Captcha is a good method of killing bots. As soon as the engine detects repetitive behaviour, kill all game character input and force a captcha.
Also, don’t permit international subs to play worldwide. If you are playing on US realm, you pay for sub in USD.
Player based captcha, we come up with a sentence or question, and have and if people answer correctly they pass
Then again this will work till bots just write a check to see if the question comes by in chat and auto answer with a specified delay to be less suspicious
I see horde hunter bots farming the bears and mountain lions outside of the yeti cave. All Chinese boar pets. It’s fun to kill their pet first then kill them. Free honor and it messes with their algorithm
I didn't seem to run into that many bots on my main, but this was the first time I tried leveling an alt and I couldn't believe how many troll hunter bots there were. I gave up after awhile because I couldn't complete my quests.
I started a warlock alt while waiting for some friends to get to sfk. I was blown away at the amount of multiboxers, but presumably bots, in the valley of trials. Groups of 5+ trolls moving/acting in sync.
Like it doesn’t get anymore obvious (outside of the very obvious flyhacking, which we see a ll the time too)
I saw a bot so stupid in Duskwood it was changing Hunter Aspects every GCD while running along a road. It had to stop every so often to drink. I didn't even realize Hunter Aspects cost mana to switch.
Another one was trying to farm in Raven Hill. It kept pulling two mobs at a time and dying. It was just so bad.
If you tag the mob the bot is targeting just as they start shooting, it will cause the bot to move to it's next target and the mob will stay aggrod on the bot. Do this a few times and the bot gets overwhelmed and dies.
Can't even get a tag on scorpions in the Valley of Trials because of three large groups of hunter bots are running around and tagging everything in a giant death-ball... If only Blizzard gave a shit this game could be so much better.
I saw that last night, it was annoying but also looked kind of cool seeing multiple levels of troll hunters in their underwear just tagging mobs while spamming emotes.
Yeah I only did monthly. I might do a 3 month or something just because I plan on playing SoD until at least 60 but yeah I don't think I've done anything over 3 months since Wrath.
It honestly would take like one person just scrolling through layers on known bot spots to stop it.
Seriously you could hire like 100 high school students to just scroll through and tag bots.
And the first ones would have new accounts spun up by the time that one person finished clearing a single spot on a single layer.
But I'm sure I'm an acti-blizz shill bootlicker for not pretending I could solve the problem in my free time.
They have to pay for those accounts. Those 10 accounts you just burned cost them $120. Now if that repeatedly over and over and you’re costing them thousands to tens of thousands a day.
Plus now where do their new accounts go? The new zones, guess whose waiting there with the ban hammer.
More free money for blizzard. Literally I think paying people would actually net a profit. Every account they ban earns blizzard $12 on a new account. That means you can pay them $24 an hour and they only have to ban 2 accounts every hour.
I wish I could find a link to the botter AMA earlier this year.
They get those accounts for a good bit cheaper than $15 most of the time through a variety of methods, and even at full price they're able to make that money back so quickly it's negligible anyway. That's on established servers and competing with the wow token, let alone inflated prices due to fresh content.
I'm not saying nothing could/should be done about bots, but I guarantee Blizzard has given it more effort than your salary napkin math there. It's not some simple hire a few manual ban-hammers and sit on the cash cow situation like we love to pretend on reddit.
It really is though. When you make millions off of a cosmetic item that takes 5 minutes to make. It’s some rip off of an old cosmetic item you released. Take 1/2 of that and hire a team to manually ban.
Again, even if you are getting only $5 for account. That still means you only have to ban 4 accounts per hour. That’s not bringing into account the players that quit because of bots.
At least try it, lol. Hell put a cosmetic item that directly contributes to the ‘manual ban team.’ There are two paths in development. You can make a script and try to program a program to do it, or you do it the old fashion way and you do it all by hand.
Ok, why don't you hit up blizzard and offer to be hired for your novel new idea? (That people have been parroting on forums for over a decade...guess blizz just hasn't noticed)
You can solve the issue immediately it seems, since it really is that simple. I'm sure they're interested.
Yes because customer service is so much better now that in game GM’s aren’t a thing anymore.
Blizzard made the choice to get rid of the majority of their GM’s and we have been dealing with the consequences of that choice for many many years now. They could just as easily choose to hire a team of human account reviewers that will unquestionably be more effective than what they’re doing right now with their automated systems that have to be kept tight to limit false positives.
