That costs money man, and its bad for Bobby Kotick and his yacht collection
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lol seriously… I have played on much better taken care of free private versions of classic wow before this crap. They must either be lazy as hell or think it’s a good idea to rake in some subscription dues from the bots before they ban them, but a game without integrity is not much of a game… They’ll end up with an 80% botting population before their classic business model dies completely. People will return to more respectable private servers.
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They currently pay software engineers to make automated anti-botting code. You’re proposing that they pay investigators to watch suspected players. Both ways create jobs, just in different fields. The only way that doesn’t create jobs is if they do literally nothing.
There are what, hundreds of bots per server? Maybe even thousands? Small handful, huh?
“Easily determine”…it’s a lot harder than you make it out to be.
Corpseten, it takes a significantly smaller skill set, time, and money for someone to moderate a server versus anti-botting code produced by software engineers, that clearly isn’t working… Plus, it looks 100 times better to the customer to have a moderating presence in the game responding to these reports that are unanswered for far too long… I’m proposing a simple, more effective approach. You’re not even considering the difference. Of course it doesn’t create jobs to do nothing.
Are you 12, or are you really not capable of any sort of problem solving ? First, look at the server populations, it’s incredibly unlikely that there are thousands of botters unless the majority of players are already botters, then this is a lost cause, but I think you can understand better than that… If you have 2,500 players paying $15/mo, then you have plenty of resources… Say 500 of those 2,500 players are bots. If you ban 200 bots a day, then that would only take 2 1/2 days. A very small team could handle that. Make it 50 a day and do it in 10 days… or any reasonable pace to just get the problem under control. The thing is they need to start somewhere with the right plan. Once it’s under control, it’s easy to keep on it, like anything else… They aren’t even making the correct effort, for whatever reason. If these bots are getting banned timely, then that kills their motivation to set everything up and even do it. They lose $15 at each go. The fact is, at Blizzard’s pace, botting has been worth it to them. Expand your mind a bit more champ.
If you can’t tell a bot when you see one then you don’t have much of an understanding on this subject at all or you are a botter yourself attempting to dismiss the issue and a good solution. It’s incredibly easy, we can sense someone is a bot after watching a kill or two, then you simply interact with them to easily confirm… They are robotic in their grind, actions, and rotation. For example, if you tag their mob before they engage they don’t react like a normal player,. If the bot isn’t sophisticated, they will just continue attacking the mob with the same rotation even though it’s not tagged for them. They don’t get upset about it, etc. They often don’t respond to messages either, and they repeat the same rotation… over, and over, and over… do yourself a favor before you embarrass yourself next time, and try not to be such a lazy thinker.
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Gonna need some Mages in here to burn this witch, too.
Blizzard DOES NOT want to combat botting. If so they couls easily do these 2 things:
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Fix teleport fly hacking server side.
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Remove LUA unlocker API functionality.
These 2 steps alone would remove functionality for the bulk of all commercial bots you can purchase and use right now.
But Blizzard doesn’t because bots are approx large % of all accounts = $$.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/fix-flyteleport-hacking-now
Yes, I’m sure that would help significantly. Their “software engineers” must be worth their weight in gold. I didn’t know people were fly hacking yet! lol
From what I understand, the tools they’ve programmed into their client automatically detect bots utilizing memory and some other things. That’s how HonorBuddy/Glider worked. But now people are botting using the LUA as you said, but it even goes further than that with pixels.
Some have programmed bots to simply react to pixels on the screen produced by an addon that turns information about the game into organized pixels… I don’t think they even need the LUA unlocker for this. Can they crackdown on these types of addons without denying the others? If so, then they should. If not, then they could stop ignoring proper customer service altogether as this is a paid for service…
Based on everyone’s responses, it doesn’t sound like Blizzard is going to do anything substantial. If that’s the case, then they are incredibly short sighted. If they would rather have paid bot city, then this will drive the regular players out eventually to better taken care of private servers that are even free and donation driven. Then the botters will leave when there is no real person left making their automation meaningless.
Blizzard should simply just respond to these significant reports, in a reasonable time, or at all… It really isn’t as hard as people are thinking it is, especially considering the income these servers produce warrant it… It will show they care, prolonging people’s willingness to keep their subscriptions, and that can go a long way.
