I’m writing this after getting in another argument with people on another part of the internet about this.
If you find a bot out in the wild PLEASE, right click on them and go to ‘report player for cheating’ then type ‘bot’ in the text box.
This is a simple thing to do but many people think that it is pointless and doesn’t do anything, the reality is this engages software to check the client of the person you reported to see if they are running 3rd person software.
If found guilty then they will be banned, you will then likely receive a letter in your mail box confirming this in a week or so time.
The argument of “well the botter will just go make another account and do it again” is also stupid, as it costs money for the botter to make another account with a subscription, this digs into the botters earnings when their accounts get banned and the more of them that get banned the less profitable it is for them to bot.
Blizzard despite what people think actually work pretty hard to get rid of bots, the issue really comes down to actually finding them, this is an issue you as a player can help with whilst out in the wilds.
1 GM working an 8 hour shift could clean up 90% of the bots on the server in a single work shift.
This is a multi-billion dollar company you are talking about, they could easily hire a few workers to go around cleaning up bots manually before they actually cause significant damage to the economy, but they don’t, because their stock investors are more important than their players.
I just started playing again like last week and oh my mother of god the bots are ATROCIOUS. If they are honestly trying then they are beyond incompetent.
By checking botting hotspots and manually banning them.
It really isn’t that frigging hard.
If you can spot them, they can.
The fact you think bots are hard to detect shows how utterly clueless you are.
GMs have powers, they can teleport to any instance and anywhere in the world they want instantly.
Teleport to dire maul or stratholme, see a potential bot, do something wacky like shoot a bunch of fireworks infront of his face, continue doing weird things with your gm powers o bot check him, if he ignores it all ban, easy.
Bots farm the same locations, once you know the hot spots it really isn’t hard to just teleport there and ban the obvious bots.
Your trying make this sound alot harder than it really is.
Because it would cost this multi million dollar company millions of dollars.
There is an easy way to do things and a hard way, what you are suggesting is the hard way.
The easy way is to program software that does it automatically, however computing is not sophisticated enough to easily analyze player behavior to accurately ban the botters.
So they do both, this is why it is important for you to right click report people.
Im not the delusional one, you are for thinking blizzard are inherently evil.
If you can honestly look at the state of bots in the game and think they have any interest in seriously dealing with the issue, then nothing I say can change your mind.
Yet they have stated that they work hard to ban bots and have made multiple edits to their code to forcefully stop tens of thousands of bots from working in the ‘Bot ban waves’.