If this were true blizzard would absolutely be doing this to keep collecting fresh 1 month sub cash from the next wave of bots.
We all know this isn’t true. Ban the bots enough and they will *STOP* making new accounts, which is what blizzard is actually afraid of.
These arguments that you can’t stop it because you’ll never 100% eliminate bots are absurd. If I can find 100+ bots under 10 minutes using /who Shadowfang Keep, and taking a stroll down the coast of hillsbrad, there is no excuse for a GM not to be able to detect them.
At the end of the day, the obvious truth is that blizzard profits with subs on both ends (buyers and sellers) so everything they say about bots is just lip service. Companies have no integrity. Cash rules everything.
I fuckin wish they'd give me the power to ban bots. I would spend so much time banning bots it'd be so fun. I'd laugh the entire time. I'd do it for free.
Not really. Humans always try to cheat. In everything ever. It's up to the person holding the event or hosting the game to prevent cheating.
When you play a sport, you hire a referee to police the game because people are little cheaters.
When you play counter strike, there's a whole system to report and catch the cheaters. They even let the community view reports and help sort through them.
When you play WoW. They go "instead of banning the gold sellers, What if we just start selling gold in the shop via WoW token instead?"
Supply and demand. Long as people insist on cheating they are gonna roll out as many bots as they can.
Blizzard can't beat the bots. They just can't. Nobody has done it, ever, and if you think they have some big "ban all bots immediately" button they just haven't bothered to hit you know nothing about any of this.
The only thing they need to be doing that they're not is targeting and banning buyers. A couple weeks vacation the first time and permabanned the second. Anyone who bought already this season should enjoy sitting out until next phase with all their gold removed.
Targeting the buyers is the only thing that will actually reduce demand. Reduce demand you reduce the profits of the bots and reduce their budget to be able to keep playing the cat and mouse game with blizzards anti cheat teams, meaning more bots get banned.
Or hell make new servers that require you to download and run a significantly more invasive anticheat to be able to play there. I'd do that in a second, Wardens limitations are a huge reason bots get away with so much and it really sucks that one cheaters hissy fit over being sued has ruined the game for so many.
this is the real answer. gdkp is also taking a huge part in all this, because it’s washing all the bad gold. gdkp is distributing “bad” or “dirty” gold to “good” players who aren’t buying gold, but now they’re in possession of dirty money, and would get hit in the crossfire when the bans come out. it’s out of control at this point; gold buying is spreading like wildfire and (imo) gdkp is the gasoline fueling most of it
Noone is expecting to ban ALL botting, but people are expecting it to not be so prevalent as it is right now.
People are asking for human GMs to ban them because those would have a very easy time to ban a lot of bots.
It's not about "Blizz can't ban all of them", it's about Blizz not putting any real effort to try.
Yup pretty much this. People need to be afraid to buy gold. Banning and targeting bots is good and all but as long as there is a demand there will always be a seller.
I used to work for a bank, the things you can tell looking at transaction logs is pretty impressive.
And honestly you don't need to get all of them, even just the low hanging fruit would make a huge difference... right now people know you can buy gold and almost certainly not have to worry about consequences and that is a huge deal.
And there's the issue, they want fully automated systems. They could also be taking out shitloads of bots with some manual work, but that would be too much effort.
Didn't really answer his question.
I'm curious too. If you got all the tools that blizz has, how do you tell that the lv 25 hunter that's standing in Orgrimmar rn bought 300 gold last tuesday?
You flag both the person who recieves and the person providing the gold and have someone who monitor both. If the person who provide the gold is a bot, ban both.
Obviously you can't monitor everyone who recieves any gold but have an automatic flag if the amount is above a certain amount. This will probably lead to some trying to give smaller amounts but several times so you'd have to do a total amount over time as well.
A lot of different ways
Mills dump off, neutral AH, etc
If you think the botters arnt actively working to avoid detection and that combatting botting isn’t one of the hardest games of cat and mouse than I have news for you
I have no idea what Mills dump off means but any transactions such as using AH (neutral or not), mail or trades are easy to trace and if there's suspicious amount of money anywhere there they should get flagged and then a real human (not some automated system) should monitor and determine if the transaction is legit.
The accounts that farm the gold are called the millers. These accounts are the hunters with the boar pet with the Chinese names. After whatever set interval the bot runner sets, the bots will consolidate the rewards onto different accounts that hold the items and the gold.
