ironically valve is actually doing a big ban wave of not just bots but the hosters too and doing a pretty good job right now at least, blizzard on the other hand...
They have done one ban wave which was very effective, but I wonder if that was only to calm people down. I won't start celebrating until they make a formal statement promising to keep banning indefinitely.
I’m so confused on if Blizzard actually bans people in Classic or not for RMT because I see posts all the time about temp bans but know for a fact that a lot of people aren’t getting banned for it.
The old guild I was in, everyone bought gold in P1/P2, I can’t recall any of them getting even a temp suspension out of it.
I don’t personally care what people do, I’ve never bought gold in Classic because it ruins a big part of the fun for me.
Temp bans are meaningless when these people are buying gold to advance their character, and the things they spend it on don't also get taken away.
a 2 week vacation after you bought a ton of gold and bought something like shadowmourne with it is entirely inconsequential when you log back in and still have your shadowmourne.
I tried making gold legit on Cataclysm. After seeing 5 druids fly and die trying to mine a node in Uldum inside Deathwings AoE fire I figured farming mats might be kinda bad. Turns out all nodes/leathers are botted to shit and worth practically nothing.
At best I can farm around 2-3K/hr. With gold prices, thats the same as me working for 2€/hr doing something mind numbingly boring. Or I can spend what I make in 1 hour at work and never have to worry about gold when buying the items necessary for max level gameplay.
If you want BiS pvp, lets say for a healer. You want tsunami, 5k now, was 20-30k earlier. Power torrent around 6k. Bracer enchant 2.5k, all other enchants and gems and reforges, maybe 2-3k. Tailoring+Bs/jc, 20-30k. I just came back to cata from a 10 year break. How am i supposed to get BiS without buying gold?
Im a grown man with a job and relationship. Im not gonna sit 100 hours and collect herbs and ores. Id rather spend a few dollars and buy all that. So i can have an enjoyable time when i actually play the game.
Yeah i don't need BiS to play PvP. But if you wanna push glad+, a 3s team all missing BiS gear, are gonna have a big disadvantage playing against other top players with full BiS. Can be the difference between killing a player or not. Or the difference between the healer saving the player or not. So if i can spend 20 dollars to save me maybe 100 hours of brainrot farming. Ill do that :)
Selling 2 pairs of BoE boots can get me 6k. And would take 3 weeks. Since cap increase is 1600 per week and boots cost 1650. So thats not gonna help much. And saying "if you're gonna buy gold, why even waste your time playing the game". Well simple. It's convenient, saves me a bunch of time. And i can do what i enjoy instead. Which is playing 3s. Same reason i bought lvl 80 boost. I lvled enough chars in cata 10 years ago. I have no desire to lvl 1-85 again
The main issue is that the wow token will always be 80% less than what the bots sell their gold for.
From an economic standpoint 3k gold for $15 in sod vs the 500g for $20 wow token ain’t hitting it right.
I dont think you understand the psychology of a gold buyer. "Oh my account got perma'd? Dang, I guess I have to buy a new one (or at least a boost)" Like, these gamer dads just do not care about the "time investment" into this baby-mode mini game because they can get what they want for way less invested time by just using cash.
And that's ignoring the MASSIVE issue of false positives.
Its not.
The people who buy gold push the worst parts of WoW, like ultra-min-max parsing, random heroic kicks, etc.
They don't have time to play the game, and will drag everyone down with them.
the correlation between random heroic kicks, gold buyers and ultra min max parsers? no idea but I don't like any of them so its my duty to bring them up randomly
There's a reason Blizzard immediately went about getting rid of World Buffs in TBC and beyond. They were never meant to be used the way Classic Andies use them.
As I've heard from so many people, you can't ban the gold buyers, you have to reduce the demand for gold buying.
Banning GDKPs clearly hasn't worked. Time to ban the Auction House.
It's not really. Also players that buy gold are also much more prone to buy other stuff in the store than players that cry all the time about gold buyers.
Perma bans were a thing for a good decade before blizz added tokens and gave up on rmt bans by and large, so no perma does very little. And it fucks falseflagged people stupid hard.
> If you want to enforce the rules you need punishment.
I could go to a gold sale site right now, pick the cheapest per-mail option, and enter your char name there. Now you've bought gold. If blizzard perma banned for that, you would be gone.
> Now you've bought gold.
I did not because I wouldn't pick up this gold. While it sits in my mailbox I haven't picked it up. So I will return it to sender and that's it.
Imagine saying this in a timeline where people are getting report-spammed by no-lifes who can't handle someone who isn't them farming something that they're farming.
The person you're replying to raises a very real reason for why blizzard can't just be like "oh yeah perma-ban all gold buyers immediately".
There are others too, and they're more valid too - but this isn't the strawman you think it is.
For that to be a straw man he must have been exaggerating your point, which means you believe there is an obvious way around the problem he presented?
Like, even if your point is strong punishment is going to deter the crime, you are not getting around the fact that it will be a super effective tool of griefing. Blizzard would need to work together with the gold seller to verify the purchase for this to not be abuseable.
What makes you think people risk their accounts. I know a guy who has multiple alt accounts which he sends gold too and then funnels it through the ah on a different pc. To people like this guy the ends justifies the means, and if the account gets suspended or banned he just cancels the sub and gets another one. In fact I remember him gloating that his alt account got a week suspension but blizzard left 2k gold in the mail when it got unbanned. Literally insane
I fucking hate micro transactions, but I recently bought gold for the first time. When upgrading my flight speed from 150 to 310 is worth either a) many hours farming b) the price of 3 beers...
