I just want to point out one thing they do have a specific team for dealing with bots but They deal with every blizzard game not just wow they cant spend all there time on one game without the other games suffering.
Yeah and to be fair to the hacks team, people cheating in Overwatch or HotS is way worse than bots sitting in instances 24/7.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game of either and thought there was a cheater on the other team. So they are doing a great job with those games.
Also are you a Blackhand vet? I was probably on that server for 10 years.
Yes i was along time ago think i switched MOP i think.
That’s around the time our guild (Cloudyeyed which turned into Gwen Stefani) left for Illidan.
LOL thats hilarious.
It removed one (1) cheater. It’s not an efficient system. It lets the cheaters know that some aspect of their bot program got detected. They update the bot program. They run five characters to replace the lost revenue. How is that beneficial?
Whack-a-mole removal of bots/cheaters does not work. It’s just a blip in the bottom line of the scammers. To hit them hard requires a ban-wave. The first ban-wave I remember, back when they released those numbers, removed over 100,000 accounts.
GMs aren’t doing that because it isn’t their job to do it. That’s why there’s a specialist team for it. If GMs were pulled to do bot investigations, who would answer tickets?
Impossible. In order to do it as a single wave, Blizzard would have to let the bots run for a long period of time while they investigate every bot and every bot program. If the number of bots we have now with an active hacks team that does ban-waves regularly is too much, imagine how bad it would be if Blizzard didn’t do the ban-waves while they are gathering all the bot accounts.
We see a lot of players venting and raging about botting in the Customer Support forum. All can say how the botting affects their game-play. Quite a few come with the attitude “All Blizzard has to do to get rid of bots is …” Few understand that the reason that Blizzard doesn’t use their “obvious” and “simple” resolution is that because it was already tried early on in RPGs, not just WoW, and found to not work.
Blizzard investigates botting. Blizzard does ban-waves. Blizzard removes their ill-gotten gains (gold/other currency/ranking/gear/mounts/pets).
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Others have hit the point, but I just want to touch on these responses:
Yes, it is. When you say:
It absolutely is speculation. You aren’t on the realms, so you don’t know. You are making up the 400 number (“I’m guessing”). You also aren’t online 24 hours, so you don’t know that they are “sitting in instances 24 hours/day”.
This is all speculation on your end. You are making up numbers, and even so, the numbers you are making up don’t add up to
You don’t seem to understand the difference between a player/account and an actual live human being who is setting up these bots. Remove all the accounts that are botting, but you have done nothing to the criminal behind the bots. They fire up more accounts (as others have said, with a slightly altered program to avoid detection), and they continue almost uninterrupted. These people operate in real life places where Blizzard has no jurisdiction to stop them.
Banwaves happen quite often, and we don’t really hear about many of them. The only time we hear is when the ban wave catches some false positives that get overturned with appeals. That doesn’t happen every time.
And here you go back to this. Hiring more people doesn’t stop the problem any faster or more efficiently. Once you understand the nature of the problem, you realize that additional employees won’t stop it. Like you said, the player base won’t stop looking for easy gains. So there will always be a market, and throwing more money at this problem doesn’t stop anything…just like hiring more cops doesn’t stop the crime.
And this is the entire crux of your complaint. If a bot beat you to a node, it’s the same to you as if another player beat you to it. No matter what, it’s not your node.
So while it’s an admirable fight, and you should always report your suspicions to Blizzard, just report and move on. I wonder how many nodes you didn’t get by spending all your time trying to track all the bots…
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What might be speculation to you is common sense to the rest of us lol.
We have eyes and a brain. Typically the only 2 things it takes to easily recognize there are cheaters on all day every day.
It takes all of adding them to your friends list or a simple /who to see nothing has happened to them.
Adding 1 + 1 and knowing the answer is 2 isn’t speculation to most people.
Can’t tell the difference between competing with real players vs computers huh? Yikes.
You keep repeating obvious statements that everyone in this thread knows and has agreed to. Including myself.
Obviously bots will never go away, but in what world does having employees reducing them not help.
You’re saying drugs shouldn’t be illegal because we’ll never get rid of drugs. I’m saying we need more people removing them because less is always better.
I can’t explain it to you better than that.
Nor is it proof. Continue to report your concerns to Blizzard, let them make the determination.
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That’s something else that has been explained here repeatedly. If Blizzard bans bots individually, as they are reported, it alerts the botmaker and allows them to figure out how they were detected, so they can patch weaknesses in the bot. When Blizzard takes the time to study the bot and learn how it works, and thus how to break it, they can shut that botmaker down and force him to completely re-engineer the bot, rather than implement a quick patch to evade future detection.
Literally nobody is saying that. You’re saying they should arrest local dealers one at a time instead of tracing them back to the supplier.
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Who is winning in this bot battle in your eyes? Just curious where your thoughts are. In my mind seeing the occasional bot is acceptable for me.
Right now on classic you can see the same cheaters on all day every day. The guild I’ve been watching hasn’t been touched for at least ~65 days.
My entire point, and yes its an opinion, that the current job isn’t acceptable and it’s far easier to blame the players then adding money and team members to make a noticeable dent.
That would be a suggestion and there is no one in this forum that can pass that along. If it’s something you want them to consider then avail yourself to submitting feedback.
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Your opinion has been addressed by a support forum agent with a more comprehensive knowledge of the work involved.
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That’s not applicable to the situation at all. It’s not like the hacks team permanently stops anyone.
I think we all agreed that they, 1. Find how to detect the current software and 2. Do ban waves after finding it. It’s not like they stop the developers from making the next patch of cheating software.
My entire point to this thread is blizzard is losing the fight in a bad way and adding GMs to investigate reports would help. How much? We can only guess. It just can’t be worse than what’s openly happening.
If you took any time to read this thread instead of joining late to look smart, you’d read this is accepted.
My reply today was to point out a failing argument.
The only thing that would accomplish is spiraling ticket response times back into the range of a month or more. There is already a team in place that is addressing the issue. Your opinion that they aren’t working fast enough hints at an utter lack of understanding of the work involved. Throwing a bunch of GMs who lack the training necessary would tend to slow the work down even more.
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If you actually hung out here enough you would know this forum in particular does not take feedback. There are no GM’s or anyone for that matter that can pass feedback along.
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Clearly you don’t have any idea how other admins and developers police their games.
Is it fair to say they aren’t doing a good or bad job in terms of effort? No, we don’t know.
All we as players know is the current job being done isn’t up to the standard’s we’ve come to expect from Blizzard. It’s almost a bad joke at this point in the classic community.
So your suggestion is simply ‘do better’ without any inkling what is involved in the process.
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Your current tack of attacking other posters is just going to get the thread locked. Not a bad thing, really, as all the relevant information was posted yesterday, and everything since has been pointless repetition.
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