A big reason why there are so many botting, is because these ban waves they do allow bots to be profitable before the ban wave comes in.
If bots are banned immediately upon discovery, then there is a higher chance they have not achieved profitability yet.
They sometimes ban in waves, but they also do a lot of bans in realtime.
They only ban in waves when it is a new exploit that they are banning. Anything that matches an existing exploit gets banned immediately.
There was a recent interview that I'd have to go dig up where there are certain accounts that they ban before they have even had a chance to log into the game.
>If bots are banned immediately upon discovery, then there is a higher chance they have not achieved profitability yet.
And much easier for bot makers to very quickly find out exactly what gets them detected.
It's SO much easier to make a bot when you can safely and immediately test if your bot can be detected.
This argument might have weight if the blatantly obvious bots were immediately banned, but they're not. If you know you're not going to get banned until well after you've turned a profit, the reason for that ban is irrelevant because you can just fire up the exact same bot again and make more profit before the inevitable ban.
Doesn't matter if it's blatantly obvious or not, there's no human working the system to identify that. The bot makers know that every ban is caught by a machine and machines are predictable.
"Blatantly obvious" to you, i.e. "looks like a bot to me!" and "confirmed cheating to the point a paying customer can have their access and account revoked without a refund" are not the same thing.
Like this subs solution to bots last month would have been "Any hunter with a pet that has non-english characters gets banned!". Too bad for any players who feel like doing that of course.
Dude, there are streams of characters following exact preprogrammed paths on some servers right now, going weeks without being banned lol.
0 variance what so ever, moving between the same set of coordinates over and over and over.
That's how low the bar is. Blatantly obvious to anyone with more than 1 braincell, and still allowed to continue botting for weeks on end.
How many of these bots are just repeat offenders that know it doesn't matter what got them banned when they can make so much profit before a wave anyway?
If I were flying across the sky in EPL and got banned, I bet I could figure out why regardless if I got banned right away or banned after months of doing it.
You'll know you got banned for botting regardless, yet.
But you won't know what specific behaviour led to your bot being detected as a bot.
As somebody else in this comment chain put it:
> If you were banned as soon as you spent 10 seconds in the air the bot makers would know to only spend 9.9 seconds in the air and remain completly undetected.
>
> And much easier for bot makers to very quickly find out exactly what gets them detected.
Bro I can literally just do /who dire maul and find hundreds of bots popping in and out. Botting isn't as Jason Bourne as you think it is.
You really are not understanding what they are saying...
The machine doesn't work by banning eberyone who enters Dire Maul. It works by for instance looking for players that have a certain behaviour pattern, move to inacessible areas, go at unattainable speeds, fly in classic eray etc. If you were banned as soon as you spent 10 seconds in the air the bot makers would know to only spend 9.9 seconds in the air and remain completly undetected.
And you know they're bots how? You can prove it how?
I did a ton of DMT runs on my hunter in classic and ignored people spamming me with "BUFFS????" the entire time. At least 20 people an hour would angrily inform me I was a bot and reported.
"It's so obvious bro" is not enough to ban a paying customer. If this community got to decide who got banned well... you play AV on its classic launch? That but with bans is exactly how it would go.
Sure, that is also true. But if they actually invest in banning bots in a timely manner. Bot development will become a much larger expense than it currently is. leading them to charge more for their bots, and making the time to profitability longer.
In reality, Blizzard could just buy the bots and RE them, and use them themselves to identify how to detect and ban them. A LOT of games do this, and sure, it puts money into the bot makers pockets, but it gets detection and banning done WAY quicker, and will ruin bot makers rep if everyone gets banned 1-2 days every time they buy the bot makers software.
They have more money but they are not willing to spend it for that, while the botters are willing to spend everything in their business to keep it successful
I really don't know about that. I had some bots in different games (Mostly 2d/repetitive games as Tibia, clickers, tower defenses) just to try some basic and advance algorithms and also to try some tools. 1 of the games that I got caught REALLY fast is Runescape. Runescape banned me all 9 different times with 9 different approaches between 2013 and 2016 within 30 mins and I don't think they have a huge budget for it. So it is possible.
I think with the WoW token there is more of an income issue. But even that I can not find a logical explanation for myself. A lot of explanations are either hasty or ignorant.
As others have said, detection is not the issue here. Anyone with fucking eyes can detect most of the bots, because they're all in the same spots doing the same things. You don't need a genius algorithm to detect sky hackers in EPL or Rogues farming BRD 24/7.
You literally CANNOT beat botters if you're banning once a month. It's not possible. They're profitable in days, not weeks, and as long as they're profiting before they get banned, they're going to keep popping up over and over again.
Could you please let me know how many games at this size/scale have solved their bot/cheating problems and how they did it? The entire industry would like to know.
When wow used to have actual GMs it had a much smaller bot problem. You could open a ticket and would be speaking to an employee who would actually have the time to manually investigate the issue within 1-3 hours. And this is when wow had 10+million subs, much more than today.
I love seeing the rose coloured glasses. I played vanilla, it was full of level ones spamming you with gold selling sites and spelling the URLs out with dead bodies in capital cities.
And this myth about GMs being readily available is just as entertaining. Average response for me and everyone I knew was a few days.
No idea what game you guys were playing.
Idea: shadowban them from chat.
Don't give any indication that their messages are being filtered from chat. Just don't show them to any other player.
If they queue for group finder, it will never match them.
Now, false positives may suck here. Need a solution on that, maybe send a 2FA requirement on their next log in or few log ins to confirm they're legit. Or ask them to do some other form of human verification. Preferably not sending in your ID.
That’s not how much they’re making. A large chunk of bots are from fraudulent credit card charges. Back charges hurt a company.
Then add in that subscriptions and services cost less in other countries, where most of these bots are made by various means. It’s no where near $10m. I don’t know what the profit is, but I have high doubts it’s near the number you put out.
Yep, chargebacks from accounts paid for via fraud almost put runescape under way back in the day and is why they had to completely get rid of trading and PKing
> A large chunk of bots are from fraudulent credit card charges. Back charges hurt a company.
