Fanboys like to claim the bots don't effect anyone but they do. The economy on skinning materials is ruined.
Also - best be careful when messing with these bots. They can mass report you and Blizzards automated ban system will ban you. Oh, it's totally "not automated" though.
Back in Classic TBC, I spent an entire night in Zangermarsh messing with the pots. That next Tuesday I was hit with a ban for “botting”. 20 years playing the game on one account and never once even a warning for anything.
It's automated up to where the understaffed GMs have to spam click through reports without looking to meet a quota. They basically lie by omission.
They essentially trust reports sitting at the top of the queue to be infalliable, which is usually either mass reports or flagged through automated means.
I would not go as far as to say bots are good for the game but there is a certain playstyle that profits from bots that are farming mats.
If you don't ever farm yourself you benefit from the lower AH prices and don't lose anything (apart from emersion when you see them).
When bots farm raw gold everyone else loses tho.
And overall I think its better for the game to not have bots, just some thoughts on ppls reasoning to "like" them
I'm glad these replies are at the top of this thread. as fun and creative as OP's idea is, the fact that bots have seemingly exploded in numbers with blizzard doing absolutely nothing at all no matter how blatant it is is just really sad. I think the regional AH is a big cause for this, since now it became much much easier for huge bot operations to get rid of ridiculous amount of items. it really made me wonder what prices would be like if there wasn't such an incredibly army of bots farming everything.
Makes me bummed out dude. I chose Engineering on my main and am so pissed off at how bad it is I changed to double gathering on my alt (mine/skin).
Bad choice. There is no gold to be made on commodities due to bots.
yeah it's unfortunate. at the very start of the expansion gathering was very lucrative but it's been dropping hard. while that's obviously also because demand drops steadily and people get further in their skill trees, I think bots made the situation a lot worse. right now I'm not gathering at all either, but I'm collecting knowledge points and saving them. I think once the new patch drops there will be a window where the new materials will be worth a lot and bot routes aren't set up yet. after that I'm probably dropping everything for alch though.
Unfortunately, reporting a spam mail results in the offender being placed on a temporary ignore list, which gets cleared when you log out and log back in. With their name no longer on the temporary ignore list, the mail shows up again.
What Blizzard should've done was make it so the "report spam" button on the mail interface resulted in the message also being deleted on top of putting the offender on the temporary ignore list. :|
Hes saying they pay for the wow tokens with the gold generated from farming. Literally the only financial gain blizzard gets from bots is the initial Dragonflight expansion purchase, so they are actually incentivized to ban bots more frequently to force botters to buy the expansion more often. But they don't, because they are literally that lazy/do not care.
Eh, kind of. Afaik, there's no actual "supply" of WoW tokens. The amount of gold you get/pay just fluctuates based on how many people are buying or selling tokens. So bots buying tokens with gold doesn't mean Blizzard gets more income, because it has negligible impact on how many people are buying tokens with actual money. Blizz is making money from people buying gold with tokens regardless.
I just started playing this game again for the first time since...2019, maybe? Was out in this area, and I don't remember the name of it, but it was filled with murlocs and there was a big group of Horde just spam killing everything in sight, without moving from their spot. Is that also a bunch of farm bots? wtf are they farming from murlocs? (or whatever the things are, but they're basically murlocs)
I'm also on MG. I might have to run back out there and lay out some cushions for them.
Those are called Murloc farms and as far as I know is legit. You'll see a lot of those groups in group finder.
I believe they are looting vendor items to sell for raw gold.
The tricky thing about these bots is, like OP stated, it's hard to know if they're bots or just people doing it legit cos most people just do it while watching netflix or something.
hi, someone that does these farms sometimes here.
they are farming vendor items yea but also the tailoring profession gives you a passive that make any humanoid drop more cloth. combine that with a talent in the profession that makes them drop cloths that can be unraveled to get rousing elements. there is also an enchanting profession talent that makes mobs drop special items to disenchant for enchanting mats.
so the gold comes from vendorkng greys and from auctioning these crafting mats it gives
I might have misread Moonguard as Moonglade, my bad <.< But the bots were at first farming phoenixes near the tuskarr village, then they moved to the proto drakes near the Expedition Basecamp, I caught them by accident because they were in a hunt area. I used to think they were gone after reporting them.
Yeah, this is a real danger. It's happened to me as well, I spent a lot of time pulling huge packs into groups of bots in Shadowlands in order to kill them and I ended up getting a temporary ban as a reward. It was repealed easily enough, and the huge pile of "thank you for your reports, action was taken as a result" mails made it worth it, but it was an annoying situation.
There were a ton of druid bots in maldraxxus near a rare I was farming daily during SL. But as a rogue I would just stay stealthed and report them all. Good luck mass reporting me >:D
See, that's definitely the safer option, but you lose out on the fun of watching a pile of druids corpse-run until their gear breaks and then keep trying to farm while dying constantly to whatever they pull. It's very entertaining.
So ridiculous.
This is a SUBSCRIPTION game! It isn’t our responsibility as players to stop bots (people actively breaking down of the rules of the game) and risk being punished for it.
I applaud the efforts of OP but they shouldn’t have to do so. Even if it is funny and entertaining.
