Thing is bots have always been a problem! Sure you see them more and more now that a lot of these mats are in such demand now.
As long as you have those who buy gold. Do not want to take the time to farm the stuff they need you will have bots in the game. Either being run by fellow players or by hackers using them to make gold to sell to their clients.
So report them and move on. They do track them and try to figure out better ways to detect them and if part of a hacker group track all those connected and shut them down. Remember the hacks have 100's of stolen accounts to work from, shut one down and then have a lot more to just replace them.
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Time to stop boosted characters from herbing and mining IMO until they do some other human activities.
Seems that being on 90% of every day and gathering a bazillion herbs is not triggering anything.
Moved location 3 times today when herbing because the number of bots. Mostly boosted druids but also a few other classes. All have the same zig-zag movement and they stop at every possible node spawn place whether a herb or mining node there or not. Can tell if they just stopped for no reason because no gathering skill is cast.
A lot have also turned experience off that way their 110 boosted gear does not diminish.
Explains how some sellers on the AH have 20 darkmoon decks for sale non-stop.
By the time this gets fixed (if ever) the damage will be done.
Seems that being on 90% of every day and gathering a bazillion herbs is not triggering anything.
Moved location 3 times today when herbing because the number of bots. Mostly boosted druids but also a few other classes. All have the same zig-zag movement and they stop at every possible node spawn place whether a herb or mining node there or not. Can tell if they just stopped for no reason because no gathering skill is cast.
A lot have also turned experience off that way their 110 boosted gear does not diminish.
Explains how some sellers on the AH have 20 darkmoon decks for sale non-stop.
By the time this gets fixed (if ever) the damage will be done.
11/03/2018 08:06 AMPosted by SixofnineTime to stop boosted characters from herbing and mining IMO until they do some other human activities.
While some of these may be boosted characters, the majority of them are from stolen accounts. When they shut one down, another pops-up.
Be sure that you are right-clicking and report for cheating. That's how you get Blizzard's attention to the bots.
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No you didn’t. Unless you too were on 24/7.
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They will shut down the accounts when they are ready to knock out the bot program.
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I have to admit that the botting problem is getting more and more out of hand. It’s to the point that on my two main servers that I rarely bother to farm herbs anymore because of all the bots cutting the amount of herbs down significantly per route.
Is it really that hard to break a program? (Legit question)
Is it really that hard to see that X account only runs its 110 druid at X farming spot for unlikely amounts of time in a row without ever stopping or deviating off path, sends the herbs to another toon that sits at the AH, lists sometimes tens of thousands of herbs at a time, and then transfers huge amounts of gold around in extremely suspicious dealings, and on top of all that never experiences any of the content outside of a few herb farming routes? Those of us that have herbed for hundreds, or even thousands of hours in BFA feel pretty insulted that this suspicious activity isn’t being dealt with in a timely fashion. The last time (A couple of months ago) I saw that I wasn’t seeing the same bots, presumably from a ban wave, new ones with a slightly different route were up and running already. If a handful of crooks can outsmart and code bots better and faster than the best and brightest Blizzard has to offer, what does that say?
My uneducated suspicion is that the answer is that botting isn’t being taken very seriously now at a time when Blizzard/Activision is cutting staff in numerous areas just to see how far they can push it before incurring major backlash from players. I do understand that it’s a company that has to make money, but when you post record earnings, and then cut staff, well that just looks plain greedy.
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Except it’s not “a handful of crooks.” It’s a black market “service” hosted in countries outside U.S. legal jurisdiction that has a vested financial interest (to the tune of millions of dollars ) in building a better mouse to get around Blizzard’s better mousetraps. Blizzard is in a cold war with those people, and the only way to make it go away permanently is for players to stop giving the criminals money and to secure their accounts.
As that’s pretty much impossible and never going to happen, because of human nature in today’s society, Blizzard combats them in the most efficient way possible. That does not include playing whack-a-mole with the bots. Doing so will only help to hammer out the flaws in the programs, telling them what got them caught so they can correct them and make them harder to detect.
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As a matter of fact, it is, because none of those things are inherently indicative of a bot, none of those things say anything about how the programs work, and most of those things are very anecdotal and aren’t verifiable or falsifiable in the event of appeals, among other problems with these kinds of shallow, and deeply mistaken, understandings of how these things work that posts like this tend to reflect.
People, especially frustrated people, have a tendency to see bots everywhere, which is dangerous because then it will seem like nothing is done and create apathy.
In the whole scope of things, it actually is quite timely. You’re just not privy to all the timelines and details, nor do you really seem to understand the process and what ‘timely’ means in that context.
Well, at least you admit it’s uneducated, but it’s actually straight up wrong. Blizzard does take security seriously.
Sigh.
Okay, let’s be clear here: Activision is not the same thing as Activision Blizzard. It is not Activision that ordered layoffs, and not Activision Blizzard who make bad games like Call of Duty 26 (Black Ops 4). Activision Blizzard is a holding company, means it handles stocks for a number of companies. It ordered the layoffs to King, Blizzard and Activision who’re all divisions and have thus far been operating fairly autonomously.
