So on the Trollbane server, I am currently in Krom’Gar fortress and witnessing a massive number of max-level druids, all with similar gibberish names, flying back and forth between Overlord and the innkeeper, with corresponding “explosions” of rank-up. I am not sure what they are doing, but this has gone on for days now, without stopping. It certainly appears to be botting, no doubt, but to what purpose? It’s be cool if someone could check it out and get rid of the scumbag botter.
It’s an old post, but a goody.
This is mainly a player to player help desk, and not a means for reporting, just fyi.
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Probably quick gold making, the same as any other location, no help in speculating though, just keep reporting.
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That’s not how botting is addressed. Bots are not removed in a whack-a-mole manner. It’s much more effective to break the botting program, have it easily detectable by Warden, then mass-ban botters. In the meantime, right-click report any suspected botters for cheating.
There’s been speculation as to what they’re doing on Reddit (leveling up or grinding gold), but I don’t think it’s appropriate to reveal anything more specific here.
In any case, right-click and report as many of them as you can.
Anything posted on Reddit by anyone other than a Blizzard employee should be taken with a grain of salt. Speculation by other players is just that - speculation. It’s not fact, no matter how good the “evidence” seems.
Yeah, reddit’s idea of “evidence” is: “look, these two things seem vaguely similar, and because I have confirmation bias going on, all I see is what I want to so it’s ironclad”.
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I mean, I don’t know how you get more ironclad evidence than a video of hundreds of bots swarming a particular NPC repeatedly and a screenshot that shows the bots are getting actual gold from this… (Neither of which can be linked here cause “no naming and shaming” is a rule despite the bots having literal gibberish names.)
Because all a video from players shows is hundreds of characters around an NPC, which is evidence of absolutely nothing. The only reason it seems like evidence of anything is because viewers are already primed with the suggestion that it is, and confirmation bias sets in. You see what you want to see, but it doesn’t mean anything. The only ones who can see actual evidence are Blizzard’s investigation team, which is why you report it. And try not to get hung up on the idea that you “know what bots look like”, because you’ll start seeing them everywhere, start getting in your head that nothing happens to them, and that works to the advantage of people who do this kind of thing.
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And the gold from botting is being traced by Blizzard and removed by Blizzard.
Video doesn’t prove anything, as they can be faked.
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Yep…so just right click report suspected bots, and move on. Botting investigations take months. Also the overwhelming vast majority of bots are run by gold sellers on stolen accounts, so even if a banhammer appeared in the sky and smited them the instant you clicked report, it would accomplish nothing because they would be right back on new stolen accounts. The gold sellers are a multi billion dollar criminal enterprise (that also engages in credit card fraud and terrorist financing), and they often have access to tens or even hundreds of thousands of stolen accounts at any time. They don’t care if the stolen accounts are banned, they expect them to be banned, and only bot on them after they’ve stripped them of anything of value. It’s just a way to get as much as possible out of the accounts before they are inevitably locked.
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