Right-click report is for 99% of ‘cheat’ reports. If you are aware of details of an exploit - hacks@blizzard.com is appropriate. I was tempted to delete this thread, but you’ve been given some very valuable information.
–Orlyia
What do you mean? Both the ingame report and Hacks email gets worked on by the same team.
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There is only one subject you should be sending to that email, and it’s only IF you aren’t able to report them in-game.
The only time you can’t do that is if you aren’t in their general vicinity with portraits to right-click. Who said the reports don’t work?
Not the same people that monitor at that email address or generally any reports sent in.
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These days the auction house, is full of bots, cheaters and hackers, they do whatever they want, where are the admins? 10 years ago, if you reported a cheater, or you were reported by someone as a cheater, the admin was capable to read the game code and verify if you were really cheating or not. Nowadays, if you want to report a cheater you have to send an email to Hacks@Blizzard.com, where the really capable people are, that is, the real admins are there.
This means that the admins who see our tickets are totally incapable of handling the game.
I’m sure there’s a visceral thrill to e-mailing Blizzard’s hack team directly, but I wouldn’t e-mail them willy-nilly.
What it means is someone now needs to manually create a ticket and fill it in with partial information, instead of having the system capture data at the point of report.
Anyway, I’d save the e-mail for reports which cannot be sent in-game.
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As Forumcat mentioned, they are the same team the right-click reports for cheating go to.
This seems a huge misunderstanding of the system, and I’m willing to bet it’s the same with your claim of ten years ago-- that seems more like a report they’re able to get their eyes on to make an aside speculation, but they can still do that today.
Are there game masters that are capable of seeing and editing lines of code? I’m sure there are. But there are specific job roles under the umbrella of development that have access to the game code. Game masters are not one of those roles.
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I mean… you don’t have to guarantee that, that’s almost verbatim what I stated in that post. The hacks email and the team that takes cheating reports are the same people.
They are NOT the same people answering tickets.
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As is confirmed by a Support Forum agent in another thread, cheating reports via right-click report and hacks@blizzard.com are handled by the same team:
Hackers, cheaters, and botters are not banned immediately. It does take time for the team to investigate, learn how to break the bot they are using, and apply the ban wave. It is not instant.
Also keep in mind, a lot of these criminals (yes, they are criminals) will use stolen accounts. They will keep deleting characters and will start new ones in an attempt to avoid detection.
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Showing up and banhammering people is not how Blizzard operates.
It’d be nice if they could, but the scale, impact, and verification requirement basically makes that a nonstarter.
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The botting problem is prevalant in all games/MMO’s, not just WoW. If there was a solution there would be one by now.
An ex-dev that worked at Blizz:
http://youtube.com/shorts/cADaFm__ApQ
You may suggest any methods you may think of through the ingame feedback box but it is not likely that it will be groundbreaking new suggestion.
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Just to circle this back around – this is a support forum. Was there something we could help with, or were you just looking for clarification on the process?
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I mean, I remember people posting ten years ago demanding Blizzard kick bots out of the game.
They didn’t do this back then either.
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There are people on both sides of that coin.
To employ enough people to sit in-game and take a mallet to every shard and every layer on every realm in every region would require a massive undertaking.
That undertaking will take untold amounts of money that will most certainly require a hefty increase in subscription fee. I am personally okay with that to a certain extent.
But for every one of me, there are at least ten people that are not.
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We have never had admin in game only support through tickets and player help in these forums. Also just report and move along. And getting rid of these people is difficult because they use multiple accounts that they have stolen from your fellow players
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There haven’t been GMs in-game for quite some time, and even back then, they had to login to the game to perform certain tasks. With the evolution of the GMs tools, that’s no longer necessary. However, that doesn’t mean there are no GMs at all. Blizzard takes a reactive approach to account penalties. It would be an enormous time and staffing investment to have GMs patrolling all of the servers, all phases, all layers, etc.
With all that said, nothing will come of your reports on the forums. This isn’t a place to report and the Support Forums Agents who staff this forum will not act on your reports. You do need to continue using right-click report and/or emailing hacks@blizzard.com. If they are botting or cheating, then the appropriate penalty will be applied.
Also, just to set proper expectations, you will not receive any feedback from the hacks team and you will not be told the results of the investigation.
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You must be miss remembering as what you’re describing wouldn’t have happened past burning crusade. As everything changed with Wrath of the Litch king.
Never seen ‘em and I’ve played since burning crusade.
Only when the situation called for it, yes. But a decade ago was roughly the time Warlords was about to come out.
They stopped coming in-game with any regularity well before that.
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Another thing to keep in mind as well, a GM did not need to be logged into the game itself to be able to chat with players. They were able to do that from their GM tools.
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Have you not seen how many people have fallen for these scammers since this xpac came out I’ve seen many on here very upset that they fell for a scam and every time a blue will say they did nasty things with account and not just stole someone’s gold.
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