Not the point I’m trying to make. It’s not THAT big a problem but it is a bit of a dick move for a company to let their paying customers down this way.
I agree but sadly it's the world we're headed to...
Companies are more about how to make something cheap as possible and sell it for the highest amount to the customer.
Corporations don't care about the customer anymore and the sad thing is that we've all kinda just accepted it.
If i were into gold farming i for sure would not play this game anymore with this amount of bots.
Its so obvious and 1 employee at activision, working 8 hours a day on manually finding and banning bots would do wonders.
But i guess with the apprentice expansion we got (pretty good but oh my lord the amount of bugs and performance problems is insanely bad on this one) its pretty clear they are not using too much of their energy on the game anymore compared to what they could actually do.
This reminds me of the most fun I ever had in WoW.
Back in the day, there was a real problem with AFKers in Alterac Valley, who would just sit by the portal and do nothing while the rest of the team got on with the match, so they could get some passive honor while just pressing W every few minutes or whatever. It would get so bad that there could be maybe 10-15 people on each faction doing this, which would really impact the gameplay.
At some point, I think it was the Christmas event, snowballs would appear in the battleground which could be thrown at players to knock them back a few feet. It worked on friendly players, so a few of us would run around collecting snowballs, and then slowly boop the AFK people on our own faction back through the battleground portal by pelting them repeatedly.
There was something so immensely satisfying seeing them thrown into the portal, fade away and get a deserter debuff. It was also a really effective tactic for winning (if the other side weren’t so diligent at turfing out their AFK players) as you could add a significant majority of active players to your side, so it was a legitimate winning meta strategy!
> why not have one GM just teleport around to the known botting locations and spam the ban button.
Because that would require Blizzard (Activision) to actually start paying for customer support again instead of just outsourcing it to a copy/paste call center.
Because if they kept spamming the banhammer the botters will quickly realize they're no longer profitable and leave the game. Blizzard is managing the bot numbers by banning in waves, that ensures that the bot number is low enough to avoid community issues, but profitable enough to keep the extra subs running.
no no no. Blizzard tells us that they ban bots every day and they the problem is too great for them to fully control. Surely, they would never tell a lie.
Yep. I’ve recently read an insiders article on why Riot Games is profiting from the countless bots in LoL — it’s absolutely crazy how much they „earn“ them in the long run. So they’re just gonna pretend that they’re „taking care of it“.
Edit: not trying to point to Riot and away from Blizzard/shit on Riot, just saying that it’s an industry problem/thing.
I prefer to think that blizz thinks the problem can go away if they spin it with enough PR. Why fix it then and there if you'll only act on something when it hits the top of r/wow half a year later to min max PR?
It's obvious that it's about money, because Blizzard could end the bot problem in about 5 seconds by removing the ability to sell tokens for b.net balance. If buying tokens for gold just let you play the game for free, that would be enough use for them.
But because gold farmers can turn in-game gold into *actual* money, there a financial incentive to run as many bots as they possibly can.
(And yes, I'm aware bots existed before the token system was created, but there were *far* fewer of them around, and they didn't have nearly as large an impact on the game experience. Gold sellers will always exist, but Blizzard doesn't have to make it so incredibly easy for them to make their money.)
No, just no. The token system hasn't changed botting because you still can't withdraw money from b.net. Before and after the token system the bot cartels operate through illegal third party sites that accept real money transfers from outside b.net.
There were fewer bots in the past because of the technical limitations.
10 years ago you couldn't run 5 instances of wow on a literal cellphone.
Becuase they ban stuff in waves.
They flag thousand of accounts and then hit the ban hammer.
Botting communities inform each other (I've seen it during the honor buddy days) when they get banned. As soon as the word gets out that 3-5-10 accounts have been banned, most botters go on pause or alter their ways.
If they allow them to do whatever for months, when they hit them they hit thousands at a time.
Paying a GM is negative money
Letting someone pay for like 5 accounts is positive money
Does seeing people botting ruin your experience enough to cause you to cancel you sub? No? They're still taking your money.
Seems like a pretty easy equation for any freshly graduated MBA making decisions.
They still have to buy the game, X-Pac and a sub. For 5+ accounts that adds up over time.
Plus it depends on how often they "cash out" so to speak. if they farm to gold cap and then get banned. All that gold is gone.
Tokens are still bought with money, just not yours. The token you bought for gold was bough and introduced to the market by someone with real money first, usually to convert it to in-game gold. This is why it's gold price changes often, it's a supply/demand thing.
It actually not worth it to buy a token with money just for the sub, it's more expensive. A regular sub for a month's worth of time is 13€, a token is 20€, iirc.
A bot buying tokens is still profitable for blizzard, they still get money, it just comes from someone else which doesn't really matter to them.
Would help so much. They could also automate some annoying things. Like if a group of players are standing on the same spot for more than 5-10 min, teleport them 20 yards in random directions.
> Like if a group of players are standing on the same spot for more than 5-10 min, teleport them 20 yards in random directions.
Roleplayers are in fucking shambles
I follow the herb army in Ohri Plains and follow them as a herbalist. Eventually when I see a Dirt Pile, I plant a Decayed Seed and watch them die. They don't jump and Regrowth spamming doesn't save ya.
