How to end bots

Ummm attack em with your spells or weapons?

How to end drug sales:

Execute everyone who buys drugs then the dealers will go out of business.

See what I did there?

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While I understand your analogy, there’s a big difference between ending someone’s life and denying them access to a game. Furthermore, I don’t think comparing buying gold to substance addiction really makes sense.

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If you want to solve a problem, you attack the root cause, not the symptoms. That’s the point here.

Bots have made it impossible to farm certain things and have killed prices on a lot of farmables for the average player. Fix those things first then see what the game looks like.

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The solutions to the bottom problem aren’t a mystery blizzard just isn’t doing anything about it.

The root cause is players buying gold. Players caused this. Bots and gold sellers are a response

Blizzards lack of caring about classic caused this buddy sorry to burst your bubble.

Blizz cares about money. Subs pay either as players pr bots. Get rid of cheating players and bots dry up. So my bubble is not burst

I mean. It would totally work.

Fix the hacks that bots use to farm.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/fix-flyteleport-hacking-now/

Bots are the symptom not the cause. The root of the problem is the demand for buying gold. Actiblizz has been very lax on punishing people caught buying gold.

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I don’t think tracking gold is as simple as you make it out to be.

They do, fairly regularly. I’ve put eyeballs on a few hacker/botter forums to get an idea of the scope of the problem, and things are changed fairly regularly. Blizzard just can’t keep up with the hackers, because once they do make changes, the hackers can see the changed data in memory and alter their code accordingly.

Plus, making any announcements to that effect would basically be telling bot writers it’s time to push an update.

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The fly and teleport hack that botters use to farm herbs and instances/raids has existed since Classic launch despite being reported with ample video evidence countless times.

I am advocating for that specific teleport/fly hack to be fixed server-side.

That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s not a hack. It’s an effect of hacks. There’s no single point of vulnerability that Blizzard is failing to patch; character position on the map is determined by both client and server side code. If you have access to the client (you do, since it runs on your computer), and a knowledge of x86 assembly language and memory structure, you can dump memory and decode the message passing. You can then send fake messages that convince the server side that your movement is valid map movement when it isn’t. This is why they don’t just spawn 200 Black Lotuses into their bank; that code is entirely on server side.

It’s like aiming cheats in FPS games. The best you can really do is squash specific vulnerabilities and hope that the penalties deter most of your playerbase from using them. Does Blizzard need to do more on the enforcement side? Probably yes. But I doubt they’re sitting on their hands here.

Terrible Solution. What they should do is a combination of the following.

  1. Legitimize gold buying; like they do in retail.
  2. Increase world herb/ore spawns dramatically.
  3. Nerf consumables or make less of them be relevant.
  4. Don’t create items like edge masters.

Now hardly anyone cares about bots because they don’t effect your ability to get what you want out of the economy.

Ban the buyers and not the dealers? We already found out the hard way that doesn’t help here in the US.

I buy gold from Blizzard all the time.

Both sellers an buyers need to be booted

OP, solid idea. Players that buy gold and gold buying apologist are the only ones against the idea of cheaters being heavily penalized. If you want people to follow the rules and not purchase gold, one of the best ways of doing that is to send a clear message that they will lose their account if they do.

I have zero sympathy for players feed the bot machine. They know what they’re doing is wrong, and how it negatively affects the game we love. If they want to swipe mommy’s CC to gain an advantage, go do it in another game that’s not this one.