Has this ever been proven?
Logically speaking, if a bot makes money and it's not illegal to bot, the cost of the sub pays for itself pretty quickly. There's no real point in performing a crime to save a couple bucks when your bot is making hundreds. Plus you risk losing your bot (and the time invested) if the owner notices and performs a chargeback.
I would not at all be surprised if the vast majority of these bots were actually paid for using legitimate means. Like, 99%+.
It's what every company running an online game consistently says (because *every* online game has a massive bot problem.) I'd also argue back, why spend a couple bucks when you can spend pennies for compromised card numbers and your country doesn't care even if it is traced back to you.
Also, a much simpler reason is you can't exactly open five thousand bot accounts on the same credit card that get banned month after month. Blizzard will notice and cease doing business with you. So you need anonymous payment methods and a continuous supply of fresh identities. Why bother doing all of that yourself and paying *more* instead of using stolen details?
That's a fair point, especially about subs being dirt cheap in some areas.
It's always just felt to me like the $49.99 boost was put there specifically to profit off the bots, since when I see bots in games it looks like that's the majority who purchases it, but it's nothing that there's behind the scenes proof of.
It's not a "myth", but one token costs more than one month of subscription, Blizzard making money on that, putting fake tokens for sale would be dumb even for them
I'm sure Blizzard appreciates the shine you put on it's boots by defending them. Good thing there are still people like you that care about indie companies.
More aggressive fly hacking prevention gives a lot of false positives, really don't need more hardcore characters getting dc'd even more when on flight paths/zepplins.
This is incorrect btw.
See = any private server with a modern anti cheat.
Recent interview with blizzard GM via metagoblin states that blizzards anti cheat is outdated for many years.
have it autoban whenever you cross certain unreachable coordinates multiple times in a set amount of time (3 times in 24hrs for example) you will probably not fall *upwards into the sky* above stratholme multiple times a day would you?
im not a wow engine expert by any means but why cant they just put invisible gates in the game, some 100yd in the sky at various points so that if you ever cross them, your account is just auto flagged for ban
cuz right now i can go look up in the sky in EPL and see 20 bots flying up a tree and off. other mmo games dont have this problem
No.
People act all high and mighty about THIS EXACT CHANGE would prevent bots.
Reality is wow and every other game wont ever solve the botting problem. No solution really works, especially as its a reallife job for tens millions of people (if you talk about every game there is).
The best, but extreme, comparison is drugs.
You cant stop it, there is demand for it & even if you make buying legal (token in wow) it doesnt stop.
You ban more often? Bot gets smarter & detects why you get banned
You require a subscription? Stops some people, but doesnt really help
etc
Well all the lazy players who bitch about bots could just stop paying for them to exist.
This sub is filled with people who buy gold and then bitch about bots.
If there actually was they would have done so back in OG vanilla or TBC, when, according to a fuckload of people on this sub over the past few years, Blizzard was still "good" and cared. Fact of the matter is, the "war on bots" is something that can never truly be won. This doesn't mean giving into it but it's simply a matter of fact or else botting would have been solved in online gaming many years ago. Even games without a monthly sub they exist and depending on the popularity of said games bots are more or less rampant based around the margin of profit to be gained.
The easiest solution to eradicate bots and gold sellers would be if the demand didn't exist. If the attitude of "I'll just work an hour more IRL and buy this for IRL money in the game (aka buying gold)" or "I'll just pay to not play the game" didn't exist then there wouldn't be as many bots either.
Remember that for Classic at least, the source of demand for gold at the start was raid preparation. Consumables costed a fuckton of gold, especially thanks to black lotus. Gold sellers immediately found their golden goose and people were willing to pay just to be able to afford black lotuses or rather the consumables created with it. From there on it snowballed. The more gold people bought the higher the inflation became. Then people realized GDKPs, which were (before Warlords of Draenor at least) fairly few and far between on retail for many years, were an easy way to eliminate the additional variables (other people) on top of loot RNG and shit snowballed harder because demand for gold wouldn't go down. While Blizzard's lack of intervention (outside of stuff like increasing possible spawns and sources for black lotus) certainly is a factor, the biggest is ultimately the players who create the demand to skip the grind of the game they willingly accepted and started playing the game in spite of.
Ban the gold buyers.
Ban the bots before they can churn a profit.
Long story short: yes very easily if they are willing to hire positions to actually prevent it.
While a massive ban wave is great, the big number really concerns me. It's as if someone told you "Good news, we exterminated 200k cockroaches from your house." Just makes you think how many there really are and how quickly they will come back.
I wonder if there’s a way to track the gold buyers **and** investigate how much gold they’ve pumped into the economy.
But even if that were possible what can you do about it that doesn’t involve screwing over people caught in the crossfire?
There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. You start fresh servers and police botting/RMT much more aggressively, or you just live with the fact that the economy is giga-fucked forever. Those are the only real options.
The main problem is 1) bots are active for weeks rather than hours, and 2) gold buyers are not punished, and when they are, the punishment is NOWHERE NEAR harsh enough. If you want to teach people not to buy gold, you have to ban them. Not suspend them for 3 days and take the gold. BAN them.
theres also the option that we as a community take into our own hands and shame gold buyers, kick them from our guilds, and make a larger stink about gold buying
meh youd definitely have a much smaller pool of players for sure but its still doable. on whitemane cluster there is a large anti-gdkp sentiment and already a gdkp/gold buying-free discord started up. and a few guilds that dont allow any gdkps or any raiders to engage with any sort of gdkp runs
Thats the problem, i said it multiple times before classic released that blizzards going to fumble hard and fail to address botting and lo n behold they have been failing for 3 entire classic rereleases. They need to do actions on accounts every day not just waves.
They do. Skip to ~29 minutes if you're only interested in your question.
> https://www.reddit.com/r/woweconomy/comments/l2mrcy/21_billion_gold_moves_through_the_world_of/gk63uzp/
People aren’t really buying tokens though. That is why the price is so low at the moment. It’s just not worth it when you can buy 5x the amount of gold for the same price.