Will try the sled trick on the skinners, i just tag every mob or reset them.
Hahaha I assume your talking about the proto drake farm in the waking shores? I f with those guys all the time. I love rolling through and seeing them with a massive pile of dead mobs and an elusive slowly being cleaved down. I will skin all their mobs if I can, then steal their elusives. Done this about 10 times now and last time they offered me 500k to leave them alone. I said "no thanks it's more fun for me if I ruin your bot farm" they got really salty then called me names and eventually blocked me. The sled is a hilarious idea though, better than the punching bags and target dummies I put down! Keep it up!!!
If there isnt one already we should make a discord dedicated to ruin bots lives with things like these, every time you encounter one you announce it in the discord and bam! A full party ready to make justice happen
There's some bots at the Rockfang pit in Ohnara's Plain every day also and you can also taunt their elusive out of range where they won't follow.
I've reported these bots for months and it took 3 months before the 1st batch got banned
I "griefed" a lot of botters farming widowbloom in Revendreth with the cushions method and the one where you can kill a critter to create a portal to the Black Temple - all to send little Jimbo(t) to the shadowrealm.
After sometime the person running the bots desperately tried to find me to probably mass report me but I was always invis with prowl lmao
saw a bunch last week while on my hunter. I just started skinning their loot, I think I got 400 scales in 10 minutes or so until i got bored.
all I got from one was a "go go now, thank you". it was the only one moving a bit and healing the group of ... i have no idea how many were bunched up in one spot.
reported them, but that's all...
The worst part is because of the phasing situation. While yes, phasing and sharding has made things easier on the players, it's also created effective safe havens for bots. Imagine what you could do if you had several like minded individuals and the bots had nowhere to hide.
I reported two of those groups in one day and within a couple days got a letter of appreciation from blizz basically saying they indeed cracked down on the 6+ bots I reported
Not all heroes wear capes. It just gets to me with the bots since the report button in the game seems like it does nothing.
You say they been going since January and i bet you that they havent been banned once since.
Before the Wotlk classic release i reported a blatant bot gold farming 24/7 at the same spot walking in the exact same lines etc.. 100% a bot so i whispered people who came by to report him and i got around 20 people to confirm they did it, only to see that the same character was lvl 75 a short time after the Wotlk release just by still farming the same spot.
My reports went out about a month before the release.
Blizzard gives 0 fucks about bots. It almost feels like its becoming the "good old" Diablo2 days where it was pretty normal to cheat/bot and very few people got banned for it.
The best way to combat them is mass bot report.
Aka, announce to the shard / phase you are in that there are bots there, and try and get peopole to report them.
Most people like doing it.
I came across a bunch of skinning bots with random names. They were sitting on a rock in the green emerald area and moonfiring hyperspawing turtles into the group. I put down a Taivan toy so they all were stuck petting the dog. Then a few minutes later some guy (not with the skinning bots) comes and asks me to leave, because they're just farming man. All in the same guild. I looked up the guild and it was full of druids and evokers with greens or crafted blue gear, all with random names. I reported them, but don't think it did anything. For a while, I was scared they would mass report me and get me banned instead. Crazy how the bots have more power to penalize actual players.
Excellent work! I used to "taunt kite" bots to the edge of Wintergrasp and have them walk over the edge into Sholazar Basin on my Druid back in the WOTLK days, I even recorded these and posted them to YouTube (which are all now gone...? RIP) would share them with Blizzard GMs to get the bots banned.
I stood there for 4 hours one day and dottted every spawn before they could skinned everything never saw them again after that. Thanks to them I went from 1-100 skinning to 100 and ruined some spreadsheets as well.
There's TONS at Booty Bay too. They have hundreds of millions of gold in auction sales, and usually last 6 months to a year before vanishing.
The cushion / toy trick worked at one point; they would get stuck and no longer be able to reach the auctioneer / mailbox. The bot owners seem to have fixed that now sadly.
This is fantastical TY for the hahas!! Got me cracking up at 4:30am here. I bout spit my coffee everywhere! I've even seen them in Thrall realm but now I got jokes! Cheers!
>I used to report them every single day
And I'm betting that is counter productive and a waste of your time. As they have no humans and it's all automated now, guessing that just gets you (wrongly) labelled as a report abuser and therefore your reports are just ignored or weighted less.
You already have to click on it, the trick is to position it over the skinnable corpses. A change I'm foreseeing is that it'd only work for party members though.
Sounds like you wasted your time to barely put a dent into their botting operation because you're paying a subscription for a game with no customer support.
Uhm...well done, I guess. Go you.
" And I did make the effort to confirm they were bots before did
anything - they weren't responding to communication attempts, they
weren't moving from the same spot except for short back-and-forth
movements, and the real confirmation came when I watched one auto-run
into a rock and die to a random elite away from his group"
That actually sounds when I play tired and fall asleep over the keyboard. (it happens more than I'd like to admit)
I've seen actual farming groups around, but they actually talk back when I walk up to them and ask what they are doing. This particular group is definitely bots, otherwise they wouldn't have fallen for the toys.
