Help Stop Botting Gold Sellers 1-30-24

Community General Discussion
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Help Stop Botting Gold Sellers 1-30-24

Botting sellers have been rampant in World of Warcraft for over a year now. Bots are almost always gold sellers. If Blizzard could stop gold selling, they would effectively end botting. However, since cross realm trade the problem has become exponentially worse. The bots have evolved, changed their tactics, and moved into craftable items. A person only needs 1 recipe, exalted, crafter and 2 accounts to sell on all servers. Now robots sell all items on all servers.

They are using an Auction House bot program that appears to bypass Blizzard’s Warden system or countermeasures. The robots cycle through all servers posting within certain time intervals 24/7. I have observed this for at least 4 months now. They only vanish for brief intervals after weekly reset and server downtimes.

If you aren’t a gold maker, or if they aren’t in your markets yet, you may not care. However, I’ve seen them expand into more markets every single day. It’s only a matter of time before they take over all of our shared markets. You may not even know you are “competing” against robots because you never paid enough attention to notice.

I would like to try to renew and update this thread weekly in hopes that it will gain the larger attention of the community and push Blizzard into more effective action. I see everything. I know their guilds, characters, markets, and intervals. I can even guess from which countries they are from the default language names of their hunter pets.

If I had the power, I could personally spend 8 hours a day fixing this problem. I would ban them one by one, along with every character and account in their botting guilds. When I make a mistake, as all people do, I’ll use technical support and resources to evaluate appeals. However, I imagine this would seldom arise, as bots rarely appeal.

To find a bot, all one needs to do is camp 1 server then wait 15-20 minutes, Then when you get cut by a suspicious level 10 who cuts you repeatedly over an hour, wow armory the character. I check to see if it’s the same groups I know, in the same places, with the same pattern. These are sometimes entire communities built around gold selling. At other times, it’s simply unscrupulous individuals acting on their own.

How to report a bot: Do not post specific names in this forum; it’s against the rules.

  1. Add it to your friend’s list.
  2. Find, target, or highlight the character; click Report Player.
  3. Select “cheating” as the reason. Highlight “Botting”. Then you are free to comment.

How to spot a bot:
The people utilizing the robots are employing all kinds of tricks to hide and cheat:

  1. The bots are in chromie-time phase at the Shrine of the Two Moons. The worst AH bot offenders are currently horde.
  2. They are using special alt-code character names in clever ways to make them difficult to add or check on armory. Use Google Search for a list of alt codes.
  3. They are almost always level 10 allied races or Pandaren DK, without any in-game achievements, mounts or pets. They have nothing to lose in-game.
  4. They are unlocking garrisons where nobody can report them unless you write to hacks@blizzard.
  5. They are using rogues, unstealthing to post, then signing out.
  6. They are using level 1 characters so they can’t be checked on wow armory.
  7. The same botters/communities are using multiple bots/instances to list the same or different items.
  8. The people using bots do this because it takes 45-60 minutes to cycle through all servers, depending on the volume of inventory.
  9. Also, their items sell, and they are not physically there to cross-trade/restock the items.
  10. When one bot gets banned, they don’t lose all their inventory.
    Hence, we observe a situation, for example, where 3 level 10 Pandaren Death Knights, with the same “types” of names and the same 40 achievement points, in the same guild, cut one another, in the same markets, on the same server in, let’s say, 15 minute intervals.

A.) Items CURRENTLY being farmed and listed by bots:
There were many more items throughout 2023 as a whole.

Mounts and Mogs
Goldenmane Reins, Chewed on Reins of the Terrified Pack Mule, Captured Dune Scavenger, Great Sea Ray, Teebu Scorching Straight Sword, Self-Rotating Dagger of Xing, Treiya’s Shining Pillar, Decapitator of Alireza, Shtuf’s Ruler, Klontzas’ Precise Pummler, Ballista of Buried Kings, Locke’s Essential Scepter, Jenrette’s Jagged Warglaive, Zink’s Subtle Shank, Hishtar’s Severe Stiletto, Ulfius’ Calming Claymore.

  1. There are more that I am not 100% sure about posting. It’s hard to know for sure what is farm/botted unless it’s in extraordinary amounts, for abnormal prices, consistently with the same characters or botting guilds listing the items.

These robots are using a combination of crafting, farming, buying, and flipping these items.
Here’s what I mean by “flipped”: For example, let’s say “Minion of Grumpus”, can neither be crafted nor farmed for 11 more months. However, the AH bots are using their gold to buy these, bring them to servers where prices are higher, and list them endlessly every 15-30 minutes. I know this because they bought them off of me.

With the BFA farm bots, we have AH bots buying the mounts that are spam listed, then spreading them to every server and posting 24/7. Bots, buying off bots – it’s gotten that bad.

B.) Items CURRENTLY being crafted, possibly farmed (the materials), “flipped” and listed by Auction House Robots.

Mounts
Goldenmane Reins, Chewed on Reins of the Terrified Pack Mule, Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger, Captured Dune Scavenger, Xiwyllag ATV, Minion of Grumpus, Mechano-Hog.

Toys & Illusions
Illusion Primal Frost, Primal Fire, Primal Earth, Primal Air, Primal Mastery, and Jewelcraft

Crafted Transmogrifications
Wanderer’s Guide, Skullstone Bludgeon, Smoked Fireshooter, Phantom Blade, Square Holders, Nightfall, Felsteel Longblade, Ghost Iron Staff, Fiery Vengeance, Venomreaver, Deepdive Helmet, Nerubian Persuader, Blade Unholy Might, Gurubashi Poker, Midnight Graze, Soulscryer, Axe of Sundered Bone.
The Shadowlands Legendaries that are now effectively used for Transmogfication.