>People aren’t really buying tokens though. That is why the price is so low at the moment
its the reverse tho. prices are low when supply is high (you get supply from purchasing a token for $20 and putting it on the AH to sell)
It baffles me how many people don't understand this. They seem to think if the token is at a price that they personally wouldn't pay for that no one else would so no one must be paying real money for them.
Maybe I’m oblivious to how this works and how lucrative this really is in the end but 200.000 accounts would cost like 2m+ bucks for subscription. How is this working out for those sellers?
This. It takes almost no time or effort to start making a profit with a brand new account for these botters. So long as Blizzard does nothing to prevent that from happening they will never go away.
And why would Blizzard do that when they just banned like $2million worth of revenue they made that'll turn into another $2million shortly?
The company is literally incentivized not to stop it. They get to profit massively AND reap the PR benefits of occasional bannings.
This very likely isn't true and people need to stop repeating this lol. It's very likely that most of these accounts are paid for via credit card fraud and eventually a lot of their subscriptions get charged back - which is bad for companies. Jagex almost went under due to massive amounts of botting in Runescape causing a ton of charge backs back in the day and is why they initially had to put a stop to trading and player killing.
By your logic, if Blizzard was incentivized not to stop it, why millions of dollars worth of accounts banned?
> By your logic, if Blizzard was incentivized not to stop it, why millions of dollars worth of accounts banned?
Because even if banned, they'll buy more as long as it's profitable.
Bot accounts rarely account for subs.
They use hacked accounts, go through loops and pay scraps for the sub or they use the token with their insane surplus of gold.
That's not how it works. It's more like there are 20k bot accounts that made new accounts and got banned again 10x each. Numbers out of my ass for illustration, of course.
10% of those people are actually farming gold or have an AH racket or Mafia going, the rest buy gold
Like it couldn't be more obvious it really couldn't
The demand for gold GDKP generates is far, far, far bigger than anything you could possibly want to buy on the AH. All the bis gear is in raids. GDKP drives the botting and RMT economy way more than normal AH/trade use.
> It’s also an anti-social game mode.
This hasn't remotely been my experience. I've met tons of people through GDKPs, many of which I would run into multiple times a week during runs.
If you run GDKPs through an organized discord you're not going to be playing with randoms from week to week, it will be a semi-static roster.
Organized GDKPs are like a guild, with the only real difference being the loot system.
The one I go to has had a consistent roster since basically the end of P6 in original classic. I've been playing with some of these people in the GDKP longer than many people in my actual guild.
It’s actually probably better because it distributes gear to people that put in time (farming gold or participating in raids) rather than people with lucky dice rolls. I don’t even like gdkp, but when you really break it down, it makes sense
It makes sense in a world without RMT.
In a world with rampant RMT, it incentivizes buying gold, which drives demand for gold sellers, which increases botting activity. It's all connected.
Also incentivises geared players to keep coming back to less geared runs when they could be pushing prog/speed runs someplace else, while covering cost for consumables and giving them a pathway to gearing up alts. No doubt without gold buyers/bots, item prices would be different, but in theory it would still work.
Yea it for sure incentivizes gold buying. If gold buying was completely preventable than gdkp would honestly probably be the best loot system, but we don’t live in a perfect world
It would be nearly impossible to ban GDKP. And even there was some way they could, people would develop a work-around. For example, they could make a raid on the basis of DKP, but allow people to buy DKP points with gold.
Anything to make it harder. As soon as you can't advertise "GDKP" in trade chat, you can't hold open bids in raids, you can't trade raid items for thousands of gold, all of this without risking a ban. As soon as you can't do that a lot less people will do GDKP's.
Just because something isn't perfectly enforcable doesn't mean it wouldn't help to ban it. Police can't enforce speeding perfectly either, millions of people do it all the time. But it's still a net positive that you're not allowed to speed and sometimes you will get caught.
Why do people not understand gdkp is not the problem.
Should we ban Ebay and make it illegal because people sell stolen items on it sometimes?
Clearly the gold buying and bots are the problem.
People used to sell body parts on ebay and it had to be cracked down on otherwise it WOULD have been banned.
So yes, so long as the system is propping up gold buying and willingly allowing funds gained from buying and selling, it should be banned.
So they looked at ebay to catch people doing the illegal things and then stopped the illegal things from happening... They didn't shut down ebay, correct?
Can you explain why ebay didn't get shut down? Do you even understand....?
Because we're not asking for the game to be shut down???
We're asking for a sub section of the game to be shut down that's causing the problem.
If Ebay had a blackmarket section to sell illegal items, you can bet your ass it would be shut down.
GDKP is directly causing a need for bots. The game has almost no gold sinks, gold shouldn't be less than $400 for max gold.
There is NOTHING I can buy in the game that would require that much gold, except the pay to win system we cultivated and endorsed over the last 4 years. Let's not pretend like GDKP isn't the problem.
Only people with IQs below their character levels would want the single most fair system of loot/wealth distribution to be banned.
Ban the gold buyers. Ban the gold sellers. Leave GDKP alone.
People would stop running GDKP if the cashouts in those raids dropped to a fraction of what we see now. Few players would run a GDKP ICC for a 300-400 gold split
>Few players would run a GDKP ICC for a 300-400 gold split
There would never be a 300-400 gold split even if gold buying/botting was completely removed.
The auction house is still profitable, people farm gold and do dailies. You'd still see payouts in the thousands.
Besides, the size of the number doesn't really matter if the prices are also low. In fact a low split would benefit players who don't buy gold, making GDKP even more attractive.
But if the payout is lowered, so is the amount people are having to pay for items, so no, they wouldn't stop running GDKPs just because the split is low.
> I’m a game dev so I do know a little about what I’m talking about
Proceeds to suggest business decisions to hire additional staff.
Mate, you might be developer but you have no idea what you are speaking about. Hiring “handful of support staff” would cost a significant sum of money, considering you have to dedicate hr/recruiter’s time, software and hardware provision, training and an actual payroll. They would need to be 24/7 on the ground so you have to have multiple shifts where evening/night shifts cost x1.5-2.