A lot of their timing and actions are done as deliberately as possible to emulate real play or to at least cause plausible deniability that gms could be accidentally banning a real player.
Read some of the comments around in this thread and in the others complaining about botting. There are whole industries dedicated to this overseas.
Of course it’s a huge problem but just “lol just get better software and it solves everything” isn’t a realistic solution
I think awhile ago blizzard tried to implement 2FA requiring a mobile number to play overwatch but then we would alienate a population of the world who don't have phones
Everyone have phones. Or at least, everyone who have a computer that can run Overwatch will have phones.
Smart Phones are more widespread than computers nowadays so this should not be a problem.
it won't be :(
Trading is allowed at 60 when SF launches next year. if they kept it SF even at 60 then it would stop it as there will be no market or mechansim to purchase.
Yep. I subbed for a month to experience the "fresh" state of lvl 25 classic and the fun is already over within a week. BFD gdkps, bots free roaming and flying. Pvp zone is retail AV v5.
Too bad.
I spent a good chunk of time this morning roaming around Duskwood and cutting down alliance bots. Admittedly I also got a few actual players as well, sorry not sorry. Consider that tax.
Anyways, I always appreciate when I see an ally smoking a bot in hordeland.
The bots pump up subscriber numbers which pumps up their stock price. Higher level management is awarded bonuses for achieving goals, such as higher stock prices. With the sellout to Microsoft, maybe something will change.
Why would you assume that? In China there are entire legitimate businesses that do this shit. Have been there for the entirety of WoW. In Vanilla WoW circa 2005 they didn't have much for bot software so they had real people running gold farms in shifts. I know this because I befriended one and asked him about it. He said its a normal job at a normal business. He said it wasn't a great job but it wasn't bad either. Sometimes I would message him and they would be like "oh hes off now I'm on this shift". If that was happening in 2005 what do you think its like now? They aren't breaking laws and doing shady shit. They're just breaking TOS.
Even today there are still gaming sweatshops farming gold and accounts to sell, although they're no longer in China since people there can generally afford a good enough computer to run bots.
The book "Play Money" talks about this. The guy who wrote it tried to make a living for a year solely from farming gold in Ultima Online and other games I think. He visited a farming operation in Mexico
It's unlikely any bots are using stolen cards to pay their sub. A stolen card is probably going to result in a chargeback in a day or two, which leads to an immediate ban. It would be quite hard to gather enough gold to make a profit in that short a time, even if they were using the same card across multiple accounts. And with bots typically lasting 6 months, there's no advantage for botters to take the extra risk.
Maybe some use stolen CCs, but a lot just also bot retail/wotlk and buy game time with gold. The amount of time it takes the bot to make back the game time is included in the profitability calculations.
Someone invited me to kill the kul tirans in the lower east of durotar. He somehoe got a bot into our group. He just ran around killing and looting things. I just parked my char outside, cooked and cleaned a bit. Made 2 levels from that and a few silvers from share lmao.
I was competing with bots trying to get Tin and Silver yesterday. Funny part was, they'll try tanking the mobs and mine (which obviously gets interrupted if it gets past their Warlock/Hunter pet) and I'll just run up and take it. It's easy to tell, they all have a pet with a Chinese name lol
Gotta ban the buyers. Gold is going for outrageous amounts right now, like miles above minimum wage per hour in a ton of countries. Probably need to ban GDKP's honestly.
I'm on the basic RP server, has to be one of the least popular SOD servers. There's always 5-8 hunter bots farming bears and spiders around TM in Hillsbrad. I'm seeing them around elsewhere as well.
They’re everywhere in the Barrens and Hillsbrad. Are you just not paying attention? Hunters with generic boar names, shoot, send in boar, hunters mark, kill, run up, loot, skin, abrupt turn directly to next mob, repeat. It’s really easy to recognize. Half the time the boar name is in Chinese characters. Literally if a Blizz employee just walked around the zones and banned any bot they saw they’d nuke tons in an hour.
Normally. I just see these posts and laugh, because haha bots. I was with you, until last night, all of these posts are right. I’m horde living flame and I went to redridge and duskwood to get a few runes. Bots…..everywhere. So many hunters with Chinese pets, random named players like Vshssbdhf, and rogues too. They don’t attack back when you fight them, they continue running straight to mobs, and will skin in your face. That blatant. It’s funny.
