Follow In Battlegrounds Broken After 5.2

[MadMilitia]

Random BGs are God awful even without multiboxers in them. You'll get the occasional teams that play to win. All the remaining are people farming HKs, testing macros and just chatting away or trolling.

Multiboxing was just a scapegoat for the complaining everyone does about random BGs. My opinion on it is that random BGs shouldn't even exist. Not in their current state anyway. The fact you much have to do them to acquire honor is also stupid.

I'll hold true to my thoughts on it. When you have a large section of the playerbase botting the content, the content needs to go. There is no better way to tell a developer how much you hate a piece of content than to bot it.

[JohnGabriel]

[..snip..]
I'll hold true to my thoughts on it. When you have a large section of the playerbase botting the content, the content needs to go. There is no better way to tell a developer how much you hate a piece of content than to bot it.

Back in the days of MuDs the developers did just that. Like how hacker used to be a term describing a knowledgeable programmer it now means bad things, just like the word bots.

Something happened when big money got involved, not just the money the corporations make but also what the player base can make. But hopefully the venus project is real.

[MadMilitia]

Back in the days of MuDs the developers did just that. Like how hacker used to be a term describing a knowledgeable programmer it now means bad things, just like the word bots.

Something happened when big money got involved, not just the money the corporations make but also what the player base can make. But hopefully the venus project is real.

The problem with the design theory is that everyone wants something different. Believe it or not there are a lot of people who really like the direction WoW is going in. I'm not one of them. I don't think many here are. Dailies piss me off to no end. But that's just my preference.

If at any point a large company like Blizzard decides I'm of the minority then the game won't be designed for me in mind. It is the same as being left handed. The market has always sucked for left handed devices in this way.

I can't really fault them there. It cost money to develop new features for a game and to support existing features. If the Farmville crowd makes them more cash then so be it. It just won't involve my money. Frankly, and it is just my opinion, the game is salvageable. There are moments where it is fun. Just a great amount of it is not fun. So they could tweak the environments on certain servers to appeal to a different crowd. This way everyone gets what they want.

It is like Mr. Fresco points out in that Venus Project. We start with a less than Utopian idea. It'll never be Utopian WoW will never be able to cover all bases for enjoyment. So it has to make due with what it knows and expand on that when possible. Some minor alterations may escape them though and the state of their design leaves much to be desired from me. Not just in WoW but company wide.

It's not the content that makes people use bots, it's a risk/reward thing.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that. I enjoyed the grind in WoW back in the BC era because I was a college student with little to focus on in the real world. Add a 40 hour work week, pets, children and a home to keep up with and the rigors of the MMO are much less dynamic. As a result much less fun.

This is true of all games though. Save for Dark Souls, there are not many games I bother with anymore. Dark Souls is the exception because the amount of dynamic interaction parceled out is unmatched by any game on the market. The only other thing that comes close is WoW PvP. People wonder why people take PvP in WoW seriously not considering that it offers the most dynamic of interactions in the game. It can be a drag at times but it is far preferable to the scripted rehashed events in PvE.

So maybe the game hasn't gotten worse. It just hasn't gotten better.

They should either remove the reward (which would make playing BGs useless for any other purpose then PvP) or increase the risk involved in botting.

Since they can't do the first, because people like to be rewarded, and playing without gaining anything would suck. They should try do accomplish the latter (which is way harder, and more expensive.)

By removing /follow from BGs all they did is make it slightly harder for some bots to operate, which, instead of combatting botting, will only force people to use better software, which will make the bots harder to detect and combat in the future. Like in real live, when you prohibit something, you're punishing honest folk, and pushing offenders to be more creative and elusive.

Detecting bots is probably quite hard to do (involves a lot of manual work), but I think that in the end, it's the only thing they can (and should) do. I think that another problem here is that they basically removed the community feeling that individual servers had in the past. You can now just bot or buy gold at virtually no risk at all, where in the past, people got identified as cheaters by the community, making it hardder for them to join guilds and enjoy content. Nowadays you can do just about anything without ever speaking to anyone on your srever.

Anyway, long story short. I think that the follow nerf is not going to combat bots at all in the long run, and I hope Blizzard will add /follow back in when they realize this.

It won't stop the bots. People who don't have the time nor inclination to grind 30k honor for every toon on their account will not grind it. They'll skirt the requirements on that in one way or another. Be it undergeared arenas, RBG carry, botting or the like.

Botting is not an easy thing to detect. Simply because most of the detection routines are very CPU intensive across a large database of concurrent sessions. This explains in part why the /report tool was modified back in 5.1. This allows player eyes to serve as the first step in detection, thereby removing much of the CPU crunch involved in detection routines. It isn't a perfect system. Multiboxers can attest to that. It'll never be a perfect system either. As many gatherers who don't bot can attest to as well.

The only recourse is to give people who bot alternatives to what exist today. Nobody bots arenas, RGBs or heroic raids because those are end game in their respective genres. It is the grind up to those end game environments that needs a serious look. The game itself may even grow more popular as a result while eliminating any reason to bot content.

[Blubber]

...

I'll hold true to my thoughts on it. When you have a large section of the playerbase botting the content, the content needs to go. There is no better way to tell a developer how much you hate a piece of content than to bot it.

It's not the content that makes people use bots, it's a risk/reward thing. They should either remove the reward (which would make playing BGs useless for any other purpose then PvP) or increase the risk involved in botting.

Since they can't do the first, because people like to be rewarded, and playing without gaining anything would suck. They should try do accomplish the latter (which is way harder, and more expensive.)

By removing /follow from BGs all they did is make it slightly harder for some bots to operate, which, instead of combatting botting, will only force people to use better software, which will make the bots harder to detect and combat in the future. Like in real live, when you prohibit something, you're punishing honest folk, and pushing offenders to be more creative and elusive.

Detecting bots is probably quite hard to do (involves a lot of manual work), but I think that in the end, it's the only thing they can (and should) do. I think that another problem here is that they basically removed the community feeling that individual servers had in the past. You can now just bot or buy gold at virtually no risk at all, where in the past, people got identified as cheaters by the community, making it hardder for them to join guilds and enjoy content. Nowadays you can do just about anything without ever speaking to anyone on your srever.

Anyway, long story short. I think that the follow nerf is not going to combat bots at all in the long run, and I hope Blizzard will add /follow back in when they realize this.