I imagine they will eventually sell all the “Narrax” and “Zul Gurub” mogs; they are likely limited by the huge cost of investment to craft and sit on them all. Every other day, I see “them” enter a new market on many or most servers.

Drop Transmogrifications
Hope Ender, Exodar Life Staff, Talon of the Tempest, Ethereum Nexus Reaver

Please feel free to add to this list, as long as you are 99% sure.
Please go into the chromie phase or whatever you need to do to find and report these bots.
I’d link their guilds and names, but I can’t do that here, and they are always changing anyway.
Thank you for your attention. I hope it was an enlightening read.

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I didn’t think of adding them to the friends list, but it is an interesting idea. I’d be interested to see someone adding a ton of bots to friends list on an empty friends list character and then reporting each bot, and then finding how many are still active after a month, year, etc.

For the comment, I think the best is something like “suspected bot activity in [location you’re in]”

Some places I’ve seen a LOT of bots (even in dragonflight) are Bastion and popping in and out of the heart of fear pandaria raid (presumably to farm gold in that first room over and over).

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I’m all for stopping botting but it has been a problem for far longer than a year. Botting has been a problem all the way back to TBC when I first started. I used to get in-game mail from gold sellers weekly back in TBC

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Yeah, we know. About 18 years more than that, actually.

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Whispers, party invites, and mail. All day long. Everyday for months. An BC I remember you fondly. Just not that part.

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Well, this Auction House botting program and selling of crafted items is fairly recent. I heard these existed in the past, but I had not seen anything on this level before. They block you from selling anything, unless you are willing to go so low in price that their settings won’t cut you. This number is usually under 1000 gold or no profit at all.

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Bot have been a thing since release. Bliz does deal with them, but not on your schedule. But thinking it can be eliminated is naĂŻve at best. As said many times, it is an arms race. There is no ultimate solution.

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To be honest, I don’t understand why it has to be this insurmountable undoable task. I’ve played hundreds of games where there are no bots or they are summarily eliminated.

There are also tactics Blizzard could employ to better curtail the them.

Here’s an idea – a mount like “Captured Dune Scavenger” which is a 1 in 2000 drop – after the first drop, make it 1 in 10,000 till daily lockout is over. Realistically few people will ever get that drop twice in one day … unless they are a tireless robot that doesn’t ever need to eat or sleep.

There are things Blizzard could do, it seems they don’t care enough to innovate.

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Blizz makes too much money off the entire pretense of fighting cheats. I wouldn’t doubt there are sanctioned bots buying permission from blizz insiders. They think we are too stupid to see it.

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No way, in fact, the entire AH should be region wide.

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There is a raw gold farm on the Gilneas quest that is heavily exploited. If you don’t proceed with the quest then the mobs constantly “hyper-spawn” and drop raw gold. I saw a bunch of bots farming this already and it will only get worse. Once you complete the quest you are phased out and thus unable to see/report them.

Botting will never be stopped and Blizzard is not really that incentivized to stop it either. If they saw it as a bigger issue they would have put more systems in place to help mitigate it by now.

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Opinion, no factual basis.

Real people also use special codes. It doesn’t make it hard to check an armory. lol

Opinion.

They are throw away accounts, a dime a dozen.

You can still report someone in a garrison.

lol because this will stop them from being caught.

Why does it matter if you check their armory? What are you supposed to see?

I can’t even finish going through this but this is just a bunch of opinions and a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t even make sense.

lol

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How do you report someone in Garrison when they need to speak to you or you need to be able to click on and target them to report?

As to your question of why use armory – I think my lengthy essay detailed this fairly well.

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an armory proves nothing, my armory looks like one of your supposed bots.

hacks@blizzard.com

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Your armory does look like one of them – but it does not as well.

It’s not the armory that proves, someone is a bot. It’s listing every 15 minutes for 24 hours a day seven days a week. Then only disappearing for a few hours after downtime.

It’s when I can sit on a server and say, “Okay it signed off at 3:01 this one is on a 17 minute rotation it should sign on at 3:18 PM” and it does.

Its when I go and find them, and I see them run in the exactly same circle with the exact same pattern and take 42 seconds to list every time.

Its when I drag mobs into two shrines to kill their level 10’s instantly – they don’t respawn or post all night.

It when they are listing 10 million gold in inventory on another Bnet, when they could just use another license. That is because they don’t want to lose their main account with the recipes and ability to craft.

Then when I check armory – I see a profile like yours – in a guild of 300 other profiles … just like yours.

Or maybe they are not a bot and just account sharing? Either way account sharing is against TOS and all humans need to sleep.

you can’t make this stuff up …

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Blizzard doesn’t really care. If they wanted to truly stop it, they could.

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that seems true. it would be easy to have their system flag certain behaviors as suspicious and have a GM take a look at the character. bots really do one thing when you think about. they stay within a designated area and carry out an action for long, perhaps inhuman lengths of time. so if an account is standing within 50 or 100 yards of a AH 20 hours a day (and they can have it so the tally would NOT reset with log offs) or farming in nazmir for 16 hours a day, flag that account and have a GM take a look.

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I can tell them 3 spots to sit and watch… They could ban hundreds… They don’t care

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If I see what’s obvious botting I report it.

Now that’s said and done.

So you’re encouraging camping.

Not adding bots to friends list. Friends list is for just that, my friends.

Honestly sounds like you are stalking people on most of this.

It’s simple, see it report it but you don’t need to jump through hoops like you’re working at a circus to get it .

Have fun on your crusade.

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On the upside, bots keep things somewhat affordable. LOL