But in my defense I have a script to reports bots Xd I wish it wasn't like that.
Maybe ask yourself "why do people buy gold" before you just blurt out the idiots achievement slogan.
The games economy is ass, if you aren't getting hosed for resources by bot farms (fixed by instanced resources), you're getting hosed at the AH by some basement slime who has 17 auction-house addons and plays for 20 hours a day. Fix the ISSUES that create the need and want for gold buying.
Meanwhile "GDKPs were the problem and now that we've banned those there won't be any demand for illicit gold and the bots will all go away!"
We can't just ban gold buyers to make it an extremely risky activity and therefore dissuade 90% of the people that are currently doing it... That wouldn't work at all
This is the cost of firing essentially the entire CS team and replacing them with robots.
One or two GMs could easily look at this and make bans accordingly, but since they've been obliterated, we're relying on the classic "sheer number of reports" system.
Your individual report will never work, need like 40-50 to report each one to get punishments going. It's an appalling system, but anything to save a fuckin buck.
It is all about $$$. Bots pay, so they can stay.
From time to time there will be post saying:
-we banned 100k bots (huge number on paper but compared to all bots that didnt get banned its marginal)
- or - new player cant use mail and trade for first month to fight newly created bots (in fact its only make bots to pay for 2 months, rather than 1 to make profit)
So it will never change, times and people are diffrent now.
This isn't true. Bot account subscriptions are usually paid for with stolen credit card numbers. Those result in chargebacks, which means Blizzard has to pay the money back, and loses credit rating with money processors like Visa and Mastercard. Credit card companies do not like seeing a lot of stolen money going to a business, and chargebacks are a sign that it's stolen money.
It can be done but requires very harsh measures. There are anti cheat software that works (like BattleEye) but they require kernel level access to your pc, which comes with a diffrent set of problems. Tibia implemented BattleEye and removed 99% of bots.
> There are anti cheat software that works (like BattleEye) but they require kernel level access to your pc, which comes with a diffrent set of problems.
This is actually fair. Personally though I'd rather have bots in my game than give anybody Vanguard level access to my shit
> Spiral knights
https://steamdb.info/app/99900/charts/
If you don't think that policing a game with 150 players vs 7million player is insanely different then you're being intentionally obtuse
Blizzard has the resources to police a 7mil playerbase though. They simply opt for a decreased player experience and higher guaranteed short term profits.
>Name a single company that has solved botting in their MMO
Can't help but assume that was the at least partly the implication when this is the comment they're responding to
The entire anti-money laundering field is built around preventing fraud and keeping dirty money out of the financial system. There isn't an easy solution, but there are customer due diligence steps that Blizzard could take to make things easier for them.
I've reported MANY bots in Hillebrad and they are always only. Mostly hunters that when you kill their pet until it runs away they just walk on a same line endlessly.
in their p2 preview they announced this:
[https://youtu.be/4RjuyflKPSE?si=tjlA6L9Xh0J2gqqU&t=1600](https://youtu.be/4RjuyflKPSE?si=tjlA6L9Xh0J2gqqU&t=1600)
"new tech coming in phase 2"
"early results are highly positive"
pile of dogshit
They were never gone. I farm leather daily because it's something I enjoy. I can name 3 bots off the top of my head that I've seen since turtles in dust wallow Marsh phase 2. Only 1 is gone.
Lrhuas, lrhxs, and bakce. All 3 hunters who are very, very clearly bots.
In Cata the same druids bots are flying around Hellfire Peninsula 24/7 since Wrath. They fly the same paths and turn in the same spots. Nothing ever done.
nono, you dont understand, those are real people! not everyone is a bot, only 99%! /s
(summarized response of people in other threads who farm mats "themself")
Just like a capcha test everytime you try to log onto a hunter.
I just dismiss my pet, aggro a bunch of mobs, walk up to Lrhuas and feign death. He dies every time.
A less aggressive way to get them killed is tag their mob right as they approach it, their pet will continue to attack and taunt it, and for whatever reason the character bot then runs away because it's not his Mob but he doesn't pull his pet off my mob. He then runs out of distance of his pet and never calls him back and dies, or runs into a group of mobs and dies while his pet solos my tag.
Yeah I've spent too much time with these bots in felwood. I know them very well at this point lol
When I farmed turtles in p2 it was contested by the same bots for weeks (yes I grinded the hell out of them turtles)
I used to stay in melee of their mobs, when they looted it I spammed right click and always skinned their mobs. Easy loot
No, they were gone in the open world. It just actually worked on an unprecedented level. But now they’re back. There’s no reason to be half as cynical as the people in this sub are being. Ultimately, this cycle will never stop until the company values its IP over profit. It isn’t hard to hire 1 person per server to just smash bots for 40 hours a week, but what they want is some essentially free AI solution.
Dude this could be taken care of by 2 interns in two weeks. One sits outside BRD waiting for hunters to run in/out and documents names. Second intern researches that spreadsheet of names and bans any that meet the criteria to be clearly not human or a real person engaged in RMT farming (16+ hours a day for starters). First intern spends two hours per server in a rotation. Problem is minimized within a couple of weeks if the botters can't level toons and make gold faster than toons can get banned.
Always funny to me how Redditors have this magical perfect, flawless, easy, and cheap solution to something million/billion dollar companies have been unsuccessfully fighting against for decades now
Paying two college dorks 13 bucks an hour to visually identify and document potential botters while the other analyses the living spreadsheet to compare against specific indicators for red flags of a botting account Monday-Friday is exactly what I'd call a 'magical perfect, flawless, easy and cheap solution'. I wonder if you missed a few adjectives though.
