Massive Ban Wave

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I feel the law of unintended consequences for blizzard.

Do tell.

[Fat Tire]

Do tell.

Re-read my last sentence. Just because there was a banning of accounts doesnt mean botters are gone. It takes very little to be back up and running. There are 4-5 other programs that will produce the same result as this particular program that was targeted. However, most are just waiting for this particular program to be back up and undetectable again.

For some they will adapt and learn to write their own scripts understanding that they dont want to be reliant on auth server with a cool Ui. In turn making it much harder for blizzard to catch botters individually rather than a mass banning targeting a particular program.

By just playing around with profiles I learned alot by accident. Hell after a while(months) of playing around I found that I didnt even need isboxer anymore.

[zenga]

A more effective approach would be to address the game mechanics that encourage people to bot in the first place.

I don't buy that, you make it sounds as if there is just 1 big common reason why people bot. At the start of this expansion the most effective way to get full honor gear was to afk 4 hours in Ashran, yet battlegrounds were still filled with bots. It basically doesn't matter how much you reduce the grind, hell even completely remove it, people will always look for shortcuts in videogames, people will always try to get an edge in videogames. That has happened in every single videogame I've played.

Re-read my last sentence. Just because there was a banning of accounts doesnt mean botters are gone. It takes very little to be back up and running. There are 4-5 other programs that will produce the same result as this particular program that was targeted. However, most are just waiting for this particular program to be back up and undetectable again.

For some they will adapt and learn to write their own scripts understanding that they dont want to be reliant on auth server with a cool Ui. In turn making it much harder for blizzard to catch botters individually rather than a mass banning targeting a particular program.

By just playing around with profiles I learned alot by accident. Hell after a while(months) of playing around I found that I didnt even need isboxer anymore.

Does it really matter that much that not all the bots will be gone? I mean if you do a random WsG and instead of 5 bots on your team you only have 1 or 2 now, then I'd argue that the overall playing experience has increased for the average player.

[Fat Tire]

Does it really matter that much that not all the bots will be gone? I mean if you do a random WsG and instead of 5 bots on your team you only have 1 or 2 now, then I'd argue that the overall playing experience has increased for the average player.

I cant speak with any knowledge regarding afk-bg/ashran botting.

To me it would make more sense to afk bot skirmishes for pvp gearing, but that is just me.

My posts were directed towards the combat/healing/cc rotations which are automated and movement/targeting is manual.

[zenga]

I cant speak with any knowledge regarding afk-bg/ashran botting.

To me it would make more sense to afk bot skirmishes for pvp gearing, but that is just me.

My posts were directed towards the combat/healing/cc rotations which are automated and movement/targeting is manual.

Then I must have completely missed the point you were making. I read it as:
- far from all botters are gone
- its easy to get up and running again
- therefore it will be harder for blizzard to catch them in the future

And I was always under the impression most people bot either to make the grinds easier (be it honor points, leveling, weekly lft for a legendary quest chain, repetitive tasks such as the garrison, ...), to make a profit (gold farming) or for a direct competitive advantage (e.g. auto kick or pre-cloack stuff in arena).

I fail to understand why someone - unless physically disabled - would want the combat mechanics to be automated, since they are so simple to begin with.

[Mokoi]

I fail to understand why someone - unless physically disabled - would want the combat mechanics to be automated, since they are so simple to begin with.

Coming from the community who continually strives to have their combat mechanics "automated" to the extent that Blizzard allows using ISboxer and macros, FCFS setups, etc. There's always benefit in removing choice where none needs to be made. Why hit 5 buttons when 1 will do? Well, in the case of botters why hit 1 button when I can focus on my positioning, and the bot will take care of my rotation fairly well without my input. It's the last step in the "making life easier" category of WoW, and it happens to be against the EULA.

[MiRai]

Coming from the community who continually strives to have their combat mechanics "automated" to the extent that Blizzard allows using ISboxer and macros, FCFS setups, etc. There's always benefit in removing choice where none needs to be made. Why hit 5 buttons when 1 will do? Well, in the case of botters why hit 1 button when I can focus on my positioning, and the bot will take care of my rotation fairly well without my input. It's the last step in the "making life easier" category of WoW, and it happens to be against the EULA.

I agree, and I disagree, because as much as I do like to create mindless rotations for simple tasks, I love to try and expand upon my overall control of each character/class... such as CC, interrupts, procs, movement, and whatever else they have that is useful. I try add in things everywhere I can with keyboard binds, mouse buttons, click bars, or VFX—Hell, I don't even use JAMBA and that automates all kinds of things for a multiboxer.

I'd say that botting, for some people, is all about the setup, and not really about removing the tediousness from the game (although it is a side effect of such a playstyle). If I was to ever run a bot, it'd be about trying to make the smartest, most "human" bot I could, and not to blend in (because that's easy), but just as a personal goal/achievement.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

My posts were directed towards the combat/healing/cc rotations which are automated and movement/targeting is manual.

OK, with that in mind, can you find no case where artificially inflating your apparent competence/effectiveness might push out other folks that are competing for the relatively small number of slots in high-end raiding? Or skew the progression speed and thus "obsolete" content prematurely?

