and they are still doing it, and yes you are asking Blizzard to solve the Botter issue.
Perhaps READ the blue post in this thread you necroed
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I offered suggestions for how they might address the problem directly, but I understand why many of those are half measures.
I also offered suggestions for addressing the problem through means other than attacking it head-on. I think those are more plausible stopgaps.
Again, the practice is so prevalent because it is so profitable. Finding ways to attack those profit margins would go a long way to making the practice less lucrative.
I don’t expect there to be a quick and easy solution, or it would have already been done. But by the same logic, taking a “this is fine, just report them” stance isn’t enough or it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
The players whom want to farm something to sell, make for their guild/self/raids.
Because changing IPs are easy nowadays to the point it doesn’t do jack to stop it.
What’d happen to the folks that like to level as boomies and the like? Should they be force out of that spce or get action?
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It is implausible for legit players to farm the areas botters exploit. The mobs are all tagged so quickly that it’s all but impossible for someone outside of the bot groups to be able to loot them.
Even slowing down the botters would be an improvement. Even just forcing them to occasionally relog under a different IP/account would significantly impact their gold/hour farms.
They are already forced out of that space, it’s all but impossible to tag mobs in these farms fast enough for anyone who isn’t part of the bot group to be able to participate in the farm. I’m also not talking about 3 or 4 boomkins, these farms are comprised of literally dozens of boomkins. Thirty level 60 boomkins spamming Starfall is a pretty dead giveaway that they’re not level grinding.
Bots can be reprogrammed. They’ll just go to the next place with lucrative and/or common drops. Unless you reduce the value and/or rate of drops worldwide to next to nothing. Pissing off a lot of players will have a side-effect of removing bots from WoW, but only because you’ll have removed economic incentives when you destroyed the game.
It’s pretty trivial for someone to spoof their IP address if they know what they’re doing. Most of the bot farming organizations know what they’re doing.
Again, bots can be reprogrammed. If druids stop being the most profitable farming class for whatever reason, they’ll go on to the next one. Until you’ve destroyed farming potential for all classes. Which again will remove bots only as a byproduct of pissing off real people and killing the game.
This is really basic security anything. Assume that your assailant is intelligent and adaptable. That’s why simple solutions won’t have any long-term effect.
Also, I’d like to reiterate that I’m primarily advocating for action to be taken to make the gold farming less lucrative, I’m not so much advocating for punitive action to be taken. I’m not suggesting that every boomkin be banned, I’m suggesting that lowering the drop rates of specific areas (or lowering the value of those drops) would directly impact the botter incentives without directly harming legit players. Again, it’s not plausible for legit players to farm these areas at the same time as the botters.
About the only thing that would make them less lucrative would be for players to stop being ignorant and giving these criminals money.
When people stop paying them, they’ll eventually dry up…but that’s not likely to happen unfortunately 
All that said, the CS forums are not a feedback forum. You’ll want to post in the General Discussion forums with any feedback or suggestions that you feel would help. Alternatively, you could also use the in-game suggestion feature.
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Everyone whom think they have the right answer often say the same thing: Lower the rate/amount! That’ll beat them!
People don’t seem to understand that folks can and have spend hours upon hours farming areas farming things like ore, herbs, skins, etc. Saying to do something will magically stop them is really outside the world of realization.
No, IP tracking won’t do anything as they can change it to anywhere in the world, even your own. No, lowering the amount/rate of something won’t stop the botters as the players will be affected as well as they’ll be going after the stuff as well. No, trying to use a given class/spce won’t stop as they’ll change to another.
There is no silver bullet to stop this. If there was, it’d have been done already.
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I’ve found bots in really odd places obviously farming skins. If you target one of them they are switching targets many times per second, there is no way to do this legitimately. But you right click - report cheating, “suspected bot” and move on. The accounts used for this are stolen and being used by gold sellers 99.999% of the time. They usually are only able to do this successfully for a couple hours, before the account is locked down and they have to move onto the next one. The organized crime groups that run these operations often have hundreds of thousands of compromised accounts ready to go at a moment’s notice.
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You seem to be saying that if an approach doesn’t completely solve the problem it’s not worth pursuing at all. I’ve said like three times that I understand there isn’t a silver bullet (and that direct punitive action certainly isn’t). I don’t expect the problem to just magically go away. I’m suggesting that making the practice less lucrative will make it less attractive in the first place. And to be clear, I’m not talking about a handful of bots farming herbs or ore, where an average player can just follow behind them and farm the same nodes. I’m talking about 30 boomkins exploiting hyper spawning in one area, spamming Starfall in unison in Suramar/Aszuna/Nazmir. It is impossible for legit players to participate in these farms due to the way tagging works, and pretty unlikely that an innocent player would be negatively impacted by making these farms less profitable (not to mention that a “just report them” stance makes legit players who try to participate in these farms more likely to be harmed because they also get reported).
These farms are measured in terms of gold/hour, and reducing that gold/hour ratio could reduce the practice without directly harming innocent players.
Yea, that’s a fair point. I just thought that perhaps commenting on a thread that already got a blue post might get more attention than a new thread somewhere else.
Have you ever wondered why every gas station has a sign on the door stating that there is less than $200 cash in the registers?
