Bashing Bots?

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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.