As per the title, the change they made to the reporting system in Classic wow is a massive help to botters.
I spent a lot of time back in SOM adding botters to friends list and following them around. Everyday I would add more to the list and everyday I would report them. After a week or two, they would be gone presumably from the reporting.
Today when I was playing on classic era I saw a hunter in feralas running towards the mountain to seemingly nowhere. I cast eagle eye to follow him and he runs into a tree and then starts fly hacking in the direction of DMT. I tried to report through friends list and it only gave me the option to report name. Luckily my eagle eye was still up and I had him targeted so I was able to report him but now the problem is, I wont be able to report him tomorrow for botting unless I happen to find him in game and get close enough to target.
During SOM when I reported bots everyday, after a week or two they would be gone. Everyone knows 1 report does nothing. Being able to report from the friends list is presumably how I helped to get dozens of bots banned and now that option is no longer available.
This is a huge W to botters and removes one of the only ways we can actually do something about the issue.
The conspiracy theorist in me is becoming more and more convinced that Blizzard doesn’t actually want to stop botting. If they wanted to take serious action against it, they’ve had almost 19 years to do something and they really haven’t.
I don’t feel banning accounts months after they’ve been operating and distributing gold to purchasers is enough. It didn’t do anything in Vanilla and has remained ineffective to this day.
You’re correct to point out that this change only seems to make it easier for bots to slip by unnoticed. What gives?
You guys are wasting your energy worrying about bots. It’s never, EVER going away.
They don’t even try. It’s the least of their worries. They’re literally everywhere guys. We literally see bot characters spawning in mid air and flying around the world at gladiator mount speed.
Blizzard is not going to ban their bot subscribers. When’s the last time you told someone you were going to burn your paycheck? Did you follow through?
If I wasn’t playing a priest I’d feel far more annoyed about this. I mind vision them daily and send emails to hacks at blizzard to report them. Definitely new system benefits them.
I have been trying to report them as often as I can. The insane stream of fly hacking into Stratholme is crazy and 95% of Arugal is bots/hackers/gold farmers abusing free transfer system. AH is dead as there only 20 max real people playing there
You don’t know who and what bots or even regular players are selling gold. I know that there are a lot of regular players who play specifically to sell gold and can’t be picked up on as a bot. There’s no reason to believe all bots are using stolen VPNs and etc. sure there are out there and probably many, but the fact of the matter is we see minimal effort period when it comes to dealing with them. There’s also advanced hacking by regular people and automated software. Think about how much USD these gdkps in all versions of the game yield. There are classic era gdkps that are yielding up to two THOUSAND dollars USD per week. I guarantee you half of that is being recycled into profit by more means than we know of
The fact that we have seen videos of level 1 characters spawning in the world out of thin air, leveling to 60 instantly on the spot and flying to dire maul tells us they are not even trying. They don’t have GM staff shooting pigeons out of the sky like they should etc
To be honest if I were blizzard I’d throw my hands in the air too
Well by not doing this they have certainly ruined all trust in the players having faith their game is worth subscribing to and participating in. I don’t care how they wish to label some severs as “full”. They seem super dead except for the hardcore ones. Queues last forever, and more people quit. What’s the point in playing a game where botters ruin the experience, cause mass inflation in the market, and blizzard’s’ WoW tokens or the cheaper bot gold making the game essentially pay2win. Easily solved by just removing gold from the game btw. Then what would the botters do?
They do not. That would cause them to have to ban the bots and they would lose subs as a result.
This new system is by design. They do not want you reporting their bots. Every reported bot is a lost sub for Blizard as they have to do something about it.
There was even a YouTuber who made a vid proving that he got in trouble for reporting to many bots. You report dozens of bots and cause them to lose dozens of subs…you can wave your account goodbye. Getting rid of you will stop the bot reporting. So it is one guy gone vs dozens who got to stay. And in Blizzard’s eyes that is money. And that is the MAIN reason why they introduced layering. All the players progress out of the layers that the bots are in, so now with the new system, you have to see them and be able to click on them to report them… new laying in Classic that was never there before prevents any of us from being able to click on and report the bots as none of us can see them.
