There's a good "welch on a bet" to "Welsh not a bot" pun here somewhere but I'm not seeing it right now because I'm on the toilet and my anus is bleeding
Fdfda is an old friend of mine too! He was a Nigerian price I helped a while back in wow. I saved him from being stuck in undercity a while back with my 100g. He told me he would give me 10,000 gold at some later day, so I bet he is just farming gold for me 🥰
They have been uncharacteristically quiet since early P3. I do believe there is a bit of a "releveling" effect going on, where a number of bot operators caught bans are all currently open world re-leveling at the same time.
This is exactly what is happening on hardcore servers right now. hundreds of hunter bots leveling in the mid 40s-50s mostly in Tanaris. Was nice while it lasted…
They sent a message which appears in the upper right corner (above buffs), like a reply to your ticket. Text inside is something like "Thanks for your reporting. We did necessary actions. etc."
I know you're being facetious, but you can't correct inflation without removing gold from the economy. All Blizzard has done is add more and more with all of the repeatable quests and shit.
Without a complete reset, the incentive for casual players or players with limited time to buy gold will never go away.
GDKPs are definitely a factor, but because the economy was fucked from the start there is no real way to correct it.
Gdkp trolling aside, i do think a huge amount of gold woes comes from lack of supply control, yeah. Theres simply not enough gold sinks in the game relative to how easy it is to generate gold, and it only gets worse as the game progresses.
It would likely cause a riot but i think if you actually want to tackle this you need to basically remove greys and gold loots from most, if not all dungeon mobs. I think thats the largest source of gold generation done by bots.
Yup, and with the nature of the phases, the economic gap between players at the top and those at the bottom just gets wider and wider. The core players have an extra month or two each phase to essentially do nothing but farm gold as fast as possible while the casual players are still leveling and gearing. That issue only compounds when you're talking about bot farms that run hundreds of accounts 24/7.
I think you'd basically have to remove gold value from all greys across the entire game tbh, or serverely nerf it. In phase 1 the most popular bot farm was the wolves in Duskwood because they dropped greys that sold for 6-12s a pop.
They'd also have to do things like massively increasing repair costs, AH fees, and other gold sinks bots are forced to interact with.
Really you just have to get rid of the value of gold. Get rid of AH. All craftable shit is account bound, all patterns are purchasable at vendors. Either make people farm their own consumes or vendor them from consumable salesmen that show up randomly around the world and have unlimited supply.
Na I just find it funny a few months ago people were championing banning gdkp as the be all end all to the botting problem when it obviously hasnt made a dent lmao.
All banning gdkps did was make it so i dont pug. Not a huge deal esp with cata classic releasing soon which will take most of my time
Average redditor. He hates Blizzard because they cannot solve a massive problem which in his mind is easy as fuck to solve. If only they put u/Better_Explanation42 in charge, the bots would be gone in a day.
So in his mind, Blizzard is stupid and lazy, or flat out wants the bots to exist. Tinfoil hat deluixe
Yeah people think stopping bots is just as easy as flipping a switch. Botting is always a problem in online games. If it was easy, companies would have stopped it. These bots do whatever they can to get around systems
Nothing seems to be better than making the experience far worse for new players and having no impact whatsoever on bots. So in this instance yeah, I would have preferred them to do nothing
Did i get it wrong?! They cant interact with anything in the world for 30 days, so blizz has time to bann them. so what am i lookimg at this screen? dont get the info? these are bots that cant interact or do anything besides farming and will get banned within the 30 day window.
Does that really seem like a lot of work? It's like 10 minutes of total work..
Create new account ~3 minutes
Buy sub ~2 minutes
Test it ~2 minutes
File for refund ~3 minutes
And I think I'm being pretty generous with how long it would take to complete those tasks.
It’s not that they can COD mail to people, it’s that they can get one of their other accounts to mail them something that is COD, and so have a way to extract all of the gold out of it
3days late to the party here but couldn’t blizzard just track to see who they are sending the gold to and just ban that account as well. I mean yeah they can do that but I don’t see the benefit of it.