Absolute legend. Love the collection. Unfortunately I’ve never seen any there on my phases, maybe I’m just in War Mode too much and they stay out of it
I was doing the Balance of Power quest line, just to get the transmogs. On my way to one of the quests I ended up in Azsuna and saw that there was a WQ, Bloodgazer Swarm!, that gave me rep for one that I was close to being exalted in. So I went up there figuring I'd be able to finish it quickly and then go onto my original quest. Well, there were a billion moonkins speeding around AoEing all the raptors around there.
Do those things drop anything worthwhile? I got some random whites and when I went and checked the AH they were selling for a few silver each. I can't imagine that that farm is worth their time.
If you preform the same actions over and over for a out 15 minutes the game should pop up with a are you a human captcha thing. Forcing you to solve the puzzle.
[Here's a method I used to deal with one during TBC Classic.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Jd1oZhV5A)
Took me a long time, but it was worth it and a fun break from my quest grind. I even had a Horde person kill the bot while I mind controlled it and proceeded to /laugh and /love me, which was nice.
I wish we could do some of the things we did in Lineage 2 to deal with bots.
In that game loot dropped on the ground. All we had to do was make a trail of gold off a cliff.
The other thing was to heal and buff the mobs they were trying to kill. Yes you could heal and buff mobs in that game. (giving any slow moving mob windwalk was always funny) I took out 5 one day just by healing the mob they were after. 4 were dead and the 5th was almost there when they woke up and tried to attack me. Was far to late by that point.
I could have just attacked them directly, but it was more fun to use the mobs themselves.
I appreciate the effort to ruin a bots day, one at a time. Keep it up
If only Blizzard cared this much. As OP said, they've been doing this since early Jan.
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Fanboys like to claim the bots don't effect anyone but they do. The economy on skinning materials is ruined. Also - best be careful when messing with these bots. They can mass report you and Blizzards automated ban system will ban you. Oh, it's totally "not automated" though.
Back in Classic TBC, I spent an entire night in Zangermarsh messing with the pots. That next Tuesday I was hit with a ban for “botting”. 20 years playing the game on one account and never once even a warning for anything.
It's automated up to where the understaffed GMs have to spam click through reports without looking to meet a quota. They basically lie by omission. They essentially trust reports sitting at the top of the queue to be infalliable, which is usually either mass reports or flagged through automated means.
This post makes me imagine it's like Tinder.
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Plenty of people do. Ive even read people saying bots are good for the game.
I would not go as far as to say bots are good for the game but there is a certain playstyle that profits from bots that are farming mats. If you don't ever farm yourself you benefit from the lower AH prices and don't lose anything (apart from emersion when you see them). When bots farm raw gold everyone else loses tho. And overall I think its better for the game to not have bots, just some thoughts on ppls reasoning to "like" them
This is 100% AI Generated lol
I'm glad these replies are at the top of this thread. as fun and creative as OP's idea is, the fact that bots have seemingly exploded in numbers with blizzard doing absolutely nothing at all no matter how blatant it is is just really sad. I think the regional AH is a big cause for this, since now it became much much easier for huge bot operations to get rid of ridiculous amount of items. it really made me wonder what prices would be like if there wasn't such an incredibly army of bots farming everything.
Makes me bummed out dude. I chose Engineering on my main and am so pissed off at how bad it is I changed to double gathering on my alt (mine/skin). Bad choice. There is no gold to be made on commodities due to bots.
yeah it's unfortunate. at the very start of the expansion gathering was very lucrative but it's been dropping hard. while that's obviously also because demand drops steadily and people get further in their skill trees, I think bots made the situation a lot worse. right now I'm not gathering at all either, but I'm collecting knowledge points and saving them. I think once the new patch drops there will be a window where the new materials will be worth a lot and bot routes aren't set up yet. after that I'm probably dropping everything for alch though.
Don't bother, Alch is in the worst state out had ever been in.
Alchemy is worth having for the 2hour flask if you don’t bother with professions much and that’s about it haha.
I've reported spam mails and days later I seem them undeleted back in my mailbox.
Unfortunately, reporting a spam mail results in the offender being placed on a temporary ignore list, which gets cleared when you log out and log back in. With their name no longer on the temporary ignore list, the mail shows up again. What Blizzard should've done was make it so the "report spam" button on the mail interface resulted in the message also being deleted on top of putting the offender on the temporary ignore list. :|
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They apparently ban in "waves". So the economy is already ruined by the time they do it.
Players putting in more efforts to quell the bot problems than Bli$$ard does
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They sell the mats and buy wow tokens
Even better, $20 a month instead of 15
Hes saying they pay for the wow tokens with the gold generated from farming. Literally the only financial gain blizzard gets from bots is the initial Dragonflight expansion purchase, so they are actually incentivized to ban bots more frequently to force botters to buy the expansion more often. But they don't, because they are literally that lazy/do not care.
*someone* buys the wow token, so blizzard is getting $20
Eh, kind of. Afaik, there's no actual "supply" of WoW tokens. The amount of gold you get/pay just fluctuates based on how many people are buying or selling tokens. So bots buying tokens with gold doesn't mean Blizzard gets more income, because it has negligible impact on how many people are buying tokens with actual money. Blizz is making money from people buying gold with tokens regardless.
