I’ve run into the same toons for weeks, I keep reporting them every time I see them. Action taken = 0.
Become a streamer and report him.
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Have you considered the possibility that you’re reporting real players who play like bots? There are many of those. If you don’t believe me, check out the slew of complaints over the newly added instance cap.
Also, there’s this:
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Blizzard does have to investigate. They are not simply going to take your word for it.
For a Small Indie company like Blizzard that can take some time.
Maybe they’re not bots after all
Imagine what kind of game this would be if Blizzard just took players’ words for it and banned everyone that got reported as bots because some people missed a few plaguebloom and couldn’t find any other excuse.
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Thank you for coming here and defending Blizzard, level 120 shaman. However, it took months for them to “investigate” and ban these accounts. Months in which these accounts were used to ruin server economies and grief real players to no end. Months in which these accounts were able to profit so much that they didn’t care their accounts got banned, because they simply bought new ones and started over. New ones that will take months to “investigate” and have action taken against them.
As far as your “players playing like bots” comment, I know. I am one of them. What I DON’T do, however, is be online 24/7. I don’t run back, rez and restart after I die in pvp. I DON’T have a very specific pathing that needs restarted after I kill one mob or hit a node.
But hey, thanks for your input, level 120 shaman.
I think this statement is accurate.
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Let me tell you a story about a player in my guild, we’ll call him Tum for this story.
Tum works from home but Tum has an extra monitor that he likes to keep WoW open on while working, he can keep up with chat or whatever else. Tum can’t play the game while he’s working but he can chat in the guild.
Tum decides to make some side money and just park his character at a lotus spawn while working, just keeping the timer and checking occasionally while working. Seems innocent enough but eventually he claims the spot as his own and makes a decent amount of gold.
Tum typically beats out the gold sellers when it pops in his spot and the gold sellers hate that, they’ll talk trash or show him their plethora of louts. Messages are shared and has a good laugh. Other players in the zone make the assumption that Tum must be a bot, how can one person stay in one spot for hours at end? Doesn’t make sense to them. They message him the nasty things we think about bots, he doesn’t take it to heart and has a good laugh.
Those players still not convinced he’s not a bot decide to start reporting him along telling him “my Uncle works at Blizzard”, that type of nonsense. One day while Tum is at his spot, he randomly gets teleported across the map. Looks like the GM’s finally decided maybe Tum is a bot, but Tum was there and shouts at the clouds that he’s not a bot. Thankfully the GM recognized that Tum wasn’t a bot and no action was taken.
To this day, Tum is still at the spot he’s been at for months. The gold sellers still get salty. Other players still assume he’s a bot but Tum persists. I imagine some of those players might be pissed and tempted to make a thread like this one wondering why this Tum scum hasn’t been banned but it’s because he’s not breaking any rules. He’s just playing in a way that seems foreign to you and that’s not against the rules.
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Blizzard does have to investigate, to see if it is actually a bot, or if someone is just salty because they got to the rich thorium veins before them. If it is a bot, then they need to investigate to see how the bot is operating, to find a way to break it. Once they know they can break it, they do ban waves and slip a hotfix in that breaks those bots, keeping people from just getting a new account and botting again.
That takes time, especially the coding, since you want to find a script that will break the bots but won’t also, say, crash game clients.
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That would be more applicable if this were something like Runescape, where actually playing the game is pretty much being a bot at times, particularly with heavy skill grinding. But I guarantee you that no player is having pixel perfect repetition on their paths, where bots mostly do. Often, it’s complete with specific degree stop-and-turn rather than a more organic mouse control.
These are the accounts that get tons of reports and it never helps. Just look at the channel invite gold spam from a while back. That took months to fix. Thing is, even launch day vets didn’t even know the channel invite was a thing, so the only investigation that would have been required was whether a channel invite was sent that included the phrase gold, before it was auto flagged for review. We had to whine about it on every outlet for Blizz to even try.
Sorry. I forgot that I was on that character. I don’t know what my class and level have to do with botting, though. I’m not defending Blizzard. I don’t have to. I’m just pointing out that they already did a fine job of addressing your concerns, but you’re choosing to cover you ears, close your eyes, and yell, “I can’t hear you!!! Why aren’t you banning mah bots? Why aren’t you reading mah reports?!?”
Then you have no problem with Blizzard banning you for a few weeks or even months while they process your report and investigate your case, right? Because that’s essentially what you’re asking them to do.
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Or a SMALL company that bans 70,000 bots in a month.
Exxon has tens of thousands of employees. Blizzard has 300 or so.
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If so, then it’s not a very sophisticated bot.
Again, that’s a very weak bot. If this is the level at which bots operate in WoW, then maybe I could make a killing programming bots, lol.
You must have a lot of time on your hands if you’re able to observe player patterns to the location and degree of their turn points.
Note: This should go without saying, but I was absolutely joking about programming bots. Besides exposing me to the ban hammer, it would take all the fun out of the game.