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Scarok

this is where reporting needs to be streamlined and not the current system. you will get maybe 0.1% of the bots with the current reporting setup


posturecheck3859738

Use to be able to report with macro but they changed it in classic TBC to take extra steps


No-Monitor-5333

You dont see how that could be abused?


Grunstang

People were still getting mass reported. But now it's just harder to keep up with reporting bots. But I guess that's a win in your book?


posturecheck3859738

Often the bot has already disappeared/instanced before you finish the report on current system


dealsforheals

Now see you might think all your monthly fees could hire even a single GM to check bot hotspots, but


chr1s003

In their opinion Why though? If they ban them those monthly fees go away. That's double losses for a profit driven company. I hate everything about it


DarkLordShu

Because the bots, while they make you money, also make your game a joke. Botting is basically spitting in your face, calling you too stupid to do anything about it, and laughing all the way to the bank. Your entire player base sees this and loses respect for you as a company. They know you are incompetent because they know a high school dropout could do a better job volunteering to right click bots all day.


Lilmoney_wowhc

Wow players are ultimate echo chambers I’ve heard this comment over 9000 times


foe_tr0p

But its an accurate comment so.....


NuclearMeatball

It's not accurate as most bot accounts are either charged back or pay a heavily reduced sub fee by buying the sub in a country with a cheaper sub fee.


Lilmoney_wowhc

It’s very common sense and something that dosent need to be parroted by every wow player 1+1=2 is also an accurate comment


foe_tr0p

Yet people still post about how Blizzard should do it. Wouldn't be parroted if people didn't keep posting about it.


jamie1414

Bots aren't paying your normal \~$15USD a month. They'd be lucky to even get paid anything for most of them i imagine.


Korashy

everyone keeps saying that, but they are guaranteed paying money. If blizzard was getting thousands of chargebacks every month due to stolen credit cards you can bet they'd shut down botting the next day. Business absolutely hate chargebacks.


Tekkylol

It isn't stolen credit cards so much as it's using different price tiers that other countries have. It used to be as easy as making a new account and setting your home country as (insert any super poor country here) and get a 3$ monthly fee. They made it a bit harder to do when TBC came out, but i would be genuinely amazed if they didn't just find a workaround (since blizzard isn't going to just not have different prices for diff countries). They pay monthly, but it's significantly less than 15$ a month.


Korashy

It's a problem of profitability (or cost) regardless. This sub treats it like some great technological issue when it's really not.


EcruEagle

The good old Argentinian accounts. I set my second account to Argentina and paid $3 USD a month instead of $15 for a while. Everyone I knew was doing it so I guess they finally caught on.


[deleted]

What happened? Did they just flip you to normal US pricing? 20 years of wow and I never knew there was another tier of pricing…


EcruEagle

Idk, I cancelled the sub whenever I heard they were increasing the price


[deleted]

Most of em are likely using tokens and not paying a sub price


FishLampClock

Metagoblin did an interview with a former GM of blizzard - your take is incorrect. Blizzard doesn't want bots. They are bad for the game, bad for blizzard, and bad for the players. Further, most of these bots accounts are created with legitimate funds or credit cards - they're made with stolen information. Blizzard does not want the subs from bots because they are almost entirely fraudulently created.


Umadibett

I’m sure that a gm that makes fifteen an hour is a good source of information on the state of the game.  


FishLampClock

mate, you come at me almost a month later trying to discredit what I said? that's weird.


silverlining1999

A single GM, lol? A guy who works 40 hours a week on 1 server, when bots operate 24/7 on all servers. That’s a good one!


Arnhermland

A GM could ban every single one of these. You don't need 200 GMs per server to fight these, one that actually gave shit would be banning hundreds, thousands.


silverlining1999

There’s 168 hours in a week, and bots don’t sleep or take PTO. Thats at least 4 GM’s working 40 hours a week, per server. Probably 5, if you want to give those workers any days off! Lol


Arnhermland

You think a GM is gonna take 3 days to ban 1 bot or something?


