I started fishing again, just trying to make some gold for MoP, when I ran into a player who was behaving very strangely. They would come up and fish from my pool. Normally, there might be someone who acts like that out of rudeness. But anyways, they would also fly in set paths, and they would turn like a robot making a sudden turn at a 120 degree angle. Another strange thing was that if me or other players would fish the last fish from the pool, they would sit there and continue fishing in the same spot. And finally, they refused to respond to Chat in /say and in whispers.
There was also several low level bots around. All level 5, and they had funky gibberish names like repeating letters.
Are bots starting to make a comeback? I haven’t seen this happening since Vanilla/TBC Classic.
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Yes there’s a big wave of fishing bots right now.
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Fishing a pool that someone’s already fishing in is just bad manners, I’ve mostly seen people avoid doing that but there’s always those few people that decide they’d rather fish 1 thing than to move to the next pool.
Sudden turns could be explained by having Routes and FarmHud enabled, I’ll be doing sudden turns when farming herbs/ore and the same can be said for fishing too because I use Routes, an addon that uses data from other addons like Gathermate to form the most optimal farming route so you don’t miss anything.
I use that alongside FarmHud, an addon that puts your minimap icons in the middle of your screen (such as handynotes, player markers, gathermate markers etc). With Routes, it puts the actual route in the middle too.
During TBC, where I fished the most, I used those addons. I’d assume a few of the people who saw me thought I was a bot at one point because I had youtube playing causing me to not hear whispers and I was at it for hours at a time.
hmm, level 5? Where are you fishing exactly? And with random characters like Hyfasdf… Those ones are 100% bots.
Bots are likely having a comeback, I’d assume that they’d want to get as much gold as they can for early MoP goldbuyers.
In Classic I did a fishing rotation for Milthril Bound Trunks and when I got to Feralas I kept seeing fishing bots along the shore of Feathermoon Stronghold, needless to say I reported all of them… I did get some mail saying that they got banned but I really hope that they all got banned.
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No, like their movement was very robotic and unnatural. They also flew in the exact same path back and fourth. Me and another player followed them for a good 10 minutes just watching them. We both tried to talk to this person, and didn’t get a response.
Also
This is what made me think that they’re botting. Me and the other player tested this out. The suspect in question would keep on fishing, even after the pool was gone. This is a huge red flag.
I’m not the kind of person who goes around accusing everyone, as I don’t believe I have seen many bots in Cata, if any.
As for the level 5’s, they were in Uldum. About 5 or 6 Warriors all with similar names, like mpmpmp (Not their toons name, just an example.)
I just don’t understand why people would risk their accounts getting banned over it :\
It’s likely not their main account, it’s likely just a throwaway account they bot on for to aquire gold then sell that gold for real money to get another account and the cycle goes on.
Yeah if it’s snapping and unnatural movment then they’re likely just bots, or they’re playing on a controller with notches however unlikely that may be.
Not to say they’re not bots, but if I’m watching something while fishing it’s likely that I’d do this too. Now, if it’s every pool that’s another thing, also if they’re “clicking” their bobber at very even intervals (like 7.5 seconds) then it’s 100% a bot.
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It was every pool. Each time they would come up and steal our spot, we managed catch the last fish at least 3 or 4 times, and every single time they would repeat the same behavior. Just standing there trying to fish with no pool.
Yeah, very bot like behaviour.
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Always remember, bots come in waves the same as they are banned in waves. Botting, and by extension banning them, is an arms race between “how do we bypass the most recent ban method” vs “how do we prevent them from coming back” that Blizzard can never win, only mitigate
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To be fair the arms race didn’t evolve as much as you’d think when for years Blizzard has done mostly the same thing. There is way more they can do, it’s mostly a question of how much you’re willing to sacrifice so bots/rmt don’t happen. If we go to the extreme and simply remove trading/ah most of them wouldn’t have a reason to exist for example.
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That’s very true. But ultimately, it’s because there are players who buy from these gold sellers. If they stopped doing that, then most of these botters would lose their power :\
Personally and that’s my own point of view (and probably more a philosophical approach) but you can’t blame human nature when it comes to this, people want to go the easiest way. There’s reasons why we have laws because they shape our society the same way as you can try to shape a game experience by having rules and at the end of the day a game is mostly an ensemble of rules.
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Most bots exist in WoW to fuel GDKPs. GDKPs are the reason most people RMT. GDKPs should be universally banned in more than just one version of the game.
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lots of level 5 bots in uldum fishing lavascale catfish
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cata on cruise control until summer no one cares about us rn
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I checked again lastnight, and there was more than 10 of them. All level 5 warriors, sitting there and fishing. And they all have bot-like names.
What makes this even worse is that you can’t even report them because the function to do so has been broken for months at this point.
Just like how Blizzard haven’t provided new realm data for the AH for the past 175 days.
Cataclysm has been abandoned, they don’t care and I honestly don’t think they’ll fix it in MoP either.
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We had a guy in a dungeon - halls of origination- a few days ago who wouldn’t respond, kept running to the left. He died in a pull, i rezzed him and he went on running left. I strongly suspect he was someone trying to bot.
For the first time I was the one originating a vote kick. It passed.
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Yes, I have a lot of bots added to my friends list to monitor them, they always surge whenever there is an expansion coming out… And blizzard does absolutely nothing about it. I’ve reported all of them many times, even written e-mails many times. They don’t give a %^&$ about the game’s integrity.
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It’s not broken. Blizzard disabled bot reporting unless you are right next to the bot back in TBC after they released level boosting(which was very popular with bots).
Blizzard 100% catered Classic to bots, gold sellers, and the whales looking to get boosted through end-game content.