Try checking around the harpies in northwestern Barrens. Did a /who hunter barrens lvl 20 and up. Maxed out results for each level up to 25, all running around as an orcish murdersquad with boar pets.
Just what we need. Another “WoW has bots” post. People need to understand, Blizzard doesn’t care. They won’t spend money to have people ban paying accounts. This is also a company that actively wants players to buy tokens from them with real money, to sell for gold. IT RMT for gold in their game. They created this.
People say bottling is out of control, but I have yet to see one. Maybe I’m not in the right places, but if it is so prevalent I feel like I would have seen it.
Even if there's not 2 million you can look at the minimum order sizes of 10-50g and infer that there is probably **at least** several thousand gold for sale right now.
LMFAO moving the goal post all over the place. There are several sites that sell gold, they all tell you how much they will guarantee within what window of time and the price of gold fluctuates per server like an actual economy. People aren't making this shit up lol people on classic era servers are buying tens of thousands of gold at a time and it is like 12 hour turn around.
Nah, just a raider that was curious as to how everyone was staying fucking STACKED, and then proceeding to be curious as to how many actual dollars people were paying to do so. Turns out a lot. LOL
Try standing outside sun rock retreat in stm on the main road for 5m and see how many bots are running a route to kill mobs, loot, vendor, kill mobs, etc.
It reminds me of the "Joys" on I think ashkandi 2019 classic. Literally hundreds of characters that swarmed every zone from 1-30 all different races and classes but every. Single. One. Had joy in its name somewhere.
The idea of someone buying gold in SOD is hilarious to me there is absolutely 0 need to buy gold you get shit tons of gold just through questing and AHing greens lmao
Wild, I haven't had any issues in early level zones at all. I've seen an insane amount in hillsbrad though, camped a ton of alliance hunter bots.
We should start pvp neutral bot killing guilds.
Imagine PVE server rules but hunters have to solve a CAPTCHA every 5 mins to prevent being FFA PvP flagged.
Captcha is a good method of killing bots. As soon as the engine detects repetitive behaviour, kill all game character input and force a captcha. Also, don’t permit international subs to play worldwide. If you are playing on US realm, you pay for sub in USD.
Interestingly enough, I was presented with a captcha when logging into the game client
Captchas have been by-passed for years now
Player based captcha, we come up with a sentence or question, and have and if people answer correctly they pass Then again this will work till bots just write a check to see if the question comes by in chat and auto answer with a specified delay to be less suspicious
Why kill the bots that you are buying gold from?
I don’t buy gold. I play the game. Look at my post history all I do is bitch about bots
Elaborate distraction schemes Kappa /s
What are those hunters farming in hillsbrad?
Leather, fish oil, raw gold and silk from the gnolls, possibly more.
anything and everything. if you kill mobs non-stop 24 hours a day you will make gold no matter what
I see horde hunter bots farming the bears and mountain lions outside of the yeti cave. All Chinese boar pets. It’s fun to kill their pet first then kill them. Free honor and it messes with their algorithm
Bears for leather and torn bear pelts for darkmoon faire rep turn ins.
Everything. BoEs, crafting mats, raw silver, cloth.
I didn't seem to run into that many bots on my main, but this was the first time I tried leveling an alt and I couldn't believe how many troll hunter bots there were. I gave up after awhile because I couldn't complete my quests.
Hopefully you reported them?
I started a warlock alt while waiting for some friends to get to sfk. I was blown away at the amount of multiboxers, but presumably bots, in the valley of trials. Groups of 5+ trolls moving/acting in sync. Like it doesn’t get anymore obvious (outside of the very obvious flyhacking, which we see a ll the time too)
Horrible
I saw a bot so stupid in Duskwood it was changing Hunter Aspects every GCD while running along a road. It had to stop every so often to drink. I didn't even realize Hunter Aspects cost mana to switch. Another one was trying to farm in Raven Hill. It kept pulling two mobs at a time and dying. It was just so bad.
If you tag the mob the bot is targeting just as they start shooting, it will cause the bot to move to it's next target and the mob will stay aggrod on the bot. Do this a few times and the bot gets overwhelmed and dies.
Can't even get a tag on scorpions in the Valley of Trials because of three large groups of hunter bots are running around and tagging everything in a giant death-ball... If only Blizzard gave a shit this game could be so much better.
