I have been trying to make some gold to get a wow token and eventually buy Shadowlands. Yes I am very poor, But I notice an absurd number of bots that farm skinning in fox hollow woods. I know for a fact they are bots because they switch in and out of druid forms in such a strange and robotic way, they path in straight lines that are beyond the player’s normal field of view, and most of all, they are always online. Many of them sharing names with other druid bots, the only difference in their names being a couple of letters. They do not respond to whispers.
I report these players but I see them the next day and the next day. If anything, their persistent existence is an incentive to cheat yourself. Why try so hard and farm skinning for so long to make such little raw gold when you can have multiple bot’s making gold for you while you sleep. It is discouraging to see. It is almost a sort of epidemic.
I got lucky and a teebu’s sword dropped which I realized I could auction for a pretty penny but there are 10 on the AH, all being sold by the same person with a slight variance in their names. I totally doubt that is a real person ofc.
why is the response to these blatant gold farming bots ignored or taking so long?
Is it because this isn’t shadowlands content? its been a week now…
Bots take time to investigate break the program and apply suspension all we can do is R&R nothing more nothing less this is the sure fire way to get them to blizzards attention. Trust us it does work once the ban/suspension wave goes out.
It isn’t ignored, but these things tend to take awhile because our Hacks team is also working on the how. Is this a new bot? Can we detect how it is doing what it is doing? Can we block it or break it?
While not guaranteed, it is often pretty easy to tell a bot from a normal player, or even a legitimate multi-boxer, but dealing with a single bot, or in this case a swarm of bots, doesn’t really have any lasting impact. Those accounts are often compromised, or not legitimately created. When caught, they jump to the next set of accounts they have available to them.
It is important to do what we can to have a meaningful impact. If we can figure out how their programs are engaging with our systems we can develop a means of detecting them, or blocking the bot entirely. So if they do jump on the next account, or the one after, our systems can stop it.
They then have to spend time figuring how what was detected and figure out how to get around it. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing since WoW launched, since there has never not been a market for goods and services for real world money.
It can absolutely be frustrating, we would like nothing more than to be able to address these a lot faster, but in addition to what I outlined above, we also do what we can to avoid penalizing legitimate players. Please report those that you see when you can, those reports do help in our investigations.
Even in current content things usually aren’t fixed within a week. There are more places to farm than just the one, but that it’s a good farming area invites more than just any one person.
The big thing here is while there is speculation of who is behind the characters, absolutely none of us know if it is a bot, a multiboxer who may or may not be playing by the rules or just a group of friends farming materials for whatever the reason.
Hinging your life on another’s actions is foolish. Right click, report and move along. Try and kill things before they do. Gather a group of your friends and farm the area. There are other options rather than putting it all on Blizzard as to why you’re not able to farm an area all by your lonesome. Bots will be removed in time. Players breaking the rules will be sanctioned. It will be done in Blizzard’s time, no one elses.
Go to Xibala or Torga’s rest and you’ll find them. The standard I’ve seen is two hunters turning around constantly casting barrage next to a couple fire mages downing them with some fire ring when they get close. They all use the mammoth with the repair bot every 10 seconds, to repair and sell junk I assume. If you kill them, they will auto run back to where they were and continue farming.
Debating whether or not they are bots is completely moot.
Blizzard has all the datas. When a toon moved left, moved right, jumped, /danced, and everything they killed. Are their pauses always 325ms or do they vary, as a human does? If they do vary, does their random variation conform to known bot algorithms, or is it truly human randomness? Data beyond these examples, that I’m not even thinking about. Down to the millisecond, in some cases.
Which is why it’s best to just right-click-report and move on. By doing that, Blizz can do what they need to do. As the pros, they can likely just glance at patterns and know one way or the other. If they wanted us to have more policing power, they would have given it to us. We have RCR, tickets, and hacks@blizzard.com at our disposal. There has never been a request by Blizzard for players to surveil other players; I trust that they do not need such a thing.
Botting reports are done by RCR.
We, as players, can only speculate, regardless of how “sure” we are that they are bots. If I wanted to, I could go act like a bot right now with the two accounts I have. Doesn’t mean I am a bot. Such speculation is, as I said, moot.
I mean, of course it’s moot. Humans are still allowed to have emotion and conversation about moot things. Regardless, it’s extremely bizarre behavior and if you did replicate it for a week it would probably be grounds for a psychiatric hold.
Absolutely they are; my apologies if you feel I alluded to suppressing emotion - I certainly didn’t mean to. However, moot conversation belongs in General Discussion.
Here, we try to stick to the point, which was OP’s report of bots. OP was given the best recourse to deal with them.
Subsequent discussion here of whether or not this particular group of players is bots, isn’t necessary, it’s not needed, and it just causes confusion and adds to the clutter.
In the end, I don’t control who posts here, nor would I ever try or even want to. I’m simply saying what I said: speculation on bot/not bot is useless and doesn’t really belong here.
Playing Wack-a-mole won’t fix anything. There isn’t a magical switch they can flip on to stop botting forever. Expecting Blizzard to just snap their fingers about this kind of thing is unreasonable. There’s no foolproof way to stop this. If someone was able to, they’d be the riches person in the world.