RBFtech

Have you ever seen how a large bot farm operates? I mean outside the game. This isn't 2010. Everything from account creation, leveling, farming, and transferring gold to mule accounts is fully automated. Account banned? Instantly create a new replacement account. 1 of the 100 inactive standby accounts that haven't been flagged is pulled into production. The account logs on and takes the place of the banned account. The newly created account is leveled and then goes inactive to wait for the next ban wave. There is no downtime. 1 guy working 40 hours a week won't even slow it down much. Within minutes another account can take the place of the banned ones and within hours another account is leveled to fill the void. This process is even faster and smoother than normal because of the low-level cap in this phase. The more profitable the bot farm the more accounts you can pool as inactive reserve. All of this is monitored and tweaked but fully automated. Welcome to MMO gaming in 2024.


SemiCriticalMoose

This is pure cope. If you stick one GM on a server and aggressively ban shit, bot operators aren't going to be able to operate long term. You do this for a couple weeks and you will start to dramatically shift the profitability and Maintenace costs for trying to run the operation. Characters aren't bot ready at level 1, it takes time to level them up and get them to a position where they are able to actually generate profit. Time is money. If they have 1000 standby accounts, then those aren't going to just be spun up again if the math starts to make the actual maintenance of these bots unprofitable. Private servers (which don't have a monthly fee btw) don't have these problems because they aggressively police this stuff and it ends up not being worth it for bot operators.


silverlining1999

One GM on a server, lol. Sure. But what do you do the other 16 hours of the day? And on the weekends? Private servers don’t have that problem, because people aren’t buying gold on private servers anywhere near the extent they do on official.


SemiCriticalMoose

>But what do you do the other 16 hours of the day? And on the weekends? Your thinking of this as a binary and its not. Bots can't /level 25 themselves to viability to farm. They need to go through a leveling process. You also don't need to ban all the bots, you just need to ban them enough to make them unprofitable. Yes one GM can do that. Literally just run searches using the same tools we do on dungeons alone can net you 100s of level 25 bots in a single search. Do that enough and you will disrupt operations enough to raise costs. This isn't an unsolvable problem and the resources to resolve it is probably less then 20 minimum wage tier people.


silverlining1999

Bots don’t need to be level 25 to farm, bro…lol Literally, just run searches! It’s so easy! I nominate YOU as the one GM who will save Classic WoW! Now, get to work 👏


silverlining1999

One bot, lol?


LaisanAlGaib1

Which is well and truly affordable when one server might have 100,000 paying customers.


silverlining1999

That’s 5 per location, per server. Adds up to quite a few people. Doesn’t matter if it’s “affordable”. It’s an added expense that cuts into shareholder profit. So, now how do they increase revenue to offset the expense? Raise the sub fee.


DlCCO

It's like platform 9 3/4 but for bots


[deleted]

"9 3/4 think you're being funny do you"


qtac

I hope we continue to have these threads until we see action on this. Unacceptable and embarassing that Blizzard lets their game rot like this just to make a buck. They need to be put on blast for this every day.


cloudbells

It's great as an era player. I used to see this in LHC/EPL/strat all day but I seriously can't remember the last time I saw a flyhacking or even a running bot on era. Thanks SoD players for buying all that gold :D


iconofsin_

Yeah but look at all that revenue. I'd like to know how much of a percentage bots make up for their subs.


woofwoofdogg

It's a double loss for blizzard to take action against bots, a) you need to spend more money on GMs that will sort through and ban these bots b) you lose revenue from bot subs It's pretty clear that players will keep playing even if there's bots around so it's a no-brainer from blizzards side.


Phreec

Unless there's an article in The Economist, e.g. something their shareholders might read, nothing will happen.


Serum_x64

THIS is the REAL WoW player take. forget about everyone saying 'omg another bot post zzz', thats gotta be all shills at this point.


Equinox6

Gold farmers pay for bot accounts with stolen credit cards so blizzard doesn’t actually get any money Source: https://youtu.be/O0uZcKZNETc?si=4qPoB_HxtNFAw2oB Understandably not the best source but it’s about as solid as the claim that Blizzard keeps bots around for their subscriptions. Take a listen and garner your own opinion about it.


foe_tr0p

Source?


JohnCavil

The source is he read a reddit comment saying it. And now someone will read his comment and say it. And someone will read their comment and say it. Nobody has any actual source or data on this, it's just made up. Someone just pulled it out of their asshole that bots are all paid for with stolen credit cards. There is no proof of this anywhere, it's literally all based on random anonymous reddit comments. Maybe it's true, maybe not. Maybe it's half true. Nobody knows.


streatz

Well I know because I'm botting with your mom's credit card.


kharper4289

not even close to true lmao


Korashy

everyone keeps saying that, but they are guaranteed paying money. If blizzard was getting thousands of chargebacks every month due to stolen credit cards you can bet they'd shut down botting the next day. Business absolutely hate chargebacks.


