In my opinion, yea, bots may be messing with the Auction House prices and such as that, but is it really making it that hard to get your gold when you’re essentially trying to do the same thing? So what you could do, is tag all the mobs that the bots are hitting and get a darkmoon firewater, or something else to make your skinning faster and take advantage of the bots by cleaning up as much as possible while following them around. If it’s a player they’ll get annoyed and let you know, but if it’s a bot who cares, screw em and take the good you can from them. Besides, if you’re trying to farm older content for gold, you’re going to have a hard time anyway, because nobody cares about the BFA leather right now.
there’s leather bots in ardenweald that are going crazy right now with some instaspawn points that are insane.
That whole notion that they don’t insta-ban accounts just b/c you think they are bots is crazy. You already see a ton of post that people claim that they are innocent and that Blizzard acts too rashly. But besides that these things do take time and trying to stop an entire bot program is more effective then just swatting these as they are reported. Botting can be a pain and you know what you can do? Report and then move on and go somewhere else. That’s all that it’s ever required me to do.
Or, look at it this way.
In one scenario, you have Blizzard identifying and playing whack-a-mole with individual botting reports. You’re a goldselling company. You have ten thousand bots running around in-game. You have three accounts in a day that are identified as bots. They get banned.
No worries to you. You didn’t buy those accounts, you stole them. And there’s no outlay of cash to replace them, you deploy a new wave of phishing emails to harvested gaming email addresses and your former customers and steal new ones. Meanwhile, how did those accounts get found out? You’re able to troubleshoot how the detection happened with 10,000 accounts still out in full force in the meantime. Oh, now five more accounts are taken down. Time to adjust again! But again, there’s no downtime, no losses.
Compared to Scenario 2. You’re a goldselling firm with 10,000 accounts running 24/7. A month goes by. Everything is fine. Your software is working great. Another month goes by. You increase your fleet to 15,000 accounts. Another month goes–
Suddenly, all 15,000 of your accounts are banned. You don’t have enough compromised accounts to reconstitute the entire fleet. What’s more, your software is clearly unusable even if you get the accounts that you can up and running again. You have to try and reverse-engineer the code and make changes, deploying small batches of accounts using the adjusted software to test if it can be detected. But can you really know if it has been? Meanwhile your company is bleeding money.
No, the bleeding won’t go on indefinitely. But with that method, there’s an actual wound that lasts a little while instead of an easily ignored trickle that only helps you fix your botting software on the fly.
These are not bots but a simple mouse/keyboard script set to play over and over. Its still breaking the rules. They are all over Kalas Den in Bastion.
Then right-click and report them if you haven’t been already. If you have, thank you for doing so.
You might want to remove those names, naming and shaming is not allowed on the forums.
Please remove the names before you get sanctioned for conduct violations yourself.
A lot of bots from gold selling sites may be using stolen credit cards, so that is highly unlikely.
And this is why there non stop botters because of conspiracy therories like all bark but no truth.
Sure is a whole lot of conjecture in that little comment.
Welcome to the CS forum, the most heavily modded area of the forums. Trying to pick fights here is a very bad idea.
Oh what a load of rubbish…
They often used compromised accounts with game time already active and/or stolen credit cards. When the account holders or the banks of the stolen credit cards become aware, charge backs are issued and locked.
So how again does Blizzard gain anything from this?
Really bad forum to troll and spread your rubbish in…
It isn’t conjuecture, it is straight from Blizzard and having knowledge about what bots are. These aren’t little Jimi in his parents basement botting to level his warrior. These are multi billion (yes with a B) dollar companies that run these bots to sell gold and items on the black market. They use stolen accounts and pay the sub fees with stolen credit cards (most of these come from their own customers). Blizzard loses money on these because they have to pay fees when the stolen credit cards are charged back.
The only conjecture here is the false belief that there is some kind of conspiracy by Blizzard to not ban bots to make money.
So you have no issue with your account being banned just because some random player reported you? You have not problem waiting weeks or months on your appeal because the same thing happened to thousands of other players?
Paid for with stolen credit cards. When the payment is revoked by the credit card company, Blizzard has to return the money and the handling fee in addition to the original price. So no, Blizzard doesn’t make money off them.
And you know this how? Detection is only part of the issue.
“Blizzard won’t do anything because they are milking them for the $$.” The only ones I see spreading this garbage seems to be players that don’t want others to use the report features. Are you posting to stop others from reporting botting so that botters have free reign? That’s what it looks like.
update:
my reports have gone through, confirmed via mailbox.
I am thankful action took place and I understand that it takes time (10~ days). sometimes you just know a bot when you look at it.
There are entire guilds comprised of nothing but bots. They run the same routes for hours on end. Entire parties of players get together to report them and nothing happens. When streamers with large followings bring attention to the issue they get layered so the problem is “out of sight, out of mind”. When I report multiboxers I usually get a message thanking me for the report and stating action was taken, when I report botters… nothing.
It feels like Blizzard is so terrified of harming a single legitimate player that they’ll let the entire player base suffer for it.
How about just tweaking drop rates on areas that botters frequent? It’s almost impossible for legit players to farm those areas right now, so who is it going to hurt except for the exploiters? What about targeting IP addresses to contend with account hopping? How about just looking for and detecting congregations of moonbois, since that’s the ubiquitous choice for bot farming?
These botters affect server performance, inflate the economy with millions of gold per day, flood the market with mats at uncompetitively low prices, and damage player morale. I don’t think the “wait until we have a silver bullet solution before doing anything” approach is cutting it.
How about report them when you see them? Let Blizzard deal with the details.
If just reporting it when you saw it was a viable solution, the issue would be long solved.
It is a viable solution. We see here ALL the time people come in the CS forums whining for being banned or suspended unfairly. It works.
Botting will NEVER be solved, and it’s quite naive to think it will be. People are gonna cheat and exploit to gain an advantage. It’s been that way since the first video game. If you think you have the solution to it. I’m real certain ALOT of game companies will throw money at you.
I’m not asking for Blizzard to solve the botter issue directly, that has proven to be an essentially intractable problem. I’m imploring Blizzard to consider “outside the box” solutions to disincentive the practice. Botters is incentivized by the fact that it’s lucrative, attacking the profit margins will at least make it less attractive.