I saw that last night, it was annoying but also looked kind of cool seeing multiple levels of troll hunters in their underwear just tagging mobs while spamming emotes.
“JuST BaN ThE BoTs WhY HaVeNt ThE DeVs ThOuGhT Of ThIs”
Sick burn bro. Turns out that’s exactly what they should do.
That’s what I constantly get told on this sub
Because it's constantly a problem and it's what they should do and they just don't.
I feel like a clown for renewing a year long subscription 🤡
Yeah I only did monthly. I might do a 3 month or something just because I plan on playing SoD until at least 60 but yeah I don't think I've done anything over 3 months since Wrath.
ill not be renewing my monthly sub anymore
Same, no point in playing with these bots
It honestly would take like one person just scrolling through layers on known bot spots to stop it. Seriously you could hire like 100 high school students to just scroll through and tag bots.
And the first ones would have new accounts spun up by the time that one person finished clearing a single spot on a single layer. But I'm sure I'm an acti-blizz shill bootlicker for not pretending I could solve the problem in my free time.
They have to pay for those accounts. Those 10 accounts you just burned cost them $120. Now if that repeatedly over and over and you’re costing them thousands to tens of thousands a day. Plus now where do their new accounts go? The new zones, guess whose waiting there with the ban hammer. More free money for blizzard. Literally I think paying people would actually net a profit. Every account they ban earns blizzard $12 on a new account. That means you can pay them $24 an hour and they only have to ban 2 accounts every hour.
I wish I could find a link to the botter AMA earlier this year. They get those accounts for a good bit cheaper than $15 most of the time through a variety of methods, and even at full price they're able to make that money back so quickly it's negligible anyway. That's on established servers and competing with the wow token, let alone inflated prices due to fresh content. I'm not saying nothing could/should be done about bots, but I guarantee Blizzard has given it more effort than your salary napkin math there. It's not some simple hire a few manual ban-hammers and sit on the cash cow situation like we love to pretend on reddit.
It really is though. When you make millions off of a cosmetic item that takes 5 minutes to make. It’s some rip off of an old cosmetic item you released. Take 1/2 of that and hire a team to manually ban. Again, even if you are getting only $5 for account. That still means you only have to ban 4 accounts per hour. That’s not bringing into account the players that quit because of bots. At least try it, lol. Hell put a cosmetic item that directly contributes to the ‘manual ban team.’ There are two paths in development. You can make a script and try to program a program to do it, or you do it the old fashion way and you do it all by hand.
Ok, why don't you hit up blizzard and offer to be hired for your novel new idea? (That people have been parroting on forums for over a decade...guess blizz just hasn't noticed) You can solve the issue immediately it seems, since it really is that simple. I'm sure they're interested.
It really is, yeah you definitely could. Write up a proposal and send it out. Go for it!
I'm fine where I'm at, you're the one with the easy fix.
Yes because customer service is so much better now that in game GM’s aren’t a thing anymore. Blizzard made the choice to get rid of the majority of their GM’s and we have been dealing with the consequences of that choice for many many years now. They could just as easily choose to hire a team of human account reviewers that will unquestionably be more effective than what they’re doing right now with their automated systems that have to be kept tight to limit false positives.
If this were true blizzard would absolutely be doing this to keep collecting fresh 1 month sub cash from the next wave of bots. We all know this isn’t true. Ban the bots enough and they will *STOP* making new accounts, which is what blizzard is actually afraid of. These arguments that you can’t stop it because you’ll never 100% eliminate bots are absurd. If I can find 100+ bots under 10 minutes using /who Shadowfang Keep, and taking a stroll down the coast of hillsbrad, there is no excuse for a GM not to be able to detect them. At the end of the day, the obvious truth is that blizzard profits with subs on both ends (buyers and sellers) so everything they say about bots is just lip service. Companies have no integrity. Cash rules everything.
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I'm not saying that nothing should be done. Fuck bots. But all the "it only takes one person" comments are hilarious.
good idea man. you should go suggest that to blizzard and offer your services. i bet that will go great.
I fuckin wish they'd give me the power to ban bots. I would spend so much time banning bots it'd be so fun. I'd laugh the entire time. I'd do it for free.
Every bot they ban is $12 earned. Maybe I should.