Further, what effect do you suppose CR automation would have on the data that Blizzard uses to balance (lol...I know, bear with me) encounters?

[Fat Tire]

OK, with that in mind, can you find no case where artificially inflating your apparent competence/effectiveness might push out other folks that are competing for the relatively small number of slots in high-end raiding? Or skew the progression speed and thus "obsolete" content prematurely?

Further, what effect do you suppose CR automation would have on the data that Blizzard uses to balance (lol...I know, bear with me) encounters?

My in-game morality aside, well because I have none. Botting is not against the law.

One could argue, however, that in high-end raiding perfect dps rotations are a must and if you are not performing top 100 then you will sit out for someone else. Some of the mechanics of some of the fights have become more difficult for the avg player. May not be a problem for the teen on adderall or the cs;go pro, but in general the playerbase has gotten older and less twitchy. By having a program perform a top 100 dps for you it relieves the stress of performance and being a drag on the raid team. One could see the appeal of a program that does this aspect for you. The program that was targeted was pretty unknown up until a year ago and then exploded in users, I wonder why.

Why would I care how blizzards balances encounters based on dps if I am always doing top 50-100 dps. Its the mechanics of the fight that I believe blizzard balances around anymore.

Listen I understand that its against the eula. All the people bitching about losing their accounts are the ones who valued their accounts. However, once they disassociate themselves from their characters of having any value other than entertainment value, because the value of time has been removed they will be free.

Well, the only way I can explain it is when you first learn how to mutibox. Most mutiboxers cant or wont play any other way. Same with botting.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT! RUN FER YER LIFEZ!1!

My in-game morality aside, well because I have none. Botting is not against the law.

One could argue, however, that in high-end raiding perfect dps rotations are a must and if you are not performing top 100 then you will sit out for someone else. Some of the mechanics of some of the fights have become more difficult for the avg player. May not be a problem for the teen on adderall or the cs;go pro, but in general the playerbase has gotten older and less twitchy. By having a program perform a top 100 dps for you it relieves the stress of performance and being a drag on the raid team. One could see the appeal of a program that does this aspect for you. The program that was targeted was pretty unknown up until a year ago and then exploded in users, I wonder why.

Why would I care how blizzards balances encounters based on dps if I am always doing top 50-100 dps. Its the mechanics of the fight that I believe blizzard balances around anymore.

Listen I understand that its against the eula. All the people bitching about losing their accounts are the ones who valued their accounts. However, once they disassociate themselves from their characters of having any value other than entertainment value, because the value of time has been removed they will be free.

Well, the only way I can explain it is when you first learn how to mutibox. Most mutiboxers cant or wont play any other way. Same with botting.

First, I don't recall anyone arguing that botting is against the law. EULA/TOS are a completely different concept. I also won't argue about twitchiness, stress, or how terribly depressing or not some of the grinds are; having budding carpal tunnel issues, I'm intimately familiar with how certain things are literally painful. Also, I understand the concepts of why people bot. If I could do it for certain tedious things without risking my accounts, I absolutely would.

My particular point is much more narrow in scope and is two-fold:

• Blizzard has repeatedly alluded to the use of Big Data in balancing things -- their internal WorldOfRaids/WorldOfLogs/etc. charts, if you will. That data is a big factor in tuning encounters and making raids/instances harder or easier or nerfing/buffing boss mechanics. Now, take a raid of people actually, you know, playing their characters; we'll call them Raid A. They've spent some time crafting up macros but they still have to remember which buttons to push, when to push them, and be careful about not pressing the wrong button at a critical point in a fight. We also have Raid B, in which two of the healers, one of the MTs and a third of the DPS are running CR/heal-priority/interrupt bots. The only way they make mistakes is if they get LoS'd or out-ranged and the spell just flat fails. So, when Blizzard does the math on how these encounters run and considers tuning things, how much of an impact do you suspect automated/perfect play has on their equations? Do you think it is significant enough to skew Blizzard's perception of the difficulty of encounters in areas where bots are prevalent?
• Another big feedback mechanism is raid members complaining (sometimes vociferously) about certain mechanics being stupidly difficult or /yawn-inducing. If some percentage of the raids completes the encounters because of perfect timing of heals/interrupts due to bot scripts and they basically pooh-pooh everyone else with "lol u guyz suck, lern-2-raid-derp," how would you expect Blizzard to treat those feedback threads?

With the above two in mind and with bots being as prevalent as they apparently are in top-end raiding (had lunch with a friend that raids and the results of his last few days (even in LFR) have been pretty freaking hilarious) then I suggest they are significant enough to warp perceptions and impact the balancing/tuning process to the detriment of non-botting players. At some point, sure, it all sorta gets lost in the overgearing but for at least some amount of time I think it has a deleterious effect on the game.

As someone that doesn't raid, I don't have a dog in this hunt. To say that botting is absolutely expected because of deficiencies and it has no effect and it's all Blizzard's fault anyway, etc. is I think being a tad disingenuous. If the game sucks so hard that you're willing to bot what is supposed to be the best parts of it, I wonder why people even still play it; and yes, I realize it's not an all-or-nothing proposition.