent to the industry and it was an issue up until very recently… So if Spotify has suddenly cleaned out all the bots (irrelevant to this discussion though it may be,) then thats news to me.
Me too, I actually have a distro and artist account 
Jan 1. Early estimates were 750k songs…
Indie artists thought we were being targeted and it was a big label conspiracy. Turns out, they got tired of the “Look How I got 5 million listens in one day!” Youtube vids.
Fyi theyll now only curate one song per artist per month to add to spotify playlists instead of the revolving door.
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Pretty safe to say any character from the same account is good. They can also identify where you are from by the IP address. So a 10,000g transfer from someone playing in the Philippines to someone playing in Austin, Texas should raise some red flags.
Of course the whole IP thing can be thrown off by VPNs.
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