What’s the deal blizzard? 10-15 years ago bots would get banned within a day or two of being reported. In Classic they’re out of control. They go with zero consequences to the cheaters and it’s a huge black mark on the game.
On rattlegore in particular there is a mage that has been logged in for 3+ months straight. He’s never left Silithus. He farms the northern half of the map East of the elites so he’s not on the typical herbing/mining loops. He uses the same abilities mechanically for 24 hours straight. If he happens to drop to a certain health range he has a new rotation that comes into play to run. When he occasionally dies he instantly releases before his corpse even hits the ground. He always rezzes on top of his old corpse and just sits to regain health/mana, doesn’t eat.
I’ve reported him multiple times over the last 3 months. Multiple people in my guild have a running joke about him (oh so and so didn’t log for raid? Get XXX, he’s on for sure…) now because we’ve all seen him, and randomly we’ll all /who silithus and no matter the time or day he’s always there.
Why do people that are simply afk in a 40 man BG getting week long bans, but people that have bots grinding them thousands of thousands of gold in plain sight going unpunished? And ‘investigating, gathering data, etc’ is an excuse that only works for so long. I mean 3 months? Come on? And that’s just that what I’ve noticed
Get better blizzard.
It’s funny how we remember things. Historically, Blizzard has studied and watched bots so that they can break the bot instead of trying to bring them down one-at-a-time.
As long as you’re right-clicking and reporting for cheating, they will indeed be looked into and the next ban wave we’ll see all sorts of ‘stories’ about how they swear they weren’t botting!
As for your investigation of the bot, the only way for you to know that they were on 24/7 for 3 months straight would be if you were doing the same. Staying logged in and following them around. I’m pretty sure that’s not been the case though 
Best to simply report and move on.
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It’s incredibly dedicated of you to personally verify this. 3+ months straight of being logged in, just to make sure another toon is logged in that entire time, is hardcore.
You… did verify it personally, right?
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I’m sorry, Sokajoo, but that isn’t accurate.
Of course we want to remove exploitative behavior as quickly as possible, that hasn’t changed, but a lot of these investigations take time. Several weeks is not uncommon, as we are often working to discover how a particular program may work and how best to detect it on a whole so that we can deal with the bots that may be reported but also the ones that are not. So that we can hopefully prevent their use entirely. That is the same today as it was 10-15 years ago. What is new is the perception that “back in the day” X was done differently.
The problem, Sokajoo, is what you “noticed” isn’t necessarily accurate as the amount of data that you have available is extremely limited. You simply don’t have an accurate picture of their access or their behavior. That isn’t to say nothing is going on, but what we can do is based on what we can verify.
If you see someone you suspect of botting, please continue to report it, it will be looked into. I would caution against assuming that you know with absolute certainty that your suspicions are correct.
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