Bashing Bots?

[Gadzooks]

Blizz has historically done mass bans, all at once.
Every now and then, on their site they announce they've banned so many people, usually in large numbers.

I read once, they've averaged a thousand accounts banned per day, just not necessarily banning people every day. Not sure how accurate that is.

I know they do ban waves, I've witnessed them. I hang around the Customer Service Forum, have for a long time, and watched all the players show up crying how innocent they are, and the GMs there pwning them hard. I was around in Diablo II when the first Rust Storm (ban wave) went through and people lost hundreds of duped gear and glyphs and Stones of Jordans. The crying over THAT was epic. It never fails to crack me up, you openly cheat, and then have the nads to complain that you got caught?

The last ban wave was MASSIVE, it included the win trading for Arenas, and a ton of Glider users, and pretty much posted to the snotty "you can't do this, I'm not buying your game again!" people that they'd rather ban 100,000 players than tolerate their cheating. They reported 50,000 accounts closed, permanently, and I think 2 were restored, that I saw posted about. It also drove the ticket qeue up to two weeks for a response.

Anyway, I'm just saying it's WAY overdue. It may be that the GMs are swamped with petitions these days, and ban waves slam the customer service department as every cheater writes in demanding their account back. They were hinting at a ban wave about 6 months ago, a CSF GM made a comment that lots of people were going to be logging in soon and finding all their AFKed gear gone...and nothing since.

There could be legal issues, too, the Glider case brought up a lot of issues I'd never considered, and they may be preparing cases against the authors.

They tended to do them around the reset of seasons, before the awards go out, or before major patches. I hope that 3.3 brings one, but I'm not holding my breath. I do see them being more proactive on a daily basis - seems like they were ontop of things for people exploiting the Brewfest boss, but as far as botting goes, they (the botters) are there for weeks, if not months, now, and it's demoralizing. I've given up on serious ore farming, as it's so hard to find now, and it's almost at the vendor price on the AH.

Cheap ore is good, but giving gold I put the work in for to pay a cheater is not.

[Souca]

I'm sure Aion will have to do one eventually.

They did. Huge ban wave and whole blocks of IPs. Bots were back same day and have caught back up to the main population. Unfortunately they tend to farm quest mobs and in some places it is so bad you will have to fight 6-7 bots for 3-4 quest mobs eventually preventing human players from ever completing the quest. In Aion you can't tag mobs, the person that does the largest percentage of damage gets looting rights and kill credit.

I can't prove it, but I'm also guessing that the botters/gold farmers are the reason that the AH prices hover about 0.5% above vendor value. Everything is expensive in Aion when you buy it from an NPC, so when the markets for rare drops becomes so low, legit players can't afford most things beyond necessity.

I report the bots every time I see them, but after 2-3 days I begin to wonder if it even matters. *shrug*

- Souca -

[HPAVC]

I find bots farming Garhal for some reason, thats the linchpin mob for doing the Hodir rep, very annoying.

On skywall, feathermoon and senjin same stupid hunter trap, strafe back and forth around obnoxiously, multishot.

It won't attack you outright if you tame something quick and name your pet Garhal and pvp flag. But it throws down a trap and a multi shot that will get you where you want to go.

[-silencer-]

Blizzard is not interested in keeping botters/farmers/etc permanently out of the game.

Think about it.

Who purchases retail copy after copy of the game on each ban? Farmers. Bliz uses the ToS as a reason to ban whomever they want, but they want to throw a carrot out to the farmers - buy and subscribe to our game, and we'll let you farm/sell gold for awhile. Long enough to make a decent profit, especially considering low hourly wages where farmers work, but for this business service we provide, we're going to make you purchase our game again and again. Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

No one is going to quit WoW due to the *relatively* low number of these cheaters & farmers. They won't let it get to the point where it's totally out of hand, but they're definitely not going to intentionally eliminate it completely either for two financial reasons:
- Cost of extra help to maintain a completely cheat-free service.
- Loss of retail & subscription purchases from farmers.

I fully believe Blizzard could completely eliminate botting & farming if they wanted to, but that's the point.. they don't want to. They're making too much extra profit by allowing a limited amount of it to remain.

[Bigfish]

Blizzard is not interested in keeping botters/farmers/etc permanently out of the game.

Think about it.

Who purchases retail copy after copy of the game on each ban? Farmers. Bliz uses the ToS as a reason to ban whomever they want, but they want to throw a carrot out to the farmers - buy and subscribe to our game, and we'll let you farm/sell gold for awhile. Long enough to make a decent profit, especially considering low hourly wages where farmers work, but for this business service we provide, we're going to make you purchase our game again and again. Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

No one is going to quit WoW due to the *relatively* low number of these cheaters & farmers. They won't let it get to the point where it's totally out of hand, but they're definitely not going to intentionally eliminate it completely either for two financial reasons:
- Cost of extra help to maintain a completely cheat-free service.
- Loss of retail & subscription purchases from farmers.

I fully believe Blizzard could completely eliminate botting & farming if they wanted to, but that's the point.. they don't want to. They're making too much extra profit by allowing a limited amount of it to remain.

That's a rather cynical viewpoint. I'd argue it would be in their interest to eliminate it completely, if only because it supports an industry that promotes large scale keylogging, for which they need to pay some hefty labor costs to undo the damage via in-game GM tickets and such.

Not to mention if they banned harder and faster, they would make more money reselling all those copies of the game.

Or potentially the rise in keylogging was due to the rising costs of creating a fresh farmers and its just cheaper to hijack accounts than to buy new ones.

Ahem. Anyway,

Personally, I'm of the opinion that when it comes to botting, it should be an all or nothing affair. If they don't mind botting, at least just come out and say it an enable it for everyone to use. Lord knows there are plenty of repetetive tasks out there that the developers have no one to blame but themselves for the rise of bots to automate the thing. If they want to eliminate bots, they need to eliminate the reason people would bot in the first place.

[RobinGBrown]

Answering the OP

I think that bots are fair game, I always report them and them mess about to see if I can trick them into doing something stupid. Easy enough on a PVP server but difficult on PVE or when they're on the same side as you.