So any of you wonder why laying was added to our classic when it was never there before? THATS WHY as it does zero benefit to any of the players. It only hurts the players as it prevents us from being able to group up and play with one another…
And when more and more people begin to unsub because Classic feels like a deserted ghost town…maybe then Blizzard will regret having chose the bots over us. Cuz when we leave, the bots leave and then Blizzard will have nothing. They will have lost everything simply because they are overly selfish and greedy.
Thats the reason why laying exists in Classic now days, so that way you cannot see and report the bots.
They CANNOT legally look deep enough into your files where hacking and botting is being hidden.
They literally cannot detect all hacking and botting because it is buried deep within you system files. On the other hand they could hire a few in game GMS and drastically reduce the population of hacking and botting OVER NIGHT.
They could redesign the game itself to eliminate common botting strategies.
The only reason flyhacking exists is that there must be some way of directly telling the server “My position is now x,y,z”, and the server just trusts you, without actually verifying it.
Take that out, and flyhacking goes away.
But they don’t, because it would be a lot of work and/or make the game a lot slower.
I’m not sure about this. I mean, when Valorant was coming out there was a lot of noise over how intrusive its anti-cheat was, all of which has died down and Valorant is now quite successful. Does it have cheaters? I don’t know, I assume so. Does it have fewer cheaters than its peers (ie, CS:GO)? I also don’t know. My point is, at least Riot seems to be trying. Valve is trying too, they’ve published a lot of material for using AI in detecting cheaters and while the game still has cheaters, whenever I play it I don’t actually experience them because I get put in the pool of players with little cheating.
You know who doesn’t seem to be trying? Blizzard. And they could… because they could install whatever they wanted on your cmputer as long as you opt-in for it. Valorant uses kernel level anti-cheat detection, Blizzard could do similar low level bot detection measures if they wanted to. Similar to Valve, they could use AI to detect patterns in player behaviour that were similar to how bots behave. If they wanted to.
The difference is, I don’t think Blizzard wants to. Games like CoD, CS, and Valorant can detect cheaters and match them against other cheaters, leaving people who aren’t cheating to exist in a pool that’s relatively legit. It’s a win-win solution because the cheaters are still buying the game but regular players are significantly less impacted by it.
In WoW though, Blizzard can’t really do this. The bots exist not to compete with the players, but to service them. If Blizzard were to prevent botters from being able to interact with players, that source of revenue would dry up.
So yea, Blizzard could do something here but it’s clear that they, as a company, are choosing not to.
Blizzard took the creators of honorbuddy to court in Germany. This is when all of that came out.
It’s a privacy act law its not just some gaming thing that blizzard follows because they use cheap software. Valorants cheating or hacking wasn’t as sophisticated as wows hacks I promise you. There are multi million dollar companies invested in wows economy lol.
They legally cannot install whatever they want onto your computer. It literally doesn’t matter what you tell them they have to follow the actual laws my guy. The laws are in place for a reason. They could take advantage of all the dumb people of the world if there were not laws like these in place. They COULD however hire GMs (Game masters) to police their game as they did in the past. But bobby had to lay off 100s of employees to get his new yacht pimped out.
This is subjective because legally they cannot dig into your computer deep enough to find the hacks, they’re just to sophisticated now. They could hire in game GMS as I said before. But i think we all know that isn’t going to happen.
They all work on the same fundamental principle of reading data values from the game either via memory or network packets, intepreting them, and them simulating inputs back. It doesn’t matter if it’s Valorant or WoW, they are the same.
You keep saying this but you’re mistaken. If Riot can install kernel level cheat detection software, so can Blizzard. If Valve can use AI algorithms to detect patterns in gameplay without even installing anything on your computer, so can Blizzard.
The bottom line is that Riot and Valve have demonstrated two viable paths to, at the very least, detect cheaters in a far shorter timeframe than Blizzard is currently doing. Yet here Blizzard is, sitting on their mountain of money shrugging their shoulders saying, “Oh, the problem is too hard, why even try?”
Botting software isn’t magic, it’s just software. It’s a problem that, at the very least, can be mitigated.