The botting problem is INSANE on SoD - New tactics needed

It’s very clear that the current approach Blizzard has for botting is NOT working, especially on SoD.

I’m attempting to level up new characters and I am being genuinely held back because there are so many damn hunter bots patrolling around and instant tagging mobs, they are a total plague. Literally a dozen in the valley of trials starting zone tagging every scorpid in sight.
They are incredibly obviously bots, with robotic movement and scripted paths and names like ‘dafsadsadd’ .

With such a small amount of SoD servers, I cannot understand why Blizz can’t just hire a handful of interns, heck even a SINGLE INTERN to just rotate on a different server each day, banning these VERY OBVIOUS BOTS. A single intern could easily slam hundreds of these bots per day, every day, at the source.

Why is this not done? It would be so cheap and vastly improve the quality of play.

Back to fighting for tags with the bots now…what a great game.

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Blizzard wants us all to quit again. Allowing gold for quests at max level is perfect to blame inflation on as well. The posters on here with the activision approved knee pads equipped at all times will defend it.

Amazing

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I tried to do some quests in Hillsbrad but I literally could not compete with the hunter bots on bear and lion kills, I’m not exaggerating, they were EVERYWHERE, like swarming cockroaches.

I just can’t believe that not a single employee at Blizzard has logged into the game and just looked at this mess. Because of the current low level cap we are restricted to a small amount of zones, which makes this botting issue so ‘in your face’ and unavoidable.

Heck, they don’t even need to give people mod powers, they could just assign some community members to have ‘higher weighted’ reports which flag accounts for a higher priority ban/review, whatever status that receiving 20 in game reports would put an account at, for example.

Again, there are not even that many servers to monitor…it’s such a small amount of resources to spend.

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I hit 25 recently wanted to try paladin got hard stuck at level 5 because every single boar/bear/wolf is already tagged by bots. Another thing is these bots are not just hunters. They’re getting more elaborate.

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Yes, you’ll find some rogue bots too.
do a /who of the stockades to see how much gold is being artificially generated and injected into the economy by pickpocketing bots.

If you want to see something hilarious, go stand outside the stockades for a server reset. If you log in quick enough once the servers are up you will bear witness to the mass migration of bots running back into the instance to get back to work.

hilarious and sad

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Hunters, rogues, and mages oh my. I went on a reporting spree tonight.
People always mention hunters but I actually saw more rogues than anything tonight. West side of the duskwood graveyard where all the spiders and wolves are. Sooo many bots. Most acted the exact same but I saw a few with different programming. Even one that would jump occasionally to try to look more human but it still did the 180 auto-target turn on a dime routine. Most of them had “normal” names compared to hfwkp and his boar with a chinese name. But they were also wearing the exact same armor, moving in the exact same way, and reacting the exact same to situations they were in.

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they’re too busy missing all of the overpowered huntard pets that are scaling incorrectly.

I’ve reported mage bots as well in the Barrens. They’re branching out.

Efficient banning of bots nets them less money. It is the only reason.

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Just saw a warrior bot, they are evolving. Standing in the Loch, and there are at least a dozen bots script walking around with their jibberish names and obvious jerky bot movement.

Impossible to believe that this can’t be stopped. The only obvious answer as to why this is allowed must be that Blizzard is benefitting from it in some way, i.e. they are making money hand over fist from them.

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the amount of bots is increasing each day

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I have noticed less bots than the previous week to be honest.
Also have received a bunch of mail from my reports last week.

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they defend it because they buy gold. I know so many people who can’t play a lot or farm gold in wow classic, so they just buy the gold. Then they are the same people that complain about retail being bad.

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It’s not Blizzard and the endless patches to classes that will kill SoD, it’s them not stamping out the gold buying/botting. It will just drive those that don’t want to p2w away.

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Seriously though…why…WHY…does blizzard not crack down on this? If pservers, ran by a handful of folks, can eliminate most botting, surely blizzard can allocate enough resources toward the problem to fix it. Wtf?

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What if someone made an add on that auto-reports bots. Or a bot that reports other bots. Now that would be interesting.

Blizzard has just done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that allowing cheaters to run wild is better for their bottom line in the short-term, so that’s what will happen.

Is it good for them in the long-term? Probably not, but they only care about the next quarter.

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Bold of you to assume they would even have one employee for one region.
Sadly their policy is also to do ban waves in order to ‘outsmart’ the bot programs.
Too bad in the time they do the ban wave the damage is already done.

Their best focus would be to just ban all GDKPs and gold buyers.
Kill the problem at its source.

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Problem is the biggest buyers are streamers and their simps and they’re relying on them for advertising.

It’s just a culture failure at blizzard. They’re too afraid to ban streamers, and calculate it’s better to let cheaters run wild than take a short-term hit in revenue.

Other companies ban cheaters if they’re aimbotting or whatever. Cheaters will absolutely abuse any loopholes including the company being afraid to ban you because you’re a streamer, because there’s a financial incentive to do so.

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I’m sure they will ban on 2nd offense.
But who knows for how long?

I’m very hopeful regarding the GDKP bans etc.