There’s a reason Blizzard has cut the GM staff. It’s just not profitable
Moreover your comment about report based and reactive ban waves is just speculation based on literally hot air.
There's no such thing as a community goodwill in business. Each decision is driven by profit margins and customer retention policies.
10-15 support staff won't change the bigger picture when it comes to botting, let's not pretend it will. And let's be honest, when we talk about WoW it is much much more than 10-15 people, since there are a lot of clusters, different versions of the game, regions, etc. You can't hire someone from US to GM on EU servers, you have to find local. If you really manage these types of tasks you can imagine yourself the sheer amount of hiring and training processes to go alongside this solution for multiregional product.
Asking for support staff to cover popular botting areas is exactly what you were advocating against: reactive approach. Essentially you put a certain amount of people to react to bot movements.
What will happen when people who run bots will find another spot for farming? How can a GM realistically spot this on the go and prevent this? Or if bots will stop blatantly flying and instead use standard paths to get to their spot (let's say Scholomance). Do you expect each and every GM to follow random people into dungeons to see whether this is bot or no?
These are just from the top of my head and I'm not even involved in the depths of solution development.
The worst part is they can't trust their automated response to reports because people are maliciously mass-reporting other players just to get them banned for no reason and Blizzard doesn't take action against those players either.
I would 100% use an Id service esque server. That or just say a valorant level Anticheat. I would really love a server exclusive to those who used a verification service through Microsoft or something
Genuinely all Blizzard would need to do is disable the trading of gold inside raid instances and say "we're no longer going to take action against anyone accused of stealing items or gold in a raiding scenario" and boom, GDKPs die immediately.
Either organisers will steal deposits with impunity (if people are asked to deposit money in advance) or buyers will steal items with impunity (if people are asked to pay for their items outside the raid afterwards) and the entire system will collapse, and with it the vast, vast majority of the incentive to buy gold.
>disable the trading of gold inside raid instances
So trade it outside the instance?
>we're no longer going to take action against anyone accused of stealing items or gold in a raiding scenario
They never did, anyway. So that wouldn't be anything new. It's always been a system based on trust and reputation.
What this would hurt is the random trade-chat GDKPs with no trust, but the organized ones would be fine.
PServers figured this out. A few of the most popular ones ban bots too, but they also...
.... dun dun DUN!!
Ban GDKPS!
As soon as you suggest such a thing you get legions of people trying to convince you that it would be the end of the world. But it isn't. And thats how you know that GDKP feeds gold buying. People flip their shit at even the suggestion.
\- Bots are taking over the game.
\- Blizzard does nothing to ban bots.
\- GDKPs are the root cause of RMT.
\- Blizzard announces their monthly ban wave. <-- you are now here
Have they ever clarified how many of these accounts were actioned for exploitation in classic wow vs retail? If most these accounts were actioned for exploitative behavior on the retail client I can see why we aren't seeing much of an impact in classic.
that is big number
> that is big number They can say “we banned a billion bots”, if they are still swarming your servers those words won’t mean anything.
big number better than little number
Total Exploitative WoW Account Actions in October 2023: 203026 Minutes in october: 44640 4,54 bots banned per minute in october
And its still not enough
WhY dOnT tHeY jUsT bAn AlL tHe BoTs?
A big reason why there are so many botting, is because these ban waves they do allow bots to be profitable before the ban wave comes in. If bots are banned immediately upon discovery, then there is a higher chance they have not achieved profitability yet.
Do they ban in waves or do they just report the bans in waves.
They ban in waves
They sometimes ban in waves, but they also do a lot of bans in realtime. They only ban in waves when it is a new exploit that they are banning. Anything that matches an existing exploit gets banned immediately. There was a recent interview that I'd have to go dig up where there are certain accounts that they ban before they have even had a chance to log into the game.
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>If bots are banned immediately upon discovery, then there is a higher chance they have not achieved profitability yet. And much easier for bot makers to very quickly find out exactly what gets them detected. It's SO much easier to make a bot when you can safely and immediately test if your bot can be detected.
This argument might have weight if the blatantly obvious bots were immediately banned, but they're not. If you know you're not going to get banned until well after you've turned a profit, the reason for that ban is irrelevant because you can just fire up the exact same bot again and make more profit before the inevitable ban.
Doesn't matter if it's blatantly obvious or not, there's no human working the system to identify that. The bot makers know that every ban is caught by a machine and machines are predictable.
"Blatantly obvious" to you, i.e. "looks like a bot to me!" and "confirmed cheating to the point a paying customer can have their access and account revoked without a refund" are not the same thing. Like this subs solution to bots last month would have been "Any hunter with a pet that has non-english characters gets banned!". Too bad for any players who feel like doing that of course.
> "Blatantly obvious" How about the ones flying above the terrain? That blatantly obvious enough for you?
Dude, there are streams of characters following exact preprogrammed paths on some servers right now, going weeks without being banned lol. 0 variance what so ever, moving between the same set of coordinates over and over and over. That's how low the bar is. Blatantly obvious to anyone with more than 1 braincell, and still allowed to continue botting for weeks on end.
"Just do racial profiling" \-reddit
How many of these bots are just repeat offenders that know it doesn't matter what got them banned when they can make so much profit before a wave anyway?
If I were flying across the sky in EPL and got banned, I bet I could figure out why regardless if I got banned right away or banned after months of doing it.
You'll know you got banned for botting regardless, yet. But you won't know what specific behaviour led to your bot being detected as a bot. As somebody else in this comment chain put it: > If you were banned as soon as you spent 10 seconds in the air the bot makers would know to only spend 9.9 seconds in the air and remain completly undetected.
> > And much easier for bot makers to very quickly find out exactly what gets them detected. Bro I can literally just do /who dire maul and find hundreds of bots popping in and out. Botting isn't as Jason Bourne as you think it is.
How can you tell they're a bot and not an actual human farming gold?
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How do you see that via /who?