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Imagine if Blizzard still had real GMs and you were in EPL trying to farm herbs, competing against bots and flyhacks, when suddenly you see…
In a golden chariot from the heavens comes forth [GM NAME]!
GM NAME: I AM HERE TO CLEANSE THIS WORLD!
GM NAME: [BotName1] begone scum!
GM NAME: [BotName2] begone scum!
GM NAME: [BotName3] begone scum!
GM NAME: [BotName4] begone scum!
Etc, etc, etc…
This would make the community actually LIKE Blizzard (the company) again…
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No I gotta ask, did you RNG that name or must I enslave you again to build the new temple?
The private servers damn near instant ban players who wall clip, fly hack, or teleport hack. Not even kidding, it’s near instantly that the server detects some BS and then that account is perma banned.
It’s not just that, but they are swift about handling cheats and exploits of any kind. The only problems I saw on the private servers was the gold farmers that were paying RL money to have the right to be there and sell gold… that was only on a few servers, not all of them, and I’ll also qualify that not all the private servers are equal at handling cheating.
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Yes! you totally get it! That’s exactly how these servers are supposed to be run… They can do this in an awesome and easy way… This seriously works, and being heard in game allows everyone to tolerate the situation longer.
This is accomplished even on free servers for various games. We are about to return to another classic game server we were playing on before this as we’re getting burnt out on this now. I wanted to take it to the forums first to see if anything takes, but it doesn’t look good. On these free classic game servers, we would get responses to reports of cheating players in game AND in less than an hour. They have two servers that are FREE with about 1500 people each… Blizzard has more population, but they have more PAYING subscribers with this as well… It’s only a matter of scale and Blizzard is too greedy or lazy to actually meet this basic challenge.
It doesn’t take a magic button like some naive people think, it takes effort that should have been implemented a long time ago. If they put in the effort, they wouldn’t have this mess on their hands now. They owe it to their subscribers to clean this up the right way. They are wasting time and money on what they think is a more advanced approach.
Blizzard could put a serious dent in bots with these 2 simple things: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/fly-hacking-lua-unlockers-vast-amount-of-bots-why-doesnt-blizzard-fix-this/
Its funny how every company has these totally simple solutions at hand but they refuse to do them. it can’t possibly be that a rando on the internet with a chip on their shoulder doesn’t understand how difficult it is to actually stop botting, its clearly that the corporations just being lazy and sending some passive aggressive messages on a board will convince them to stop.
You’re absolutely right… It’s just sad how clear it is that many, if not all of them, do a better job than Blizzard with a pittance of the resources.
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In the early days of WoW they had the best customer service out of any game company. This is when they had real Game Masters in the fields doing work. GMs would actually appear in front of you. They were friendly, understanding and worked with customers. I don’t think it had ever been done on this scale but they did it. Now it’s just an old carcass with no emotion and out of sight, out of mind. Reminds me a Zuckerburg.
I’ve seen numerous posts and explanations as to why they stopped doing this. The tools evolved so they no longer needed to appear in-game. I’ve also heard that people were making a spectacle of a GM appearance, and it was causing a lot of misuse of the ticketing system.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/azerite-token-redemption-mistake/105305/22
Here’s another quote from Vrakthris:
I’ve been around 15+ years too and have a little more exposure to the data involved here. Our Support overall has made vast improvements in the number of folks that we’re able to help and in the ways that we’re able to help them.
If you spend any time on reddit, you’ll see dozens of threads made by people who have long person to person conversations with GMs.
Here’s an example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/fel8if/official_gm_word_on_warsong_gulch_jumps/
I’d volunteer to GM for free. I already have a job that pays me, I’d be more than happy to help throw out the wow trash a few hours here and there for no charge.
yeah, those “respectable private servers” where half the server is chinese players, the server crashes and rolls back multiple times per day, the admins spawn rank14 characters for money, the scripting is broken, the stat values on enemies are wrong, etc. etc.
totally gonna go back to that
definitely
it’s almost like handling 1 server with 5-10k players is easier than handling 30+ servers with 1 million+ players
imagine that
Get serious. Blizzard already does that, and has for years.
There are 800,000 players. How can a “small handful” of people respond swiftly to 800,000 people? Get real. That’s silly.