It’s so annoying that I am getting beat by players that use Weak Auras or Addons to INSTANTLY message a person from trade chat the moment their BOT spots a KEYWORD in the chat.
That is 100% Automation and deserves a suspension or even a perma ban for repeat offenders.
Using a script or addon to instant whisper players even if you are away from your keyboard is AUTOMATION and you deserve to be suspended for it.
I would really love for blizzard to do something about this because it’s ridiculous.
I literally am sitting her monitoring chat intently and have my hands ready to go and speed whisper a person when they say they are looking for a craft and I keep it short and quick,
I whisper then instantly
“Here”
“Send Order”
And it’s already too late, some cheater with an automated bot has already snagged them.
I know for a FACT that is what this is too because I myself have asked for a crafter in chat as recent as earlier TONIGHT for my new char, And the MOMENT I put the request in chat, I got a spam message from a crafter that was multiple sentences long, And after his AUTOMATED reply to my KEYWORD, Then he followed it up with “Send the order I can do it”
You can tell 100% that the first message is from their script or addon/weak aura and the second followup message is really them talking.
Everyone knows that people looking for crafts go with the very 1st message they get and thats why people are using AUTOMATION to make sure they are the 1st person to message them no matter what.
Blizzard, We pay for the game to not have cheaters ruining it for honest players. Do something about it, Clearly you consider crafting to be a huge part of Dragonflight and going forward considering how much time you’ve put into it… Stop allowing people to use AUTOMATION to poach orders.
Put out a blue post or something and make players aware that it is against the rules to use AUTOMATION in this way
The weak aura is doing something that’s allowed In the WoW API. Blizzard has gone to great lengths to determine what automated chat messages can and can’t do.
If this were broken, it’d probably break a lot of the casino bot stuff too. Obviously they could still operate, but they’d have to actually, you know, do it themselves.
In general though, WeakAuras is just a broken addon. It should let you track spell cooldowns and buffs/debuffs. That’s the most common use and the one that’s actually reasonable. Anything beyond that is excessive, and the pure freedom Weakauras has to just do whatever it wants is insane.
Should have been nuked years and years ago along with Boss Mods.
I understand that at this point in the game’s life taking any serious action in that direction would just result in a bunch of people ragequitting and not really improve anything though.
As much as I like to bash on cheat auras and how they are a mental crutch and overall bad for the game, this is the wrong argument to make. “Automation” is a very wide term. When a cheat aura or DBM marks a player afflicted by a spell, is that person subject to a banning? The human being didn’t recognize the changed state of the game and make all the actual clicks and button presses to communicate that to the other players (let alone at the speed of which the addon and/or cheat aura does it).
The argument you SHOULD be making but will fall on deaf ears is that the onus should be on the developers to provide a UI and setup things to where the need for such things don’t exist…not that the provided power that is 100% up to Blizzard to even provide the hooks for in the first place is wrong.
Spoiler: Pandora’s Box is never ever going to be closed.
They wont. If it is allowed via the API, it is not an actionable offense. Here are some examples of something being technically automated, yet still allowed.
Auto-Repair
Auto-Selling of Grays
The Addon that removes the Confirmation DELETE box.
Interrupt Announcements.
And many other things. So again, if it is allowed via the API, it is allowed. Also, if you want to get really technical, Auto Run is an automation feature built into the game itself.
It would only be breaking the terms of the EULA if any sort of bot software was used. However, if someone has, say, a macro that sends a message when the player clicks on another player’s name, that isn’t automated by Blizzard’s rules. Macros are allowed as long as someone is there hitting buttons.
For example, there is an add on called Chat Monitor. To quote its overview: “Chat Monitor (formerly know as LF Monitor) monitors the trade, guild, LFG and general channels for specific words or phrases.” In theory a player could have this app, have it set up along with a macros to send to a player once an alert comes up with one of the chosen filtered terms.
That app is on Curse Forge with around 15k downloads, and it looks like it been around for a number of years now without any issues with Blizzard.
I would have to break the Terms of Service to get banned, which you already admitted and also subsequently informed that this is not against the Terms of Service. Cope, seethe, mald.