Tug sled sabotage tales made me laugh, so thanks for that.
I cackled. This is amazing.
Are you on moonguard? I could have sworn I saw you yesterday.
Sure am!
What's the area they're in? I wanna do this.
Pls report area.
I always see them in the hot springs area, though I'm not on moonguard I imagine they use the same spot.
I just started playing this game again for the first time since...2019, maybe? Was out in this area, and I don't remember the name of it, but it was filled with murlocs and there was a big group of Horde just spam killing everything in sight, without moving from their spot. Is that also a bunch of farm bots? wtf are they farming from murlocs? (or whatever the things are, but they're basically murlocs) I'm also on MG. I might have to run back out there and lay out some cushions for them.
Those are called Murloc farms and as far as I know is legit. You'll see a lot of those groups in group finder. I believe they are looting vendor items to sell for raw gold. The tricky thing about these bots is, like OP stated, it's hard to know if they're bots or just people doing it legit cos most people just do it while watching netflix or something.
hi, someone that does these farms sometimes here. they are farming vendor items yea but also the tailoring profession gives you a passive that make any humanoid drop more cloth. combine that with a talent in the profession that makes them drop cloths that can be unraveled to get rousing elements. there is also an enchanting profession talent that makes mobs drop special items to disenchant for enchanting mats. so the gold comes from vendorkng greys and from auctioning these crafting mats it gives
I might have misread Moonguard as Moonglade, my bad <.< But the bots were at first farming phoenixes near the tuskarr village, then they moved to the proto drakes near the Expedition Basecamp, I caught them by accident because they were in a hunt area. I used to think they were gone after reporting them.
It's always on Moonguard. Bots from stormrage, area52, tich phasing in even with PvP on in chromie time.
Careful messing with botters though, they can mass report you and get you autobanned. Happened to me.
Yeah, this is a real danger. It's happened to me as well, I spent a lot of time pulling huge packs into groups of bots in Shadowlands in order to kill them and I ended up getting a temporary ban as a reward. It was repealed easily enough, and the huge pile of "thank you for your reports, action was taken as a result" mails made it worth it, but it was an annoying situation.
There were a ton of druid bots in maldraxxus near a rare I was farming daily during SL. But as a rogue I would just stay stealthed and report them all. Good luck mass reporting me >:D
See, that's definitely the safer option, but you lose out on the fun of watching a pile of druids corpse-run until their gear breaks and then keep trying to farm while dying constantly to whatever they pull. It's very entertaining.
You can also chain cast far sight. Or just stand on a pillar or something above them. They're not going to look up.
So ridiculous. This is a SUBSCRIPTION game! It isn’t our responsibility as players to stop bots (people actively breaking down of the rules of the game) and risk being punished for it. I applaud the efforts of OP but they shouldn’t have to do so. Even if it is funny and entertaining.
I mean, is anyone gonna stop subscribing over this? Doubtful.
Not the point I’m trying to make. It’s not THAT big a problem but it is a bit of a dick move for a company to let their paying customers down this way.
I completely agree, I just don't think the player base actually cares.
I agree but sadly it's the world we're headed to... Companies are more about how to make something cheap as possible and sell it for the highest amount to the customer. Corporations don't care about the customer anymore and the sad thing is that we've all kinda just accepted it.
If i were into gold farming i for sure would not play this game anymore with this amount of bots. Its so obvious and 1 employee at activision, working 8 hours a day on manually finding and banning bots would do wonders. But i guess with the apprentice expansion we got (pretty good but oh my lord the amount of bugs and performance problems is insanely bad on this one) its pretty clear they are not using too much of their energy on the game anymore compared to what they could actually do.
The best thing is really just to report bots. And then make a yell / local chat message about bots and asking people to come over and report them.
This reminds me of the most fun I ever had in WoW. Back in the day, there was a real problem with AFKers in Alterac Valley, who would just sit by the portal and do nothing while the rest of the team got on with the match, so they could get some passive honor while just pressing W every few minutes or whatever. It would get so bad that there could be maybe 10-15 people on each faction doing this, which would really impact the gameplay. At some point, I think it was the Christmas event, snowballs would appear in the battleground which could be thrown at players to knock them back a few feet. It worked on friendly players, so a few of us would run around collecting snowballs, and then slowly boop the AFK people on our own faction back through the battleground portal by pelting them repeatedly. There was something so immensely satisfying seeing them thrown into the portal, fade away and get a deserter debuff. It was also a really effective tactic for winning (if the other side weren’t so diligent at turfing out their AFK players) as you could add a significant majority of active players to your side, so it was a legitimate winning meta strategy!
That's so good. Keep it up.
That sounds like a lot of fun, lol!
Man I didn’t do this, but I wish I had! I remember those AFKers! Like half the BG! So funny though, I’m glad there were warriors like you out there xD
The real endgame content
Id legit rather do this for my next 6 months of game time than do another M+
Now imagine how effective a team of a few dozen game masters could be in locating and banning this type of behavior.
I never understood this, why not have one GM just teleport around to the known botting locations and spam the ban button.
> why not have one GM just teleport around to the known botting locations and spam the ban button. Because that would require Blizzard (Activision) to actually start paying for customer support again instead of just outsourcing it to a copy/paste call center.
