So what you’re saying is they should commit time resources and energy to… get the same amount they would get from just banning the bots, and also give bots a place where they are allowed, which opens all kinds of legal problems for them.
It’s a terrible idea. You should know better.
What “legal” problems?
I would imagine complete bans having more of a negative impact than moving the offending acounts away from legit players.
And yes, I expect my $15 a month to go toward actual work being done to keep the game integrity healthy.
Time resources and energy? They could set it up that as soon as a bot is seen and verified, a press of a button would move that entire account off of the legit realms.
I’m glad you asked.
Bots are generally used to farm gold and other items for RMT sites; which are also against the terms of service. These sites have been known to steal credit card information.
Right now, both bots and RMT are strictly not allowed due to the EULA. This gives blizzard’s lawyers a document to point to, should someone try to sue for allowing that sort of transaction (which then stole the user’s cc information and possibly identity) on their servers. The lawyers can say it’s 100% not allowed and that ends the suit right there.
And this part I’m not 100% sure on, because I am not a lawyer, but it’s also possible they could be sued just for having the RMT advertise on their game. I know if you host ads on your website for a service that then goes and steals your cc info/identity, you are liable if you knew or could be reasonably expected to know they were going to do that. Not 100% sure how that translates to online gaming, but Blizzard definitely knows that RMT sites are likely to try that kind of fraud.
You give a botting/rmt server, that legal defense goes away. Suddenly it’s a much more complicated court case; Blizzard can’t stop all of these transactions, but surely they are being negligent right now? Criminal negligence, perhaps even?
Basically, they get away with the lack of moderation they do from a legal standpoint by saying it’s 100% not allowed and if they find it they ban it. They have wiggle room in how they ban, legally (this is why they can ban in waves, and are not forced to ban immediately), but permitting the behavior tosses away that legal defense and forces them to commit more resources as not to appear negligent.
I suppose technically the argument could be made that bots aren’t neccessarily RMTs, but it’s dubious to how that sort of defense would hold up in court.
Realistically, part of the reason we have Classic is because, in some countries, Vanilla was considered abandonware and not covered by their copyright laws. Now since Classic is here and we can play on the official Blizzard version, Blizz will be much quicker to crack down on Pservers that get too big. Small ones with a few hundred or maybe 1k players max may slip past, but you’re not going to see another Nost again (not if they can help it anyway).
The case could be made that what PSs were running was more vanilla-like than classic with layers, tokens, etc. The further blizzard veers away from actual vanilla, the weaker their case gets.
That would be a very weak case at this point in time. Especially since most realms don’t have layers now and tokens are a China only thing for now. The main thing is that the content is available.
That argument wouldn’t pass muster in court.
Can you imagine trying to explain it to a judge who’s never played a video game in his life? Or even one who does? And then the opposing council just brings up screenshots to compare and your entire case is thrown out because they are identical.
It’s like arguing that if I drew stickmen in a mickey mouse cartoon, it was an all new-cartoon and disney couldn’t sue me. Or that a server that gets boss hp values wrong or makes it harder is an entirely new and different product.
Lol, an entertaining suggestion.
Hate to be the player that incorrectly is identified as a bot and is shipped off to bot realm to be forever alone.
Shipping bots to a bot only realm is the same as a ban. It defeats the purpose for botting so they will abandon the account and create a new one on the realms where they can make money.
Yes, I read what the OP has said it one has to once again manually hand picked and two is literally the same thing as banning a account, the botters make a new account and three innocent accounts may be hit in the process.
If you are going to be absurd, why three? Why not suggest that the ratio of banned bots to banned legit players would be 1:8,765? The argument that innocents would accidentally be booted is ridiculous. Botting is so blatantly cut and dry, which as someone else suggested could be proven with a simple captcha.
Machine learning bots tho. They be gods at the game
He has obviously been inspired by Mythic Quest tv show which is about the on goings of making and running a successful MMO. Since it is how the devs dealt with the fascists ie: put them all on same server.
The real problem with this suggestion is the false positives. (And, believe me, I’ve mentioned this very idea myself, but more as wishful thinking because I know it wouldn’t work.)
