Exactly. And people would abuse it. Next.
This is a good idea. The drawback is it could increase the false reports. People might report every player that MIGHT be a botter. It only takes a few seconds, and it might give me some gold.
This increases the Blizzard workload, and slows down the rate at which Blizzard finds REAL botters. We donât need 10 different players all reporting one botter.
And what about that case? Would all 10 players get the reward? If thatâs the rule, it causes another problem â groups of players all finding bots together and reporting together, so that they can all get the reward.
It isnât âmonitoringâ, it is finding. There are tens of thousands of players, in every zone and every instance. How many GMs does it take to monitor them all (after training each GM for a couple months)?
I donât know the details. But I do know Blizzard cannot turn this into a human-run game. Not for $15/month. We are not paying for a human-run game. So any solution that involves an unlimited supply of humans (trained GMs) is not possible.
Why would they fire a huge portion of their support staff when botting and cheating is so rampant and needs addressing?
Oh yeah, money. Money makes people do stupid things.
Yeah, this is just you focussing on semantics. But the point is still the same. You get automatic action taken against your account. And an overworked, underpayed, human makes the decision to advance or dismiss. Usually they just do whatever is easiest for them in that moment.
There are plenty of people with receipts about how they were reported for botting and then had actions taken against their account. Appeals ignored and then awhile later the action is dismissed for it being an error or it was a short term suspension.
Mistakes happen and giving a profit incentive to report people on top of the awful and inaccurate system they are currently using is not a good mix.
It is not free to introduce that system. Doing that would require some work to create and execute. Things donât just magically happen. Engineers need to make that tool for GMs to use and it needs to work. An entirely new policy has to be written too and the TOS updated and Iâm sure theyâd have to research how best to implement this system.
This all takes work and it will be added to an already perma crunch mode staff.
This whole conversation is people trying to come up with schemes and incentives when the real solution is just hold Blizzard accountable and demand they take the problem seriously and improve their internal systems.
This idea is like having gofundmes for peopleâs surgeries and medical bills.
Yeah we shouldnât have to be responsible for making sure a game we pay for is cheater/bot free. Blizzard offers the service and promises to do take action against bots. They have not. They need to do better.
if Blizzard recruits you as a volunteered GM. Do you do it for hours without pay every week?
I would take that opportunity to ban all the lotus competitors =)
Youâre taking my statement out of context.
There are bots that just sit in specific spots for literally days just running the same script over and over again.
Like rogues in BRD or mage groups in Strat/ZG. Monitoring activity and having suspicious behaviour flagged is easy enough. And you could assign a GM to do a basic lookup of rogues in BRD and then check their recent actions and easily tell whoâs the bot and whoâs not.
For botters out questing about itâs a bit harder and I understand the difficulty in that situation.
But for the static bots that just sit in instances or do constant runs are much easier to spot and itâs unacceptable theyâre still so rampant.
They didnât.
Yep. Completely agree. Given time gamers will optimize the fun (usefulness in this case) out of everything.
Not an original sentiment. Borrowing from a quote that I canât remember the person who said it. Just wanted to be transparent about that.
Lol.
Itâs funny how ignorant you are.
Show me the factual source for your claim that they fired a:
Yeah it could see the new gold making Meta being to report everyone you encounter , playing the odds that some might be bots.
You would have to create a punishment system to prevent abuse.
But even then, the smart players will figure out where the line is and step right up to it without crossing it.
Hereâs the big one in 2019. https://kotaku.com/activision-blizzard-begins-massive-layoffs-1832571288
And more details on thatâŚ
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/2019-02-13-activision-blizzard-staff-cuts-largely-hurt-support-teams-it-qa-and-publishing
And hereâs a more straight forward article about Bobby himself saying they need to hire more people to keep up with production.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Itâs a very well know thing there happened.
Unsure if itâs more sad or funny that youâre this willing to double down on your ignorant comment.
I read the articles, I did not see anything about support staff. All I saw was this:
â According to Jason Schreier, a well-respected game journalist at Bloomberg, the majority of those laid off were employees who handled the programming for esports events.â
Did I get the wrong articles?
Hereâs the legal document for the February 2019 layoffs:
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/401389950/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-Dh96i2zsTyPm8t95vdMf
The only two positions cut from the CS department were a Bliz. IT Analyst and a Blizzard BI Programmer, zero actual CS.
1 Like
No, you just didnât read them. The title of the second one is literally âstaff cuts largely hurt support teamsâ
And the third one is literally talking about how they fired over 1000 people and now need to straight up restructure and hire 2000 more people. Bobby literally says that in the interview.
Or, as I stated, I may have read the wrong article.
I agree, Blizz needs to do more to stop botters. Every mmo contains botters and it will always be present in every MMORPG. This thread exists to talk about strategies to reduce them, if you donât like the idea of players being responsible, thatâs fine, you donât have to participate in the hypothetical world where this suggestion is reality. Also, gofundmes for surgeries actually get something done - instead of raising for your fist at the healthcare industry and government and demanding they fix it because we pay taxes and insurance premiums - sound familiar?
Most people do not care about the truth, they only care about pushing whatever narrative they want to believe, regardless of the facts. The rumor mill never rests; disinformation plagues every facet of our lives, even gaming.
1 Like
Great argument batman!
Again with the semantics based goal post moving. Maybe one day youâll get somewhere with that tactic.
Support staff doesnât mean just âCustomer Supportâ. Itâs a general term or engineers, testers, analysts, people who do the brunt of the real work thst enables game designers, artists, and game masters to function properly.
If you seriously think that the hundreds of people laid off didnât affect the work flow efficiency of the company then thereâs no point in taking you seriously.
And if you still wanna argue that Blizzard didnât make a bad move firing a bunch of people then just read the game industry article and look up Bobby himself saying they need to hire more people to meet their production demands.