Quoting myself.
That statement is wrong in multiple places. First off, the layoffs are over. It was that one instance, and that’s done. It’s not ongoing.
Second off, that hyperbole doesn’t even come close to the why. The reason for AB ordering the layoffs isn’t one that many of their consumers have agreed with, but it’s certainly not “just to see how far they can push it”.
Yes.
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Yes. What they do to “break” the bot program has to minimally impact legitimate players. Back when the gold-sellers were “writing” their URL in dead characters in the sky Blizzard took a while to stop it. That’s because all the initial resolutions would have locked characters on a single plane. No going up hill. No going down hill. No using stairs. Blizzard had to find a way to stop this graffiti but still let players play.
Pure speculation on your part. Some of that would also encompass large guilds that have characters that farm materials for their main raiding groups. If it is always a 110 druid, it’s level-locked. An “expense” and time consuming step a botter wouldn’t waste time on. I know I leveled pretty quick just running around there on any character with herbing.
You only speak for yourself. Don’t presume to speak for anyone else.
Definitely. Your statements would have looked less educated if you had actually educated yourself on what was happening.
It’s Activision-Blizzard that is the holding company, not the game developer. Blizzard is the game developer of WoW.
Not game development. They are expanding game development. If you had bothered to research it, you would know this.
When players only look at the part of something that supports their agenda, they miss the important information that disproves it. Yes. people were made redundant. It is not pleasant. I really feel for those that no longer have those jobs. However, if you check the jobs listings at Blizzard, they are looking for more in other areas. Especially in Game Development. It was not the money-grab issue that players like yourself have made it out to be.
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Which wouldn’t have stopped them anyway - I recall a period when they were lying in the street outside Stormwind AH to spell their URLs.
OP, if you have herbed literally thousands of hours in BFA - that’s on average several hours every day - then you probably look like a bot to some people. That’s one reason they don’t just go “oh, looks bottish, ban it.”
It was after that. They had them up in the air.
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My reports seem to be doing nothing why?
From my experience they do a mass ban all at once. At least that’s what I’ve seen happen. These things do take time though, but believe me when I say it does happen.
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I don’t think people often realize the scope of botting. Blizzard isn’t fighting Bob in the Basement; they’re fighting a well-equipped, well-funded criminal business that makes a lot of money off of people’s poor choices.
Bots run on complicated programs that the criminals constantly update to keep ahead of the curve. That program is what Blizzard wants to break, so it can’t be used anymore in WoW.
Just banning the account won’t break the program, and banning the account won’t stop the botter. They’ll just grab another compromised account and start again, and they have a lot of compromised accounts queued up.
This isn’t a single guy with a few accounts; this is a criminal business with tons of people whose only job is to steal information and use it to make money. Botting is the least of what they do; they also steal credit cards, bank info, identities - anything to make money, because that money is very very good.
Report any bots you suspect, but also spread the word to your fellow gamers to not become a victim of their enterprise. Losing their accounts to a botter is the least of what these people are capable of.
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But you know what though, that would be an awesome idea.
Every time a bot or someone gets the ban hammer, a lighting bolt should come from the sky and hit them where they stand. Make it a bright blue or white lighting bolt that stands out.
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On the other hand bots help blizzard make money Pots cost so much gold that you are forced to buy a wow token.
And costs more money in chargeback fees from stolen credit cards. ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
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Except they don’t. The financial impact of compromised accounts is significant enough that it’s in Blizzard’s best interest to stop them. Charge-backs, the cost to pay GMs to restore accounts (which includes salaries and benefits), and the significant amount of time it takes to secure the code so people can’t hack it. Not cheap.
Players buying tokens doesn’t miraculously overcome that impact. Perhaps do some reading on the impact of identity theft before making an illogical comment.
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False information. In order to herb in BfA zones they need an active account. They use stolen credit-card numbers to activate those accounts. When the credit-card holder disputes the charge, Blizzard must pay it back plus a handling fee. All that is outside of the man-hours it takes to investigate and address reports about them.
If you find that pots are expensive, make an alchemist and make them yourself. It doesn’t require buying a WoW token.
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I’m sorry, but the suggestion that bots help Blizzard make money or can be viewed by the company as even remotely positive is laughably ridiculous. Such an idea illustrates a fundamental lack of understanding of who these people are.
First and foremost, the majority of botting/farming accounts are exploitative. They are usually compromised accounts (meaning they’ve been stolen from normal players, often who are currently inactive so aren’t aware of the theft), or they are created with stolen credit cards.
In both cases, dealing with fraudulent charges costs the company money. That isn’t counting the negative impact is has on normal players, who may get frustrated and quit playing because they don’t want to deal with bots, gold sale advertisers, etc.
No, we certainly don’t make money from them and the amount of resources dedicated towards efforts to deal with them is substantial.
Given the entirely unnecessary resurrection from 4 months ago, I think this one should be closed. Thanks all.
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