Recent Actions Against Exploitative Accounts

That would help the botters/hackers a bit more than they’d like to.

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What are you doing about bots, specifically?

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Y’all making a big leap assuming these bans are for RMTing and related to gold, and not for exploiting and cheating. Exploitative accounts doesn’t necessarily mean relating to gold selling/botting, there is a lot of cheating going on in PvP with people making thousands doing carries and win trading.

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If WoW Classic still exists in 2040, perhaps that will be enough time for somebody with a PhD in Advanced Game Design Theory with 30+ years of industry experience to figure out how to ban Death Knights with complex names like Qqfvsbx, Jkklmaanz, and Tybwxttot.

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Still the same principal identify why people are using those services and make it easier to achieve those goals. It’s simply supply/demand. Blizzard will never beat the supply of bots as many years has shown, but they can make it so people’s demand is less.

Also a bit confused by this, are they making money or gold and what are they doing with that? I honestly don’t get into PVP much, but it still sounds like a form of RMT unless they are just charging and stockpiling gold which I don’t know why someone would continuously pay for new accounts to bot if all they were doing is amassing gold.

With one important difference. When SE reports a number, I actually believe them.

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Shadowmourne pieces drop in 10-man.
No more demand for gold buyers.

Fin.

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Can we get some house cleaning in the PvP side of things? The bots are super thick out there and doing battle vs the terminator is not fun., frankly its a big turn off to Wrath.

Also consider banning entire battlenet accounts of people scripting.

Thanks

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If they ban the bots the que times are going to be 40 minutes again lmao. It’s honestly lose/lose at this point because Blizzard doesn’t address core issues with the game.

40 min Q’s for Honest matches?? Where do i Q up?

would not take long before word spreads that Arena is clean and honest again, the Zugs will come rushing in to play if they know they’re not battling the T1000 any more.

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Ban the buyers. You actually want to solve the problem make people afraid to buy gold.

No one I have ever had a candid conversation with about them buying gold has ever talked about being meaningfully punished. They have discussed receiving minimal penalties and sometimes failure to aftually claw back the gold after they get back in.

Until then nobody cares. Blizzard made misstep after misstep in managing bot levels in Classic and clearly whatever bots you shut down at this point is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The prevailing theory on why anyone amasses massive amounts of gold is to sell it, pretty much end of story. And in Classic where the value of gold is very mediocre (no WoW token until very recently) that should have been a clue to pretty much anyone with half a brain.

Guzu did some math about how much some people who lead GDKPs could be making if they were selling their gold and it came out to hundreds of dollars per raid in some cases. Now consider some people are running multiple a week if not a day and suddenly you can see the appeal of selling gold.

Now if people just want to carry people for gold because they want it that’s fine (win trading is obviously not). But a lot of people find ways to rake in ungodly amounts of gold that doesn’t pass the sniff test as to why they really want all that gold for legitimate purposes. Just look at what happened with Gallywix in retail. It was 100% legitimate until it suddenly wasnt.

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I absolutely agree, I watched the Guzu video when he released it and he really sheds light on it. I personally have done 1 10man gkdp since wrath launched and I hate it. Also you replied to my comment about PVP with PVE stuff. That comment was a reply to someone saying that PVP isn’t full of RMT.

That being said I do raid with a guy that has been trying to recruit me to GDKPs and it’s not a general population discord, but the top spender has spent 9,000,000 gold or 36,000$ (5000g WoW Token x 1800 Tokens). The next four spenders are within a million gold. Keep in mind this is just a few guys and just Ulduar. This is also pre tokens the prices haven’t seemed to go up from what I’ve looked at, but the token probably hasn’t been out that long to cause that much inflation tbh.

These #s blizzard are providing are just to pacify the crowd, they have no interest in solving the problem instead of just joining in the profit with the wow token. If they wanted to solve the problem they would make it so people didn’t need to spend this gold to achieve the same thing. Banning Bots or even Players has little effect on the overall situation.

They also can’t ban GDKPs because they’ve let it go so long that would piss people off, but if they made gear more accessible or less RNG sidereel version essence for current 25man raiding. (Why do we have an Emblem system that has almost has 0 use after week 2) I’m not saying make content easier, but as long as it can take a whole phase to get lucky enough to see your loot why would someone who plays the game for loot not be enticed to swipe their card. This is the problem that needs addressed, if enough players are participating in RMT to ban that many accounts monthly than it’s simply a game design flaw. Also Blizzard this isn’t me saying ban GDKPs because that won’t help they will find another way. The solution is to help the players that are buying gold get the things they want with that gold through fun/rewarding gameplay.

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8675309 accounts still actively botting.

Let’s see a list of the offenders. Full Bnet name/shame. Maybe less will be inclined to do it when their friends know that they aren’t “taking a few days off and will see everybody next week”.

It also lets people see that you really are doing something. If a name is on the list and back in 3 days all this is just for show.

Let’s see some real enforcement happen AND the results from it.

PS. Don’t just ban WoW7. Delete the whole BNet. Start from 100% ground zero if they want to come back. No reason to take out 4 tires when you can take out one driver.

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How many of those are in WotLK Classic? My guess is a small fraction.

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We banned 170k accounts. Let rephrase that. “There was more then 170k bots in the game last month.” You should not be patting yourself on the back for this number that is embarrassing.

You have less then 300k wotlk raiders / pvpers according to ironforge pro. Not including one player on alts but just for ease we will assume all individual players. So let’s give a huge estimate of another 100k players who never raided or pvpd so we will call it 400k players. So you are telling me just of the ones you actually banned you banned 170k. Almost half the actual player base worth of bots.

This doesn’t make me want to play more and be happy you are doing something, this makes me want to quit since those numbers are ridiculous. 1/3 players in the world are bots.

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They meant over all of wow. Retail had more people than wotlk. At this rate era may have more too.

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Yeah, lets just say the post is in the WotLK forum and signed by the WotLK team but it’s not WotLK accounts cause they have no way to separate the account “types” since it’s all the same.

What that post actually means for WotLK players is “we banned between 0 and 170k accounts” which is utterly meaningless.

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According to Demographic Data (reset #35 May 31 - June 6), there were 138,528 total characters logged/accounted for on NA realms.

This means there were more “cheating/exploiting” (bot) accounts banned in 1 month’s time, than there are active players on NA? Granted we’re been in an end of phase content drought for awhile but… This stat is still pretty staggering to me. I’m beyond unfamiliar with the whole cheat scene, but I feel as though it used to account for a small minority of the population(?).
And now it’s legit the majority? With more bots getting banned than there are active players on NA? And those are just the banned ones.
So the number of bots out there is even greater than :: 167,799 > 138,528

Playing a game with legit more bots than people feels weird to process.

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That’s cause it’s wow accounts while you’re specifically comparing it to a subset of a subset.

The number reported is across versions and regions of wow.

It’s an utterly meaningless metric for classic specifically. It doesn’t address classic concerns at all.

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There’s no way botters are paying for US priced accounts. Can’t they be paid for in other regions for like $3 USD and still access US servers?