Every single mining node has twenty or so bots descending upon it at every time.
This is getting out of hand. Blizzard needs to do something about this garbage. Clearly this “ban waves every 60 years” doesn’t help because in the meanwhile bots just go ham.
Ban waves need to be weekly, or maybe even more frequently.
Machine learning should be used to flag players who are following suspicious patterns for human investigation. I mean, with every bot following the same path, this shouldn’t be terribly hard to implement. The algorithm shouldn’t be able to issue discipline on its own, but should be able to at least trigger a human to investigate.
Oh and MS/Blizzard need to actually RETAIN A FREAKING CS/QA TEAM for things like this. Maybe don’t lay off these sorts of jobs?
Real players like myself can’t even operate in that zone. Can’t get a mine when 20+ bots descend upon it and it despawns before you even find it in the crowd of randomly named untransmogged bots on renewed protodrakes.
Well the good news is that all those bots make the mats there cheap, So, it’s probably more time-efficient to farm the gold someplace else and just buy the mats.
For punishment to work as a deterrent it needs to be assured, swift, and just. Otherwise it’s just a cost of doing business.
Seems like there’s preferred shards that they operate on. And if they get a lot of flack they just marshal themselves or get marshaled to another shard where they aren’t as disruptive.
I feel like simply having /follow disable node gathering for as long as its active + X minutes afterwards would help with at least some of the least sophisticated approaches.
Preventing subsequent players with the same originating IP addresses and who have recently followed near-identical flight paths would also make bot-chains somewhat harder to implement.
Probably neither of these nor any others are bullet-proof, but the point is each additional hurdle makes it harder, limits the number of people who can do it, and may require those who still can to use compensating mechanisms that themselves leave clues to target in the next cycle.
The part about /follow seemed like a very good potential fix, to a degree. This, however, I think would cause issues for families and people who live and play together. Sometimes, instead of dungeoning, you just want to work on professions. I feel that this would hinder people who play together from the same house from being able to comfortably help each other with professions.
My best example of this is that, while botting very much is an issue, I also have seen a handful of players here and there where one dragonrides the other to nodes. These, I truly doubt are bots. They do collect the ore or herb, but not always at the same time. (They also, if attacked in PvP, have absolutely beat my character so hard not even Bwonsomdi could save her, despite having decently matched ilvls, but I don’t take that to mean very much given how bad I am at PvP). With two characters who very much seem to be getting played independently, I assume this handful of miners (or herb collectors) are genuinely two players; and, while they absolutely could not be under the same I.P. address, they also very much could be.