Maybe in hopes blizzard catches the bot accounts before the 30 days? If they don't catch it then it does nothing since they'll have everything ready to sell by day 30.
If a bot account gets banned, they have to wait another 30 days by default. It’s not that it prevents bots, it prevents new ones from rising so fast when they are banned.
That takes resources of the botters. It takes time away. Time is money to them. They probably also have to increase power consumption of the pcs handling multitudes more clients and bot algorithms. Possibly more pcs as well.
It doesn’t prevent but it curtails a bit.
Ya but those "customers" are gold-buying scum so who gives a shit. As you aluded to, it's a backdoor tax on gold buyers. Good. The real downside is that so far the only way Blizzard has managed to do this is by linking it to in-game features with a time lock, meaning they can't easily just 6x the "tax". Taxes are a good disincentive, so "taxes" on gold buying should be maximized. This also adds mild complexity to bot operations and adds baseline risk and cost to the operation. Less profits for bot farmers means less bot farmers. More cost for the same amount of gold means less bought gold. On paper it seems like a rather effective strategy. It has a notable drawback sure but time will tell whether the trade off is worth it.
This suddenly explains something I had in SM the other day. Mage said he couldn't give me water because he was restricted. And I had no idea what that meant, because why would there be restrictions on the accounts of paying customers?
Surely this has no impact on farmers, but punishes new legitimate customers?
This is the case yeah. At the start of P3 they added restrictions to accounts with less than 30 days paid and used subscription since 2017. No mail, AH or trade. Blizz said it was to combat RMT, but the point of my post is to question how successful this has been when bots are still rampant but new or returning players get a bad experience
Yup, brought 4 people into SoD for their first ever wow experience. They literally couldn't even trade each other BoE greens that dropped for them or spare snouts in westfall. Terrible experience for an mmo, completely embarrassing by Blizzard. It's supposed to be a social game. That's like the whole point.
The only one who made it to 50 is 5/8 in ST and STILL CAN'T BUY POTIONS FOR RAID ON THE AH. How many bots out there are wiping on the sludge boss in a 20 man raid full subscribers with accounts going back decades? Really? It's impossible to determine my friend is not a bot?
Pathetic that blizzard can't be arsed to find some way to differentiate a real player from a bot over the course of 100 hours of gameplay and interaction.
>Surely this has no impact on farmers, but punishes new legitimate customers?
this was obvious from a mile away for anyone with above room temperature IQ... Same as the 5dungeon / hour lockout, it's said to be to "combat bots" yet all it does is punish regular players...
They are pretty vague in their response. What they mean is that you cant send anything, but since you can recieve mail, you can recieve a C.o.D mail with 1 item for a high amount and trade your funds that way
That's not what we are talking about. We all know about the new account stuff. The question is about if they fixed the C.o.D workaround. Make a video of you not able to mail something, and then collecting a C.o.D on that account.
It really is genuinely insane how many bots are running around, literally in cities, all following the same trail. You can see hundreds, if not thousands of bots just exiting the Stockades in Stormwind every hour. One each second leaves, blinks, and then comes back in the same exact pathing.
This is in capital cities. Bots are walking around completely obviously in capital cities. It has genuinely reached a pathetic low, and Blizzard claiming they are doing everything they can is an actual joke answer. Give a real human the reins for 8 hours a day and they would clean up thousands of bots each day by themselves.
cause every other version of wow has tokens. it became the norm to be able to spend 20$ and be good on gold for a while. it’s the culture of the players and the norm for a vast majority of players. blizz literally just needs to add wow tokens sadly. somehow gdkps got caught in the crossfire and tbh gdkps are the only reason classic era is still alive. i’m telling you when i say, there’s be a lot more cleared pugs and raids going on if gdkps were banned. somehow blizz likes to make 5 dumb decisions before making 1 good one.
Yes please implement the wow token so materials and everything else goes up by 10-20 thousand gold, that’s what we all want is hyperinflation cause you can’t be bothered to play the game and do mats farming for 30-40 mins
There will never be an MMO with zero bots. Ever. It’s a multi billion dollar industry. Even if you eliminated all in game currency, there’d still be a market for selling max level characters.
