Its simple. Since these bots are running pvp to gain honor and then turn around and buy epic gems to sell for gold then turn around and sell the gold for $$$… How to stop this? Either completely remove epic gems from the pvp vendor OR make them BOP. Its as simple as that.
5 Likes
so why do you think they don’t do it? do you think the botting companies secretly infiltrated the executive boards and are pulling the strings?
OR, and bear with me here, Blizzard just plops a few GMs in BGs. I’m really, really, really not a fan of punishing legitimate players because Blizzard chooses to be cheap and lazy.
2 Likes
Here’s a better idea. They hire 1 dude on minimum wage to police BGs. This would easily ban 100x more than whatever they’re doing now, and probably be cheaper too.
4 Likes
wont they ask to be payed, though?
maybe it can be outsourced to cheap-labor places.
I always think about Steam’s Easy Anti cheat.
So Blizzard used to have something similar back the in day. But a lot of grown dudes cried, as it was “invading their privacy”. But it was identical to steam’s anti cheat as far as I can tell. It was an app running on the background scanning for malicious applications.
So, blizzard could get their hands on said hacks, figure out how to catch it in system’s trey and pop auto bans.
Some people say, “hacks don’t work on pservers”. The hacks you’re referring to, like 2010 Hitchhiker’s hacks don’t work on Blizzard’s realms either. And no one bots on 2k pop pservers, as there is no $$$. Not nearly to the extend there is on here.
Why do people buy gold? To buy gear.
RMT exists in all versions of WOW. SoD is flooded like we’ve never seen before. Thought Wrath was bad? Oh boy. BFD gdkps are like a honeypot for botters.
The only reason there bots, as
- There are lot of customers for gold.
- Blizzard does indeed have pretty poor anticheat in place (if any).
There are 3 options:
- Invest into a really good anticheat.
- Start PERMA BANNING buyers. Not 3 days. Not a week. Not a month. Permanently. Forever.
- Ban GKDPs - remove the need for gold. people will stop buying said gold.
3 Likes
Literally a team of 10 dudes being paid 20$ an hour working on three shifts could police the more popular servers to the point where the bots are being banned so fast it’s flat out not profitable to keep botting. These characters don’t get setup instantly, it takes 1-3 days of botting to get them to the point where they’re able to farm the gold. Literally ban them on character creation with a macro bound to the ‘1’ key. Made make an unban-last-ban macro bound to ‘2’ incase they miskicked.
LITERALLY just hire people to log into the damn game and ban the bots. A week of this and you’ll have 90% of them gone at max level and they’ll all be spam making new accounts. Found out how those accounts are being created and block that while just sticking a dude at the character creation location and banning them the second they move and it’s obviously a bot.
You can even quickly log over to the dead servers, /who, and ban 99.99% of the bots instantly on those servers because they’re so dead.
Like this is NOT rocket science. Just good ol’ fashioned man power to fix this issue. Blizzard could completely address this problem for like 400k/year in salary costs. Hell the guys they hire could work from home. Blizzard fired all their CS staff in like 2018 and it really shows.
2 Likes
Or they can simply have GM’s in the game.
1 Like
check this out
SoD bots
youtube com/watch?v=Figo46xCT84&ab_channel=BRAD
I honestly think they dont care.
They can message into the middle ground and give slap bans. But bots are revenue.
Likely a majoriry of the playerbase likes the game more due to the gold available for purchase and available for use in gdkp.
Bots farm raw materials and drive the prices down.
Some players adamantly hate it. And maybe quite a large number of players probably dont like it if asked but probably dont care enough to really discuss it much past that. And another chunk actively engages in the market enabled by bots.
There are many solutions. Even player based systems where players can have instant feedback ingame for marking players as bots triggering some captcha like appeal on the bot side. And penalties (less access to the instant banning) for false positives.
There are so many possible ways to solve it nearly overnight. But i think the accounting bottom line is bots are more revenue.
They may lose some subs to disgruntled players over the state of botting in their re-release of 15-20 year old expansions but its likely a drop in the bucket compared to what they would lose if they actually dealt with the problem.
1 Like
Warden, as the “anti cheat” was called wasn’t cancelled cause “it invaded peoples privacy” (although it did and the EU would’ve come down on them like a ton of bricks), it was cancelled cause it had every problem Captchas do.
It doesn’t do squat vs bots who program their way around it but hits actual players with false flags constantly.
Updates to Warden were circumvented by bots in less than a day but if it falsely flagged some program it punished real players hard.
This is the actual war vs bots you can’t win.
Blizzard could offer unpaid intern positions to do nothing but monitor bot activity. Give them the tools and training to spot bots and ban them on the spot. Considering how many people jump at the opportunity to alpha/beta test their content for free I doubt they would have any problem finding people to fill these roles.
I know they like to do banning in waves, but sadly doing that gives the bots plenty of time to ruin economies and disrupt gameplay for other players.
I love how zero people with actual real life experience in say a hacks department has ever given this idea credit. Almost like it would be a pointless exercise
1 Like
You say that. But most actual players in a bg can identify the bots that are currently running rampant in seconds. And solidly confirm within minutes. (Most of those minutes being waiting for the gates to open)
These arent elaborate hacks players are using during their own play. Like in fps/moba games. If blizzard actually started to take more direct action maybe it would force the devs for the bots to itterate in attempts to avoid detection. But we arent even at the “its an arms race and we cant let bots quickly itterate to avoid detection” blizzard has seemingly given up they may take some meta action after weeks of reports but bots are a rampant persistent issue.
They are choosing the laziest solution. Acting like they are solving a problem when everyone can observe the problem isnt remotely being solved.
Bots are revenue. “Solving” the problem costs money. PR posts are easy and meaningless.
What could is a department, let’s say of 50 people do with over 2 million bots?
If it really, really was that easy there would be 1 company at the very least employing it. So why is it no one in any hacks department has ever advised that approach?
We arent complaining about hacks here. We are complaining about bots. Very basic waypoint bots. Obvious to players.
Idk wtf you are on about with “hacks departments” you blowhard weirdo
1 Like
If there are over 2 million bots, Blizzard has really, really dropped the ball.
At any rate, Blizzard has said they do not auto ban. I don’t know if I believe that or not, but for the sake of argument let’s say that’s the case. This means that every report they receive they investigate and review. So instead of monitoring the game first hand, they rely on reports which they have to individually investigate anyway. If Blizzard is telling the truth, they individually ban each and every bot. Not only that, but the process is slowed and needlessly convoluted. And this is better than having those GMs in the game?
Can you explain that logic?
Can you explain the logic that makes auto banning bots a smarter practice than in waves?
And also why no other company does that?
Why has no one in a hacks department ever advised auto banning as best practice?
I think you need to read things better.
you’re angry that a department is reviewing the reports?
Instead of what floating into the server and watching someone? How is that better than reading actual data?