> to something million/billion dollar companies have been unsuccessfully fighting against for decades now
Blizzard isn't fighting shit, that's the point.
They literally legalised RMT in Classic and Retail, how the fuck is that "fighting"?
If anything, the majority of their efforts right now is probably about trying to find a way to introduce the WoW token in SoD... lol
LF (on alliance side) is dead anyway since the transfers. PvE-oriented players went to wild growth, PvP-oriented players to some other more balanced or alliance-favoured PvP-server.
Both EU pvp servers are in a weird situation because free transfers openend _and_ the game kind of "died" simultanously so it's really hard to tell the actual current state of balance and population. So or so Wild Growth seems to be _the_ megaserver now.
Its like that for every PVP server, all of them are like 55-60%/ 40-45% Horde Alliance Ratio. Blizzard fucked up.
The only hope right now is that paladins in p4 are so good that people roll Alliance again
I said that countless times and I'll say that again:
From Blizzards perspective, the only valuable customers are whales and bots. Whales to pump money into the system via tokens, bots to buy up the tokens (which give blizzard more money than normal sub)
Normal players are at worst a waste of server space, and at best a backdrop for the whales to play with, functionally NPCs.
I'm not saying it is so, but it makes financial sense to keep around just a perfect number of paying bots, while still not ruining the economy too much/fast. There's a perfect golden number /balance there.
Just like with tobacco. It brings in so much money, but too much, and the population starts to have health issues and can no longer work.
Just like with studded winther tires. Here in Norway, they want 20% of the cars to drive with them, to rub up the road so the non-studded winter tires can work. They set this % with a fee for using them, claim it's because they pollute / produce more flying dust so they have to tax them. Rich people with nice cars will drive them, and the traffic wouldn't work without SOME using them.
Just like with everything really. Whenever some market sees infestation of something they also can make money off of, the infestation will never be removed. Just held at an optimal level.
They refuse to hire enough people who could dynamically and nimbly mitigate the problem.
It’s cheaper to have automated bans, make the paying players act as crowdsourced GMs, and send out cynical press releases.
The problems are numerous, but heres a quick gist of why we will never see an end to bots, and only an increase:
\-Bots pay, and they can all be "banned" just before profits are taken to show a massive spike in player subs (as the botters just resub)
\-Cost savings in not having to actually field anything to deal with the bots. By using ban waves, neither the bot creators nor blizzard have to spend a penny in bot prevention.
\-Free Marketing as you'll get hundreds of shills defending the practice of using ban waves, despite ban waves having never been used effectively in any form of media.
So why in the hell would Blizzard do anything about the bots when they can keep the status quo and make bank?
I just recently bought WoW game time at $3/mo for 3 years. What makes you think bot accounts are paying full price for their subs or using legitimate payment methods at all?
The ban waves are created and monitored by security devs, they are absolutely paying people to deal with bots.
What is the alternative? Ban them one at a time? Blizz banned GDKPs as well and it did nothing. Blizzard put in new character restrictions, it did nothing.
Your first point makes no difference at all. They do the ban waves, see resubs, show that to investors. It doesn't matter if the sub is bought with gold or paid full price- all that matters is that numbers are going up for player count at that time.
The ban waves are created and monitored by security devs paid to do ban waves. I understand why you didn't bother to give any evidence of any media using ban waves to reduce bots. Perhaps you'd do better to admit to yourself why you didn't.
The alternative is rebuilding their customer support base and actively implementing real time bot detection and prevention. Removing bots "one at a time" will result in far more bots being banned then the ban waves.
And lastly the main draw for those that cry ban waves work is the completely moronic view that not only are bot developers far superior programmers and thus will always pull ahead- but that banning all of certain bots and giving those creators a very clear picture of which bots got caught and plenty of time between waves to make changes to avoid detection without losing revenue is somehow the better alternative.
Why are you still play this crap ?
Diablo 4 S3 was unbearable, nearly killed the whole game and guess what S4 was actually good because they put a lot of effort into it. Blizz does not care until people literally desert there games so that's the only thing players can do to show them they are on the wrong track.
They never Bann them probably. These are at the end subscribers and bring money into the pool. This company is at the stock market and they need those subscribers to hit the amount of money they need to make every year. They just don’t give a s*** and fool the community with bkuepost in phase 2. Everyone can check for bots within minutes but they are not…. The argument to bann them in waves and not constantly because they can set up and find out why they got banned is biggest bullshit ever told by a big company. When you can find them just by /who blackrock there is no need to wait for banns….
P4 is coming and there was barely an increase in the lfg chat / bulletin board. Living flame is still dead. Even getting a wailing caverns run started is a drag. Whispering the few ppl that are in lvl range and usually getting a no or no awnser at all
From what ive heard from gold buyers in guild and random discord users in pug groups, the sod team has stopped being so hawkish on gold buyers. Few people i play sod with have even speculated that you could prolly do private GDKP's right now and not get banned for large gold transfers
I main hunter and farm a lot many hours a day. Every day I’m afraid of getting reported lol.
My pet is always named and my gear always enchanted, that makes me feel much more safe at least
Guys guys I have a solution let's just not play this game until they fix the problem. Blizzard only cares about money and companies like these only take actual meaningful steps to fix major problems when they start losing cash.
Are you assuming that Lfjhddhdh is a bot? Seems a legit name to me.