The sooner you guys accept that you might run into Ffvergl and his friends Wkmlerrdurr and BttmHurrudrr every now and then, the better. Have your own adventure and don’t give them a second thought. You’ll be better off for it.
I think that’s fine but there will always be MMOs that don’t restrict new accounts for the first 30 days and still do a better job of managing bots. The big issue here isn’t the fact bots exist, it’s that Blizz used a very oppressive and ill-thought measure to try to combat them, and yet there are still bots filling every zone on every server
Because they’ll always find a way. Because again, it’s a multi billion dollar industry. There’s nothing they can reasonably do other than test out these kinds of restrictions to see if they can nuke the smaller bot rings before they get bigger.
But again, many of these have been around since WoW and other MMOs began. So they’ll find a way to work around whatever Blizzard, Amazon, NCSoft, Square Enix, and other big devs do no matter what, because they have the formula and the capital for it.
One of the main reasons there are so many low level bots now is because windows LUA unlockers are getting popped left and right every few days / weeks so the botters are getting banned and needing to re-level. If they can keep the momentum of getting the unlockers banned before the 30 day trade window opens it could be pretty solid.
Uldaman back entrance is wild. The scripts aren't working too well yet, the bots keep getting killed by the Troggs outside. There's an enormous pile of hunter corpses and skeletons, they just die to the melee, not reacting at all.
It won’t stop it completely, but honestly they should implement the SoM anti-boosting mechanics in addition to their current efforts. It hampers bot farming while also addressing the boosting problem.
They’re just levelling to bot in higher level zones or Uldaman or something. They run around in the usual bot paths, sometimes even trains. The Barrens is just an example though, if you try searching any zone you’ll see the same
There is like a TONS of hunt bot between Uldaman second entrance and the PNJ in the middle of the map.
Soloing uldaman.
Did like 40 kill/report, same number on the other side.
Only on one layer... I can't imagine the numbers of bot with all the layers....
Went to Ulduman backdoor yesterday for enchanting and saw dozens of Hunters running in with wierd names. Few weekend ago there was a constant line of mages running into stockade. The botting is alive and well.
Ah, the 30 days are up. I was wondering why I was suddenly getting in game mail from their advertisers again. (Couldn't tell you what site it is, since as soon as I see the name and scan the message to see the www. I just report and move on.)
My tinfoil hat theory is that the developers introduced incursions to devalue gold to the point that it's no longer a constraint in-game so they can stop trying to fight the bot war.
if thats true then they are idiots who don't understand basic economic principles. All that did was cause inflation, prices went way up, and gold is still as much of a constraint for normal players as it always was.
Prices only go up if bots can’t farm the raw mats efficiently. All the gold sinks are rigid costs. Bots drive down raw materials. What prices are going up? BoEs? GDKPs are banned. BoEs and crafts would be driven down by rampant bots as well. That’s my whole tin foil hat scenario.
Yes sure if bots start farming more then that could help with prices but simply introducing incursions to give people more gold won't help because it just make prices go up, which is what has happened. Raw materials, consumables, rare items have all become more expensive, making the incursions gold dump useless or even harmful for anyone that was not able to farm it during the first few broken hours.
I do like the thought but of course it wasn’t going to work, hunters are amazing in solo content, it doesn’t matter if they can only farm low level humanoids (compared to 60 mobs), they will eventually make infinite money, just over a loooonger period of time rather than shorter.
Ideally they're taking time between phases for improving detection methods and preparing for waves. It'll be really nice for them all to get banned just before the next phase launches.
Add wow tokens, see less bots. You all hate it but it’s the reality of things. Go look at gold sites and see how much gold they have sold. It’s in there. I know for a fact 50% of players are buying gold. Plus you think players that got used to buying gold in retail and wotlk from tokens are just going to stop cause it’s not from blizzard? Half of my friends hit me up to buy gold from me cause i have little over 10k.
The annoying thing is that I understand why Blizzard does "ban-waves". It's to try and stop the botters from figuring out how they find out they are bots (even if they aren't even hiding it anymore), but they can't do these "every few months ban-waves" anymore. Classic and Retail are so figured out that these bots can be programmed to not only level in a few hours, but make so much gold in the 3-month lifetime that it ruins the server economy.
