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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they didn’t. The game cannot be played on GM accounts, and never has been able to. If the support staff do play the game, they do so on their personal accounts outside of working hours.
This never happened except sometimes on PTR/beta. There were times where the developers would do stuff like that on test servers. What you’re describing has never happened on the live servers. While the GM’s did have to have in-game avatars at some point before the tools evolved, things like that never happened.
Nope. You’re either mistaken and misremembering something that happened on a PTR or beta server, or just outright making stuff up. That did not ever happen on the live servers. Youtube videos mean nothing because they can be recorded on private servers.
I’ve also been playing for 20 years, and you’re incorrect. Such things never happened on live servers. Only on PTR or beta servers occasionally. GM’s have never had the ability to do the things you’re thinking of.
Um yeah noone is going to believe you because none of that ever happened on live servers. Everything the GM’s do is monitored, and has always been monitored. The GM tools can only be accessed from the Blizzard offices, and can’t be used to “play the game”. You’re thinking of the rare event the developers ran on PTR or beta servers, or you played on private servers and don’t want to admit it.