Follow In Battlegrounds Broken After 5.2

[Palee]

hahaha ^^^ So true....DONE! But once the makers of the bot's get around this follow issue there will be tons back in the BG's Botting. Give it a few weeks Ima kno

Do we know for sure that the bots are using follow? I saw a video on youtube where they showed a ton of bots in IoC and they were clearly not using follow, but instead some kind of pathing hack. They were going in all sort of directions, not following anyone.

[Sam DeathWalker]

As far as I'm concerned, it's not one action, it's several recent actions. This, the OQueue thing, the automatic bans, getting booted when mass-reporting in the outside world, the "tolerated, for now" blue comment, the massive increase in bots in BGs as well as farming bots going unchecked for far too long.


They are in Court, in Germany, with attornies suing the bot company, and they won at the low level. There is no way anyone can conclude they are not doing their very best to eliminate bots.
Oq allowed premades to go agaisnt randoms, a HUGE problem.
Auto bans and reports were ALL reversed against boxers.
A random blue quote later taken back.....
And maybe the bot problem was not addressed previously because they knew solutions would have adverse effect on boxers.

All and all most everything has resonable and logical explainations. If they wanted to be done with boxers they could come out and say it like GW2.


Some garbage bots use follow, I doubt the major paid ones do. There is no technical solution to bots they read data from ram and act on it, even random get stuck things wont work if the reading is in real time. If you know the offsets and where to look in ram where wow stores its game information there is nothing you cannot do. Wow has to store map data in ram and if wow can read where everything is so can another program ..... forget about a technical solution to bots.

Just think about it for a second. You command your level 89 to fly in panderia. Wow stores information as to the level of your character in ram, you command fly wow goes to a ram address and gets your level to determine if you are 90 or not. Bot program changes 89 to 90 in the ram address storing your character level information and wow thinks you are level 90 .... what can they do about that?

[Meathead]

Like I said ages ago, Wow needs to update there game engine or bots will be in it forever. But they dont want to do that and have no time or effort to do so.

[zenga]

Like I said ages ago, Wow needs to update there game engine or bots will be in it forever. But they dont want to do that and have no time or effort to do so.

The amount of uninformed nonsense posted in this thread is amazing. There are both technical and legal limitations (depending on where you are located) to what blizzard (or warden) can scan on your computer (i.e. check your memory). Updating there engine won't change nor prevent botting in the future.

Google the main bot, head to that forum, check the ban section: many bg botters got banned over the past weeks, to the extend that it's no longer considered safe. They manually intervene in BG's, real humans checking out players. A lot of logistic and human resources are devoted to that. Long story short:

It's the same thing as speeding on the high way or driving when smashed: you can't prevent it, but when you know that there is a good chance that you will get caught with severe repercussions, a big % will actually abide the rules. And that is something they have achieved now. If they will be able to keep up, that's a whole different thing. But in Europe, the amount of active bots in bg's during the night has decreased by a multitude. creating a much more fun gaming experience for everyone in random bgs.

[Palee]

All and all most everything has resonable and logical explainations. If they wanted to be done with boxers they could come out and say it like GW2.

Sam, what you are saying implies that if we DO find a workaround in BGs to replace follow Blizzard would be TOTALLY OK with it.
But given the sequence of events and their responses, I highly doubt that. I'm scared to do any more BGs now even WITHOUT follow because I think Blizzard will just find yet another way to force me to stop multiboxing in BGs.
Which is why I got a refund for my subs. Not paying them a dime unless they come out clearly and state that MULTIBOXING IS OK IN BGS.


Also, in a different perspective, if they came out and just said that Multiboxing is no longer allowed, that would be bad for business. The strategy that they chose to follow (pun intended) is more covert and makes some of the boxers think that they can still PVE or do world PVP so there's no reason to cancel.
In other words, they are just putting out fires with as little collateral damage as possible. And in this case the fires consist in all the whining about multiboxing that has increased over the last few years as multiboxing got more and more popular. And they are using the bots as an excuse to get rid of those of us who are the most annoying to the playerbase. And that means those of us who like PVP in BGs.

[Rosebud]

I'm going to over-simplify things. If removing /follow was the secret to detecting and removing bots, why did they not do it sooner? I'm not a game programmer or developer, but it cannot be difficult to disable that function. Actually it is probably one of the easiest things for them to do. Has it really taken them all these years to figure out that /follow was the key? Unlikely. It could be a tiny bit helpful, but in the end, I do believe that multiboxers were the target. Bots, oddly enough, are the scapegoat.

[moog]

Just think about it for a second. You command your level 89 to fly in panderia. Wow stores information as to the level of your character in ram, you command fly wow goes to a ram address and gets your level to determine if you are 90 or not. Bot program changes 89 to 90 in the ram address storing your character level information and wow thinks you are level 90 .... what can they do about that?

Er, encrypt the data.
CRC the data.
But it's easier to ostracise MBers and panda (see what I did there) to the gullible masses!

[Meathead]

You know whats funny, Is that the main used bot does not use the follow function. I say give it a few months they then will be like ok lets turn it back on, we have lost a lot of subscribers who are mainly botters I would assume then they see how many people really play there game. I remember if using AHK you can get banned but we use that to MB back in the day.

I started MBing back in the day when TBC was out, I got bored of playing only 1 toon. BGS are boring as hell without friends or your 5 man team.

[pinotnoir]

Guys, the fact that they disabled /follow in arenas too, is a clear sign that removing /follow was actually a direct ban of multiboxing in PvP.
Blizz knows there are no bots in arena. How can there be bots there? How would a bot follow a legit player in arena? How would a bot even queue in the same arena with a legit player?
They targeted us without a doubt. And they threw us a sale too before this change hoping that they can string us a long a little more.
They knew very well some of us will cancel and some of us might even call to get a refund, but not all of us are doing that.
So the thinking process went like this:

Blizz emp1: We are killing multiboxing in PvP. It causes too much whining and people leaving the game.
Blizz emp2: OK, since they are gonna leave, let's throw them a sale so we can offset the losses as much as we can.

If they had kept /follow in arena then their pathetic excuse would have sounded more realistic, but they didn't.

I totally agree with this.

[MiRai]

I'm going to over-simplify things. If removing /follow was the secret to detecting and removing bots, why did they not do it sooner? I'm not a game programmer or developer, but it cannot be difficult to disable that function. Actually it is probably one of the easiest things for them to do. Has it really taken them all these years to figure out that /follow was the key? Unlikely. It could be a tiny bit helpful, but in the end, I do believe that multiboxers were the target. Bots, oddly enough, are the scapegoat.

Perhaps they've been avoiding it because of multiboxers and/or handicapped individuals who rely on it.

Er, encrypt the data.
CRC the data.

From what I've read on random forums randomly on the internet, SquareEnix does this with both FFXI and FFXIV. If you've ever played either game you would realize it's much slower paced, and from what I understand, the encryption is partially responsible for that (that, and the fact the servers are located across the ocean in Japan). This doesn't necessarily stop botting altogether, but I'm sure it makes it much harder to accomplish.

Just think about it for a second. You command your level 89 to fly in panderia. Wow stores information as to the level of your character in ram, you command fly wow goes to a ram address and gets your level to determine if you are 90 or not. Bot program changes 89 to 90 in the ram address storing your character level information and wow thinks you are level 90 .... what can they do about that?

From what you're saying, it sounds like you believe all of the server's data is stored in RAM on your home computer. That would mean you could just change the values in your RAM to level everyone up on the server to 90! Just think about it for a second...