Every time I teleport to moonglade there is an endless stream of bots TPing in and out. I have reported as many as I can, but Blizzard doesn’t pay me to report 1000s of bots, so I’m curious. As this appears to be fairly easy to spot, why is this allowed?
I was recently in Nazmir, and I was the only non-bot Druid I saw for whole day. All of the insta-spawn points were filled with bots.
Based on the volumes of bots I’m seeing this is very much allowed at this time. But why?
Please don’t ask me to “continue to report” them… I’m here to play a game not report 1000s of bots each and every day.
Botting is not allowed, please continue to report as you can. These accounts get shut down as quickly as possible, but these guys spin up accounts all the time using stolen accounts or simply stolen credit cards, to continue their illicit work.
They are managing their game. The way they do this is to watch the bots to learn how they work. Once they figure that out, they break the bot and act on all the accounts at once. If they actioned an account when it’s been reported as a bot, they would either ban an account that wasn’t really botting or give the bot software programmers info on how they caught it, allowing them to modify the software and continue on as before.
It’s an arms race between the botters and Blizz.
Keep reporting each character you believe to be botting. It really does work.
There is no “lightning bolt” that will strike them down instantly. They take the reports and find the best way to break the bots and ban them all at once. Anything else would alert the bot creator and allow them to evade being broken.
Someone is going to step in and address your reports, just not right away. You are not the only one reporting bots. Your report goes into a queue like everyone else’s. Blizzard isn’t going to ban someone just because you reported them for botting. If that were true everyone would have been banned at some point and appeals would take months. They need to investigate and verify first. Someone “looked” like they were botting is not going to survive an appeal.
Edit:
I’ve seen the suspected bots in Moonglade. I reported a bunch of them. You don’t need to report them all, just a selection to give Blizzard a number of data-points to work with. Blizzard’s priority is going to be to determine how the bot works, how they can break it, and how they can detect it so that a ban-wave will get most of those bottters and not just the ones who were reported.
Fighting botters has gone on since the game began. If you are expecting them to go away and never to see them again, then you will be disappointed, because they are just too successful and motivated for that. There is no way for blizzard, or any game of this nature, to get rid of them entirely.
Botting software isn’t easy to catch en masse. Every now and then blizzard will manage it, and they’ll have a huge banwave. Maybe every few years or so. But then the botters will analyze what went wrong, change their software, and get back at it. And then blizzard will start trying to figure out how to detect it again.
In the meantime, blizzard does stop lots of bots. They pick off individual botters from reports, and no doubt catch some more using automated detection. But trying to nab all of them one by one is futile - there are too many, in too many places, and they are too quickly able to replenish characters after getting caught using new fraudulent accounts. It isn’t feasible for GM’s to watch the whole game world on each server to stop all the bots. And so they do the best they can.
It’s the only answer I as a player, can give a fellow player. Acceptable or not, Blizzard always investigates each ban or suspension, and part of that investigation are the reports it receives from us players.
I reported a huge pile of moom boys in darkshore the other day. all spaced out evenlyy over that wq on the shore. constant starfall and exactly 2 orange beams each. there was like 10 of them hyper farming it. Once reported they were gone in 10 mins. Though i did make it a point to tag as much as i could on my warrior and let them kill it for me lol. kinda my way of cutting down on how much they got.
Then don’t. And the suspected bots will continue. Why? Because no one is reporting them. Why are there bots? Because unfortunately, other players continue to purchase illegal gold and services. So long as there is a market for it? There will be bots.
Now, to be the devil’s advocate - you don’t know that they are bots. You suspect they are. They may have bot-like mannerisms. But while botting is not allowed, multi-boxing is, though unsupported, and under certain conditions that don’t go against the terms and rules set for them.
Only Blizzard themselves know who are bots and who are not. We see many folks come through here who do multi-box legitimately for their farming with their choice of druids as the medium. You don’t know that they are botters or players. Only Blizzard knows for certain and the only thing they look at are the right-click-reports from other players and the logs that the game generates. Anything we say here are nothing but suspicion and conjecture.
Please continue to right-click and report, and then move on. That’s all you have to do and Blizzard will deal with them after their investigations are complete. Hoards of druids teleporting into Moonglade specifically do not interrupt your game play. If you come across them out in the open world, report them and move on about your day. Their existence may hinder a quest or two along the way, but only you can make it an issue when there is an entire open world out there.
" you don’t know that they are bots. You suspect they are."
Please feel free to go to the Druid TP spot in Moonglade and tell me those are players. Those aren’t Multiboxers. Unless Multi boxing now uses 1000s of accounts operating separately.
Going to go ahead and close this thread as it’s clear from the initial post that it was not created to solicit a conversation in good faith.
If you encounter players that you believe to be cheating in-game, please continue to report them and our teams will continue investigating them and removing them as necessary.
Those aren’t Multiboxers. Unless Multi boxing now uses 1000s of accounts operating separately.