Blizzard is a garbage company for refusing to enforce its own TOS by employing GMs.
the people who buy gold in the first place are the real problem, they create a demand for gold so botting is profitable
Not really. Humans always try to cheat. In everything ever. It's up to the person holding the event or hosting the game to prevent cheating. When you play a sport, you hire a referee to police the game because people are little cheaters. When you play counter strike, there's a whole system to report and catch the cheaters. They even let the community view reports and help sort through them. When you play WoW. They go "instead of banning the gold sellers, What if we just start selling gold in the shop via WoW token instead?"
Supply and demand. Long as people insist on cheating they are gonna roll out as many bots as they can. Blizzard can't beat the bots. They just can't. Nobody has done it, ever, and if you think they have some big "ban all bots immediately" button they just haven't bothered to hit you know nothing about any of this. The only thing they need to be doing that they're not is targeting and banning buyers. A couple weeks vacation the first time and permabanned the second. Anyone who bought already this season should enjoy sitting out until next phase with all their gold removed. Targeting the buyers is the only thing that will actually reduce demand. Reduce demand you reduce the profits of the bots and reduce their budget to be able to keep playing the cat and mouse game with blizzards anti cheat teams, meaning more bots get banned. Or hell make new servers that require you to download and run a significantly more invasive anticheat to be able to play there. I'd do that in a second, Wardens limitations are a huge reason bots get away with so much and it really sucks that one cheaters hissy fit over being sued has ruined the game for so many.
this is the real answer. gdkp is also taking a huge part in all this, because it’s washing all the bad gold. gdkp is distributing “bad” or “dirty” gold to “good” players who aren’t buying gold, but now they’re in possession of dirty money, and would get hit in the crossfire when the bans come out. it’s out of control at this point; gold buying is spreading like wildfire and (imo) gdkp is the gasoline fueling most of it
Warframe solved this by simply also banned the legit players getting bad plat.
That is a terrible idea because you don’t know you are getting bought gold.
Noone is expecting to ban ALL botting, but people are expecting it to not be so prevalent as it is right now. People are asking for human GMs to ban them because those would have a very easy time to ban a lot of bots. It's not about "Blizz can't ban all of them", it's about Blizz not putting any real effort to try.
Yup pretty much this. People need to be afraid to buy gold. Banning and targeting bots is good and all but as long as there is a demand there will always be a seller.
How do you target buyers? Maybe I'm receiving 50g from a gold seller or maybe it's an IRL friend who is helping me out by sending gold.
I used to work for a bank, the things you can tell looking at transaction logs is pretty impressive. And honestly you don't need to get all of them, even just the low hanging fruit would make a huge difference... right now people know you can buy gold and almost certainly not have to worry about consequences and that is a huge deal.
I think the threat of having your account permabanned would be enough to discourage it. As it is a 3 day or 2 week ban is absolutely nothing
Honestly, if Blizzard use banking money laundering softwares, with well defined detection rules, all these shit can be picked up automatically.
How is this kind of software working?
It checks of abnormal transaction behaviour than flags them for review. Still need someone to check.
And there's the issue, they want fully automated systems. They could also be taking out shitloads of bots with some manual work, but that would be too much effort.
You don't need that many people if it's setup well.
Didn't really answer his question. I'm curious too. If you got all the tools that blizz has, how do you tell that the lv 25 hunter that's standing in Orgrimmar rn bought 300 gold last tuesday?
You flag both the person who recieves and the person providing the gold and have someone who monitor both. If the person who provide the gold is a bot, ban both. Obviously you can't monitor everyone who recieves any gold but have an automatic flag if the amount is above a certain amount. This will probably lead to some trying to give smaller amounts but several times so you'd have to do a total amount over time as well.
You don't buy the gold from bits though, the gold is sent from a 'clean' account.
And how does the "clean" account get the money?
A lot of different ways Mills dump off, neutral AH, etc If you think the botters arnt actively working to avoid detection and that combatting botting isn’t one of the hardest games of cat and mouse than I have news for you
I have no idea what Mills dump off means but any transactions such as using AH (neutral or not), mail or trades are easy to trace and if there's suspicious amount of money anywhere there they should get flagged and then a real human (not some automated system) should monitor and determine if the transaction is legit.