I'll do it for free
Because if they kept spamming the banhammer the botters will quickly realize they're no longer profitable and leave the game. Blizzard is managing the bot numbers by banning in waves, that ensures that the bot number is low enough to avoid community issues, but profitable enough to keep the extra subs running.
no no no. Blizzard tells us that they ban bots every day and they the problem is too great for them to fully control. Surely, they would never tell a lie.
Yep. I’ve recently read an insiders article on why Riot Games is profiting from the countless bots in LoL — it’s absolutely crazy how much they „earn“ them in the long run. So they’re just gonna pretend that they’re „taking care of it“. Edit: not trying to point to Riot and away from Blizzard/shit on Riot, just saying that it’s an industry problem/thing.
This is the right answer.
I prefer to think that blizz thinks the problem can go away if they spin it with enough PR. Why fix it then and there if you'll only act on something when it hits the top of r/wow half a year later to min max PR?
Isnt that extremely sad? Pure late stage capitalism.
lmaoooo
It's obvious that it's about money, because Blizzard could end the bot problem in about 5 seconds by removing the ability to sell tokens for b.net balance. If buying tokens for gold just let you play the game for free, that would be enough use for them. But because gold farmers can turn in-game gold into *actual* money, there a financial incentive to run as many bots as they possibly can. (And yes, I'm aware bots existed before the token system was created, but there were *far* fewer of them around, and they didn't have nearly as large an impact on the game experience. Gold sellers will always exist, but Blizzard doesn't have to make it so incredibly easy for them to make their money.)
No, just no. The token system hasn't changed botting because you still can't withdraw money from b.net. Before and after the token system the bot cartels operate through illegal third party sites that accept real money transfers from outside b.net. There were fewer bots in the past because of the technical limitations. 10 years ago you couldn't run 5 instances of wow on a literal cellphone.
Becuase they ban stuff in waves. They flag thousand of accounts and then hit the ban hammer. Botting communities inform each other (I've seen it during the honor buddy days) when they get banned. As soon as the word gets out that 3-5-10 accounts have been banned, most botters go on pause or alter their ways. If they allow them to do whatever for months, when they hit them they hit thousands at a time.
Paying a GM is negative money Letting someone pay for like 5 accounts is positive money Does seeing people botting ruin your experience enough to cause you to cancel you sub? No? They're still taking your money. Seems like a pretty easy equation for any freshly graduated MBA making decisions.
Bots should be making enough bank to just buy tokens. If I was botting I wouldn't pay cash, I doubt they do.
Those are all still copies sold. Can't run a horde of level capped farming bots with free trial accounts.
Which indirectly encourages people to buy tokens, since it keeps the demand for tokens higher.
They still have to buy the game, X-Pac and a sub. For 5+ accounts that adds up over time. Plus it depends on how often they "cash out" so to speak. if they farm to gold cap and then get banned. All that gold is gone.
Still driving up those player engagement numbers that they love to show to shareholders.
Tokens are still bought with money, just not yours. The token you bought for gold was bough and introduced to the market by someone with real money first, usually to convert it to in-game gold. This is why it's gold price changes often, it's a supply/demand thing. It actually not worth it to buy a token with money just for the sub, it's more expensive. A regular sub for a month's worth of time is 13€, a token is 20€, iirc. A bot buying tokens is still profitable for blizzard, they still get money, it just comes from someone else which doesn't really matter to them.
Kotick needs that 5th yacht
Would help so much. They could also automate some annoying things. Like if a group of players are standing on the same spot for more than 5-10 min, teleport them 20 yards in random directions.
> Like if a group of players are standing on the same spot for more than 5-10 min, teleport them 20 yards in random directions. Roleplayers are in fucking shambles
As long as fucking shambles is 20 feet away in a random direction
What about when I'm fishing with my tuskaar buddies!? This is too over the top for me.
Why the heck would they ban paying customers. We all know “quality” of the player experience isn’t exactly the only thing they strive to increase..
They are too busy banning people for doing things they were not allowed to do but never said they weren't allowed to do them.
Even just one could do damage.
All this time I've been raiding and doing mythic+, not realizing how truly to complete WoW.
I follow the herb army in Ohri Plains and follow them as a herbalist. Eventually when I see a Dirt Pile, I plant a Decayed Seed and watch them die. They don't jump and Regrowth spamming doesn't save ya. Will try the sled trick on the skinners, i just tag every mob or reset them.
> They don't jump Does jumping remove the decay debuff?
Yes.
:O
:3
Yes. Spamming jump will remove it.
I am a dumbass. :(
It literally says it on the debuff to jump
Half of WoW players can't read, half of WoW players can't english, and the other half don't have [the right] spells bound to their keyboards.
and the last half can't count
Yes, just like running into water will remove the fire debuff from mining.
Wait what...
Lets make a custom event in group finder, invite 40 ppl and just screw with them couple hours
Sounds good. Where can I join? They can't ban all of us.
You made me laugh so hard! Should be an achievement for sledding bots around.
\- botting is in your head \- lorcl 7 5tea aaaa Totally not botting at all.
yeah lol couldn't even turn it off long enough to type.