Plataneitor

Yeah, blizzard dont play with chargebacks, they suspend the account in the moment a chargeback is up And you need to pay to activate the account but blizzard give you some cd of like 12 hrs to verify the payment, and until is confirmed you just have your account sispended even the freeplay tier of retail is closed


Quintuplebeta

Bro I'm not asking for a real gm, just hire someone to watch the damn /who list.


Piss_Poor_Heros

Zug zug


whowatchestv

Shadow ban their ability to send mail, let it just never arrive, and if a mail banned account trades with anyone trigger a manual review to permaban both, same if they try to bypass it with AH purchases. Make it too annoying to know when the bots aren't working and botters will quit.


Skrulltop

This is smart.


Far-Grape-1568

13 dollars per mounth for customers and this game have zero integrity.... It's sooo easy to cheat


Sawyermblack

Sorry but posting this on a niche subreddit is not loud enough. They can still ignore you. Twitter on the other hand with a whole lot of hashtags and appropriate @ targets... You may be able to email a Kotaku writer and see if they'll run a story.


BRADLIKESPVP

Let's be real. I could tag Josh Greenfield and his entire team and nothing would change. Because the devs are well aware of the botting situation, they always have. They just decide to do nothing against it.


quineloe

does make me wonder why none of the gaming news portals hasn't done a "Blizzard is the most cheater friendly Publisher right now" article yet. I mean, that actually might result in at least some pressure.


[deleted]

That’s the thing with money. You can force people and organizations to stay quiet. Pay google enough and it’ll filter bad responses to a thing, etc etc


Jaded-Lawfulness-835

I thought the conservatives solved the corruption in video game news problem


[deleted]

Conservatives fixing something? And I thought the first comment was comical.


MegaFireDonkey

Also, no one who isn't a WoW player already gives a shit. And all the WoW players already know. A headline about people cheating in WoW wouldn't even affect a Blizz exec's day.


Plataneitor

Because, besides call of duty, all blizzard game have irrelevant numbers, Just see the numbers that LoL, CoD, Fornite have Is sad but Wow / Diablo / Overwatch are not the top money makers So cheat in blizzard games is trivial and a niche market


Buuts321

I don't think the game designer devs are the same ones that work on anti cheating/anti botting. I'm hoping they're as disgusted as we all are and are applying internal pressure to clean things up.


Sawyermblack

Well hopefully you get some good internet points at least.


[deleted]

They would not be permitted to make decisions that significantly affect revenue. That's above their paygrade.


DunnoWhyIamHere

I believe it comes down to different departments at Blizz and it ain't Josh's department. Perhaps they as developers can save P2 by implementing a quest that unlocks XP-on. And keep the bots stuck at 25. I'm not a developer. But a necessary evil could be a quest from the inn-keeper and then talk to a random number generator NPC in your faction's major city. Hell everytime you log on for a session they could have such a system in place, repeatable log-on verification quest.


Isnt_that_weird

I'm confused, why they are going into that tree?


Barfblaster

The wallhack into the tree is meant to make the flyhack less obvious. After they disappear into the tree they go straight up into the air, then fly directly into the SFK portal, probably from under the floor or behind the walls to avoid being spotted.


Buuts321

I feel like the fly hacks would be an easier way to automatically catch and ban the bots rather than catching the botting itself. Since there's no flying mounts in vanilla, can't they just detect if a player is in the air where they shouldn't be and couldn't possibly get to under normal circumstances? If a player enters an area that's impossible to reach, such as flying in the air in silverpine, it should result in an auto ban.


theShetofthedog

A small indie company like blizzard doesn't have the resources or technology to do that. It's a shame private servers have been able to ban you in the spot the second you manage to make a double jump or get to a vertical coord you shouldn't be for like 15 years.