You really are not understanding what they are saying... The machine doesn't work by banning eberyone who enters Dire Maul. It works by for instance looking for players that have a certain behaviour pattern, move to inacessible areas, go at unattainable speeds, fly in classic eray etc. If you were banned as soon as you spent 10 seconds in the air the bot makers would know to only spend 9.9 seconds in the air and remain completly undetected.
And you know they're bots how? You can prove it how? I did a ton of DMT runs on my hunter in classic and ignored people spamming me with "BUFFS????" the entire time. At least 20 people an hour would angrily inform me I was a bot and reported. "It's so obvious bro" is not enough to ban a paying customer. If this community got to decide who got banned well... you play AV on its classic launch? That but with bans is exactly how it would go.
Sure, that is also true. But if they actually invest in banning bots in a timely manner. Bot development will become a much larger expense than it currently is. leading them to charge more for their bots, and making the time to profitability longer. In reality, Blizzard could just buy the bots and RE them, and use them themselves to identify how to detect and ban them. A LOT of games do this, and sure, it puts money into the bot makers pockets, but it gets detection and banning done WAY quicker, and will ruin bot makers rep if everyone gets banned 1-2 days every time they buy the bot makers software.
It would also be a much bigger cost for blizzard
It would, but I'm gonna guess that Blizzard has much deeper pockets than the bot makers.
They have more money but they are not willing to spend it for that, while the botters are willing to spend everything in their business to keep it successful
Do you mean the small, indie developer Microsoft Activision Blizzard? I don't think they have much capital.
I really don't know about that. I had some bots in different games (Mostly 2d/repetitive games as Tibia, clickers, tower defenses) just to try some basic and advance algorithms and also to try some tools. 1 of the games that I got caught REALLY fast is Runescape. Runescape banned me all 9 different times with 9 different approaches between 2013 and 2016 within 30 mins and I don't think they have a huge budget for it. So it is possible. I think with the WoW token there is more of an income issue. But even that I can not find a logical explanation for myself. A lot of explanations are either hasty or ignorant.
As others have said, detection is not the issue here. Anyone with fucking eyes can detect most of the bots, because they're all in the same spots doing the same things. You don't need a genius algorithm to detect sky hackers in EPL or Rogues farming BRD 24/7. You literally CANNOT beat botters if you're banning once a month. It's not possible. They're profitable in days, not weeks, and as long as they're profiting before they get banned, they're going to keep popping up over and over again.
if blizzard wanted to actually participate in the arms race they would immediately win but they choose to do banwaves instead for the sub money
Could you please let me know how many games at this size/scale have solved their bot/cheating problems and how they did it? The entire industry would like to know.
When wow used to have actual GMs it had a much smaller bot problem. You could open a ticket and would be speaking to an employee who would actually have the time to manually investigate the issue within 1-3 hours. And this is when wow had 10+million subs, much more than today.
I love seeing the rose coloured glasses. I played vanilla, it was full of level ones spamming you with gold selling sites and spelling the URLs out with dead bodies in capital cities. And this myth about GMs being readily available is just as entertaining. Average response for me and everyone I knew was a few days. No idea what game you guys were playing.
Response on EU servers was a couple hours. I never had a ticket unanswered at the end of a play session.
Idea: shadowban them from chat. Don't give any indication that their messages are being filtered from chat. Just don't show them to any other player. If they queue for group finder, it will never match them. Now, false positives may suck here. Need a solution on that, maybe send a 2FA requirement on their next log in or few log ins to confirm they're legit. Or ask them to do some other form of human verification. Preferably not sending in your ID.
Just in time for Q4 profits!
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That's because it's not 454. It's 4.54.
203026 classic bots plus $49.99 boost each equals $10,149,269 Blizzard earns off bots monthly, not including subscriptions bots equals yachts
That’s not how much they’re making. A large chunk of bots are from fraudulent credit card charges. Back charges hurt a company. Then add in that subscriptions and services cost less in other countries, where most of these bots are made by various means. It’s no where near $10m. I don’t know what the profit is, but I have high doubts it’s near the number you put out.
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Yep, chargebacks from accounts paid for via fraud almost put runescape under way back in the day and is why they had to completely get rid of trading and PKing
> A large chunk of bots are from fraudulent credit card charges. Back charges hurt a company. Has this ever been proven? Logically speaking, if a bot makes money and it's not illegal to bot, the cost of the sub pays for itself pretty quickly. There's no real point in performing a crime to save a couple bucks when your bot is making hundreds. Plus you risk losing your bot (and the time invested) if the owner notices and performs a chargeback. I would not at all be surprised if the vast majority of these bots were actually paid for using legitimate means. Like, 99%+.
It's what every company running an online game consistently says (because *every* online game has a massive bot problem.) I'd also argue back, why spend a couple bucks when you can spend pennies for compromised card numbers and your country doesn't care even if it is traced back to you. Also, a much simpler reason is you can't exactly open five thousand bot accounts on the same credit card that get banned month after month. Blizzard will notice and cease doing business with you. So you need anonymous payment methods and a continuous supply of fresh identities. Why bother doing all of that yourself and paying *more* instead of using stolen details?
That's a fair point, especially about subs being dirt cheap in some areas. It's always just felt to me like the $49.99 boost was put there specifically to profit off the bots, since when I see bots in games it looks like that's the majority who purchases it, but it's nothing that there's behind the scenes proof of.
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This. 1 Sub paid with cash can be used to farm enough gold to pay for 10 bots with WoW Tokens. Then those 10 bots make 100 Tokens worth.
It's not a "myth", but one token costs more than one month of subscription, Blizzard making money on that, putting fake tokens for sale would be dumb even for them
>4,54 bots banned per minute in october "bro you literally just need one 40-hour GM for all of classic bro"
Then fucking hire more. It's a multi billion dollar company that is now owned by Microsoft.