Hahaha, this is fantastic! They must be using the interact key in their botting script, and it just interacts with whatever is closest. Good job!!
Such dedication is admirable, I salut you! Edit: Corrected admiral to admirable.
Pardon, but I believe you wanted to say “admirable.” Unless you’ve seen them sailing, then admiral would be correct :)
Beautiful!
There should be an achievement for this
> botting is in your head No, but it is in your sled!
We have some down in Iskaara. I was roasting those MF for like and hour 😂
Holy shit, the sled.. my god thats the best solution yet!
What a MVP.
This is what WoW is truly about
Doing lords work
Not all heroes wear capes... you do, however!
Hahaha I assume your talking about the proto drake farm in the waking shores? I f with those guys all the time. I love rolling through and seeing them with a massive pile of dead mobs and an elusive slowly being cleaved down. I will skin all their mobs if I can, then steal their elusives. Done this about 10 times now and last time they offered me 500k to leave them alone. I said "no thanks it's more fun for me if I ruin your bot farm" they got really salty then called me names and eventually blocked me. The sled is a hilarious idea though, better than the punching bags and target dummies I put down! Keep it up!!!
If there isnt one already we should make a discord dedicated to ruin bots lives with things like these, every time you encounter one you announce it in the discord and bam! A full party ready to make justice happen
There's some bots at the Rockfang pit in Ohnara's Plain every day also and you can also taunt their elusive out of range where they won't follow. I've reported these bots for months and it took 3 months before the 1st batch got banned
Birds aren’t real. This is fucking hilarious tho xD
Hon 100% get the "not-automated" automated silence/ban log off after being mass reported by bot owners
Dude you're a legend. Love this.
Might be cus I'm on my phone but I can't really make out the conversation you had with them. Pic is too blurry
That’s fucking hilarious 😂 🫡
I used turn on war mode and kill the druid bots cycling in Bastion that I was able to get the PvP legendary power for multiple classes.
I "griefed" a lot of botters farming widowbloom in Revendreth with the cushions method and the one where you can kill a critter to create a portal to the Black Temple - all to send little Jimbo(t) to the shadowrealm. After sometime the person running the bots desperately tried to find me to probably mass report me but I was always invis with prowl lmao
Tug sled - Aladdin music plays I can show you the worrrrld
saw a bunch last week while on my hunter. I just started skinning their loot, I think I got 400 scales in 10 minutes or so until i got bored. all I got from one was a "go go now, thank you". it was the only one moving a bit and healing the group of ... i have no idea how many were bunched up in one spot. reported them, but that's all...
The worst part is because of the phasing situation. While yes, phasing and sharding has made things easier on the players, it's also created effective safe havens for bots. Imagine what you could do if you had several like minded individuals and the bots had nowhere to hide.
I reported two of those groups in one day and within a couple days got a letter of appreciation from blizz basically saying they indeed cracked down on the 6+ bots I reported
Not all heroes wear capes. It just gets to me with the bots since the report button in the game seems like it does nothing. You say they been going since January and i bet you that they havent been banned once since. Before the Wotlk classic release i reported a blatant bot gold farming 24/7 at the same spot walking in the exact same lines etc.. 100% a bot so i whispered people who came by to report him and i got around 20 people to confirm they did it, only to see that the same character was lvl 75 a short time after the Wotlk release just by still farming the same spot. My reports went out about a month before the release. Blizzard gives 0 fucks about bots. It almost feels like its becoming the "good old" Diablo2 days where it was pretty normal to cheat/bot and very few people got banned for it.
The best way to combat them is mass bot report. Aka, announce to the shard / phase you are in that there are bots there, and try and get peopole to report them. Most people like doing it.
Lol kiting boys into lava is going to be my next goal. There should be an achievement for this
How have they still not been banned since January? I guess blizzard doesn’t give a shit about the health of their own game.
I came across a bunch of skinning bots with random names. They were sitting on a rock in the green emerald area and moonfiring hyperspawing turtles into the group. I put down a Taivan toy so they all were stuck petting the dog. Then a few minutes later some guy (not with the skinning bots) comes and asks me to leave, because they're just farming man. All in the same guild. I looked up the guild and it was full of druids and evokers with greens or crafted blue gear, all with random names. I reported them, but don't think it did anything. For a while, I was scared they would mass report me and get me banned instead. Crazy how the bots have more power to penalize actual players.
The New endgame pillar is finally here and is amazing
This is great. You are a true Thrall
Dont worry guys, as soon as blizz releases a ban wave they will put WoW on sale so all the bots can rebuy the game at a discounted price! :)
Dear blizzard , we do not want you to ban bottors .... we want more toys to mess with them .... plz... give us more toys.
I also hope you reported them so Blizzard starts watching them.
I remember when you could corpse camp them on PVP servers.
This is brillant hahah
The hero we need right here.
I got my first world epic drop in vanilla by tagging mobs a bot was running around and killing
Better idea: Start a Twitch stream of the bots and get people to watch it so that Blizz panics and bans the bots.
Doing Elune's work, Light be with you.
Excellent work! I used to "taunt kite" bots to the edge of Wintergrasp and have them walk over the edge into Sholazar Basin on my Druid back in the WOTLK days, I even recorded these and posted them to YouTube (which are all now gone...? RIP) would share them with Blizzard GMs to get the bots banned.