Would you be happy to log in and find yourself on a realm that clearly was for bots only? Would you be happy waiting 2-3 days minimum for Blizzard to do an investigation and possibly reverse the decision, during which you couldn’t play with friends, couldn’t group with anyone but bots?
One of the long-time reasons that Blizzard gives for not immediately acting when an account is deemed a bot is that it gives them time to investigate and identify other accounts using the same automation software, as well as to develop tools to identify the methods it is using to bypass protections and close those without impacting other players. When they do the wide ban-waves, there’s that tiny moment before the bot makers can rewrite and find new ways around it.
While bots may run automatically, the player who pays for the account will notice. Any obvious to them change (hey, the AH isn’t full of players to sell to, trade chat has no one buying, they can’t find a group) would be relayed to everyone else using that bot, so they’d all stop while the bot owner got the next update ready.
Related to the idea they’d lose at least a month of paid game time … these people sometimes PAY for the botting software. They’re not poor and scraping for coin. Some pay for game time with Blizzard balance from Retail gold-for-token. Few do it on accounts associated with their “main” identity. Lose an alt account not connected, who cares? Start another. “But, Blizzard, I couldn’t have known the players that bought my over-priced auctions were botting”.
What about a shadow ban? Where the bots can farm items, but are muted, can’t trade (it’ll always say they are busy), can put items in a separate ah only they can see, and the mailbox will give them an error whenever they try to send something (player cannot be found)
It’s also absurd that you think that anyone would ever start manually start banning bots in mass. Let me explain it like this, if you had a barrel of pennies and barrel of nickels and you dumped them together and it is was your job to pick out all the pennies, it would be quite the task. Yes it’s fairly obvious a penny (bots) is not a nickel (players), but it doesn’t matter. Things get worse if you factor in that every time you find a few pennies and pull them out, someone throws a bag of assorted nickels/pennies into the pile. This is the dilema, you can’t script or blanket ban them. The best Blizzard can do at this point is slightly inconvience botters imo.
Selling gold, items, or characters is not against the law bud. Just because Blizzard doesn’t like it, doesn’t make it illegal.
It is a pretty hard case to call it against the rules also… as I can choose to freely give gold to whomever I want. If that person decideds to give me favors for that, it’s really none of Blizzrd’s business.
The problem here is robots, not gold sellers. There are plenty of people botting to level characters, pvp rank, and farming other than the gold sellers.
You must have missed the part where I said they steal your cc information and misuse it, which is illegal. Not every gold seller does this, but enough do that blizzard knows about if they allowed RMT they would be negligent to not stop the ones that do. It’s fraud.
And you definitely missed the part where I said not all bots are RMT.
We actually agree on this issue, believe it or not. It would be extremely difficult to claim a person was linked to RMT just because a bot was used to harvest items. They could easily transfer the gold or items to another account, and if botting was allowed, blizzard couldn’t ban the bot that generates the items, because the bot technically broke no rules. Which is a big part of the reason botting isn’t allowed, for any reason. It’s impossible to only target “legitamite” botters and not “RMT” botters, so no botters are permitted.
The same with RMT trades. In your example given, yes I could pay you 10 bucks and you could give me 50 gold. If the entire transaction was something we talked about IRL or out of game, blizzard can’t prove anything. The EULA is worded so that if they can prove you are RMT, they can ban for breaking the rules. So it’s really only going to get the people they can prove broke the rules, or be reasonably sure about. They physically can’t catch everyone, but by having it be something they can ban for, they are legally covered if you get ripped off in a RMT, because it’s against the rules and they ban for it.
They wait till after the financial reports then the bans happen. In game right now the majority are just zoning in ant staying at the starting point or making loops around the bg in stealth. If something does ZERO anything remove the honor and give it a extra long deserter that lasts past resets. “But what if its a premade and they are guarding” Exclude full 15m groups from the same server from the debuff.
Why are they announcing bans weekly in China in the hundreds of thousands then? I guess Blizzard doesn’t make money off WoW in China, right?