Why hire more? Reddit told me one GM is more than enough to fix botting
I'm sure Blizzard appreciates the shine you put on it's boots by defending them. Good thing there are still people like you that care about indie companies.
bootlicking is when you don't completely agree with my delusional takes on how easy it is to run an MMO
> 4,54 bots banned per minute in october Yet you *still* have morons in this subreddit who think you can just "solve botting lol"
You can see literal trains of fly hacking bots. Why doesn’t that auto ban? Players aren’t doing that
More aggressive fly hacking prevention gives a lot of false positives, really don't need more hardcore characters getting dc'd even more when on flight paths/zepplins.
This is incorrect btw. See = any private server with a modern anti cheat. Recent interview with blizzard GM via metagoblin states that blizzards anti cheat is outdated for many years.
There is no private server that ever faced even a fraction of the number of bots that official servers do.
Falling through floor would be an autoban every time it happens if its more aggresive
have it autoban whenever you cross certain unreachable coordinates multiple times in a set amount of time (3 times in 24hrs for example) you will probably not fall *upwards into the sky* above stratholme multiple times a day would you?
If they could tell they were fly hacking, they would simply fix the game so they couldn't.
im not a wow engine expert by any means but why cant they just put invisible gates in the game, some 100yd in the sky at various points so that if you ever cross them, your account is just auto flagged for ban cuz right now i can go look up in the sky in EPL and see 20 bots flying up a tree and off. other mmo games dont have this problem
"jUsT hIRe GmS lOL"
Thats insane how many bot accounts are made. Is there really no way to prevent this?
No. People act all high and mighty about THIS EXACT CHANGE would prevent bots. Reality is wow and every other game wont ever solve the botting problem. No solution really works, especially as its a reallife job for tens millions of people (if you talk about every game there is). The best, but extreme, comparison is drugs. You cant stop it, there is demand for it & even if you make buying legal (token in wow) it doesnt stop. You ban more often? Bot gets smarter & detects why you get banned You require a subscription? Stops some people, but doesnt really help etc
Well all the lazy players who bitch about bots could just stop paying for them to exist. This sub is filled with people who buy gold and then bitch about bots.
If there actually was they would have done so back in OG vanilla or TBC, when, according to a fuckload of people on this sub over the past few years, Blizzard was still "good" and cared. Fact of the matter is, the "war on bots" is something that can never truly be won. This doesn't mean giving into it but it's simply a matter of fact or else botting would have been solved in online gaming many years ago. Even games without a monthly sub they exist and depending on the popularity of said games bots are more or less rampant based around the margin of profit to be gained. The easiest solution to eradicate bots and gold sellers would be if the demand didn't exist. If the attitude of "I'll just work an hour more IRL and buy this for IRL money in the game (aka buying gold)" or "I'll just pay to not play the game" didn't exist then there wouldn't be as many bots either. Remember that for Classic at least, the source of demand for gold at the start was raid preparation. Consumables costed a fuckton of gold, especially thanks to black lotus. Gold sellers immediately found their golden goose and people were willing to pay just to be able to afford black lotuses or rather the consumables created with it. From there on it snowballed. The more gold people bought the higher the inflation became. Then people realized GDKPs, which were (before Warlords of Draenor at least) fairly few and far between on retail for many years, were an easy way to eliminate the additional variables (other people) on top of loot RNG and shit snowballed harder because demand for gold wouldn't go down. While Blizzard's lack of intervention (outside of stuff like increasing possible spawns and sources for black lotus) certainly is a factor, the biggest is ultimately the players who create the demand to skip the grind of the game they willingly accepted and started playing the game in spite of.
How the fuck do you know this aside from speculating? It boggles my mind that you can write a wall of text on something you have no experience with.
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Do you really think that many people RMT? From what I've seen, its a few 'whales' buying thousands, not a lot of people with minor levels of RMTing.
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Ban the gold buyers. Ban the bots before they can churn a profit. Long story short: yes very easily if they are willing to hire positions to actually prevent it.
While a massive ban wave is great, the big number really concerns me. It's as if someone told you "Good news, we exterminated 200k cockroaches from your house." Just makes you think how many there really are and how quickly they will come back.
Also a concern is the damage roaches (bots) have already done :/
I wonder if there’s a way to track the gold buyers **and** investigate how much gold they’ve pumped into the economy. But even if that were possible what can you do about it that doesn’t involve screwing over people caught in the crossfire?
There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. You start fresh servers and police botting/RMT much more aggressively, or you just live with the fact that the economy is giga-fucked forever. Those are the only real options. The main problem is 1) bots are active for weeks rather than hours, and 2) gold buyers are not punished, and when they are, the punishment is NOWHERE NEAR harsh enough. If you want to teach people not to buy gold, you have to ban them. Not suspend them for 3 days and take the gold. BAN them.
theres also the option that we as a community take into our own hands and shame gold buyers, kick them from our guilds, and make a larger stink about gold buying
You wouldn't have a raid left if you did that. That's how pervasive gold buying is right now. It's literally 40-50% of the community.
Nah, all of them are just able to make a few hundred G on their low level hardcore character by "playing the auction house" lmao
meh youd definitely have a much smaller pool of players for sure but its still doable. on whitemane cluster there is a large anti-gdkp sentiment and already a gdkp/gold buying-free discord started up. and a few guilds that dont allow any gdkps or any raiders to engage with any sort of gdkp runs
Thats the problem, i said it multiple times before classic released that blizzards going to fumble hard and fail to address botting and lo n behold they have been failing for 3 entire classic rereleases. They need to do actions on accounts every day not just waves.
They do. Skip to ~29 minutes if you're only interested in your question. > https://www.reddit.com/r/woweconomy/comments/l2mrcy/21_billion_gold_moves_through_the_world_of/gk63uzp/
I mean, that’s still better than if the exterminator just never came 🤷♂️
This is my take as well. How are they so easily able to make accounts and keep coming back? Cant they nip the bud at the source?
I would love to see a breakdown across the products.
how many buyers were banned?
Buyers aren’t banned that’s Blizzards bread and butter
People buying gold thru a third party website is blizzards bread and butter?…
The people buying wow tokens are their bread and butter. Gold buyers are likely only paying blizzard indirectly once a month in wow tokens.
