Just curious if Blizzard plans on hiring new GMs in the relevant future?
I understand completely the war on botters is a never ending fight, but it’s fair to say that the team in charge of maintaining cheaters is failing. People love using absolutes on the forums to exaggerate, but being completely honest, after 18 years of playing WoW, I’ve never seen it this bad.
I mean there are quite literally guilds of botters with 50+ people in them on 24/7 farming the same instance. If you know where to look there is a conga line of bots funneling in and out of instances to repair/mail and then back again.
GMs aren’t really the ones that handle these anymore, Vtm - we have a whole dept dedicated to this.
And they are VERY effective, but tend to do things in waves. Which, just btw, have been steadily getting closer together.
You are correct, this is a war we’ve always fought - and continue to fight. Sadly, as long as players continue to give them cash, they have a vested interest in continuing.
In the case of a suspected nest - you could also email hacks@blizzard.com with the information.
Individual reports are still important - they go into the system and go a long way in helping the team ferret these out.
I’ve spent a handful of hours sitting in the path of botters, reporting every single one. It’s pretty obvious because they all literally walk the exact same lines. Doesn’t look like the effort I’ve put in the past few months has done anything.
I’ll submit that information to the email address. I’ve never used that to report players before and you have me excited it might make a difference.
I’m not angry with Blizzard, I’m angry it is financially advantageous for people to ruin the integrity of the game with the system that’s in place.
Also what is the job title of the people on the hacks team? Would be something interesting for me to look into, being as passionate as I am about cheaters.
I wouldn’t normally recommending mailing about individual characters - but if you think you’ve found an entire guild, yeah - that might be worth dropping a note.
You aren’t likely to see them go in small numbers. There’s no advantage to doing it that way. The hacks team looks at what mechanisms the botting software is using to operate to find a way to break the bot. There’s no point in banning if the bot software isn’t broken at the same time. Someone gave an excellent rundown on why it is done this way.
Here you go. You would be looking for jobs in application security or related tasking. I am 99% sure this is for a position on the “Hacks” team as it is publicly called. No, that is not the internal name.
For all of those interested. Did some more digging. There are at least 4 botting guilds on Whitemane, made up of ~25’ish bots online at any given time. All full of DKs with nonsense names sitting in instances 24 hours/day. That’s obviously not counting the more than 50 (limited by /who but I’m guessing 400) of bots not in guilds farming the same dungeons.
I’m sure there are even more on Grobb/Faerlina. Just /who Old Kingdom and Mana-Tombs. There are bots in other instances, but those seem like the 2 big ones. If you pull up guilds you’ll notice the common ones.
I’ve reported all of them to the hacks team 5 days ago. I’m not expecting a banwave any time soon since I’ve been reporting these bots and guilds for months.
Just hoping Blizzard takes the botting issue on Classic more seriously than they are now. I’ve never imagine there would be actual botting guilds in WoW, but that’s where we’re at.
Blizzard has literally never stopped fighting bots. There have been Blizzard threads showing the 10’s of thousands of bots being stomped out on a regular basis. Until people stop giving these criminals money, they will continue to do what they do unfortunately
If you’re trying to make gold with a gathering profession good-luck. Spending countless hours only to compete with bots destroying the market, you won’t get far. Not to mention competing for nodes against thousands of bots.
Has there ever been a time in WoW’s history where botters could be so brazen that they actually make guilds and stick all of their toons in them? I don’t remember the scale ever leaning this far in favor of the botters.
It’s incredibly easy to blame the players who are giving these degenerates incentives to cheat, but I don’t.
I used to only blame the botters, but at this point it’s hard for me not to think Blizzard isn’t allocating the resources to compete against botters like they used to.
Im sure bot making guilds are as old as wow just you gota rember this is a multi billion dollar balck market industry not just for wow every mmo has this they have millions of stolen accounts from players looking for teh easy way for gold they prey on the players that dont look at the consequences and then the cockroaches that run these shady buissness take there account and run with. It literaly is the players that buy there services that make it as bad as it is.
News to me, but that might be because I’ve never been so interested in seeing them banned.
That seems like that easy answer but not the easy solution. That’s like saying crime won’t go away until people stop doing crime. Not a realistic solution. The best and most proven way to reduce crime is hiring more police.
Obviously this is a business for Blizzard and they can’t hire one team member per player attempting to bot, and quite frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizz had the correct amount of team members in terms $lost to players quitting to bots vs. $cost of removing bots.
It’s very unfair of me to say Blizz isn’t doing enough without knowing exactly what is being done, but as a player it really ruins the fun having to work x times harder because I’m competing with thousands and thousands of computers.
