Bashing Bots?

[Souca]

So I wanted to pose this question to the people here.

If botting is against the TOS of a game, do you feel getting the bot killed by helping it to attack more mobs than it should is a bad thing? Assuming this behavior is not against the TOS, would you do it?

I'm curious on what others think.

- Souca -

[burningforce]

isn't that still harassment? I mean you do not know for sure it is a bot, could be someone running the same patterns and what not. I doubt they are real people, but I wouldn't want to take that chance in case they are real and report you.

just my opinion

[Ualaa]

Well, botting is against the ToS.

I've played with a bot before.
Found one which would /wave to me if I got near enough.
If it ran up to a mob, I could do an instant cast and have it kill something for me.
But it wouldn't leave a relatively small area of Felwood, so wasn't too helpful in my leveling.
Still fun to play with them sometimes.

I could see a hunter dragging a bunch of mobs to the bot and then using Feign Death.

[Gadzooks]

As long as you're not breaking TOS, they are fair game, IMHO.

Just be careful and make sure they are actually bots, tho.

[Zal]

Personally whenever i find a bot i attack it, (since they attack back) then kite it into a mob and let the mob kill it. Haha fun times, fun times. Once gave a bot full 100% repair bill for 4 days in a row.

[Malekyth]

If you manipulate a bot to help you kill mobs ... umm, you're botting. :)

Better to report to a GM and leave it alone, I think.

[blast3r]

Report the botter then do whatever you want to him. :) We had two bots..one ally and one horde near the cauldrons in icecrown. We all reported them but they were there for close to a month. I finished my dailie kill ally quests on him. :)

Even though you pretty much know it is a bot it isn't one until blizzard confirms it and bans them.

[Mono]

I once discovered a bot in Stranglethorn Vale, on the western shore of the lake. I waited for him to engage one of the raptors he was grinding on and taunted it, then kited it to the bottom of the lake. The bot haplessly pursued, but failed to surface for air again :D

Best part of it? The bot had demonstrated an ability to run back to its corpse when I'd kited it through other mobs and got it killed, but ghosts can walk on water and you have to aim with your mouse to descend below the surface, something this bot clearly could not achieve as he did not rez again after that.

As we were same faction I was able to add him to my friends list and determine he remained online , no doubt floating in ghost form on the lake surface, for quite some time.

[Gadzooks]

I see bots all the time - there's a few spots in Icecrown and Storm Peaks where they tend to gather. I spotted one flying circles near Dun Niffelem, probably running a macro to spot the time-lost proto drake.

I report them, and report them a lot. Sometimes they go away for good, sometimes not. I browse the scummier botting sites once in a while to get a feel for what they're up to, and what scams they're running, to protect myself, and most of them seem focused on Wintergrasp and the Basin.

I really don't know why Blizzard has'nt done a massive ban wave, it's so overdue, what with all of the Wintergrasp botters, BG botters, and bots running all over Northrend. There's got to be a way to flag them all and get rid of them, so we can have a couple weeks without them. Even EVE Online recently had to do a massive bot ban wave, and I'm sure Aion will have to do one eventually.

There's no way to get rid of them, except to make anything of value, including gold, soulbound, but that would kill the game, and the pro exploiters would just focus more on leveling for you. "You need 100 stack ore? You buy service! Happy Ore! $19.99!"

[Ualaa]

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.

[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 (http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=12907) 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.