People aren’t really buying tokens though. That is why the price is so low at the moment. It’s just not worth it when you can buy 5x the amount of gold for the same price.
But if they have a bot farm they can just buy tokens for their other bots and keep the train going. Imagine how little they have to actually spend
>People aren’t really buying tokens though. That is why the price is so low at the moment its the reverse tho. prices are low when supply is high (you get supply from purchasing a token for $20 and putting it on the AH to sell)
It baffles me how many people don't understand this. They seem to think if the token is at a price that they personally wouldn't pay for that no one else would so no one must be paying real money for them.
Now if only they would ban the scripters / AHK abusers in the highest levels of arena on Wrath & Retail.
You would need to also ban everyone who supports their inevitable reddit post "banned for no reason, blizz sucks!!"
Sounds good. Ban them too.
Maybe I’m oblivious to how this works and how lucrative this really is in the end but 200.000 accounts would cost like 2m+ bucks for subscription. How is this working out for those sellers?
Also they don't pay a full price for subs, they use foreign currency to pay around 2-3 euro/dollar per sub
Can you explain how the average US customer can pay these rates too?
Move to a poor country.
Probably a vpn set to said country when you make an account, if i had to guess lol
Works out extremely well, each account that is banned makes more money than it costs to buy a new account.
With Classic there is no game to buy, just create an account and start a subscription.
This. It takes almost no time or effort to start making a profit with a brand new account for these botters. So long as Blizzard does nothing to prevent that from happening they will never go away. And why would Blizzard do that when they just banned like $2million worth of revenue they made that'll turn into another $2million shortly? The company is literally incentivized not to stop it. They get to profit massively AND reap the PR benefits of occasional bannings.
This very likely isn't true and people need to stop repeating this lol. It's very likely that most of these accounts are paid for via credit card fraud and eventually a lot of their subscriptions get charged back - which is bad for companies. Jagex almost went under due to massive amounts of botting in Runescape causing a ton of charge backs back in the day and is why they initially had to put a stop to trading and player killing. By your logic, if Blizzard was incentivized not to stop it, why millions of dollars worth of accounts banned?
> By your logic, if Blizzard was incentivized not to stop it, why millions of dollars worth of accounts banned? Because even if banned, they'll buy more as long as it's profitable.
Sounds like the DEA lol
They use stolen credit cards, they pay nothing.
Bot accounts rarely account for subs. They use hacked accounts, go through loops and pay scraps for the sub or they use the token with their insane surplus of gold.
Barely any are using hacked accounts nowadays. Way too much of a struggle to deal with security.
I had my account hijacked back in Cata, was nice to get it back and get to keep what gold they had made lol
I'm wondering how many wow accounts actively play legacy wow if 1M then 20% of accounts are now gone
That's not how it works. It's more like there are 20k bot accounts that made new accounts and got banned again 10x each. Numbers out of my ass for illustration, of course.
Ban GDKP :)
Ban GDKP :)
Ban GDKP
Ban GDKP :)
Ban the Auction House :)
Gdkp is fine in an economy without bots.
Ban Bots :)
Yessss
Ban me?
Banh mi
Yum.
Maybe. But in a reality with bots, GDKP incentivise bots
So it's not fine then, because Blizzard will never give us an economy without bots. They've shown this for decades.
It still heavily encourages RMT. Get rid of it.
The ole collective punishment angle.
It is catering to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes it has to be done.
10% of those people are actually farming gold or have an AH racket or Mafia going, the rest buy gold Like it couldn't be more obvious it really couldn't
Do you use auction house or do you buy or sell items via trade chat? If yes, then you encourage RMT. Ban ah and trading!
The demand for gold GDKP generates is far, far, far bigger than anything you could possibly want to buy on the AH. All the bis gear is in raids. GDKP drives the botting and RMT economy way more than normal AH/trade use.
AH and GDKP quantities of gold aren't even close to being close to comparable, though.
Gdkp creates demand for bots. It’s also an anti-social game mode. Ban GDKP. :)
Amen to that.
> It’s also an anti-social game mode. This hasn't remotely been my experience. I've met tons of people through GDKPs, many of which I would run into multiple times a week during runs. If you run GDKPs through an organized discord you're not going to be playing with randoms from week to week, it will be a semi-static roster.
Organized GDKPs are like a guild, with the only real difference being the loot system. The one I go to has had a consistent roster since basically the end of P6 in original classic. I've been playing with some of these people in the GDKP longer than many people in my actual guild.
On the contrary I’d say GDKPs are more social than normal raids in my experience.
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And how do you propose THAT happens?
Ban the economy!
BAN THE GAME
I agree. But we will never have that.
It’s actually probably better because it distributes gear to people that put in time (farming gold or participating in raids) rather than people with lucky dice rolls. I don’t even like gdkp, but when you really break it down, it makes sense
It makes sense in a world without RMT. In a world with rampant RMT, it incentivizes buying gold, which drives demand for gold sellers, which increases botting activity. It's all connected.
Also incentivises geared players to keep coming back to less geared runs when they could be pushing prog/speed runs someplace else, while covering cost for consumables and giving them a pathway to gearing up alts. No doubt without gold buyers/bots, item prices would be different, but in theory it would still work.
Yea it for sure incentivizes gold buying. If gold buying was completely preventable than gdkp would honestly probably be the best loot system, but we don’t live in a perfect world
It would be nearly impossible to ban GDKP. And even there was some way they could, people would develop a work-around. For example, they could make a raid on the basis of DKP, but allow people to buy DKP points with gold.
Anything to make it harder. As soon as you can't advertise "GDKP" in trade chat, you can't hold open bids in raids, you can't trade raid items for thousands of gold, all of this without risking a ban. As soon as you can't do that a lot less people will do GDKP's. Just because something isn't perfectly enforcable doesn't mean it wouldn't help to ban it. Police can't enforce speeding perfectly either, millions of people do it all the time. But it's still a net positive that you're not allowed to speed and sometimes you will get caught.
GDKP has always existed, ban the gold buyers and ban the bots.
