Just got out of a solo shuffle with what at first we thought was an AFK ele shaman, but quickly realised it was a bot. As soon as anything got in range instantly flame shocked while it was standing still. Any cast instantly kicked. It didn’t move a single time, so we tried to stay back… but then of course the enemy dps and healer knew it was 2 v 3 so they had to hang out in start room behind the ele bot. I reported it every round for hacking and botting to no avail. Told the others to do the same. Seeing this kind of bot a lot in shuffle this season. Get on top of it please Blizzard.
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these get purged in ban waves generally. one just happened a few nights ago from what i heard, but the people just make new accounts since it’s so easy to level and gear
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Exactly why I said STOP doing it in waves and start with INSTANT BAN ON DETECTION. I do NOT CARE if “we catch more by doing waves” if it means the same people just pay to cheat like it’s a subscription. It doesn’t matter if you catch more if you just let them back in again. It’s like when Valve Anti-cheat (VAC) became a thing. Back when VAC was new, Counter-strike cost $10 and VAC wouuld flag an account and ban it 2 weeks later. So for the same price as a wow subscription, the same person could just come back again and grief out every CS server in australia every night until all legit players quit. Back then we only had a handful of servers from EGN/iiNet/Eftel and it became impossible to play without a speed hacker spinning in circles instantly headshotting entire teams within seconds EVERY NIGHT. Before VAC made this stupid method the new norm we had a better method called Cheating Death. When it detected hacks it HARD FROZE the PC and made you hold the power button to shut down, couldn’t control alt delete or alt f4. That’s the kind of protection online games need. INSTANTLY PERMANENTLY BAN THE USER AND THE MAC ADDRESS AND THE IP AND THE CREDIT CARD THEY PAID WITH. Nothing else will suffice.
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You know this effects “pro” players too right?
Yet another reason the retail version of the game needs to return to a classic pacing and have any and all forms of boosting removed, especially the game shop boost token. Wow token needs to go away too.
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^^ how to kill the game 101
This is the most fried take ever.
You are saying:
“Make it harder and slower for real players to make alts and get into PvP INSTEAD OF putting any effort into dealing with cheaters.”
That is just so dumb. I play the game MORE because I can make alts in a reasonable time frame. I have 8 x 1800 and 2 x 2100 this season… in shadowlands I never had time to do that many toons because of all the tedium and grinding of Torghast and Korthia.
We need to DEAL WITH CHEATERS. NOT slow down the legit players.
Far out that is such a dumb take Seratox.
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Call it fried all you want. The speed and effortlessness of leveling and gearing, the ready access of boosting, and the excessive amounts of fotm rerolling resulting from the culmination of those two points mixed with piss poor class balancing has caused nothing but grievous and, at this point, irreparable amounts of harm to this game.
There are a few hills in this game upon which I am most certainly willing to lose my life, and this one is the biggest.
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Bots don’t care how long it takes to grind, players do. You will have less players more bots with your stupid logic. More honor farming bots in bgs, more gold farming bots in the world. The more accessible the game is for real players, the less real players are inclined to bot to farm gold/honor etc.
deal with the cheaters and slow the game down.
then there are no bots and the FOTM rerollers decrease also. like currently its way to easy and fast to swap to the next best specc.
Bots don’t level nowadays lol they just abuse level boosts lol
I’m not sure I follow, what’s the point of a bot queuing arena matches?
You can’t be that naive.
The only reason would be conquest points. How often are they going to win 2v3 though?
Bro. Think about how advantageous bottling in the arena could be.
Let’s say you only script your damage rotation. Every match you have over 90% efficiency or near perfect rotations. If that was all you did how much of an advantage would that be? Forget about the awareness factor which is really what makes WoW such a difficult game (keeping track of multiple things), I am talking about pure efficiency. Humans make mistakes, they smoke, they drink, they get tired or they get on tilt. Not John Dilhole who is automating his damage rotation. He is smoking and drinking and getting completely sauced and pulling off perfect damage rotations all night.
If you were to chart it on a graph a human player would have mountains and valleys, highs and lows where they perform great at the start of a session but lose focus and start playing worse toward the end. Not a computer. Its graph looks like a straight line that always maintains peak efficiency.
Or let’s say you use a program to automate your defensives under certain conditions. That’s another thing you don’t have to track. Ever been cc’d within a millisecond of hitting your trinket? That would be a scripted response if it happens repeatedly.
You could program a bot to always kick certain spells at the very end of a cast guaranteeing you never get juked. Who the hell is going to juke a cast at like 95%? No one because you would spend the entire match not casting anything at all. Would be better to just eat the lockout.
The possibilities are endless. Venruki posted a vid about a rogue bot that was almost AI quality good.
See this has been going on forever but no one really said anything because the pros could simply outplay them. The bots are getting so good that is no longer always the case so now you are starting to see high profile people complaining about it.
Scripting is to ESports what Steroids is to professional sports like baseball or football.
Scripting, I get. I thought we were talking about an actual bot where a human is not playing the character, a program of some kind is making it perform basic functions.
Isn’t scripting just a lesser degree of botting? For example you can script kicks or damage rotations or defensives but if you script basically everything other than movement you’re basically botting. I guess adding in programmed movement patterns would be the traditional understanding of botting where nobody is present at the keyboard doing anything, but it’s all just different degrees of automation no?
Why you think people who program bots or people who use them would restrict themselves to a scenario where they aren’t piloting at all puzzles me. Sure maybe in a farming scenario or bgs but any scripting or botting in the arena is going to be piloted by someone who is cheating to gain and advantage and climb or sell rating boosts.
It’s unfortunate that Blizzard has to deal with this crap to be honest. It’s already one of the most toxic communities in online gaming but to have this many accounts getting banned in one wave is just really pathetic. Not fair for Blizzard to have to spend time and money to deal with cheaters.
I personally can’t understand this. Even if you push up to glad or rank 1 you know you cheated. Kind of hard to brag or be proud of something you know you didn’t really get. But any time there is real money involved people are going to do shady crap and some people have such fragile egos they are willing to go to such lengths I guess.
In Classic there were bots farming the world for mining and herbs that weren’t being controlled by a human, that makes sense to me. Deploying an automated bot to try to win arena matches…I’m skeptical that’s going to work.
That’s generally not how you deal with botting effectively. Banning on detection means banning just ONE botter can lead to “I got banned for using X program. Let’s adapt to prevent this”.
Whereas a banwave bans hundreds of thousands of botters. Sure, it’ll still lead to “We got banned for using X program. Let’s adapt to prevent this.” But at least hundreds of thousands of botters got banned instead of just one.
The botting epidemic in gaming is way more complex and complicated than you think it is. There’s a reason every single popular online game has bots. There’s a reason no one has come up with a full-proof solution. And no, “ban on detection” is certainly not a full-proof solution, nor is it even effective at all.
You realize you can easily spoof your MAC address, right? Are you familiar with what a MAC address is?
Do you think hackers and botters are not using VPNs?
You mean the stolen credit cards?