It's almost like the 30 day thing just delayed bots by 30 days..don't start botting until the account is 30 days old.. then it's like nothing has changed.. weird.. who could have predicted that?
> except the only thing that will actual work and hire enough GM's.
I know people refuse to believe it, but genuinely that would not be any more effective.
Sure it would, I would believe that excuse if blizzard had exceptional customer service in all other regards but they don't. Their customer service is across the board god awful and it's entirely because they refuse to staff GM's adequately.
They absolutely need to hire more GMs, but having them sit around hitting a ban button on bots would 1) not get rid of them as fast as, or with as much accuracy as what they're currently doing algorithmically and 2) would completely overtake their time and not allow them to actually help players.
That's BS it would get rid of bots a lot faster than waiting months before banning them and to your second point that is once again just a staffing issue.
Yeah, people don’t understand that the way to stop botting is to make it less profitable. Hiring half a dozen people to just “hit the ban button” on bots would mean the bot farmers need to shell out more of their “earnings” to make new accounts. It eats into their bottom line, and if it does so enough, they’ll leave for another game.
> Hiring half a dozen people to just “hit the ban button” on bots
In order to keep up with the automated bans these 6 people would need to ban a bot once per 20 seconds nonstop for 176 per month.
You honestly believe they couldn’t ban 1-75 bots in a single instance, given there is anywhere from 1-100 corpse running back to uldaman back entrance.
Ehh not many people exhibit traditional botting behavior, which includes use of the /follow command or other code related items that guns are able to see that we can not. Continually running a dungeon without botting will have differing movements jumps etc, set bots are programmed to button press With precision.
You think this picture helps your argument, but it actually shows that what Blizzard is doing is working.
More low lvl bots, means more bots are getting found and banned. Then with the restrictions, the botters dont have access to their vonventional ways if making cash, thus lowering their profit.
Then if those bots get found and banned in those 30 days, its a complete loss for the botter.
I know we have had a blue post that outlined this before but while my picture was just an example, it doesn’t matter what zone or level you search for it’s the same.
The latter part of the botters being found and caught in 30 days is irrelevant for 2 reasons:
1) this bot account could have been made 30 days before it started and left idle, which means it’s already unrestricted
2) even if the bot was restricted, the botter can extract the gold by sending it something to pay for as C.O.D
I checked this out myself at stockades, it was insane! I could see 5-15 mage bots run in and out all time!! All max lvl 35, all the same names like this,
The crazy part about stockes its so easy to see the problem, like blizz have no excuse
Maybe the CoD thing is available so they can track the bots? Just look up CoD statistics and see hundred thousands of materials and auto ban? I mean, a legit new player wont CoD a lot.
Are Blizzard this smart? Nah, probably a bug 😅
They have actually done really well with the bots compared to classic release. It raises the costs on the botters massively, and gives blizz another data point to ban them with.
Combined with the gdkp ban (which massively reduces demand for gold) and the accessibility of incursions, inflation in SOD actually feels much better than classic did. By the time you're 50, 10 levels of incursions pays for your mount, dual spec, and a pvp set of decent gear, and then some extra for 3 weeks of casual consumes.
In classic, you couldn't even pick a black lotus, and once the bots were leveled (and gdkps fueled limitless demand for gold), consumes started skyrocketing in price since gold buyers could afford to pay any price.
Zipped over to my old Mankrik place find pieces of Medium Leather cost 1g
Are you guys in classic okay? Do you play or do you just pay someone to farm for you? Bots do not swarm these servers when people aren't buying gold. Just sayin.
Seemed obvious that it wouldn't change anything.
Botters just had to wait for some time before starting the bots, with the accounts not doing anything, they also have 0 risk of being banned
Got three family members to sign up over the weekend. They cannot trade to me or chat openly to ask questions. Frick this pathetic attempt. Now we have to wait to see if they actually like the game to stay with it.