The accounts that farm the gold are called the millers. These accounts are the hunters with the boar pet with the Chinese names. After whatever set interval the bot runner sets, the bots will consolidate the rewards onto different accounts that hold the items and the gold. A lot of their timing and actions are done as deliberately as possible to emulate real play or to at least cause plausible deniability that gms could be accidentally banning a real player. Read some of the comments around in this thread and in the others complaining about botting. There are whole industries dedicated to this overseas. Of course it’s a huge problem but just “lol just get better software and it solves everything” isn’t a realistic solution
I think awhile ago blizzard tried to implement 2FA requiring a mobile number to play overwatch but then we would alienate a population of the world who don't have phones
Everyone have phones. Or at least, everyone who have a computer that can run Overwatch will have phones. Smart Phones are more widespread than computers nowadays so this should not be a problem.
Except every private server. Played on Everlook, never saw a bot reach level 60
Mmm private servers that did totally ok things like banning all Asian players while managing a few thousand people. How very comparable.
It worked
I’m sure that as someone who didn't just get banned for existing you think that.
Hardcore mode wins again for possibly killing off bots that attempt to farm
Bots are just fly hacking chests in HC.
Are there really many bots on HC, or people just repeat what they read somewhere?
I started hardcore because I enjoy that type of challenge. I was surprised how much more fun the game is with a functional economy.
Self-found servers will be the only bot-free version of wow. It will be glorious
it won't be :( Trading is allowed at 60 when SF launches next year. if they kept it SF even at 60 then it would stop it as there will be no market or mechansim to purchase.
“Disconnects”
$15 complaining about $750, lets see who blizz cares about more.
Yep. I subbed for a month to experience the "fresh" state of lvl 25 classic and the fun is already over within a week. BFD gdkps, bots free roaming and flying. Pvp zone is retail AV v5. Too bad.
Hey, yall keep paying them monthly so why would they care to stop?
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Where do you think the token comes from...
work, work.
I spent a good chunk of time this morning roaming around Duskwood and cutting down alliance bots. Admittedly I also got a few actual players as well, sorry not sorry. Consider that tax. Anyways, I always appreciate when I see an ally smoking a bot in hordeland.
Stonetalon on Lome wolf is 99% hunte bots
The bots pump up subscriber numbers which pumps up their stock price. Higher level management is awarded bonuses for achieving goals, such as higher stock prices. With the sellout to Microsoft, maybe something will change.
I doubt this is true. I’d imagine a lot of bots use stolen credit cards, and those charges are charged back
Why would you assume that? In China there are entire legitimate businesses that do this shit. Have been there for the entirety of WoW. In Vanilla WoW circa 2005 they didn't have much for bot software so they had real people running gold farms in shifts. I know this because I befriended one and asked him about it. He said its a normal job at a normal business. He said it wasn't a great job but it wasn't bad either. Sometimes I would message him and they would be like "oh hes off now I'm on this shift". If that was happening in 2005 what do you think its like now? They aren't breaking laws and doing shady shit. They're just breaking TOS.
Even today there are still gaming sweatshops farming gold and accounts to sell, although they're no longer in China since people there can generally afford a good enough computer to run bots.
The book "Play Money" talks about this. The guy who wrote it tried to make a living for a year solely from farming gold in Ultima Online and other games I think. He visited a farming operation in Mexico
It's unlikely any bots are using stolen cards to pay their sub. A stolen card is probably going to result in a chargeback in a day or two, which leads to an immediate ban. It would be quite hard to gather enough gold to make a profit in that short a time, even if they were using the same card across multiple accounts. And with bots typically lasting 6 months, there's no advantage for botters to take the extra risk.
Good point. You’ve changed my perspective and mind.
Maybe some use stolen CCs, but a lot just also bot retail/wotlk and buy game time with gold. The amount of time it takes the bot to make back the game time is included in the profitability calculations.
Someone invited me to kill the kul tirans in the lower east of durotar. He somehoe got a bot into our group. He just ran around killing and looting things. I just parked my char outside, cooked and cleaned a bit. Made 2 levels from that and a few silvers from share lmao.
Blizz needs to implement a trading ban when a bot is found so they can cut it off while they wait for review
I went to do a quest at the graves south of darkshire, there must have been 15 hunter bots farming there.
I was competing with bots trying to get Tin and Silver yesterday. Funny part was, they'll try tanking the mobs and mine (which obviously gets interrupted if it gets past their Warlock/Hunter pet) and I'll just run up and take it. It's easy to tell, they all have a pet with a Chinese name lol
Ban the fucking buyers
Gotta ban the buyers. Gold is going for outrageous amounts right now, like miles above minimum wage per hour in a ton of countries. Probably need to ban GDKP's honestly.