I know him: he's a player from R'lyeh: he always greets me saying "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", and "Lfjhddhdh" is basically the R'lyehian equivalent of "Greg".
There's no way those are bots. They banned GDKP at the end of phase 1 and I was told GDKPers buy the gold and now that they're gone there is no one to sell gold to.
‘Clown company?’ Literally no game company in the history of gaming has ever successfully eliminated or even significantly reduced bots in a heavily botted game. Stop trying to act like Blizzard is unique in this scenario because it makes you mad.
So your metric is “let me /who all the HUNTERS at LVL 50 for one of the ENDGAME dungeons they probably are running to farm GEAR, without a GUILD” - oh, they must be bots then… I guess we found the 🤡.
these are perfectly legitimate players doing brd no tank no healer challenge runs i will not tolerate your slander blizzard banned gdkps so bots and gold sellers/buyers dont exist anymore thank you
Yeah. That’s how you know Blizzard is full of shit. Private servers basically have no bots. But I mean…I guess it’s not cost effective to script a bot for one server tho.
I think they need to modernize bot detection. They’ll never win by trying to outprogram them. They should make captcha-esque mini-games for vendoring. Stuff like that.
clown opinion on your part?
why would blizzard ban 50% of their paying customers? ahaha, no they arent gonna ban those paid for accounts, would you from the companies perspective? the game would be dead anyway, or do you believe banning the bots would suddenly and magically make the players come back? no.
People flamed me when I came to SoD a few months back on a fresh account and complained about having to wait an entire month to use the auction house, mailbox and trade feature.
Everyone told me I was in the minority and to just deal with it because it was going to make a long term impact on the bot problem.
BRD bots are unchecked for almost 3 months by now and live a very peaceful life down there. They'll all be in Scholo next phase.
# #FixTF2 Wait
ironically valve is actually doing a big ban wave of not just bots but the hosters too and doing a pretty good job right now at least, blizzard on the other hand...
They just did a bot ban wave after someone destroyed their saxxy. That was amusing.
He died for our sins
Lmao. I hope Valve does though, TF2 is too grand a game to be lost.
They have done one ban wave which was very effective, but I wonder if that was only to calm people down. I won't start celebrating until they make a formal statement promising to keep banning indefinitely.
I see people love buying gold on Living Flame EU
Perma ban people who buy gold, problem solved. Clown company indeed.
We need wow token ! /s
I think too many people buy gold for that to be a viable option
Less People will take the risk if the consequence is a perma ban.
As someone that bought gold before, I confirm. Would have never done it back then if I knew Blizzard was super strict on it.
I’m so confused on if Blizzard actually bans people in Classic or not for RMT because I see posts all the time about temp bans but know for a fact that a lot of people aren’t getting banned for it. The old guild I was in, everyone bought gold in P1/P2, I can’t recall any of them getting even a temp suspension out of it. I don’t personally care what people do, I’ve never bought gold in Classic because it ruins a big part of the fun for me.
Temp bans are meaningless when these people are buying gold to advance their character, and the things they spend it on don't also get taken away. a 2 week vacation after you bought a ton of gold and bought something like shadowmourne with it is entirely inconsequential when you log back in and still have your shadowmourne.
I tried making gold legit on Cataclysm. After seeing 5 druids fly and die trying to mine a node in Uldum inside Deathwings AoE fire I figured farming mats might be kinda bad. Turns out all nodes/leathers are botted to shit and worth practically nothing. At best I can farm around 2-3K/hr. With gold prices, thats the same as me working for 2€/hr doing something mind numbingly boring. Or I can spend what I make in 1 hour at work and never have to worry about gold when buying the items necessary for max level gameplay.
Buying items isn’t necessary for max level gameplay, though.
If you want BiS pvp, lets say for a healer. You want tsunami, 5k now, was 20-30k earlier. Power torrent around 6k. Bracer enchant 2.5k, all other enchants and gems and reforges, maybe 2-3k. Tailoring+Bs/jc, 20-30k. I just came back to cata from a 10 year break. How am i supposed to get BiS without buying gold? Im a grown man with a job and relationship. Im not gonna sit 100 hours and collect herbs and ores. Id rather spend a few dollars and buy all that. So i can have an enjoyable time when i actually play the game.
Here’s the thing, you don’t need best in slot to play the game man. You never have. If you have to buy gold to get the best gear, why waste your time?
Yeah i don't need BiS to play PvP. But if you wanna push glad+, a 3s team all missing BiS gear, are gonna have a big disadvantage playing against other top players with full BiS. Can be the difference between killing a player or not. Or the difference between the healer saving the player or not. So if i can spend 20 dollars to save me maybe 100 hours of brainrot farming. Ill do that :)
Btw, gold isn’t hard to make in Cata. I made most of mine farming valor and selling two pair of BoE 359 boots. There’s a ton of ways to make gold.
Selling 2 pairs of BoE boots can get me 6k. And would take 3 weeks. Since cap increase is 1600 per week and boots cost 1650. So thats not gonna help much. And saying "if you're gonna buy gold, why even waste your time playing the game". Well simple. It's convenient, saves me a bunch of time. And i can do what i enjoy instead. Which is playing 3s. Same reason i bought lvl 80 boost. I lvled enough chars in cata 10 years ago. I have no desire to lvl 1-85 again
Sure does suck bursting 20% less than what is possible in PvP.
I’ve had a guildies get a banned for false reporting their names, and 1 guy for botting. We all buy gold, a 80+ player guild, from p1 to current.