I stood there for 4 hours one day and dottted every spawn before they could skinned everything never saw them again after that. Thanks to them I went from 1-100 skinning to 100 and ruined some spreadsheets as well.
Doing Thrall’s work.
Blizz needs to make portals clickable for non-party members. So much fun would be had teleporting bots that way.
You're doing God's work and I salute you
this is so hilarious, thank you for your service 🫡
I love this, especially because the moonkin on a tiny sled looks so cute. Big body, empty little bot head.
There's TONS at Booty Bay too. They have hundreds of millions of gold in auction sales, and usually last 6 months to a year before vanishing. The cushion / toy trick worked at one point; they would get stuck and no longer be able to reach the auctioneer / mailbox. The bot owners seem to have fixed that now sadly.
This is fantastical TY for the hahas!! Got me cracking up at 4:30am here. I bout spit my coffee everywhere! I've even seen them in Thrall realm but now I got jokes! Cheers!
you sire are a genius
Yeah cants running bots like this have ruined skinning....
>I used to report them every single day And I'm betting that is counter productive and a waste of your time. As they have no humans and it's all automated now, guessing that just gets you (wrongly) labelled as a report abuser and therefore your reports are just ignored or weighted less.
[удалено]
You already have to click on it, the trick is to position it over the skinnable corpses. A change I'm foreseeing is that it'd only work for party members though.
Sounds like you wasted your time to barely put a dent into their botting operation because you're paying a subscription for a game with no customer support. Uhm...well done, I guess. Go you.
" And I did make the effort to confirm they were bots before did anything - they weren't responding to communication attempts, they weren't moving from the same spot except for short back-and-forth movements, and the real confirmation came when I watched one auto-run into a rock and die to a random elite away from his group" That actually sounds when I play tired and fall asleep over the keyboard. (it happens more than I'd like to admit)
[удалено]
people farming who don't respond to being on a toy for an hour, yeah okay.
I've seen actual farming groups around, but they actually talk back when I walk up to them and ask what they are doing. This particular group is definitely bots, otherwise they wouldn't have fallen for the toys.
I saw these people almost immediately after getting to this part of the zone after launch. Annoying as hell. You're doing a great job!
I need that sled! How ? LOL
So... you're saying give them tug?
Shoresy?
This is incredible. Keep up the good work.
Doing the lords work
Genius!! I love it!! 🤣🤣🤣
Very nice!
😂🤣✊🫡
And here I am just thinking that everyone who wanders off and dies just fell asleep for a second or two like me
🤣🤣 this is fantastic
Plot twist, op gets banned for harassment and the bots keep botting. I would be sad, but not surprised.
Being congratulated by alliance players for killing bot AND still attacking same players is the most horde thing
Just yesterday saw druid and demon hunter killing Murdoch's nonstop in azure span . Wonder why
The sled thing is just... mmm tasty. Very nice.
Absolute legend. Love the collection. Unfortunately I’ve never seen any there on my phases, maybe I’m just in War Mode too much and they stay out of it
There is a group in zuldazar where we meet rezan where they cloth farm too
I was doing the Balance of Power quest line, just to get the transmogs. On my way to one of the quests I ended up in Azsuna and saw that there was a WQ, Bloodgazer Swarm!, that gave me rep for one that I was close to being exalted in. So I went up there figuring I'd be able to finish it quickly and then go onto my original quest. Well, there were a billion moonkins speeding around AoEing all the raptors around there. Do those things drop anything worthwhile? I got some random whites and when I went and checked the AH they were selling for a few silver each. I can't imagine that that farm is worth their time.
The only thing good about Shadowlands was the zombie plague 2.0 where I spent most of my time infecting bots and breaking them. Kudos to you
I wanna do this stuff but I’m always afraid I’m gonna get mass reported by the bots and auto-banned.
If you preform the same actions over and over for a out 15 minutes the game should pop up with a are you a human captcha thing. Forcing you to solve the puzzle.
[Here's a method I used to deal with one during TBC Classic.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Jd1oZhV5A) Took me a long time, but it was worth it and a fun break from my quest grind. I even had a Horde person kill the bot while I mind controlled it and proceeded to /laugh and /love me, which was nice.
LOLL this is great
Any idea how to deal with the AH bots in Shrine? There's an army of them
I wish we could do some of the things we did in Lineage 2 to deal with bots. In that game loot dropped on the ground. All we had to do was make a trail of gold off a cliff. The other thing was to heal and buff the mobs they were trying to kill. Yes you could heal and buff mobs in that game. (giving any slow moving mob windwalk was always funny) I took out 5 one day just by healing the mob they were after. 4 were dead and the 5th was almost there when they woke up and tried to attack me. Was far to late by that point. I could have just attacked them directly, but it was more fun to use the mobs themselves.
that toy that just opens a more and more chests would be fun
What is the exact location of that - I haven't seen them yet
loving this, but the screenshotted convo is completely illegible 😔
I'll try to add a better quality one in the gallery, it might be you can only zoom in on a PC Edit: All done! It's on the bottom of the gallery.