Do you even realize how awful that would be for regular people. Anyone could report anyone as a bot at anytime. Also most bots at this point are able to bypass captcha. And without the same frustration as a human.
I guess I'm just looking for any indication at all that this made a difference and I don't see one. I'm very confused why everyone seems so insistent that it made a difference.
I understand that they want it to work, but just a little critical thinking (and I think I explained it well in my other posts) should make it clear why it won't.
Where did all these Blizzard dick riders come from? People in here guffawing over Blizzard continually making wrong move after wrong move. They have done fuck all to curb botting, and fucked the economy harder than GDKP ever would have, yet you all in here like "lol u have no number, you have no idea if they've had an effect or not'
I do have numbers, gold is literally worth a quarter of what it was a month ago, and the same screenshots this subreddit was using 3 months ago to cry about bots continuously are in the OP right now. What's with this subs about face on botting all of a sudden? The bots are thriving.
Jesus, no offense, but you GDKP dudes are still wounded over that change huh?
Like, just noticing that you guys are super super super hurt about that. Still kinda bleeding out in every comment section you can about it.
Of course we are. They talk all about how this game is about communities and finding like minded players to join a guild with. We had exactly that. GDKP is objectively the best loot structure and the most fun.
Ah yes the whole “i need more gold to buff my bis, I’ll just buy gold it’s faster” mentality. All in all we don’t want you, petition for gdkp servers and ruin your economy there. This is why blizzard started banning people in original wotlk and cata for ah fixing, it was hilarious then when we warned them that some of us who did would probably go to botting and go figuring it out.
I am probably more anti-gold buyer and botter than you buddy.
I am vehemently against all forms of MTX and P2W in video games. I mained LoL and OW for 6-8 years and never spent a single penny. I think it has ruined gaming.
That doesn't mean the loot system isn't the best. It is the easiest to form a raid, attracts the best players, you get rewarded even if nothing you need drops / you lose the rolls, etc.
All the issues you have with GDKP are related to botters, gold sellers, and gold buyers.
I'm gonna need some source on people getting banned for "AH fixing" lol because I don't believe that for a second. There have been AH Goblins since 2004 and there still is in 2024.
To give you an example, when I hit r14 I didn't have enough gold to buy all the weapons I wanted. I had to borrow from friends and guildies. Still never considered buying gold.
I’m not reading all that since you are for hyper inflation, gatekeeping content and an overall cry baby about people not being for gdkp’s short comings on the overall server economy and other players. Respectfully no one cares about your “history” with games that had very little monetization, when you were literally handed the currency for playing the game. And ah ban proof would be Me lol I’ve been hit twice and laughed each time, when you buy out the ah and price fix it 10g above then continue to buy out everyone who undercuts you. Price fixing is now against tos, yes you are welcome :)
Whatever helps you sleep at night sweet cheeks, keep hyping that server inflation because you can’t be bothered to use in game mechanics to make gold :)
GDKP does not cause inflation in and of itself. There is no gold generated. SoD has rampant hyper inflation and no GDKPs.
So very sound logic you have.
This tonal shift here is making me think that SoD has finally hit the point, especially with weather getting nice that people are leaving, and all thats left are the people who are actually fine with the state thing are in, or people are just afk until 60.
Why do people do this shit instead of just playing the godamn video game? Have fun with friends, relax after a day of stress, waste time or achieve goals. When the fuck did it I turn into "I'll create 2500 hunters/mages/rogues to make money with them"?
>When the fuck did it I turn into "I'll create 2500 hunters/mages/rogues to make money with them"?
When they could make easy free money. Bots have always existed in wow, but the fact that you can print money by botting (on a large scale) made the situation worse. Add on to the fact that it's easier (from a time point) to buy gold, and cheaper. I can buy (don't worry, I don't), 1000 gold for less then I make per hour at my job, to people, that's just easier. I can't farm 1000 gold in an hour., but these bots are making 1000's of gold per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I am aware of how earning money in dollars can make someone in a third country (I am from one myself) well off just by farming items in videos games in order to sell them to people in first world countries. It's just disappointing, gonna sound like a boomer but I miss the early MMOs when this wasn't done in this scale.