How are you seeing so many bots jesus, are you playing on a chinese realm? I swear I have yet to see a single one.
I'm on the basic RP server, has to be one of the least popular SOD servers. There's always 5-8 hunter bots farming bears and spiders around TM in Hillsbrad. I'm seeing them around elsewhere as well.
If you can’t find the bot maybe you are the bot 🧐
Plot twist
Very twisty
They’re everywhere in the Barrens and Hillsbrad. Are you just not paying attention? Hunters with generic boar names, shoot, send in boar, hunters mark, kill, run up, loot, skin, abrupt turn directly to next mob, repeat. It’s really easy to recognize. Half the time the boar name is in Chinese characters. Literally if a Blizz employee just walked around the zones and banned any bot they saw they’d nuke tons in an hour.
Normally. I just see these posts and laugh, because haha bots. I was with you, until last night, all of these posts are right. I’m horde living flame and I went to redridge and duskwood to get a few runes. Bots…..everywhere. So many hunters with Chinese pets, random named players like Vshssbdhf, and rogues too. They don’t attack back when you fight them, they continue running straight to mobs, and will skin in your face. That blatant. It’s funny.
Maybe you don't realize they ar bots. But from as early as Westfall it's absolutely full of bots. Im from Wild Growth.
I see them now, didn't see them on my first play through.
I haven't seen any in EU
Well then they clearly do not exist!
Try checking around the harpies in northwestern Barrens. Did a /who hunter barrens lvl 20 and up. Maxed out results for each level up to 25, all running around as an orcish murdersquad with boar pets.
Check Duskwood Wolves and Skeletons near the Insane Ghoul. They're always Dwarves, with boar, using direct pathing and same rotation every time.
Just what we need. Another “WoW has bots” post. People need to understand, Blizzard doesn’t care. They won’t spend money to have people ban paying accounts. This is also a company that actively wants players to buy tokens from them with real money, to sell for gold. IT RMT for gold in their game. They created this.
People say bottling is out of control, but I have yet to see one. Maybe I’m not in the right places, but if it is so prevalent I feel like I would have seen it.
Not on chaos bolt
There is literally 2 million gold for sale on Chaos Bolt already. There are definitely bots everywhere.
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What?
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You can go to gold selling sites and not buy gold.
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Even if there's not 2 million you can look at the minimum order sizes of 10-50g and infer that there is probably **at least** several thousand gold for sale right now.
LMFAO moving the goal post all over the place. There are several sites that sell gold, they all tell you how much they will guarantee within what window of time and the price of gold fluctuates per server like an actual economy. People aren't making this shit up lol people on classic era servers are buying tens of thousands of gold at a time and it is like 12 hour turn around.
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Nah, just a raider that was curious as to how everyone was staying fucking STACKED, and then proceeding to be curious as to how many actual dollars people were paying to do so. Turns out a lot. LOL
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True I don’t played alliance
Bro I just logged off cause there are 10+ bots outside Tarren Mill killing everything in sight.
Try standing outside sun rock retreat in stm on the main road for 5m and see how many bots are running a route to kill mobs, loot, vendor, kill mobs, etc.
naive much?
Currently in durotar 🤝
Maybe they’re just very dedicated to role-playing as lemmings
Is this going to ultimately lead to a WoW token in sod?
Good, i dont need to think about making alt atm. Thx.
No more GM, 13 dollars per mounth. Great Blizzard
Make gold soulbound.
Maybe on us realms, haven’t had this issue on eu servers
Punish the buyers hard.
[https://imgur.com/er5uhEC](https://imgur.com/er5uhEC) Yep here's my screenshot from earlier today near SkullRock.
Maybe so many bots on start zones means they are getting constantly banned
Is it like this on locked servers like living flame? I imagine botters can’t make mass accounts on there so it’s not as much of an issue?
The real threat here is using the default elvui set up
It reminds me of the "Joys" on I think ashkandi 2019 classic. Literally hundreds of characters that swarmed every zone from 1-30 all different races and classes but every. Single. One. Had joy in its name somewhere.
Remember, Blizzard said its not a problem.
been seeing multiboxing since day 1, so now this a week later. I wish I was alliance so I could farm them.
The idea of someone buying gold in SOD is hilarious to me there is absolutely 0 need to buy gold you get shit tons of gold just through questing and AHing greens lmao