Feels like my server consists of nearly 50% bots

Support Customer Support
1

CrusaderStrike is overflowing with bot players. Everywhere I go to farm in the open world there are bot hunters farming mobs. If you try to mine or go herbing guess what? More bots taking everything. Want a summon somewhere? No problem the server is full of bot summoners all over the world that will summon you anywhere for 2 gold. Bots are very easy to identify why aren’t they being banned? My only conclusion is blizzard you are happy with the $15 subscription the bots are paying and don’t care about the game experience. I’m not going to just complain about this and not offer any solutions so below I have some ideas.

Possible solutions. Allow players to take a gathering profession as a secondary profession. Current min/max culture in SOD prevent people from taking gathering professions as it hurts their DPS. What does this mean? It means the majority of gathering is done by bots because no one else is doing it.

Possible Solution#2. Stop issuing measly two week bans to gold buyers. I know its two weeks because I’ve known several people who have been banned for buying gold and they continue to buy more gold anyway. Buying gold contributes to more botting. Start banning for six months first offense for buying gold.

Possible Solution#3. its time to admit your automated system or whatever it is you use to detect bots does not work. Bots farm for a period of months before ever being caught/actioned which leads to a profit for them and incentive to just continue doing it. Hire more staff dedicated to just getting rid of bots. Where will you get the money for this? Increase subscription costs if you have to. I’m sure people won’t mind paying another $10 on a subscription for a bot-free game experience.

1 Like
2

I just noticed a large group of bots (10+) stacked on top of each other - seemingly farming mobs (potentially power leveling?). They were all in warmode and didn’t release after I killed them, so clearly not real players. Seems to be an issue elsewhere…

1 Like
3

Of course it doesn’t work, as it doesn’t exist. Blizzard relies a lot on player reports. Are you reporting them?

6 Likes
4

Was there an issue you need help with? The CS forum isn’t for suggestion, let alone thories with what someone think how something works.

3 Likes
5

It is an issue everywhere… It is the same on SOD there are 100’s of bot mages just spamming instances (stockades for example) and nothing gets done about it.

7

You assume that the accounts that are botting or otherwise exploiting are using a legitimate means of payment. In most cases they are not, if they are using tokens the gold is often obtained exploitatively. If they are using a method of payment, it is often stolen. I don’t know how much you might know about stolen credit cards but they end up costing the merchant far more.

So no, they don’t exist because we somehow make money from their existence. Additionally, given how negatively they impact games and other players, their expense tends to be far reaching.

Sometimes, yes, but there are often far more of them then you can see, so the goal is always to make meaningful impact. Not just ban those that you see, who simply switch to a new stolen account so you are simply playing a game of wack-a-mole, but to detect or block the means in which they are exploiting. That is an ongoing battle because it isn’t a single unchanging program, it’s multiple ones that are constantly evolving to avoid detection.

That would be a suggestion for our Developers to consider, but it is unlikely to happen. There has always been a min/max culture in all versions of World of Warcraft, changing how the profession system has always worked doesn’t seem like a viable solution.

There are a lot of factors that go into the penalty for certain violations. Some may have received 2 weeks, some more. Our teams look at the effectiveness of the behavior, including repeat behaviors and factor that in. Again though, that is something for our Game Development team to consider, not Customer Support.

We have a team of folks dedicated to finding and addressing exploitation of our games. They do so using many tools, but the only real “automated system” would be the one that detects verified programs. That verification often takes weeks, if not months and is constantly challenged by those trying to hid how the program interacts with the game and what we can detect.

Our methods do work, from detection to prevention and breaking of various exploitative methods to the efforts our teams make to sifting through thousands upon thousands of hours of data. That isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement, but that is exactly what our teams are always working to do.

The majority of the bots you see don’t exist for months on end. They often are around for a limited time before being caught, but they are often quickly replaced by new fake or stolen accounts.

Feel free to submit your feedback to our Game Developers, but an increase in subscription cost is not likely going to happen, nor is it likely that any game would be able to bot that it could be “bot-free”. Depending on the popularity of the game and the potential to make money, there will likely always be a market for it. More cooks in the kitchen isn’t always the answer either.

We absolutely do understand the frustration around this type of exploitation. Addressing this issue is one of the highest priority issues for Team 2.

21 Likes