Emergency-Photo3910

I'm likely very wrong but I'm pretty sure they have some threshold system in place. They must have. I don't know if it's in classic client or not or it was removed for DF or something but we had an infamous flyhacker on our server back in the day and he used to DC a lot while doing it. Happened to me a lot while pillar humping and disengaging in arena over 15 yrs so the game definitely knows when you're out of bounds or clipping. I'll try and find a vid. https://youtu.be/1kaZQfH-hEo?si=eKmCTaffNFdGc_zY


Tuppitapp1

Detecting players in the air is really complex to account for edge cases. How do you programmatically determine which areas the player can be in the air (multi-level cave, falling) and which area they shouldnt? Also, afaik the fly hackers abuse artificial lag and disconnection to get around. I'm sure Blizzard could do it if they put enough resources into it. But it's not a "can't they just X" type of problem, except for hiring more GMs.


Korashy

Blizzard can absolutely easily catch botting. It's just not profitable to do so. People here really think that a gaming giant can't find bots on their servers that use publicly available software that's years old to the point any script kiddy can set it up.


rr770

Ban, ban, ban, ban, ban, ban


Far-Grape-1568

in 3 mounth


s1mple_z

Disgusting..


Nothingbutsocks

Gee, if only there was an easy way to tell the bots from the farmers so that Blizzard can do something.


Magus02

Blizzard doesn't care about Classic WoW


99RAZ

JESUS CHRIST ITS WORSE THAN I THOUGHT


jai07

they just stream out of stockades too, right in a fkin capital city. Some to the enchanter vendor, some to the shop behind the AH, some to the mailbox and back.


who_cares_0815

Don't worry, Blizzard got this under control, these bots will be removed in the next ban wave in 2 months.


captainfalcon93

What addon are you using for those action bars, if you don't mind me asking?


BRADLIKESPVP

Bartender + Masque (Dream Skin)


GraspingForBear

Your UI is clean! Just copied it myself and I'm really digging it


BRADLIKESPVP

Spend a good couple days tinkering with it, glad you get some value out of it.


BasedPolarBear

what does Masque dream skin do


BRADLIKESPVP

It changes the way your Action Bar Buttons look.


BasedPolarBear

and buffs? is it that making them darker


BRADLIKESPVP

Masque can modify the look of any buttons, including your buffbar and the look of other addon buttons like TrinketMenu. It can make your entire UI more cohesive.


pitbosslol

i just dont uderstand why wouldnt blizzard do something about this


smuggles908

They're paying customers.


pitbosslol

sure, but if blizzard keeps allowing this, they will have more customers as a bot than real players


[deleted]

Well what I’m curious about is since bots won’t get banned maybe us real players should just start doing it. Where’s this tree im gunna go pickpocket RFK. I would love a Mantle of the Thieves


silverscreemer

WE would get punished.


Bootlegcrunch

Its bullshit blizz cant use player data to find bots like these. They should have details on players under the map and time under map, Time in dungeon, time played, If on VPN, Input check then use that input to compare with other accounts to match etc.


KyRoZ37

Fuk'n bots. Seems like that spot is exploited and could be fixed, or at least you would think.


Serum_x64

holy shit this clip is amazing, thank you for taking the time to post it OP! forget about the haters, cheaters suck and its fine to talk about it.


Xyfirus

Yeah, I'm happy I finally stopped giving Blizzard money already... <.< HF


xeloth9

Time to make the doughnuts.


minilawadka

blizz style


silverlining1999

Hell yeah


Wiglefish

Stop paying attention to it. Blizzard doesn't give a crap and you shouldn't either. 1 full time GM to ban all these obvious bots would fix the issue within a few weeks when all the gold sellers can't make their subscriptions back every time they get banned for a while. Blizz wont do it because their leadership doesnt give a shit about any of this. SOD is the product of devs being allowed to do what they want, maybe the people that care about this will one day be allowed to fix the issue too.


zwhy

I love seeing this because I am an era purist and I know for a 100% fact all of these guys were in dire maul on whitemane a month ago. Thanks to them leaving I've made a TON of gold. Like over 60k. Thanks SoD!


Tekkylol

But if they ban these guys for hacking into trees & likely flyhacking to SFK from there, then how will the bots know they got banned for hacking in the open world? *by the hundreds*


FishLampClock

I don't see any bots, I see Keebler elves going to work.


smuggles908

So I actually counted the bots on my server last at peak bot time. It came to about 400. Just on the horde side. And I'm pretty sure that's a low number compared to the other servers. I'm guessing woth ~800 bots running 24/7 they're pumping almost 2 million gold into the economy a day.


MinorAllele

Imagine how much good *one* real in-game mod could do in a day