how does it effectively stop them if they are allowed to play long enough to turn a profit even if eventually banned?
and the difficulty to click and report each one is not even possible. you might get 3 out of that 100 bot conga line. not to mention they intentionally stack to avoid it. they flyhack pretty quick from log in as well.
blizzard cant expect us to do all of the work. if they do, please give someone trusted the power in game to ban anyone they see flyhacking like this.
they let them play for far too long that getting banned is a minor inconvenience to the botters, yet the damage botters do the the server is a major issue for so many of us players.
Blizz encourages videos or links to 'em be submitted to hacks@blizzard.com. I imagine the videos especially help.
So that is one thing you can do with this video.
Include as much information as you can.
As far as not being able to get all the bots, because of either magic farming ball closeness or the fast conga line u’ve seen, get as many as you can. I want to say there was a Blue post about that. A few at least, though, allows for patterning.
Your question re: operating long enough to make a profit, consider the amount of money being thrown at this. It is HUGE, on both sides. If it were easy to stop, I guarantee it would be stopped.
Naming and shaming. The names of the alleged bots are clearly visible in the clip you’ve posted. You can remove it yourself, or risk forum penalties when a moderator removes it for you.
Harassing or Defamatory
This category includes both clear and masked language and/or links to websites containing such language or images which:
Insultingly refer to other characters, players, Blizzard employees, or groups of people
Result in ongoing harassment to other characters, players, Blizzard employees, or groups of people
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, they will:
Be given a temporary ban from the forums, depending upon severity
You don’t have to click them all. A handful of them is sufficient. Blizzard will see the pattern and can pull up the details on the back-end of things.
You’ve posted several times on this forum about how you don’t believe things are being addressed as you believe they should be. Orylia’s response is just as valid here as it was in the other more recent thread.
If this is a deal breaker for you? There are other games out there if you don’t like how Blizzard handles things here. Not a single soul is holding you here if this eats at you so.
Report and move on. That’s all you need to do. Bots suck, everyone admits it. But what people fail to remember is that Bots exist because of the players who buy illegal services. Kill the business, kill the botting empires. It’s a problem that begins and ends with us players. Blizzard does the best they can to combat it, but every game out there has the same problem because there will always be idiots who want to cheat to get ahead.
that works but its slow, and they effect so many players every hour they are allowed to farm and ruin the efforts lots of players put into the game.
if complainers like me are support to be squelched and reported for being frustrated about the blatant obvious flyhacking bots, then so be it. i fight for the user.
You can complain and give feedback without violating the code of conduct, and without forfeiting your ability to use the forums. How will you fight for the user then?
Look, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t get angry. Remove the video link as the others are not wrong, the SFA’s will be able to see that link if they need it. Send in the video to hacks@blizzard.com and continue playing.
You fight for yourself, you only speak for yourself. Not a single other soul, just as I mentioned in that same post I linked. You’re not a matyr for any cause.
Breaking the rules to report other people breaking the rules doesn’t make you any better than those that cheat. Blizzard works on their time - not yours. You and all of those who may think like you do that insta-banning supposed bots is the answer, but how would you respond to the fact that there would absolutely be legitimate players no doubt caught up in that mix? Folks already rage about the handful of people who get mistakenly caught up in banwaves as it is. Instantaneous bans (that are not the more black-and-white social sanctions) would be far more devastating on the true playerbase than swatting down the bots - who have hundreds of thousands of accounts that they’ll just swap to when one is banned. It is not so clean and easy as people seem to think it may be.
That is unfortunately the truth. There is only so much any business can do to combat them, but with it being a multi-million (though likely multi-billion) dollar industry, it’s just a straight fact that they will always find some way around whatever fixes or roadblocks put in their way to keep operating. The businesses exists because there will always be a market for it.
But it’s easy for players who don’t know and who don’t care to know that their idea of “oh it’s easy to fix if you do X!!! And if you don’t, you don’t care about us players or this game!!!” isn’t realistic.
Just correct me, if Blizzard takes this “slow” time to analyze, be it days, weeks or months, it gives the cheater a chance to earn the gold needed to acquire a new account, or purchase illegally.
Now, if the process were faster “we are in 2024!!!”, there are much faster and more capable processors than in 2013-2014.
Frankly, giving this excuse that you need to do a full, detailed investigation is a little frustrating.
The community tries to collaborate, but I clearly see that this type of slowness only encourages more and more bots.
We’re always posting feedback on the forums, but the fact that we don’t include names of potential “cheaters” makes us seem protective of “cheaters.”
We know this is boring.
By saying that we are not comfortable with the processes, are you inviting us to leave the game and leave only the bots, cheaters?
I understand that the forum team does not have direct powers to do this, but passing on reports would be enough to make the game more balanced and with less cheating.
I’m assuming that these things would be tracked, and that illicit currencies would be removed during the suspension process.
Everything you need to report is included in the game reporting system, reports on the forum would not speed up the process, and would not include this vital information.
To be frank, there’s no magic bullet in this kind of thing and rushing thins will have more work to do then if one took their time. Why? Unless you want to catch a permaban because of the rush and have no means to appeal it, then it’s better to take time with it.
They don’t allow it because it’d easily end up as he-said-she-said where folks would point at one another as botters and such to get one another action with no proof to back it up.
It is at this point that we are quite frustrated, the system that exists in the game sometimes cannot match the “flight speed” to make the report, in many cases an error occurs in the process.
In this system, even though you always recommend using it, it feels like it takes too long. As I said, we are in 2024, computers are more powerful, even more so with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.
Yes, on that part I agree! There would be a war of narratives with each other.
I suspect then you have not seen the other side? The side complaining about false AI bans, mass reports, and automated replies to appeals? Just scroll down.
Blizzard tends to not only verify account suspensions, which take time, but does it and appeals manually.
They also tend to monitor bot software to not only detect it, but to also attempt to break it.
Yes, and the makers of these bots are also in the same year. They have greater advantages than they did back when WoW launched.
You keep saying that right-clicking and reporting takes too long, but typing out a post on a forum with zero evidence (which the right-click report system collects) is somehow faster in 2024?
If you’re experiencing errors with reporting, then that would almost certainly be a UI or Addon issue. Otherwise, you could report the errors in-game with the bug report system.
Right-click reporting is vastly superior for us as players as well as for Blizzard as it’s quick and simple, and the system collects the necessary data in the background to actually catch and detect real bots (not just accounts we ‘think’ are botting).
The last thing I’ll note is that the reason they take their time is to reduce false positives and to catch MORE botters than the whack-a-mole process that you would prefer they use. Instead of catching hundreds of botters quickly, they catch thousands and thousands.
Of course I think it’s unfair! If the person has been wrongly accused, I understand the need for a full investigation, if there is evidence against the accusation, there is nothing left but time to carry out the investigations.
As for errors, errors result from the player leaving their area of vision due to the speed of the mount, which is why an error sometimes occurs when capturing the report.
I remember the “commendable” changes Blizzard made to contain bots: the ban on command mirroring programs and the more recent requirement to buy 1 month of game with currency $$.
These changes have had a severe impact in some aspects, but as you said, there will always be new searches for ways to cheat and use the bot.