Every single day, I come across groups of bots chain pulling and harvesting elementals around dragonflight. Primarily water and air ones. It’s the same behavior every time. Clumped up in a tight group, spamming AOE, generally with a hunter or some other long range one walking a circle and misdirecting mobs to the core clump. Never moving, never reacting to any external stimuli, never changing their patterns or behaviors. Clearly bots harvesting elemental materials.
I report them every time, which can take a few minutes depending on how large the group is, and every day, I come across them again.
Do the reports of botting just get tossed in the trash at Blizz support? It would take literally seconds for a GM to pop in where they are, take a look, and drop the ban hammer.
It’s almost like there’s an implied tolerance of obvious, blatant, economy ruining botting in Blizz, even if it’s against the ToS. Is it worth continuing to take the time out of my day to report them? Or is it a futile effort?
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They take action on these things in bulk. Report them anyway and they eventually get banned.
Note that I’m not commenting on if this is a good system or not. It’s just how they do it.
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This is the best explainer I found. Dude used to be a Blizzard employee in that very department.
And:
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Hmm. That’s an interesting take on it, to be honest. Makes me wonder how tight the net is for those ban waves. I’ll have to keep an eye out for rumblings on ban waves and see if those daily groups are there or not the following day!
Thanks for the links!
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If you see bots, report them for cheating.
I got an in-game mail from Blizzard Support thanking me for reporting cheaters. Makes me happy to know it actually works.
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If people get away with it for long time it becomes a cost of doing business at most.
For punishment to be an effective deterrent to a crime it needs to be certain and swift. You need the “touched the stove, got burned” to get people to stop touching the stove.
But that type of justice is expensive.
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Professions suck, bots mean cheap mats when I need a craft, they are just fine.
IRL crime goes unpunished without witness and people taking a stand.
Report it, thats all you can do.
Pretty sure bliz is on top of it as much as they can be. Until they can teach the computer how to tell the difference between bot and human behaviour in a highly reliable way it will be an ongoing issue.
Aww, they arent so bad. You get used to it after awhile. Plus they keep the ah more in check.
Botting has been a problem since the first month into DF, sadly
I 've done a few reports, and prior to the Blizzard → Microsoft sale transition I would get an in-game message about 48 hours latter letting me know that action was taken. Now I get nothing. So, I’m guessing that the internal people who use to send those messages may have been reallocated to helping with the transition to Microsoft? I’d still make reports when you see violations in the game.
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…. What?
Why is Microsoft some bogeyman now?
Typically when a ban wave happens people post in here about getting suspended or banned. I imagine those 4x4 bot groups are about to take a serious hit soon, with the change to tokens it’s going to be much harder for them to bot when the next wave happens. Given they can’t open new accounts without having to pay $15 for each one, meaning their profits are about to take a huge hit.
Unless those things are just a placebo…
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It’s super annoying. If I see a bot I report it but they’re often flying around in smaller caravans. Often you’ll get a mail that says something about your help but that’s about it. I’ve seen bots that still fly around to this day without anything happening to them.
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People keep saying this without apparently considering how unrealistic it is. I mean, that would be thousands of employees popping in and out, banning people and then doing it again.
Without apparently checking each and every character to ensure that it is, indeed, a bot (by whatever means they would need to use to do that). Unless they didn’t mind banning some poor player who decided to wander in and take advantage of the mayhem to pick up a few goodies.
I mean, I’ve had that happen myself. Needing to get to a quest item or npc, going through the middle of a farming group and picking up stuff along the way that I happened to kill. And I assure you, this cute little Gnome ain’t no bot.
Perhaps, rethink yourself, OP.
I’ve been reporting them in the Azure Span for months now. There’s always 3 or more groups that just swarm in. All look the same, ride same mounts, go in a straight line like follow the leader. Ugh… I’m hoping that having to pay real money will help. Kind of makes the game feel depressing to see so many of them. All I do really is gather and fish. I don’t sleep well so I see them all hours of the day and night. They never stop. I don’t care about being sent a response. Means nothing if the bots never go away.
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There are two things I think about bots.
One, nothing Blizz does will ever stop it. Any game that has a system of currency that involves commerce will have them. I’ve seen it in every game of that sort I’ve ever played. Whatever systems the games’ developers put in place, the people who run bots will get around it eventually. The only way to stop it is to entirely remove currency from the game. Even Palia, which has an almost completely closed loop as far as their currency goes, people still managed to find ways around it. So getting the old undies in a twist about botting achieves nothing but increasing your stress and it’s just not worth it.
Two, it can be frustrating for those who generate some of their game income from gathering, I get that. What people have to do is find other things to sell that gold farmers don’t generally bother with, as they will often take time. And I tend to just farm up stuff for my own use and try not to buy a lot unless I am stuck at the time.
As I say, the bots will never go away. There were gold farmers riding up and down one river system in BfA for the entirety of the expansion; no amount of ban bombs stopped them; as someone at Blizzard once said, getting their accounts and characters banned the farmers just see as cost of doing business. They create new accounts, level up new characters or hack the account of people unwise enough to buy gold off them, and carry on.
I don’t let it interfere with my fun.
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The hills are alive . . . with the sound of ro-bots . . .
So then are you saying just accept the bots and change what I like to do in the game. Wondering how I ever stood having " the old undies in a twist" this long. What a relief to be put straight about things. I must say you have a very articulate and condescending way of explaining things.
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