I find it troubling that the OP got mad enough that he thinks the “root of the bot problem” = ‘AOE and ranged attacks exist’.
You heard him, Blizz… in order to get rid of bots you just have to recreate an entirely new game from the ground up! Should be an easy fix.
Yeah… try again dude. Heartseeker isn’t even close to the most populated. Check out ironforgedotpro.
There are posts on the EU forums as well, some dude is taking screenshots every day of /who Stratholme, Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, etc. and cataloging it in a GoogleDoc. There are dozens and dozens of unguilded mages, priests, druids who are inside that zone continuously for days on end. They are even expressing obvious botting behaviors in broad daylight in major cities as their scripting has them hearth, vendor and repair, go to the AH and post items, and run back to the flight master and fly right back to EPL, all on identical paths and mounting at identical positions. This is RAMPANT and beyond any scope that this game has seen. So your links to posts from Blues from a decade ago, or even months ago, are not relevant to the current situation on the ground.
Even a single day going by with this many botters operating severely damages a server’s economy. They’re operating with impunity for extended periods of time - and these servers might literally never recover even if the botting was stopped dead in its tracks tomorrow. So yes, of course there are tons of threads and hundreds upon hundreds of replies complaining about this issue. The volume of cheaters and its very real damage to every player’s experience is NOT overblown.
At the end of the day, I don’t care what the internal procedures are in Blizzard for handling this stuff; what me and everyone else here is saying is: it’s not working.
It’s people buying gold. If there was no market for RMT gold selling there would be no market for these bot farms. Although it does not help botters actions are artificially helping to create their market. Blizz needs to ban botters and gold buyers alike. I’ve known multiple people who outright buy gold and none of them are ever punished. Blizzard needs to send a message with a huge ban wave of anyone participating in RMT transactions whether it be buying or selling. Currently even buyers know there will be no repercussions for their actions so they do not care.
There’s currently 4 servers on ironforge.pro that have more Alliance than Heartseeker.
Irrelevent comment. My server has well over twice the population of your godawful 93/7 server. No wonder you don’t believe there’s a serious bot problem.
Herod has fewer Alliance. Bots don’t farm gold on one faction to sell to the other faction dear. They go where the numbers are, Heartseeker has a high number of Alliance, period.
The root of the bot problem is people buying gold. If the demand dries up people will have no reason to bot anymore.
The question we should be asking Blizzard is: how do you make players not want to be associated in any way with those websites? I think the only way is a permanan for the first time you’re caught. This is perhaps the most damaging rule break there is in Classic WoW, if it doesn’t warrant a permaban for the first offense what does?
you are wrong. If mage did zero aoe and hunter had perma-daze, botters would still fly or go under terrain and harvest minerals and herbs… so leave classes alone and, you know… ban the actual exploiters?
The root of the issue is Blizzard. They are not going after the bots like other companies. We dont even need to look at Runescape or TSO we can look at WoW Classic in China ran by NetEase they do 100k bans a WEEK not every few months weekly bans. They show the numbers banned and the player names. The issue is Blizzard, a company with the WoW license operating it in China can detect and react to bots better than the company that actually made the game.
Isn’t the root of the problem that some players buy gold and they ruin the game for everyone else?
Better idea, if they had to pay $15 to try and got nuked before level 2…
Blizzard most likely does not ban bots because the accounts that the bots use are hacked accounts. Think about it, if I am going to cheat in the game, why wouldnt I use a stolen account!? All retail accounts can log into classic if they have active sub. Best accounts to hack would be retail players who bought the 6-moth sub to get a mount and got tired after a month or two.
The solution is to require an authenticator every time you log in, and to automatically disconnect people that are logged in for more than 24 hours and in the same zone shard.
What a terrible change.
Blizzard only banned them cause q2 is finished, wont be another ban wave til q3 finishes , they dont give a crap thats the truth. Its all about padding the time played, MAU metrics.
Exploiting mob pathing is perfectly ethical.