Blizzard unfortunately doesn’t actually look at individual reports and are just feel-good measures. They say they “look” at them in the sense they lower thresholds set for automated data bans, but they are otherwise tossed.
The bots that do get banned are blatantly raging for too many hours of the day and hit a “did too much” threshold. The bots with any form of RNG and online time limits have been going undetected for two decades essentially. There is no real client side anti-cheat, and blizz relies on quick and dirty server side checks someone probably threw together in an evening.
Bot still there and it’s probably gonna be there in booty bay for another decade unless I cry in trade chat for people to mass report it to utilize the mass report auto ban system.
Put gm’s back in game , Stop there programs that let them run 7 or more toons at a time . But the main thing is in game GM’s to ban them right there and then .
They won’t because corporate decided it’s better to ignore the problems in the long run than pay to do it right. Usual corporate risk analysis to please shareholders in the short term.
It doesn’t help people eat up the “we care” gaslighting PR every time. It’s been 20 years, Blizzard does not and will not ever care.
Goto the murloc farm by the feast area and sit there for 5 minutes, ignore the bots and watch the rock, every minute there is a new player phasing in each server checking if they can bot there. Sometimes they phase in with their bots but it’s the same exact spot everytime. These people aren’t getting banned then buying new accounts, they already have countless accounts setup. They set them up in one spot from the start. Their reserves are ready to go instantly. There is no special software changes, they use the same stuff. It’s not a cat and mouse hacker vs fbi or whatever people see on tv. It’s all about player reports which is very sad but it’s true.
Player reports can’t make a dent though unless there was like a bot hunting discord that made raids to mass report and get the bots instabanned. However that is susceptible to a lot of false reports because your average player will see a 2x4 and automatically assume bots without more proof. Even still I think it’s the only thing that could make a difference as banwaves are a joke. I say abuse the system for good to remove the people cheating the system and if there’s enough casualties that Blizz is forced to kill the system then so be it because the system is already broken.
Using the automatic ban against bots if actively hunting them, and actively going to each server and to each bot location to mass report them is the only way to hurt them. Blizzard won’t hurt them and in their laziness or cheapness with the automatic system, they’ve created a way for players to take matters into their own hands. Otherwise individual reporting is next to useless and I’d rather people not do it at all so that these barely contained bots hidden across countless shards can spiral so far out of control that Blizz is forced to act.
I was reporting them and I’ve even seen the entire flock get insta d/c’d immediately after my report but after I seen how quickly they’re replaced last night I realized there’s literally no point.
It’s still fun breaking them though. Last night during community feasts I would take the Iskaar sled toy and drag it through the bots and after a few tries I’d get a bite and then I’d take my catch to the feast area and release it in front of everybody. Then while it’s spinning in circles spamming barrage and rain of arrows on itself, I’d say look at the bot I caught and have everyone report it. Low and behold they get d/c’d and I’d fly back to check the rest and most the rest have d/c’d too. That’s actually funny as hell and fun to do as is completely breaking the hyperspawns by aggroing a few mobs just out of their range and then watching 8 toons attack nothing until the bot runner notices. I also killed an herbing bot by planting a decay seed in rich soil when he got close to it. It’s fun but completely pointless.
They’ve been going at this problem for well over a decade and it’s only getting worse, meaning they’re losing the battle… I have zero faith that it will get better.
They ban in waves which is the dumbest thing they can do. The damage is being done for days, weeks, months, before anything is done.
I also think that some of the gold selling sites IS Blizzard. They can absolutely shut down the websites through legal actions. You agree to the TOS, it’s a contract and can be legally enforced.
Last time I reported a bot, I watched it for 5 minutes. Exact same path taken. I watched it walk over the exact same rock over and over, never diverting… GM contacts me in game and tells me they spoke to the suspected bot and it’s a person. I told him no it’s not and to watch… the bot stopped playing… so not only do they not care, they don’t know how to spot the bots themselves… the person was botting while doing something else…
You also forget… Blizzard is an indie company. They don’t have enough employees working to take care of their game(s)
These bots are essentially running with no protections. The botter might place them in a VM or RDP window, both of which are easily detectable by other anti-cheats like battleye or EAC, to walk over the baby gate that’s been warden for the past decade.
Teenagers are cooking up half-done bots like this:
yes and those operate at the kernal level. which is leaving your system open to all kinds of nasty rootkits. if someone hacks into the client and starts distributing all kinds of nasty payloads to the client server.
This is such a copypasta FUD take on the whole anti-cheat client situation.
Edit: Should also mention you don’t need a kernel-level anti-cheat to detect both the vectors listed that botters are currently using to evade warden atm.
Detecting if RDP is active is a simple win32 call, and VMs can be detected by the game itself with special assembler doing things like poking at MSRs.
Most botting is done by the same organized crime cartels that sell gold and launder money. They also deal in drugs and terrorist financing. It’s a multi billion dollar per year business, not something a couple kids are doing in their basement.
Banning them one at a time is extremely counter productive. These organizations often have hundreds of thousands of compromised accounts to go at a moment’s notice. Ban them right away? They make a tiny change, and try again. The accounts are disposable to them, they don’t care. Eventually they make enough tiny changes that they figure out Blizzard’s detection systems and don’t get banned.
Banning in waves every 3-6 months leaves them with no information at all. No clue what was detected, or how to work around it, and they have to start from scratch.
Blizzard also does not make a cent off of bots. It’s done on compromised accounts, and paid for with stolen credit cards. Not only do they not make any money off of botting, it also costs them a substantial amount.