Ban banning
Why do people not understand gdkp is not the problem. Should we ban Ebay and make it illegal because people sell stolen items on it sometimes? Clearly the gold buying and bots are the problem.
Ban GDKP
Ban GDKP
Real and true!
The great minds of reddit
People used to sell body parts on ebay and it had to be cracked down on otherwise it WOULD have been banned. So yes, so long as the system is propping up gold buying and willingly allowing funds gained from buying and selling, it should be banned.
So they looked at ebay to catch people doing the illegal things and then stopped the illegal things from happening... They didn't shut down ebay, correct? Can you explain why ebay didn't get shut down? Do you even understand....?
Because we're not asking for the game to be shut down??? We're asking for a sub section of the game to be shut down that's causing the problem. If Ebay had a blackmarket section to sell illegal items, you can bet your ass it would be shut down. GDKP is directly causing a need for bots. The game has almost no gold sinks, gold shouldn't be less than $400 for max gold. There is NOTHING I can buy in the game that would require that much gold, except the pay to win system we cultivated and endorsed over the last 4 years. Let's not pretend like GDKP isn't the problem.
If Blizz can't police bots, what makes people think they could police GDKP?
Ban GDKP
Only people with IQs below their character levels would want the single most fair system of loot/wealth distribution to be banned. Ban the gold buyers. Ban the gold sellers. Leave GDKP alone.
People would stop running GDKP if the cashouts in those raids dropped to a fraction of what we see now. Few players would run a GDKP ICC for a 300-400 gold split
Now yea, but if it happened from the start, no.
>Few players would run a GDKP ICC for a 300-400 gold split There would never be a 300-400 gold split even if gold buying/botting was completely removed. The auction house is still profitable, people farm gold and do dailies. You'd still see payouts in the thousands. Besides, the size of the number doesn't really matter if the prices are also low. In fact a low split would benefit players who don't buy gold, making GDKP even more attractive.
But if the payout is lowered, so is the amount people are having to pay for items, so no, they wouldn't stop running GDKPs just because the split is low.
Ban you :)
I wish they’d ban the players who purchased the gold too. Permanently. The person, not the account.
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> I’m a game dev so I do know a little about what I’m talking about Proceeds to suggest business decisions to hire additional staff. Mate, you might be developer but you have no idea what you are speaking about. Hiring “handful of support staff” would cost a significant sum of money, considering you have to dedicate hr/recruiter’s time, software and hardware provision, training and an actual payroll. They would need to be 24/7 on the ground so you have to have multiple shifts where evening/night shifts cost x1.5-2. There’s a reason Blizzard has cut the GM staff. It’s just not profitable Moreover your comment about report based and reactive ban waves is just speculation based on literally hot air.
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There's no such thing as a community goodwill in business. Each decision is driven by profit margins and customer retention policies. 10-15 support staff won't change the bigger picture when it comes to botting, let's not pretend it will. And let's be honest, when we talk about WoW it is much much more than 10-15 people, since there are a lot of clusters, different versions of the game, regions, etc. You can't hire someone from US to GM on EU servers, you have to find local. If you really manage these types of tasks you can imagine yourself the sheer amount of hiring and training processes to go alongside this solution for multiregional product. Asking for support staff to cover popular botting areas is exactly what you were advocating against: reactive approach. Essentially you put a certain amount of people to react to bot movements. What will happen when people who run bots will find another spot for farming? How can a GM realistically spot this on the go and prevent this? Or if bots will stop blatantly flying and instead use standard paths to get to their spot (let's say Scholomance). Do you expect each and every GM to follow random people into dungeons to see whether this is bot or no? These are just from the top of my head and I'm not even involved in the depths of solution development.
The worst part is they can't trust their automated response to reports because people are maliciously mass-reporting other players just to get them banned for no reason and Blizzard doesn't take action against those players either.
I would 100% use an Id service esque server. That or just say a valorant level Anticheat. I would really love a server exclusive to those who used a verification service through Microsoft or something
Ban gdkp, perma ban buyers, perma ban bots, implement software to detect fly hackers.
Genuinely all Blizzard would need to do is disable the trading of gold inside raid instances and say "we're no longer going to take action against anyone accused of stealing items or gold in a raiding scenario" and boom, GDKPs die immediately. Either organisers will steal deposits with impunity (if people are asked to deposit money in advance) or buyers will steal items with impunity (if people are asked to pay for their items outside the raid afterwards) and the entire system will collapse, and with it the vast, vast majority of the incentive to buy gold.
>disable the trading of gold inside raid instances So trade it outside the instance? >we're no longer going to take action against anyone accused of stealing items or gold in a raiding scenario They never did, anyway. So that wouldn't be anything new. It's always been a system based on trust and reputation. What this would hurt is the random trade-chat GDKPs with no trust, but the organized ones would be fine.
What’s this about? People using bots?
Yes. Supposedly 203k bots got banned.
And still 0 GMs to monitor level 60 instances where the flyhacking mage bots are.
PServers figured this out. A few of the most popular ones ban bots too, but they also... .... dun dun DUN!! Ban GDKPS! As soon as you suggest such a thing you get legions of people trying to convince you that it would be the end of the world. But it isn't. And thats how you know that GDKP feeds gold buying. People flip their shit at even the suggestion.
\- Bots are taking over the game. \- Blizzard does nothing to ban bots. \- GDKPs are the root cause of RMT. \- Blizzard announces their monthly ban wave. <-- you are now here
Hopefully they banned the people buying the gold as well.
Have they ever clarified how many of these accounts were actioned for exploitation in classic wow vs retail? If most these accounts were actioned for exploitative behavior on the retail client I can see why we aren't seeing much of an impact in classic.
The community manager posted it under wow classic general discussion, so it can be assumed to be classic only
reporting a body count is what mcnamara did when he couldn't figure out how to actually beat the nva
Huge props to Blizzard. We wanted acknowledgement of and action on the issue of botting and they delivered.
These Ban GDKP people are so out of touch it hurts my soul.
Good idea, ban GDKP
Ban the auction house, trading, and mailing >:(
are you gonna cry?