Does reporting players work properly?

Yes, but it is important to understand a few things.

First, you are reporting your suspicions only. While you may believe them to be botting, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are or that such behavior can be easily verified. That isn’t to say that you can’t, with some accuracy, identify those that are likely using some kind of automation, but there will always be some uncertainty without specific verification being available. An account note that says “I saw them, they looked like a bot” isn’t really reliable evidence that can be verified after the fact when that person inevitably appeals the penalty.

Second, as the others have said, these investigations often can take weeks if not months. We are not only trying to properly verify if someone is using automation but we are also trying to figure out if we can either break it, block it, or verify it automatically so that we can address all those that may not be reported. Which works towards our goal of having the most impact we can.

Keep in mind that the moment we ding a bot the creator of that bot immediately tries to figure out what we found and how to better hide it. It’s a constant battle and rarely one in which once we ban a bot they are gone forever.

Additionally, the penalty for this kind of behavior is fairly severe, so we try to make sure with as much certainty as we can that we aren’t impacting legitimate players.

A lot of things “should be dealt with quickly” but that doesn’t magically happen, Mesamashstuff. Everything takes time and resources and no small amount of work to investigate and while your issue is no less important, there are a number of other botting/exploitation reports that are just as much important to address as well.

We absolutely understand the frustration, but please continue to report those that you feel may be botting. Those reports are invaluable to our hacks teams investigations.

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