The delay is literally what keeps them in check. Whatever the “level of botting” is, I guarantee it would be worse if they played whack-a-mole with bots.
Ban one bot and you reveal to the botter what got them banned. There’s then an
insta-fix by botter. This way, 4,645 bots can remain active with a simple update to the bot.
A ban wave collects offending accounts over time, then breaks the exploit good and hard in one feel swoop. This way, zero bots using that exploit can remain active, and Blizz banned 4,645 accounts instead of one.
We need to promote fact over hype. “Blizzard does nothing about bots,” is literally the WORST signal to send to botters - that they should go ahead and give it a shot because there’s no consequences. The bots actually don’t rule the entire game due to the efforts of those in charge, and reports from the community.
Either way, bots will remain just like criminals remain in real life. The existence of either is not proof in any sense that we are “doing nothing” to combat them.
Dude if I’m a botter and I know Blizard will take 6 months to act. I will buy 50 accounts and bot because there is a financial incentive.
Who cares if they are banned in 6 months, I already cashed in!
I’ll buy another 50 accounts, use the new botting program and there is ALWAYS a new program. Then cash in for the next 6 months while the Hacks team is having fun with research.
If the Hacks team did nothing but monitor farming areas and ban accounts, there would be less bots than if they nerded for 6 months doing “research”.
If we go by your logic, just banning anyone on the spot for reporting them for such, I could go around to end game raiders and report them as botting to mess with everyone in the guild. Or go around and report anyone whom disagree with me as botting to get them banned. Just shooting first and not asking anything isn’t going to fix jack.
You don’t though. The next ban wave could be on Friday. Think of it like this:
Do we want to bust the corner street thugs, or would we rather find the big bad boss on top of the pyramid? If all we do is bust street thugs, the big bad boss gets to live eternity in style. But, if we watch the thugs, they lead us to the middle-men, who lead us to the captains, who lead us to the boss. Then we bring down the whole shebang.
You’ll lose the accounts, and any in-game gains obtained via botting. If you also made out-of-game profits, you’ll have real-life legal issues, no doubt. You speak as if there’s no risk and unlimited rewards.
Take a minute and think about how many bots you could ban in an hour, roaming around the world. Whatever single-digit number you pick, multiply that out by eight for what you could clear in a shift. Then multiply that by 260 for your year.
“But the huge packs of bots, I can do more than that!”
The day after you clear those bots. The days you are doing your twenty-fifth lap around a zone at 3am checking every cave (or, far more likely, staring at data on a screen at 3am looking for patterns.) The days that you didn’t catch any bots because you just weren’t at the right place at the right time - or there just were no bots active.
You are talking about employing warehouses full of people. It’s not feasible.
You just proved my point by using the War on Drugs as an example, which is waged by the DEA which has the financial motive to create a never ending war.
Hey here’s an easy solution that requires no research. Put a cap on the loot the botters are farming.
After a certain amount, that’s it for today!
Now that greatly limits how often Botters have to manually intervene and how much money they can generate per toon.
The financial incentive is decreased and 99.99% of players are unaffected.
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything. I wasn’t speaking about wars on drugs, I was talking about how crooks are organized in a criminal pyramid.
Good suggestion, you’ll want to submit that one via the suggestion tool. I’d work out how to deal with false-positives, and include that info as well; normal folks won’t take kindly to their loot being capped. Also, you’ll want to work out how to cap the loot without making the botter aware (a heck of a problem) because they’ll just switch to different loot once they’re (instantly) aware of a cap.
The cap would also alert the botter that they’ve been made. It would also reveal to them what the cap is, so they could avoid it and instead switch to a different bot or account when they were ever so slightly below the limit.
I can go on. Banning bots isn’t as easy as you make it out to be.
There are over 240 realms in NA Retail alone. Not including Classic. Not including EU Retail and Classic. How many people are you going to employ to manually check realms for bots? It is one of the worst methods for getting rid of bots.
It is a better use of time and resources to have players report suspected bots. The in-game bot report includes the log files needed for the investigation. That is why it was added to the right-click>report system.
The number of realms and the number of players and the number of reports they get has an impact on how fast account action happens. Blizzard gets a lot more reports than they used to because streamers have shown action happening live on stream. Blizzard addresses the reports in the order they receive them.
Even if Blizzard locks the account requiring the player to update their password to unlock, the botters just switch to another stolen account and start again.
Are you willing to be forced out of the game for weeks or months because someone reported you for botting and Blizzard banned without investigating? That’s how long ticket times would be if Blizzard did what you suggested.
Without this derailing any further - this forum is not one for feedback, suggestions or anything of the sort. Customer Support (not to be confused with Customer Service) is a forum for players to assist other players.
If you have suggestions, feedback or Ideas, please take them to General Discussion or make use of the in-game suggestion tool. This isn’t the place to debate Blizzard’s policies or routines, nor disparage them. If you’ve got some amazing idea that no one else has ever thought of to truly combat the bot problem in a cost effective and efficient manner? Those two methods I’ve already stated work just as well. Just not here derailing this thread any further.
