Blizzard, I hope you are ready to get serious about botting with 9.2.7. You are about to make all your legitimate players abandon their gathering professions once all trade goods fall to vendor sell prices from region wide botting destroying commodity prices. No human will bother to gather for gold when bots are doing it for 7 silver per item.
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It is odd that nothing has been done to more effectively thwart them. There’s absolutely low hanging fruit for making botting more difficult and less profitable.
The main thing is that if you’ve ever watched them, you’ll notice that they all operate on fixed paths. They’re not smart at all and can’t navigate around unexpected obstacles in those paths.
Following that, if herb and ore node spawns were changed to be fully random and dynamic instead of having fixed spawn points, writing a gathering bot that’s profitable would become exponentially more involved. The problem that has to be solved goes from following paths made from publicly available (Wowhead) data to being able to autonomously navigate the world without getting stuck or dying and visually recognizing nodes to gather them… it’s basically writing self-driving car software with the added complication that following roads isn’t helpful and that there are enemies that can aggro and kill your character. It’s a problem that even giant corporations haven’t yet cracked.
Why haven’t they made node spawns random? I have no idea. It’s probably the single most effective bot mitigation strategy and the impact on real players would be minimal.
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I have made literally THOUSANDS of reports in both LFG and the game world. I am well tired of it since Blizzard do nothing with my efforts. Whether it’s the IDENTICAL “WTS 2’s / 3s’” in arena LFG 5 at a time at all times of day. Or the classic “Bot riding a bot” druid setup gathering in the world… I have reported hundreds of the druids and thousands of the LFG posts only to see the identical LFG post / bot pathing continue 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
This company is absolutely pathetic at controlling spam and botting and it really makes me want to quit at times.
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Bold of you to assume the change isn’t to drive people toward buying more tokens for gold.
I don’t bother wasting the time to report suspicious bot behavior anymore. The last time I bothered was with a painfully obvious bear druid in Revendreth right out in the open that stayed in the exact same spot for a week. They probably have a minimal amount of staff that deal with the issue.
The long waits for ban waves is getting old.
They need to start blasting these bots instead of waiting for months and months.
How hard can it be when any player half paying attention can see the Druid riding a Druid following the same path over and over is a bot.
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They made it so it’s a ghost node now.
Everything seems real about until you finish mining it…then Poof! It vanishes. As a human player, I fall for it all the time. 
Perhaps that’s their goal. If players can’t earn enough gold gathering, they’ll have to buy tokens, won’t they?
I am super ready to not waste my profession slots on herbalism/mining/skinning… Who honestly enjoys gathering 2000+ borean leather to do northrend leatherworking (not even kidding) or ANY of the legion professions requiring multiple thousands of ore to max out
Let the bots waste their time grinding out mats for 7 silver each, I’d much prefer them do it than me wasting my life away moving from spot to spot clicking nodes covered in annoying enemies.
I got about halfway through that grind.
Truth is, they don’t care. The bots pay the bills.
I miss my garrison mine/garden/barn.
Alas, the devs seem to be more scared of alts than bots.
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dont worry, not only gathering professions will be crap, also crafting profession will once they implement the crafting orders too, basically this is a money grab move to force people to buy wowtokens.
Let say we get rid of all gathering professions. What would happen to the market? would blizzard have us buy them food and flask we need and completely monetized the game because it sure seems so.
i mean all they’d do is wait a month for wowhead to show all the little dots where nodes have been gathered then they will just program the bots to run the most efficient path and go from there. Not even seeding nodes under terrain and scenery since legion have been usefull at stopping them.
Its going to take more than small changes to kill the botting which sucks hard, things like active GM’s monitoring 24/7 each zone and running checks on any character excessively doing the same path and the same thing. basically its going to cost a lot to stop them. I dont see that happening. They will bait people into tossing away millions on bad rng systems, but wont spent any of that back on improving gameplay
I can tell you how to massively cut down on herb botting.
Put potion recipe requirements back to where they used to be for most of WoW’s life - 1 or 2 herbs per potion.
People buy from botters - people LIKE botters - because the volume of herbs needed to play effectively this days is absurd.
The crafting system would BREAK overnight if they actually got rid of mat botters. There wouldn’t be enough flowers in the game to make what people use.
I say this as somebody with Herbalism on most of my characters. Without bots, the game’s economy can no longer function, because of changes Blizzard has made to make botters essential.
Another way is to check database data, Log in/log out times frequently x y z coordinates of player movements and look up patterns frequently established by bots. Look at gold transfers and mule accounts. Come to a reasonable conclusion and nuke the suckers out of the game. 20 years and they don’t do this why? Because bots bring in the dollars.
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Because people like gathering bots, they perform a huge service for the community.
If you want to crack down on botting, start with the bots that don’t benefit the community, like the AH botters and the people who bot their pet battles.
But cracking down on gathering bots without simultaneously adjusting how crafting works… eep that’s a tsunami just waiting to happen.
It’s why I think the report system is just a giant joke. Something in play so the customer feels somewhat reassured. Like leaving comment cards at a fast food restaurant.
I dunno, I always report those packs of boomkins with almost identical names that are obviously botting killing everything in an area for hours on end. (You know, Aaaaa and his buddy Aaaaaa and their friend Aaaaaaa, etc.).
Haven’t seen one of those in a while.
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