I totally get it! Trust me, I think everyone who posts here would love to see bots become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the blues here are not liaison to the development team which is why we tend to point people in the direction of where feedback will indeed be seen.
I’m sure if you check the General forums that you’ll find a few different “Ban the bots!!11!!” threads ongoing there too 
It’s such a vicious circle for Blizz. They break one thing and the botter adjust…over and over
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IP blocking is USELESS on the modern internet. In the 70’s it would’ve meant something. These days, a lot of people don’t even have their own IP (my entire apartment complex shares one IP). Also, with VPN’s, anyone can change their IP in less than a second to any place in the world. And the gold selling companies that do this botting use VPN’s extensively.
Suggesting IP blocking just means you don’t understand how the internet works. All it would do is inconvenience legitimate customers.
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Also report anyone that’s dumb enough to admit they bought gold. Your report is anonymous.
Ban waves are great and all but there needs to be more action against people using their services. Bots are like drug dealers… they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t buy from them.
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This is great advice. I haven’t personally run into anyone who admitted they bought gold, but if you do, yes report them.
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Holy crap dude, forget I ever mentioned IP targeting. Ok? I suggested it as a means to slow down and disrupt botters, not as a means to stop them entirely, and then I didn’t bring it up again.
I know that VPNs and other tech make the whole idea kinda pointless. You seem really obsessed about a thing I suggested once and then dropped. I was responding to the whole paragraph, not just that one part.
And you personally will get caught up in that. At some point you personally will get knocked off and not be able to get back on because the IP range your ISP uses will be impacted. IP-blocking hasn’t been a viable solution for over 20 years.
No. We are saying that the “IP solution” would have little impact on the botters. It is not a viable solution, at all.
I have boomkins. I haven’t been forced out of anything, but I really wouldn’t be happy if they nerfed boomkins just to address this. Changing the returns from the mobs is a much better solution.
It is possible to tag mobs, just not easy. They aren’t single tags. It actually impacts the farm of the botters because it add someone who is not part of their group to the agro/loot table. Change your warmode setting (off/on) and do the quest. Then restore your original warmode setting.
The only way to do this is for players to stop buying gold/services from these criminal enterprises.
I’ve been able to. It’s slow going, but it is possible. Changing your warmode setting is another option.
Not impossible. Just harder than if they weren’t there.
And has that stopped people from robbing them?
You brought it up twice. And if they were like me they were making a post while others were posting, or while reading the thread. The information about the “IP solution” needs to be reiterated because this thread will be seen by people who come to this thread through a search engine.
Check out post 24 in this thread. It gives a good idea about why botting is handled the way it is. As frustrating as it can be for players, Blizzard’s method of dealing with bots is currently the most effective way to do it.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/dozens-of-skinning-bots-printing-gold-in-foxhollow-woods/776046/24
If you are having issues tagging mobs, try group-finder to get a different realm/shard/CRZ, or change your warmode.
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Sweet mercy, I’m barely awake with all of this back and forth.
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If you have suggestions, post them to the staff either via the General Discussion forum or using the in-game interface. This is a forum for players to help other players. No GMs or Devs or QAs come here. It’s just us and the poor SFAs who have to put up with us all while trying to moderate and offer advice and insight where they can.
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If you see a suspected bot, right-click and report. That’s it, one and done. If they’re a flagged group? Murder away. Otherwise, that is all you can do. Do your part and move on however your gaming takes you.
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Notice where I said suspected bot? Just because you think it’s a bot, does not mean it is definitively a bot. It could be a legitimate multi-box farm. That is not against the rules, though it is not supported. Before anyone gets on a high-horse about knowing, you don’t. The only people who know for sure are the people guiding the box/bot and Blizzard. Blizzard only uses their logs to make these determinations.
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Yes, because we don’t have an automated system that would suspend an account based on the number of reports they get. These are investigated and we absolutely do take action. Even when removing those, which are done on a constant basis, others replace them fairly quick. It is the nature of the situation that finding a means to block them or automatically delete their activity so they can be dealt with will often have the most impact.
First, sharding is automatic based on the number of characters in an area, so no one is sweeping anything under the digital rug. Second, based on the posting you’ve seen just in this forum, where would that indicate that they are out of sight?
Tweaking drop rates has been done in a number of areas throughout the years to help deal with some exploitation. That may or may not be an option, but that is in the hands of our Hacks and Development teams, not Customer Support.
Targeting IPs would be ineffective as far as I know. As for the Moonkin congregations, there is no detection system that would allow us to scan an area to determine the general population at a given location. Nor would such a generalized marker be used as there are legitimate players who also play Druid and specifically Balance.
We know exactly what it impacts. We don’t wait for “the silver bullet”, our teams actually take action on hundreds/thousands of accounts almost daily, if that gives you an idea of the scope of things.
If it were as simple as you may seem to believe the issue would have been resolved. It is a vastly complicated issue though and one that our teams are doing what they can do address. Please continue to report those that you suspect of botting.
I’m not that kind of blue and getting attention isn’t really necessary. It isn’t like we aren’t aware of the issue. We don’t have the folks on the Hacks team sitting around going… where are all the bots hanging out these days? shrugs
The issue of botting and exploitation has our attention and has always had our attention and priority, regardless of how popular the subject is among influencers or their fans.
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