Solution for Bots

Community General Discussion
1

Perhaps, the only way to solve this problem would be to remove tokens, lower the prices of mounts and ingame services, and drastically decrease the gold needed to buy mounts in the game.

Calm down, let me explain my idea: bots are skinning animals, picking flowers / herbs and mining for one purpose: sell directly on AH or create items and sell on AH, get gold, sell gold.

Other people sell pvp and pve carry for gold. With gold, you buy tokens and with tokens, monthly fees.

I believe that the token has increased the problem of having too many bots in the game.

In the past there was only pvp and pve carry for those who paid money on websites or directly to a person on whatsapp - which was “resolved” by tracking the IP and looking at activities that the player was doing (I know people who were selling tower carry on legion which was banned for 1 year along with the accounts that purchased this service).

It was easier to track these people than it is now.

Now, the game is full of bots, they make as much gold as possible, ruining AH and ruining normal farms, how can a normal person grind 2M gold to buy the spider (mount) for example, if there are bots for each game mode?

If we went back to the point where the monthly fee could only be bought with money, without gold, maybe that would solve it.

“but I can’t pay, I make gold just to keep playing” - so you just play by doing this (making gold) because competing with bots is surreal. This is not playing. If you spend the whole month making gold, you either use bots or you need to ask yourself if this is a game for you - because you aren’t playing a game, you are just making gold to pay for…nothing.

“But I dominate AH, I know how to make mountains of gold” - you must be the exception of the exception.

“but I get gold by collecting animal skins” - I highly doubt it, with the competition with the bots that exists today.

“But if you remove the token, lower the price of ingame mounts and store services as well as the monthly fee, there will still be pvp and pve carry”

So we went back to the time when blizzard just needed to track these players.

2

I for one welcome our bot overlords. All hail cheap herbs on the AH.

4 Likes
3

So, what you’re saying is, the gold that Blizzard sells is overpriced.

4

You do know that tokens are also there to buy gold and that the sole purpose for bots is to sell gold right?

Remove tokens and bots are selling even more gold. Good plan! /s

6 Likes
5

i heard bots are run in 3rd world countries who do it to feed their family…

6

Oh yeah this’ll totally fix it.

That’s why there are no bots in classic. Because the wow token doesn’t exist. It stopped them. Totally.

3 Likes
7

The way I think I’d go about it is to simply change professions to not be easily automated.

Take herb/ore bots, for example. The way those operate is with a series of waypoints through the world that follows known node spawn locations. They only work because they know where the herbs are.

If nodes instead could spawn at any random point within a zone, with no herb spawning in the same spot twice it suddenly becomes much, MUCH more difficult to automate. Bots then have to solve the same problems as autonomous driving AIs, which is an insanely higher bar — current bots are barely functional script kiddie stuff.

They could add an additional layer of “hard mode” by making each character having their own personal sets of nodes (like archaeology), which would kill the strategy of having a single “smart” character leading a team of other “dumb” bot characters.

For skinning, the solution could look something like disabling skinning on mobs that were spawned when hyperspawning is enabled. This wouldn’t stop skinning bots entirely, but it would slow them down to speeds not far from what a regular person is capable of, reducing their advantage and thus also their profit margins.

2 Likes
8

Cure the disease by killing the patient.

9

if you don’t need gold to play the game … so the problem decreases, a lot.

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Also, farm bots are not the only type of bots.

11

Probably the nuttiest type of bot I’ve seen was a Classic boosting bot I saw a video of several months ago.

It would automatically:

  1. Advertise boosting services in STV general chat
  2. Confirm a rate with the customer
  3. Run into ZG to meet the customer
  4. Trade the gold
  5. Use fly-hacking to aggro all the trash in the raid and kill it without being killed

And the people running these bots had tens of instances of WoW doing this across multiple characters and servers, all completely automated.

1 Like
12

Yes, I know people selling 1M gold in whatsapp groups costing 30% less than blizzard.

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13

Why did we have bots before tokens existed? Why are there bots on Classic where tokens still don’t exist.

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14

I didnt want to go into detail since Blizz frowns upon talking about stuff like it, but yeah they can do all sorts of things. Farming something is probably the most popular for lots of reasons, but I dont think the OP is the magic solution that the creator thinks it is.

1 Like
15

Onboard to remove the $20 token.
You can leave the token for the 30 days of game time and add to ballance.
Ballance to be used only for shop mounts, pets and services, but not time.

This would reward for playing game.
Save your gold for carries, but not be able to use real money to buy gold.

The carries would be lower and lower over time until the guilds take over.

16

Make EVERYTHING BoP, disable trading, delete AH, give every player a 3rd profession slot for gathering profession only and bye bye gold selling bots.

Of course this is a terrible idea but it would need to be extreme if you want to remove bots for good.

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17

The 20 dollar token is the only reason blizz does it.

What you suggest would be giving away free subs/balance

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18

You are aware bots existed before the token and would exist after any token removal.

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19

Yep, it is not a magic solution, it is the BEGINNING of the solution, something has to be done, if not, nobody does anything and the problem does not end.

I believe that if we solve one problem, the others can be solved with modifications in some parts of the game.

The problem is that gold nowadays rules everything. Whether to buy a mount of 2M, 5M, equipment at AH, food, incantations, monthly fee, carry … if you remove the token, many bots will stop and lose their purpose;
There will be left the bots that make gold to sell outside on the black market (aka. Whatsapp), and tracking those bots / players that some players buy directly, is easier.

Seriously, there is a website here in my country called “Mercado Livre” - it is a website similar to aliexpress. There are a ton of gold sellers over there.

This has become a business (for years, i know) . So how do we kill these other bots for good?

Drastically reducing the requirement to create materials for each profession. Few materials would create a large amount of enchantments, or foods, or equipment.

“but the professions would be easier” yes and with that, we MAYBE end up with another category of bots.

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20

You know bots existed before WoW tokens, right? The token was introduced to give people a legal alternative to gold sellers (and put those profits in Blizzard’s pocket, of course).

1 Like