Bots ruining the game

[Balttarr-shuhalo]

{Linke Removed}

This can be found on youtube.384 accounts using bots to farm and not getting banned for this? This is why people leave the game Blizzard,start banning these bots that ruin the economy for actual players {Inappropriate acronym removed}…

[Darthwraith-blackhand (Darthwraith)]

Thats not how this works if you read the multiple bot threads theres 100s just like yours youd know there no insta nuke option for bots.

[Vorsol-thrall (Vorsol)]

Report them and move on! They do not always instantly remove bots. Sometimes they want to study them to see how to detect others using the same bot. If it is a gold seller they also watch to see what else there doing and where the gold is going too.

Bots have been in this game since day 1. Blame your fellow player and not blizzard. Only so much they can do to stop it. Every time they mess it up so they stop working, they fix it to work again. Never ending fight.

[Kozzae-doomhammer (Kozzae)]

Unfortunately this is an ongoing battle, but there are victories and player reports are key.

If you witness this in game, right click and report for cheating, or if a battleground, for afk play.

If you do not witness this, email the information to hacks@blizzard.com

Reports are not accepted here though.

[Nephe-caelestrasz (Nephe)]

Bot are banned, but not to your timeline.

They’re done in mass waves - for a very good reason. It gives the bot users and makers little notice that they’ve been detected and actioned against, and to disrupt their black market. Otherwise they make changes to avoid detection.

While investigation bots, Blizzard also studies them, then works out how to break them without breaking the game in the process. This too is to disrupt the bot makers as much as possible.

But it takes time.

The only way to truly get rid of bots, is to remove the demand for their black market - those who insist on cheating with gold purchased from illicit gold sellers, or using power leveling services that rely on having them log in and control your character.

[Forumcat-wildhammer]

This links to the Wrath token thread I know, but in it has an explanation too why they can’t just snap blam bots:

@Kaivax

We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. It’s just one tool, though, among many. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

[Vrakthris]

@Balttarr-shuhalo

This is why people leave the game Blizzard

People leave the game for any number of reasons, that others may be botting certainly counts among them, but the idea that we don’t care or don’t work to combat it is fairly ludicrous.

We appreciate your fervor, Balttarr, but linking to a video, which has been going around for a while now, isn’t useful as a report. Tiny little screens which likely provide little actionable information other than than someone somewhere may be botting. Who knows, I’m not part of the Hacks team, maybe they are able to glean info from those videos.

It should also be pointed out that you don’t know the status of those accounts in the video. Saying that they “farm and not getting banned” would indicate you have some insight into the status of those accounts. Which most reasonable people would doubt that you do.

It is entirely possible that some or all of those accounts have already been dealt with by our teams. It is also likely they have created more illicit accounts or using other stolen ones to replace those they lost. It is an endless battle and there will always be videos of things that never tell the whole story but get that outrage train a chugging for the clicks.

There isn’t much more that I can add that isn’t better stated in the link that Forumcat provided so I’m going to lock this one up.