Sus? What do you guys think?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I have a particular spot I like to use to farm a particular material. I park my character there and when I have a bit of time I log in, collect the stuff, and then log back out. I’ve been casually farming this spot for a few months now and sometimes when I log I can collect things, other times people have cruised through and it’s gone.

Around the start of SoD though (a bit before), I’ve gotten some competition. There’s another player who is parked in this place all the time, logged in constantly, collecting the resources. I log in at random intervals and they are always there. I added them as a character friend on a few chars so I could check and they are almost always on within any hours I would typically log in (anywhere between 7am and 11pm pacific).

In the week and a half ish since I’ve started paying attention, I’ve seen them log off twice. Last week (I can’t remember which day) they were gone for about a four hour time block. Today they were gone from 7am (when the unscheduled maintenance started) to around 4:00pm, and now they are back.

I’ve watched them a bit and they actually look like they are a person playing. They sometimes park in the spot, sometimes walk around and kill mobs nearby. They do have a tendency to always return to the same spot to park and I often find them there AFK, but when the materials spawn they always come back and go right to it.

It’s… weird! Like, I’m not actually sure they are a bot. Sometimes they look like one, sometimes they don’t. It’s kind of weird that they are online, in the same spot, always doing the same activity for such long periods of time and it’s kinda weird that the largest break they took was right after unscheduled maintenance. I did submit a report to Blizzard several days ago that basically amounted to “I’m not sure about this person, you guys figure it out!” but they’re still there, farming away.

I don’t actually know what to make of this. What do you guys think?

I don’t actually mind competition and when I see people doing stuff in that area when I log in to check things, I usually just let them take it since I figure I’ll get the next one. I just like it when my competition is an actual person! Which this individual might be… I don’t know, it’s weird!

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Probably several people on one account

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What if I told you…

…other people aside from you play World of Warcraft™?

Honestly the way in which you’re sort of stalking them is sort of creepy. Sometimes I go in to heavy grinder mode for a couple weeks and the idea that someone friends me and monitors my play time so they can report to other people they don’t know kind of creeps me out.

You should probably step back and re-evaluate how much what someone else is doing concerns you, just looking out for your health brother.

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Do you bot or something?

That’s the whole reason why OP added them to see if they were in fact botting.

I report obvious bots(They take the exact same path with the exact same stopping points and turning points over and over again, I’ve seen some doing loops between the vendors in the Inn in brill and the blacksmith and trade good vendors, for example) all the time and I add them to see how long it takes them to get banned.

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Frankly anybody that is in my way when I’m farming for anything out in the world is definitely a bot.

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You don’t read posts do you?

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What do you mean I’m fat? You don’t even know me!

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Honestly, I expected a response like Zipzo’s. Forum trolls are gonna troll!

I appreciate that you clearly read my post and understood my intentions :slight_smile:

Yea, that’s why I posted here for other’s opinions. I’m not sure it’s an obvious bot. Sometimes they look like they’re pathing, sometimes they look like they’re just playing. What really gets me is how they always return to what feels like a pretty precise spot.

The other one that tipped me off is how they’re almost always on, but today’s unscheduled maintenance seems to have tripped them up. Maybe they run a bot part-time and monitor it, or maybe it’s some other kind of assist tool?

Or maybe it’s just coincidence, I honestly have no idea.

I don’t hold a grudge against people for how they want to play the game, even if it is a bit frustrating to be completely outcompeted by someone who effectively lives online. If it’s a human player though, so be it! It’s just hard to tell because it’s weird behaviour and because there’s soooooooo much of this in Era.

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So what exactly is the point of this thread?

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could be partly botting, its not impossible and its not all that uncommon. You could report as “potentially botting” in the text box.

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It’s likely someone botting when they’re not playing rather than some gold farmer.
That troll is clearly a botter.

The botters and gold buyers always come out to try and derail threads that threaten them.
Cheaters gonna cheat and they get mad when you point it out.

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Coiners and Sellers are always trying to defend it, they are so obvious “its not a bot” or “they’re just bad players”

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It’s the immediate jump to insults that tips me off.

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Very true, that or whatever the excuse for the bad behavior of botting.

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Yeah no reasonable person makes excuses for bots.
Other than maybe “Are you sure?”

When they start deflecting it’s sometimes an indicator that they’re a botter, but when they jump to insults immediately it’s almost always the case.

Like take buddy’s first response to the OP.
It’s clear they don’t like the idea that can people add them as friends and I would I bet they’d never considered that before.

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Yup, I have a whole list of bots so that I can track them and slay them both horde and alliance. I did my best to shut them down. What really annoyed me is when the botters got AoE guy banned, I think they perma’d him too… Guy was not cheating and yet gonzo because botters, because he was basically shutting down their operation.

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yeah they mass report you if you mess with them.
Kinda sucks that blizzard does basically nothing about the problem.
They do the banwaves but it’s not enough.

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There is always time to be logged in when living in grandmas basement.

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Ironically my one friend who does in fact live in his grandmother’s basement makes more than I do running a 3D printing business. He doesn’t even really game that much anymore.

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Yea, I kinda question the effectiveness of banwaves. I saw a thing from a former Blizzard employee talking about them and saying how the intent behind doing it that way is to force charge backs so that the company selling the botting software loses money.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be working. Botting hasn’t gone anywhere in the last 19 years so clearly it’s not hurting their bottom line, business seems to be good.

The downside of banwaves is that Blizzard doesn’t retroactively remove everything that bot generated in the game. So all the gold/materials they farmed and sold are still there. So sure, 200k bots were banned last month… but that’s 200k bots worth of assets were generated and the only outcome is that the botters just reroll :frowning: