Sounds crazy I know, but hear me out.
As we all know, Blizz is totally cool with multiboxers. Botting on the other hand is against the ToS and will get you banhammered. Furthermore, most real players now know what bots look like and will report them. Making a bot look like a real player is hard – real players don’t farm at all hours, don’t fight stupidly, and don’t move robotically, so they stick out.
But what if a set of bots were to be disguised as a multiboxer? It may actually be easier than emulating a solo player. Multiboxers are famously known for spending a lot of time farming, any stupid fighting would be hidden by mobs dying instantly, and the lack of “realness” of movements would be covered up by the swarm of characters following the leader. Make all the characters have themed/similar names and you have a team of bots that would be difficult to distinguish from a real multiboxer. It’s some extra effort, but it could pay off very well by dodging the periodic ban waves bots usually get hit with.
Obviously this isn’t to say that all or even a significant number of apparent multiboxers are actually botters, but it struck me as a possibility.
How likely is this? Are there bots in our midst slipping under the radar this way?
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Blizzard has a measure for what bots and multiboxers are. It is “action per button (or click, but button is a generic, cuz click is made in a button, you know”).
The client can know what buttons you using while you have it running, and it does not work while it is not the active window or your mouse is not over it.
Multiboxing software might split a button press, but it is still coherent that the button you pushed is the button the client is receiving.
Bots can be detected from multiboxing to the extent that if the client receives a command but your input is idle, it means you are boting. Multiboxing or not.
If your client receives a series of commands but your input gives only one, it is botting.
And so on.
And WoW refuse to work when you try to use it with known botting software. On top of that, those “red flags” of bottings are sent to blizzard servers and analysed for further inquiry if you are botting or not.
Some multiboxers who do setup wrong are banned as botters very frequently, and that is why people always tell new multiboxers to do it standard until they know what they are doing.
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Interesting. If bots are detected by input and running software, I wonder if there may be USB accessories that look like keyboards to the OS but are actually something like a Raspberry Pi running bot software… that would be both cheap and very hard to detect.
They still under the same predicament.
I have a Naga and a Tartarus, they allow me to do macros and stuff. They might get me faster sequences and stuff, but internally it is still one input, one action, and therefore I need to be playing for it to work.
Bots are things that require no operator. They involve much more than input sequences. They need to have feedback, decision making.
Bots in general read the screen for feedback, and stuff. They are complex programs.
If you are just doing a bunch of macros, these are not bots. You might imply they are cyborg players, but not bots.
And blizzard uses “pattern of behavior to draw a line”.
I might have an idea of how I can setup my tartarus and naga to be flagged as a bot by the automated system, and that is why I dont. lol
Really?
Shift workers play WoW too.
People from all around the world play WoW.
Insomniacs play WoW.
I’m playing now on Illidan, where the realm time is 2.15 am.
My time is 6.15 pm, a difference of 14 hours.
The periodic bans don’t just come from people reporting they mostly come from Blizz’s Warden software detecting the latest botware running on the botter’s pcs.
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when are people going to get it? botters are NOT boxers and boxers are NOT botters Blizzards software knows the difference between the two and boxers are each a separate acct which is still requiring a live person making the command decisions
until Blizzard comes right out and officially says multi boxing is illegal there is nothing going to be done to punish them since they are clearly NOT violating the TOS the EULA or whatever misconstrued warped interpretation of the rules you think are being broken
Blizzard is NOT going to ban people that are not breaking any rules so get over it
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I don’t think they ban anyone unless someone reports them first. I saw a youtube video of a former gm explaining how he spotted botters and it was very time consuming. He followed them while invisible, tried to talk to them, moved them to see if they would go back to the same spots, and looked at their actions to see if they were repeating the same ones. It’s basically impossible to catch them all because blizz just doesn’t have enough resources.
Idk anything about gaming except to play one, sort of so keep that in mind but I’m thinking Blizzard has another way to detect when someone is using bots and it may not matter if the botter is reported or not, eventually they’ll be disabled.
I could be wrong and no, I didn’t read this thread.
Sounds like you could use a good cheese to go with your multiboxing whine.
illegal gaming currency is a multi million dollar business the CIA doesn’t even have the resources to catch botters
Ban multiboxing.
Nerf dh’s while we’re at it.
ok for the millionth time for those who refuse to read before… Multiboxing is totally legal, does not violate the TOS and blizz has said they have zero intent of banning it for years now.
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The past is the past, it’s time for a revolution.
Ban multiboxing.
They don’t need to be reported first, the software just needs to be detected. They do need to verify things first though because the software isn’t perfect. They don’t want to ban someone because Warden came back with a false positive. That’s why it takes so long and they only ban in waves.
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you wanna know why botting is hard to stop?
quoted from wikipedia
“In 2005, The New York Times estimated that there were over 100,000 full-time gold farmers in China alone, and by 2009 the number had increased to one million. And in 2006, sales of such virtual goods were thought to amount to somewhere between 200 and US $900 million.”
“Academic studies of gold farming have revealed that the social networks of gold farmers are similar to those of drug dealers”
“Another estimate, drawn from 2005/2006 data, valued the market at not less than US$200 million per year and suggested that over 150,000 people were employed as gold farmers”
“2008 figures from China valued the Chinese trade in virtual currency at over several billion yuan, nearly US$300 million.”
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Educate yourself.
~https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Warden_(software)
I agree please ban this blizz #BanMultiBoxing
troll threads in full force…
muted / ignored
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