Every layer, every zone with value, every little section has at least 1 bot and usually 2-3. They are beyond obvious… they get reported and absolutely nothing happens.
Someone made a topic about getting rid of all bots. It took me a little while to find it but I did. This makes for a good read. The replies are the icing on the cake:
I spent about 3 hours yesterday getting bots killed and I will likely do it again today.
There are so many bots it’s crazy.
But worry not, Blizzard just fired 9000 employees, surely they still have some CS/GMs available to ban bots.
I’m in the belief blizzard gets paid by bots to remain active, they cannot for the love of gawd get rid of them, but if you or I buy a GDKP we get the ban hammer
Thing is, they are typically funded by stolen gold or stolen credit cards and it always catches up to them. It costs Blizzard a lot of money to fight botting. There’s a team specifically for catching them. It makes Blizzard $0 having bots that aren’t really paying.
It also costs them money to go after people who break the rules and end up getting their accounts suspended/banned as they generally won’t come back waving fists full of cash to get back into the game.
It’s a lose-lose in both scenarios. And the only reason for them to follow through on both is for the integrity of the game.
Hire me to get rid of bots. Ill do it for free. Just give me a lifetime wow membership.
Can you blame the crux of the issue?
If the company is just going to end expacs on a whim without providing a museum era piece or just make derivatives of one expac without always ascertaining if they will have some permanence or not…
The crux of the issue is definitely going to cut every corner they can.
Just because you want to waste every little moment of your life achieving every little thing, playing what you perceive to be legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re going to; at the risk of getting reprimanded for it or not.
I can give you an anecdotal example…
Boy, would there have been egg on my face if I had decided to invest time, energy, and money in Cata while waiting for a feature like LFR.
I used my hindsight to know better than to bother playing it; because, of the precedents they keep setting.
Instead of trying to be on Full servers try out the smaller ones and I’ll promise you’ll have a smaller botting issue.
You mean you, on your other character. This isn’t the first time you’ve linked to a post by Gryvellous.
We get it, you want attention.
No there isn’t.
Automation is not “a team”
Go on cata classic and /who Naxx
Those bots will never be banned, but the bot you run? Banned in a week.
yeah I should absolutely try a different server… Let me look at the list… oh look, there’s only one
Jokes on you for playing Anniversary ngl
Yea, I definitely feel like Anniversary, along with this whole mega server concept, has turned into a bit of a disaster. Honestly, at this point, I’d rather they just made a bunch of small servers but then let people group with each other cross realm if they want to. No trading of anything that’s not conjured if you’re not on the same realm.
I dunno, at the end of the day though, the player bases’ hunger to buy gold and services is just insatiable. Those of us who actually like to play the game feel like we’re in the minority and it’s a bummer.
Oh for real? I thought that person came out of the gate swinging just a little too fast. That explains a lot. I really wish Blizzard would do something about forum alt hopping. I think it’s fine to want to change your avatar, but it’s mildly annoying that the ignore list (which Gryvellous is definitely on) is so easily trivialized.
Bots on Anniversary are probably like 20% of the active 60s, no one knows the actual numbers but I’d say that’s a safe assumption. There is too much money through the actual bot subs (yes some are via stolen cards, some via wow tokens on Retail etc) but there are lots that aren’t.
Plus a large % of actual players would quit if they didn’t have access to easy gold and had to farm for it so they keep those people’s subs as well via having bots.
If they actually cared they would have in-game GMs like back in the day to monitor the issue that would get rid of 90% of bots before they even reached level 60. But that costs money and Blizz is just milking this game for whatever it can with minimal financial input.
They just say “report them if you see them” so relying on paying customers to do their work for them and then doing automated banwaves a couple times a year.
It’s lazy and shows they don’t care anymore and are just trying to make the shareholders happy every quarter.
And why haven’t they nerfed boosting? 99.99% of the boosters are Jajas who sell the gold they make for real money. Someone buys that gold, then gives it right back to the booster for boosts. They can recycle the same gold infinitely and keep making money off it.
Nothing will ever be done about bots. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can decide if this is the product you want to play.
Botting, RMT, jaja being 30% of the population; all of these things are a part of WoW that Blizzard will NEVER do anything about.
It doesn’t matter how many posts you make, this will never be a priority for them and never has been.
Good luck with your choice.
At the end of the day bots=sub numbers. Blizzard staff can make excuses to the players of bots totally costing them money, even though they do nothing to stop them.
But theyd never mention to shareholders that 20% of the subs are using stolen credit cards and losing the company money. Instead blizzard is happy to say that subscription numbers are up.
And that means what exactly? I’ve linked several topics in posts made by several other some being the same, so what? You’re saying I should have linked a totally unrelated topic? And so what if i linked the same user, I’m not allowed to find something or someone funny. This topic is about getting rid of bots, that topic contained a solution about getting rid of bots, so why wouldn’t I link it? I would have linked a reply like that no matter who wrote it.
Your reply doesn’t even make any sense.
Anniversary could have really used token at this point. This is a result of mega servers, Blizzard cannot do anything about it. It is economics. Only dead servers are immune from this. I mean they still have bots (if server transfers are active) but it’s less competitive. And no one likes the dead server experience because if one of your raiders doesn’t show you are cooked.
Is it actually mostly “stolen gold” or is it farmed gold? - If you wait to ban them until they make enough money to re-purchase their account, they can operate indefinitely.
I really question the idea that on one hand people say these botters are so sophisticated and large organizations that are making millions of dollars and it’s impossible to stop them.
And then at the same time people say they use stolen credit cards, which to me begs the question of if they’re so big and organized and engaging in using stolen credit cards so often, how have they not been identified for the much larger criminal offenses of widespread fraud and theft compared to violating Blizzard TOS?