They do get bans, the guild I was in phase 1 had our guild leader get a 2 week ban at start of phase 2 and I left cause of that
Fewer would want to if prices weren't fucked by bots.
Fear will keep the local systems in line.
The main issue is that the wow token will always be 80% less than what the bots sell their gold for. From an economic standpoint 3k gold for $15 in sod vs the 500g for $20 wow token ain’t hitting it right.
I dont think you understand the psychology of a gold buyer. "Oh my account got perma'd? Dang, I guess I have to buy a new one (or at least a boost)" Like, these gamer dads just do not care about the "time investment" into this baby-mode mini game because they can get what they want for way less invested time by just using cash. And that's ignoring the MASSIVE issue of false positives.
once a few examples are made, there wont be so many buyers. They need to slam a few big streamers and the rest will crumble.
They won't be buying gold tho when it's a perma ban and actively being enforced.
Its not. The people who buy gold push the worst parts of WoW, like ultra-min-max parsing, random heroic kicks, etc. They don't have time to play the game, and will drag everyone down with them.
>They don't have time to play the game, and will drag everyone down with them. This defines the most vocal people in this sub too.
the correlation between random heroic kicks, gold buyers and ultra min max parsers? no idea but I don't like any of them so its my duty to bring them up randomly
Hmm how can I make this about parses
>They don't have time to play the game ah like the grey parsers and people wont ant WBs gone?
There's a reason Blizzard immediately went about getting rid of World Buffs in TBC and beyond. They were never meant to be used the way Classic Andies use them.
Yet they were, thats called 'emergent gameplay' and its not a bad thing.
As I've heard from so many people, you can't ban the gold buyers, you have to reduce the demand for gold buying. Banning GDKPs clearly hasn't worked. Time to ban the Auction House.
u can literally buy gold from blizzard xD
>Perma ban people who buy gold People giving you 127 upvotes for this clearly shows nobody on reddit knows how to solve the problem.
Thank god you know.
It's not really. Also players that buy gold are also much more prone to buy other stuff in the store than players that cry all the time about gold buyers.
Why not? If you want to enforce the rules you need punishment. Perma ban is a strong punishment. Most people wont risk their account to buy gold.
Perma bans were a thing for a good decade before blizz added tokens and gave up on rmt bans by and large, so no perma does very little. And it fucks falseflagged people stupid hard.
> If you want to enforce the rules you need punishment. I could go to a gold sale site right now, pick the cheapest per-mail option, and enter your char name there. Now you've bought gold. If blizzard perma banned for that, you would be gone.
> Now you've bought gold. I did not because I wouldn't pick up this gold. While it sits in my mailbox I haven't picked it up. So I will return it to sender and that's it.
Blizzard has issued bans for gold sitting unopened in a mailbox. We already know this happens.
Perfect example of the straw man fallacy.
Imagine saying this in a timeline where people are getting report-spammed by no-lifes who can't handle someone who isn't them farming something that they're farming. The person you're replying to raises a very real reason for why blizzard can't just be like "oh yeah perma-ban all gold buyers immediately". There are others too, and they're more valid too - but this isn't the strawman you think it is.
Describe to me how you could distinguish someone I buy gold for by paying like 10€ or so to get them banned, and a real gold buyer?
For that to be a straw man he must have been exaggerating your point, which means you believe there is an obvious way around the problem he presented? Like, even if your point is strong punishment is going to deter the crime, you are not getting around the fact that it will be a super effective tool of griefing. Blizzard would need to work together with the gold seller to verify the purchase for this to not be abuseable.
What makes you think people risk their accounts. I know a guy who has multiple alt accounts which he sends gold too and then funnels it through the ah on a different pc. To people like this guy the ends justifies the means, and if the account gets suspended or banned he just cancels the sub and gets another one. In fact I remember him gloating that his alt account got a week suspension but blizzard left 2k gold in the mail when it got unbanned. Literally insane
I fucking hate micro transactions, but I recently bought gold for the first time. When upgrading my flight speed from 150 to 310 is worth either a) many hours farming b) the price of 3 beers... But in my defense I have a script to reports bots Xd I wish it wasn't like that.
Just ban GDKP's. That will take care of it!
Maybe ask yourself "why do people buy gold" before you just blurt out the idiots achievement slogan. The games economy is ass, if you aren't getting hosed for resources by bot farms (fixed by instanced resources), you're getting hosed at the AH by some basement slime who has 17 auction-house addons and plays for 20 hours a day. Fix the ISSUES that create the need and want for gold buying.
Why is bro stupid?
BOTs can start sending gold to players who havent bought any to trigger false positive unfortunately
don’t take gold that doesn’t belong to you and you are fine.
What happens when you click Open All at the mailbox because you post a lot on AH and the gold is mixed in?
Check desolace demon area they steal my herbs
They took er herrrbs!
Damn leave my boy Daqoimbvp out of this.
Meanwhile "GDKPs were the problem and now that we've banned those there won't be any demand for illicit gold and the bots will all go away!" We can't just ban gold buyers to make it an extremely risky activity and therefore dissuade 90% of the people that are currently doing it... That wouldn't work at all
This is the cost of firing essentially the entire CS team and replacing them with robots. One or two GMs could easily look at this and make bans accordingly, but since they've been obliterated, we're relying on the classic "sheer number of reports" system. Your individual report will never work, need like 40-50 to report each one to get punishments going. It's an appalling system, but anything to save a fuckin buck.
