people at blizzardactivison are not doing a good job on this game… not one bit… the bots are very happy… the legitimate players are NOT. it’s hard to say if ill be playing TBC if these dont stop NOW
Not enough manpower to do anything, Blizzard tried to male Classic into a good game without spending any money on it. They are trying everything against bots/hackers except paying old-school game masters to moderate the damn game.
Quartly profits of Blizzard Activision would disagree.
It isn’t about manpower. It is about respecting and valuing customers, which Blizzard does not. They have the capability of fixing/doing anything with this game. They are actively deciding not to.
Also classic makes mountains of cash, so its not like they cant afford adding some more dedicated man power and paying them well enough for a living wage. They are however banning bots, and hackers. I have gotten several confirmed kills, im up to 7 now!
They are, its just incredibly slow and they do it in such a pisspoor manner that it means bots become locusts. 3 people for US getting paid a decent wage could do way more if given the leeway they need to remove them.
yeah they gotta get more aggressive with the bot problem, probly hand out some bans for buying gold and RMT. 3 more employees would not be enough, you would need like at least 1 per 5 servers to even have a hope of keeping up. The raw number of bots can be really crazy. Get on retail and check out the outside of mechanar, it can be silly.
How would you want them to ban bots? Visual indication? If it moves like a bot, it’s a bot? If it paths about in the manner that most bots do, ban it? What happens when the bot creators purposely program the bots to act more like players? What do the GM’s do then? Message the bot, if it doesn’t respond then ban it? What about people who aren’t paying attention or don’t have their chat window up?
How would the people responsible for ban appeals do their jobs? Have the GM’s tasked with banning bots go around recording thousands of videos to archive as evidence? Keep in mind, they ban tens of thousands of bots every month. That’s a pretty beefy archive of video evidence, dontcha think?
The forum experts here really don’t think about what they post.
P.S. Most people here already believe that Blizzard lies and bans people for no reason. What happens when they go around instantly banning people that look like bots? This forum and reddit will be nothing but people claiming they were banned for nothing, and far more will be correct about that.
Then let the bot programmers make better bots. Make it a race, at least, because currently 90% of those I encounter are painfully obvious, I mean 4 hunters in the same area of feralas walking in the same way and getting briefly stuck in the same places. The GMs of yesterday dealt with those obvious bots just fine.
EDIT: It is hard to make a bot behave anywhere close to how a player behaves.
There was a small period of time during Vanilla before Blizzard created a hacks department when GMs would go around banning bots.
Botting is a lot more sophisticated and widespread now than it was during 2005. I don’t know why people think that Blizzard can effectively manage the botting situation with the suggested handful of GMs. They already employ roughly 1,000 CS employees, if they could solve the botting issue with a half percent increase to their staff, they would.
While I can’t prove this, I’d bet the code that allows the fly hack is tied to some other super important bit of code. The probably can’t just outright fix it without breaking something else. They really have to dig into the nuts and bolts of the game to fix it, and as was mentioned, they don’t have the man power dedicated to the task.
How do you know they’re not? If you go back to forum archives from Vanilla, people complained en masse about the exact same things.
Bots evolve.
Efforts to combat bots evolve.
Ongoing, forever and ever. Every massive online game has bots, no company has managed to completely thwart them because it simply isn’t possible. Then we have all these conspiracy theories from people claiming Blizzard wants bots or that they’re somehow beneficial to Blizzard as a company.
Yeah I dont buy into that at all either, bots do nothing but harm the game overall and that hurts the bottom line. There is probly some sort of min-maxing going on, how much effort in dollars vs results ratio that they do use, could be frequency based or something too. Costs them money to handle it for sure, but its interesting to think about how much does botting hurt the bottom line, because it has too when players get frustrated and quit over it.
I would not call them so much conspiracy theories, because there is no conspiracy, but they are just ideas people have that dont bear fruit.