Is Blizzard aware of or doing anything to actively combat the incredible amount of bots that are popping up on HC servers? I’ve played for a bit over a decade and have seen my fair share of them popping up in the past sure. Today in Dun Morogh I have sat for the last 30 minutes watching a literal endless stream of bots (hunters) taking the exact same path, with similar garbled names. A troll mob will pop up and suddenly 12 hunters all turn and all press Hunters Mark → Auto Shot → Serpent Sting.
Truly, log on to a toon that starts in Dun Morogh, go to the bottom left side of starting zone at level 1 where the trolls are and just… stand there.
I’ve not had any issues with bots on HC. To your question, yes, Blizzard releases a report monthly regarding the number of overall WoW accounts they take action against for various ToS issues, including botting. Blue posts go up each month pertaining to these reports.
The issue there is the money involved in botting. Gold selling is a big business and it’s pretty easy to create a new email address and pay for a new WoW account. Blizzard has a massive hill to climb with their current process but I have yet to see anyone arrive at a solution that makes a difference without affecting regular players negatively.
Simply stated, enough is not being done to combat this issue, it needs far more serious attention than it is receiving. I’d expect Blizzard to have a much better grasp on this due to the simplicity of identifying the actions as bot behavior. I mean it is literally stand in dun morogh by a box and watch all of them hit the corner and immediately pop a left turn in unison level bad.
Put a rock in the way, a ledge, a random event that changes the ui so a bot is ineffective, something.
Hire people to be in-game and ban them because the bots don’t really hide themselves very well beyond going into instances. On my server Scholo currently has 13 people in Scholo; and they’re all under level 50. You could blindly ban them and the chance of getting a real player is about as close to 0% as you can get, but I’d wager it’d only take roughly 5 minutes to verify they are all bots first. Instead they are left to their own devices because players don’t really see them and Blizzard doesn’t do any active management.
Oh and on that note how about letting us report for botting in the who list; like it is actually braindead stupid of them not to allow this. They are literally making it easier for bots to get away with it. I report them as player name violations, but I have no idea if it goes to the right person and I have seen others say “Well I can’t report them for botting so I don’t”
Botters are so aware of how little active management Blizzard does that they used to, and still probably do, form guilds up to make it look more like they are real players because they know if they do that players won’t report them and that means they get left alone. Classic had an obvious problem with massive rogue/mage guilds that eventually became DK filled guilds and I can promise you for every legitimate rogue/mage or DK only guilds that existed there was a thousand ones that were just bots.
Bots are extremely complex these days and capable of making basic decisions like pathing. I’ve seen devs speak of the old way to catch bots was to do things like put a rock in the way and then someone could come by to ban the pile of bots. Put a rock in the way today and they will go around it.
I unintentionally caught a bot once because I tapped a vein and refused to loot it as someone came up behind me and I figured he’d take the hint to buzz off, but he just sat there indefinitely until I figured it out. The point is clearly bots could still get trapped if Blizzard could put a fake node in there to trap them, but then even if they did botters would just put a timer into their bot that says if failure to loot a node after X time occurs to move on.
No matter what Blizzard does it’s a constant game of cat and mouse, but the big issue is Blizzard doesn’t devote human resources to actively managing bots and instead just do massive banwaves which means the playerbase suffers in the interim.
I’m not trying to truly trash Blizzard here, but these bots aren’t doing complex actions. I implore you to log in to specifically a dwarf or gnome character in Dun Morogh and just watch. I’m talking dozens upon dozens of garbled name toons taking the exact same path. People spam discuss it in general, it is the exact same motions, paths, actions. If what you say is true and the bots are somehow complex to notice via current systems then design a new one.
Why can they not for example have something that checks and or flags if numerous characters take the exact same path over the course of a long period of time? If a string of toons take the same actions and hit the exact same x,y coords on repeat, at least check it out. Sure, 1-2-5 characters may take an identical path every hour or so, but this is dozens per 30 minute interval.
They do follow preset paths, but they are also capable of getting around them if need be. Blizzard could absolutely try it again if they wanted, but I imagine it’d be an easy solution for them to circumvent if push came to shove.
And to be clear I am not defending Blizzard in any capacity.
For all that Blizzard is doing wrong in fighting bots there is no silver bullet. There is no solution that makes botters go “Oh they beat us” and give up.
Blizzard starts banning based on a specific path; they change the path.
Blizzard starts focusing on mages/rogues/hunters; they switch to paladins and priests.
Blizzard starts mass banning bots pickpocketing in Stocks; they change their farm spot.
This isn’t something that can ever be beat, and it’s definitely not a set it and forget it procedure. What is required to trump bots in real time is real people doing active management on the bots.
They won’t give up, they’ll never not be a thing, but Blizzard could absolutely be doing better instead of being idle about it because they only catch them in mass banwaves.
This. Earlier this week the layers were removed. Bots could then be observed everywhere in the starting zones. Some running in packs of 5 or more. They used random letter names. All were dwarf hunters killing most of the quest mobs. The layers came back and now its back to hardly ever seeing a bot. Not sure how the bots manipulate the layering this way. Possibly they have discovered a loophole to not show to the general player base when layering is on. Lately we have had about 3 layers on DP.
the problem is will, not capability.