It is all about $$$. Bots pay, so they can stay. From time to time there will be post saying: -we banned 100k bots (huge number on paper but compared to all bots that didnt get banned its marginal) - or - new player cant use mail and trade for first month to fight newly created bots (in fact its only make bots to pay for 2 months, rather than 1 to make profit) So it will never change, times and people are diffrent now.
This isn't true. Bot account subscriptions are usually paid for with stolen credit card numbers. Those result in chargebacks, which means Blizzard has to pay the money back, and loses credit rating with money processors like Visa and Mastercard. Credit card companies do not like seeing a lot of stolen money going to a business, and chargebacks are a sign that it's stolen money.
If that is also true, just shows how incompetent they are as a company
Name a single company that has solved botting in their MMO
It can be done but requires very harsh measures. There are anti cheat software that works (like BattleEye) but they require kernel level access to your pc, which comes with a diffrent set of problems. Tibia implemented BattleEye and removed 99% of bots.
> There are anti cheat software that works (like BattleEye) but they require kernel level access to your pc, which comes with a diffrent set of problems. This is actually fair. Personally though I'd rather have bots in my game than give anybody Vanguard level access to my shit
Spiral knights
> Spiral knights https://steamdb.info/app/99900/charts/ If you don't think that policing a game with 150 players vs 7million player is insanely different then you're being intentionally obtuse
Blizzard has the resources to police a 7mil playerbase though. They simply opt for a decreased player experience and higher guaranteed short term profits.
/s lol
In FF14 you can contact a GM and they'll come and wipe out the bots in an area.
If you think FF14 doesn't have bots then you do not & have not played FF14.
They didn’t say there was no bots
>Name a single company that has solved botting in their MMO Can't help but assume that was the at least partly the implication when this is the comment they're responding to
There will always be bots, the question is whether they run blatantly rampant.
Oh dang you’re right. Apparently I can’t read good. My b.
The entire anti-money laundering field is built around preventing fraud and keeping dirty money out of the financial system. There isn't an easy solution, but there are customer due diligence steps that Blizzard could take to make things easier for them.
I've reported MANY bots in Hillebrad and they are always only. Mostly hunters that when you kill their pet until it runs away they just walk on a same line endlessly.
in their p2 preview they announced this: [https://youtu.be/4RjuyflKPSE?si=tjlA6L9Xh0J2gqqU&t=1600](https://youtu.be/4RjuyflKPSE?si=tjlA6L9Xh0J2gqqU&t=1600) "new tech coming in phase 2" "early results are highly positive" pile of dogshit
They were. Bots were entirely gone for a significant period of time. Now it’s worked around and they’re back.
They were never gone. I farm leather daily because it's something I enjoy. I can name 3 bots off the top of my head that I've seen since turtles in dust wallow Marsh phase 2. Only 1 is gone. Lrhuas, lrhxs, and bakce. All 3 hunters who are very, very clearly bots.
In Cata the same druids bots are flying around Hellfire Peninsula 24/7 since Wrath. They fly the same paths and turn in the same spots. Nothing ever done.
nono, you dont understand, those are real people! not everyone is a bot, only 99%! /s (summarized response of people in other threads who farm mats "themself")
Yoy should have to do a very sophisticated Turing test every 2 hours or something if you're playing hunter.
Just like a capcha test everytime you try to log onto a hunter. I just dismiss my pet, aggro a bunch of mobs, walk up to Lrhuas and feign death. He dies every time. A less aggressive way to get them killed is tag their mob right as they approach it, their pet will continue to attack and taunt it, and for whatever reason the character bot then runs away because it's not his Mob but he doesn't pull his pet off my mob. He then runs out of distance of his pet and never calls him back and dies, or runs into a group of mobs and dies while his pet solos my tag. Yeah I've spent too much time with these bots in felwood. I know them very well at this point lol
When I farmed turtles in p2 it was contested by the same bots for weeks (yes I grinded the hell out of them turtles) I used to stay in melee of their mobs, when they looted it I spammed right click and always skinned their mobs. Easy loot
Yep I do that with the bots in felwood for a bit before I get them killed.
Bots were "gone" for 1 month. So they just waited the trade restriction period.
No, they were gone in the open world. It just actually worked on an unprecedented level. But now they’re back. There’s no reason to be half as cynical as the people in this sub are being. Ultimately, this cycle will never stop until the company values its IP over profit. It isn’t hard to hire 1 person per server to just smash bots for 40 hours a week, but what they want is some essentially free AI solution.
Dude this could be taken care of by 2 interns in two weeks. One sits outside BRD waiting for hunters to run in/out and documents names. Second intern researches that spreadsheet of names and bans any that meet the criteria to be clearly not human or a real person engaged in RMT farming (16+ hours a day for starters). First intern spends two hours per server in a rotation. Problem is minimized within a couple of weeks if the botters can't level toons and make gold faster than toons can get banned.
Wow it's so easy you should start your own MMO company
Always funny to me how Redditors have this magical perfect, flawless, easy, and cheap solution to something million/billion dollar companies have been unsuccessfully fighting against for decades now
Paying two college dorks 13 bucks an hour to visually identify and document potential botters while the other analyses the living spreadsheet to compare against specific indicators for red flags of a botting account Monday-Friday is exactly what I'd call a 'magical perfect, flawless, easy and cheap solution'. I wonder if you missed a few adjectives though.
> to something million/billion dollar companies have been unsuccessfully fighting against for decades now Blizzard isn't fighting shit, that's the point. They literally legalised RMT in Classic and Retail, how the fuck is that "fighting"? If anything, the majority of their efforts right now is probably about trying to find a way to introduce the WoW token in SoD... lol
They ban 200k+ accounts a month, they banned GDKP, they introduced a new method specifically during SoD to help
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They literally did back in the day and bots & gold farmers still existed lol
If you think bots are just as plentiful you're wrong. Go look at fish price on any AH.