It’s actually not. And police work in a similar way to Blizzard. Police do not follow every single player around, stopping them from doing something before they do it. They may be a bit more proactive with patrols/checkpoints/etc, but in the end, they can only react to someone having committed the crime.
Not sure why you think real life police or Blizzard can stop something before it happens. The very nature of a crime is an act that has been committed, not an act that has been prevented.
But are you? Your numbers above don’t add up to “thousands and thousands”, even when you start guessing about how many you can’t see or are on other servers (which don’t really count as “competition”). You even said they are sitting in instances, so how are you competing with them?
Yes, botting is a huge problem, and you are definitely doing right by reporting them. But let’s leave the speculation out the window, and let’s also not snip at the people you are asking to help get rid of the problem.
I’m sorry but it’s like you don’t understand the situation. Right now there are thousands of bots blatantly cheating on my server. The “crime” has been committed and is currently being committed. Yeah I hope this doesn’t come across as mean or trolly, but man your own argument went right over your own head.
This isn’t speculation. Try progressing a toon by leveling a profession, or farming gold through a profession, to progress a character somewhere else.
Bots stealing nodes from players is nothing new, sure, and I hate using absolutes on the forums, but I’ve never seen this many bots on my screen stealing nodes from ME.
If Blizzard wanted to remove every botter from ever playing on WoW for more than 10 minutes they could. Would probably go bankrupt in the meantime hiring that many team members.
The reason I made this thread was because I was curious if Blizzard was in the process of hiring more team members to fight the battle against bots. The only way to remove botters is to hire more people to ban them. The player base will never stop looking for easy gains for money. So,…
My point is the ball is in Blizzard’s court, not the player’s.
Edit: I’m very aware Blizzard is removing botters. My only point is they aren’t removing them at a rate it’s noticeable at all. I mean how many times do people need to report the same botter before they’re banned? Like I’ve said the one guild I’ve been reporting has been active and healthy for months.
I dont think u understand how botting works lets break it bot makers create program A blizzard bans a few hundred as example. Bot makers realize blizzards and has broken there program. They got 2 2nd bot program release it more players buy it download it. Like i said its a billion dollar industry its not gona go bankrupt so easily.
Again, this is not new. There have literally been thousands if not tens of thousands of bots in the past, working for people willing to buy illicit gold. Gold sellers used to drop bodies from the sky to spell out website names on the ground.
This is a very old and very lucrative business of stealing, cheating, hacking and scamming.
I’m sure that they’re hiring and would love your expertise. Unfortunately, it’s actually not that easy.
I understand how it works. You’re only thinking of the big picture. There used to be a time where GMs would investigate players being reported and remove them outside of massive waves.
This is speculation but purely from what is happening on classic, the amount of GMs actively banning these degenerates are; A) not doing a good enough job or B) don’t exist.
I’ll be the first person who will admit they were affected in a positive way by Blizzard’s job banning cheaters. The MOP PVP scene was literally full of botters/scripters. Not anymore.
Blizzard did a great job stopping players from cheating in the rated PVP scene. They did a horrible job actually moderating the ladders at the time, but that’s neither here nor there.
Well sure, I was just using that extreme as an example.
Edit: I would honestly work for Blizzard for free if that meant I could spend a few hours a day investigating reports and banning cheaters. Seeing admins beat cheaters is so entertaining and fulfilling.
Yes - it proved to be fruitless - it did nothing to stop or disrupt the bot networks.
That’s the reason why Blizzard’s actions changed, and it became a lot more than just banning the bots - they have to find a way to break the bots without breaking the game. This takes time.
Once the ban wave is unleashed, and the changes implemented to break that particular bot, it will at least disrupt the gold flow if only briefly.
I realy dont see the point of this conversation going any farther so im gona leave it on this note if u have any suggestions i would use the ingame suggestion feature and submit them there I would avoid the forums.
What do you mean by fruitless? It removed cheaters from playing WoW. Isn’t that the goal?
If these waves banned every single botter I’d be completely on board with this method.
I’m assuming since Classic Wrath came out at least one ban wave has gone through. I think that’s a fair assumption. If one hasn’t, that is an even bigger problem. My friends and I noticed this botting guild (with 25+ active members 24/7) in early November.
We need GMs in charge of investigating reports in-game on top of the hacks team working to disrupt bots from working. Like the blue said in this thread already, GMs aren’t doing that.
Yeah honestly I think I was more venting than anything else and feel the same way now.
Edit: If you think I’m pointlessly talking now, should have read my dozens of posts raging about cheaters in MOP when I thought my alt got bumped out of Glad Range to cheaters and pilots.
