If all of you don’t know yet, classic EU+NA together has around 50k+ active bots.
These bots are not being used by poor ppl to make money to feed their family, these bots are own by a single multi millionaire company located in China, they are specialized in botting and hacking in every single mmorpg you can think of. They sell in bulk all their farmed gold to resellers all around the world, and then, these resellers sell to players.
If botting 24/7 was already bad for the economy, these bots not simply bot, but they also flight and wall hack, killing mobs from above, etc. This makes the bot cancer even worse for the game integrity, let’s face it, WoW has no integrity at this point.
A company like that spends so much money in their program that it’s near impossible to detect it, they hire insane programmers and hackers to make sure of that.
I can assure you the option to detect the program injection to solve the bot problem is not doable, and obviously banning manually 50k bot every week is not doable aswell.
So the option comes to what Blizzard is doing right now.
Blizzard most likely has a script running that dectect suspicious behavior and keep track of it, this way they detect what is a bot and what is a legit player. Such a thing to be precise and not wrongfully ban legit players need to collect as much data as possible, things like reporting the bot helps alot in the math, that’s why Blizzard ask us to report the bots. After a while of this script running, seems like something around 3 months I would say, they get enough data to make sure they can run a ban script on all of the bots caught.
If you are a bit smart and knows a bit about programming logic, you know that the less time the script runs, higher is the chance for it to be imprecise and ban legit players in the process. Making a script good enough to make sure the character is a real bot in 3 months, costs X, making a script that makes that in 1 week costs 100x.
If my math is right, a bot takes around 2 weeks to get to 60, in 1 week the bot made enough gold to sell and pay for it’s subscription, 2 weeks is already too late for the fight, because it will be worth for the bot to start all over again. So unless the ban wave occur every week, the bot fight will never be over, they will keep coming back because they will still profit from it.
Lets be real here, Activision Blizzard is not a company that created a game to make us happy and profiting from it is a plus, it’s on the contrary. Their goal is making as much money as possible, they are in the money business, our happiness has a diminishing return for them, as long as it brings them more money, they go for it, when it gets to a point that it won’t grant them any more profit, they won’t care at all if we are happy or not, this is how the world works, grow up and accept it, they are not bad for doing that, this is how companies works.
If a 5/10 level of happiness is what they need from us to keep their profit at maximum level, that’s how far they will go, nothing more, nothing less.
This ban wave every 3 months (that is close to useless) is the maximum they will go, spending 100x more to erase the bots is not worth for them money wise. People won’t quit because they are 5/10 happy as blizzard intended, Blizzard will profit, bot company will profit, everyone is “happy”.
So that’s it, there’s no such a thing like a conspiracy theory like “blizzard own the bots”, “blizzard gets paid from bot company”. It’s just business guys, we can’t blame them, they aim profit, they are not in charity business. The only way we can get a MMORPG free of bots is if one day a millionaire fan creates a game for love, and profiting being a plus.
Ashes of Creation, is you our savior?
So stop blaming Blizzard, that won’t help at all. They are doing what they are suposed to do as a company. Let’s face it, bots will reign forever, nothing will change that.