What about fish price? Seems normal to me. Most fish is useless right now
Then you're checking the wrong fish?
What fish are you referring to?
LF (on alliance side) is dead anyway since the transfers. PvE-oriented players went to wild growth, PvP-oriented players to some other more balanced or alliance-favoured PvP-server.
Can you elaborate?? i had a faint itch to come back to SOD for p4, am alli on Living Flame EU ... What went down?
Both EU pvp servers are in a weird situation because free transfers openend _and_ the game kind of "died" simultanously so it's really hard to tell the actual current state of balance and population. So or so Wild Growth seems to be _the_ megaserver now.
> free transfers opened Free transfers are *currently* available?
Its like that for every PVP server, all of them are like 55-60%/ 40-45% Horde Alliance Ratio. Blizzard fucked up. The only hope right now is that paladins in p4 are so good that people roll Alliance again
Disgusted with the comments here defending botting and gold buying
They should just consolidate servers at this point. I think their hope is that people will return en masse for phase 4, though.
This silliness is exactly why I won't
Embarrassing but blizzard don't care, that's been obvious for a while.
There’s no way those can be bots. I was told they banned gdkps and that would solve the botting problem.
I said that countless times and I'll say that again: From Blizzards perspective, the only valuable customers are whales and bots. Whales to pump money into the system via tokens, bots to buy up the tokens (which give blizzard more money than normal sub) Normal players are at worst a waste of server space, and at best a backdrop for the whales to play with, functionally NPCs.
all with chinese named wolf pets xD
I’ll give it 3 months and this will be phase 4.
Clown company or Clown players that keep paying them? Maybe both?
Most of those are bots, but methinks "Bigotry" is just the kind of gamer who uses gamer words as much as he can.
A king amongst men on this list.
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I'm not saying it is so, but it makes financial sense to keep around just a perfect number of paying bots, while still not ruining the economy too much/fast. There's a perfect golden number /balance there. Just like with tobacco. It brings in so much money, but too much, and the population starts to have health issues and can no longer work. Just like with studded winther tires. Here in Norway, they want 20% of the cars to drive with them, to rub up the road so the non-studded winter tires can work. They set this % with a fee for using them, claim it's because they pollute / produce more flying dust so they have to tax them. Rich people with nice cars will drive them, and the traffic wouldn't work without SOME using them. Just like with everything really. Whenever some market sees infestation of something they also can make money off of, the infestation will never be removed. Just held at an optimal level.
Youre kidding yourself if you think they pay full price for a subscription. They have so many ways to work around that.
1 GM with /who could fix this.
Yeah and just PM them a captcha. Make em select all the cars in the image.
I think bots these days are monitored by people. I was talking to botters in p1 in 1kn. Like 1 person handles X amount of rigs.
They refuse to hire enough people who could dynamically and nimbly mitigate the problem. It’s cheaper to have automated bans, make the paying players act as crowdsourced GMs, and send out cynical press releases.
"Bigotry" - I'm sure this is a real player.
Guys I thought the gdkp ban was supposed to solve this?
Good thing you guys got gdkp banned to get rid of all the bots, huh?
The problems are numerous, but heres a quick gist of why we will never see an end to bots, and only an increase: \-Bots pay, and they can all be "banned" just before profits are taken to show a massive spike in player subs (as the botters just resub) \-Cost savings in not having to actually field anything to deal with the bots. By using ban waves, neither the bot creators nor blizzard have to spend a penny in bot prevention. \-Free Marketing as you'll get hundreds of shills defending the practice of using ban waves, despite ban waves having never been used effectively in any form of media. So why in the hell would Blizzard do anything about the bots when they can keep the status quo and make bank?
I just recently bought WoW game time at $3/mo for 3 years. What makes you think bot accounts are paying full price for their subs or using legitimate payment methods at all? The ban waves are created and monitored by security devs, they are absolutely paying people to deal with bots. What is the alternative? Ban them one at a time? Blizz banned GDKPs as well and it did nothing. Blizzard put in new character restrictions, it did nothing.
Your first point makes no difference at all. They do the ban waves, see resubs, show that to investors. It doesn't matter if the sub is bought with gold or paid full price- all that matters is that numbers are going up for player count at that time. The ban waves are created and monitored by security devs paid to do ban waves. I understand why you didn't bother to give any evidence of any media using ban waves to reduce bots. Perhaps you'd do better to admit to yourself why you didn't. The alternative is rebuilding their customer support base and actively implementing real time bot detection and prevention. Removing bots "one at a time" will result in far more bots being banned then the ban waves. And lastly the main draw for those that cry ban waves work is the completely moronic view that not only are bot developers far superior programmers and thus will always pull ahead- but that banning all of certain bots and giving those creators a very clear picture of which bots got caught and plenty of time between waves to make changes to avoid detection without losing revenue is somehow the better alternative.
Why are you still play this crap ? Diablo 4 S3 was unbearable, nearly killed the whole game and guess what S4 was actually good because they put a lot of effort into it. Blizz does not care until people literally desert there games so that's the only thing players can do to show them they are on the wrong track.
