Fun solution to bots

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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This morning I was brainstorming about how to deal with bots in a more permanent way than banning. I was doing so because I saw several bots while trying to tame a gorilla for my hunter. Normally, I wouldn’t have cared other than to report them but the earliest a gorilla can be tamed is level 32 and those gorillas only exist in one place that I know of. When I got there I found 5 or maybe 6 bots farming the mobs and it took me 30 minutes to get one when it should have taken 2.

The issue I see is they’re gaining exp and resources while breaking the ToS for WoW. Sometimes, at the expense of other players. Banning them puts a stop to that but it wastes everything they’ve gained and it never gives regular players an outlet for their own frustration so I came up with a bounty/raffle system.

The trick is in reliably identifying which characters are bots. I’m guessing Blizzard has some systems in place which they trust to do that. However, instead of banning the account the characters become permanently PvP flagged for both factions similar to entering Gurubashi Arena. This prevents the botter from interacting with any NPC’s or PC’s so they wouldn’t be able to transfer gold, crafting materials, train, or sell anything on the AH.

The fun part is a scoring system gets set up for players who want to hunt flagged botters. Each kill equates to a raffle ticket. At the end of some period of time all of the gold, items, and XP gains a botter has acquired are confiscated by Blizzard and divided up among the legitimate players participating in the hunt. The more you play the more you can win.

Since there’s the opportunity for abuse by creating false cheating reports, players who are found to be unreliable in reporting botters would be prevented from participating in the drawing at the end of the month.

The result here is players are able to immediately do something about botters from their own faction and there’s an incentive to keep hunting instead of reporting and moving on. Plus, we all get an outlet for our frustrations instead of having to just let it go.

Realistically, I know this is an intellectual exercise to help relieve a little frustration. Blizzard has never struck me as being maliciously punitive but I’ve seen developers take drastic actions before while trying to protect the integrity of their craft. Maybe someone is open to the idea :grin:. Plus, it would really be nice to be able to stick it to the botters instead of filling out a cheating report and hoping things work out.

1 Like
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I agree in general, but I disagree with this. In my opinion, the whole reason we have so many bots is that computers cannot automatically do this. Banning an account requires a human GM every time.

Your suggestion is about increasing the player reports – which (in my opinion) won’t help. We get plenty of player reports, and many of them are correct. But some are incorrect, or even malicious reports. So a human GM has to check each time. And GM time is expensive. A company can’t make a profit from a $15/game unless almost all of it is automatic.

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What? The GM’s doing this probably make $15 an hour. You really think they “can’t make a profit” if they had 10 people doing nothing but bot reports all day?

kek

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While fun the problem is that it would possibly hurt the efficency of botting and thus people might stop paying the monthly fee for the bot account. Resulting in monetary loss for this trash company.

So while It is fun to hunt em, they will not do anything that makes em lose money. And your suggestion might put a dent in the botting market so thats a big no no

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Fun solution to bots: ban bots