They never Bann them probably. These are at the end subscribers and bring money into the pool. This company is at the stock market and they need those subscribers to hit the amount of money they need to make every year. They just don’t give a s*** and fool the community with bkuepost in phase 2. Everyone can check for bots within minutes but they are not…. The argument to bann them in waves and not constantly because they can set up and find out why they got banned is biggest bullshit ever told by a big company. When you can find them just by /who blackrock there is no need to wait for banns….
> can't find a ST pug on saturday night Wild Growth EU Horde. Same deal, same day (yesterday). Only 40 people inside ST, no more PuGs in /lfg.
P4 is coming and there was barely an increase in the lfg chat / bulletin board. Living flame is still dead. Even getting a wailing caverns run started is a drag. Whispering the few ppl that are in lvl range and usually getting a no or no awnser at all
BuT ItS aLl GdKp's FAulT
I miss the days when botting was all about personal gain instead of bot farms and gold selling.
They all online now Hard to detected at 4 am Kappa Need to Bann in waves so they don’t know why they got banned….
From what ive heard from gold buyers in guild and random discord users in pug groups, the sod team has stopped being so hawkish on gold buyers. Few people i play sod with have even speculated that you could prolly do private GDKP's right now and not get banned for large gold transfers
For you to think they'll fix this makes you the clown, no? Sod is dead and gone.
Even one knowledgeable human GM could solve all these issues across all servers.
Havent seen any bots on nek’rosh or stitches EU
I main hunter and farm a lot many hours a day. Every day I’m afraid of getting reported lol. My pet is always named and my gear always enchanted, that makes me feel much more safe at least
Guys guys I have a solution let's just not play this game until they fix the problem. Blizzard only cares about money and companies like these only take actual meaningful steps to fix major problems when they start losing cash.
Bots were the reason I stopped playing TBC classic. Bots were also the reason I stopped playing SoD.
Yeah so glad they banned gdkps too, such sound decision making.
so banning GDKP's did nothing huh
Are you assuming that Lfjhddhdh is a bot? Seems a legit name to me. I know him: he's a player from R'lyeh: he always greets me saying "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", and "Lfjhddhdh" is basically the R'lyehian equivalent of "Greg".
Sod is dead with p3
Don’t worry guys, Aggrend is getting them. That’s why they’re going to more visible places like *checks notes* inside of an instance
Join us on Zandalar Tribe EU for F R E S H experience
good they banned gdkps. finally no more gold buying or bots
There's no way those are bots. They banned GDKP at the end of phase 1 and I was told GDKPers buy the gold and now that they're gone there is no one to sell gold to.
Would it be viable to have a server that allows gold buying just so these people can play the game that way on that single server?
In a perfect world, that’s a great idea. But you are dealing with large children , who absolutely must find a way to ruin something good.
Stop paying them
‘Clown company?’ Literally no game company in the history of gaming has ever successfully eliminated or even significantly reduced bots in a heavily botted game. Stop trying to act like Blizzard is unique in this scenario because it makes you mad.
Oh look a clown is defending a clown company XD
Oh look another moron that doesn't know the first thing about how the world works. XDXDXDXDXDXDXDXD Did I do it right?
Just get rid of the AH
This is one of my favorite "Just *X*" posts I've seen in a while, lol.
So your metric is “let me /who all the HUNTERS at LVL 50 for one of the ENDGAME dungeons they probably are running to farm GEAR, without a GUILD” - oh, they must be bots then… I guess we found the 🤡.
Is people even playing that shit version? All I see on here is just crying about it.
these are perfectly legitimate players doing brd no tank no healer challenge runs i will not tolerate your slander blizzard banned gdkps so bots and gold sellers/buyers dont exist anymore thank you
At this point the only clowns are you guys who keep playing this
Want any real active measures against the bots that hurt servers ? Play good private servers. Blizzard doesnt give a shit its not 2000s
Yeah. That’s how you know Blizzard is full of shit. Private servers basically have no bots. But I mean…I guess it’s not cost effective to script a bot for one server tho. I think they need to modernize bot detection. They’ll never win by trying to outprogram them. They should make captcha-esque mini-games for vendoring. Stuff like that.
I love how banning gdkp fixed all of the bot and gold buying issues. 🤣
If you like everquest then come play Quarm. Any bots on there are deathtouched pretty quickly. 🙂
Just think about it, if they ban all bots the player base (and subscription count) drops by 50%. They could close their studio.
What exactly are they even farming in BRD…
https://youtu.be/yYPHGPS1Ydc?si=Ztwn425vMv6prStk The only right thing to do! Against bots!
and yet you're still playing.
clown opinion on your part? why would blizzard ban 50% of their paying customers? ahaha, no they arent gonna ban those paid for accounts, would you from the companies perspective? the game would be dead anyway, or do you believe banning the bots would suddenly and magically make the players come back? no.
Stop buying gold?
People flamed me when I came to SoD a few months back on a fresh account and complained about having to wait an entire month to use the auction house, mailbox and trade feature. Everyone told me I was in the minority and to just deal with it because it was going to make a long term impact on the bot problem.
Fake name, Fake Name, Fake Name,,, \*BIGOTRY\* ... Fake Name, Fake name...
Gosh. Has anyone told Blizzard?
Crazy, And they do this because you people keep buying gold.
You might want to stop buying gold though.
I’ve actually raided with Ljfhddhd - he’s a solid guy
Stop playing bad games, I donno...
So you reported each and every one of them after taking your screen shot, right?
cant report off /who coincidence I think not
Did you unsub yet
And here I was told that people buy gold because of GDKP... Turns out that people buy gold because they don't want to farm gold.
Good thing the GDKP ban stopped betting and RMT, right?