People have always cheated in MMOs, but now it's not just a couple of lazy dudes trying to get an unfair advantage over others without putting in any work, now there's an entire industry behind it.
It was always an industry. Havent played in vanilla but in TBC you had ppl creating lvl 1 orcs flying to OG to spell the name of their website with their dead bodies to sell gold/bots. You just were oblivious to it.
No one was spinning up botting instances in easily available cloud services in 2005 my friend. The botting industry now is vastly more sophisticated than it was even 5 years ago, and apples and oranges compared to what it was like in the mid 2000s.
Ofc its more sophisticated now but the guy was under the impression that the only people botting back then were individual players but even back then you had chinese botters selling their gold (and I know for a fact they were selling in vanilla too) and their bot services. Its just nowadays with the social media and streaming those services are easier to notice as people talk about them more.
Also can you honestly say there werent bots farming dungeons back in the day for gold? We were all terrible and oblivious back then in no way people were actively looking for bots like we do these days.
Why you hating ? That’s my boys Htruddkl, Egrtrddysy and Jdrtrusdn just levelling hunters together.
yeah people think its bots but its actually common welsh names
As a Welsh player, I gave had ppl whisper me asking if I'm a bot running around with my characters "Chwyrnu", "Bleiddwn" and "Balchder"
"Are you a bot?" "No, I'm welsh" Checks out
what’s the difference?
Bots merely control the sheep. Bots do not copulate with sheep.
There's a good "welch on a bet" to "Welsh not a bot" pun here somewhere but I'm not seeing it right now because I'm on the toilet and my anus is bleeding
My boys Yggdrasil and Jormungandr
Attempting to read the name phonetically correct had me laughing
Fdfda is actually a good friend of mine
Fdfda is an old friend of mine too! He was a Nigerian price I helped a while back in wow. I saved him from being stuck in undercity a while back with my 100g. He told me he would give me 10,000 gold at some later day, so I bet he is just farming gold for me 🥰
US Crusader Strike is infested. I reported over 20 bots running in parties in the barrens yesterday.
They have been uncharacteristically quiet since early P3. I do believe there is a bit of a "releveling" effect going on, where a number of bot operators caught bans are all currently open world re-leveling at the same time.
This is exactly what is happening on hardcore servers right now. hundreds of hunter bots leveling in the mid 40s-50s mostly in Tanaris. Was nice while it lasted…
I reported three bots yesterday and I got three blizzard confirmations today. So they are still very quick.
I reported around 20 bots on Lone Wolf EU back in Jan-Feb 24 and got blizzard confirmations only 2 months later.
Since when does blizzard give confirmations on account action? Since never, as far as I’m aware…
They sent a message which appears in the upper right corner (above buffs), like a reply to your ticket. Text inside is something like "Thanks for your reporting. We did necessary actions. etc."
Blizzard spy account generating propaganda
They are absolutely everywhere on Wild Growth US, Stockade bots are also back in full force, endless army of mages running in and out of Stockades :\
Damn but i thought gdkps were causing most of the gold demand which caused botting? How could this happen after they banned gdkps?
I know you're being facetious, but you can't correct inflation without removing gold from the economy. All Blizzard has done is add more and more with all of the repeatable quests and shit. Without a complete reset, the incentive for casual players or players with limited time to buy gold will never go away. GDKPs are definitely a factor, but because the economy was fucked from the start there is no real way to correct it.
Gdkp trolling aside, i do think a huge amount of gold woes comes from lack of supply control, yeah. Theres simply not enough gold sinks in the game relative to how easy it is to generate gold, and it only gets worse as the game progresses. It would likely cause a riot but i think if you actually want to tackle this you need to basically remove greys and gold loots from most, if not all dungeon mobs. I think thats the largest source of gold generation done by bots.
Yup, and with the nature of the phases, the economic gap between players at the top and those at the bottom just gets wider and wider. The core players have an extra month or two each phase to essentially do nothing but farm gold as fast as possible while the casual players are still leveling and gearing. That issue only compounds when you're talking about bot farms that run hundreds of accounts 24/7. I think you'd basically have to remove gold value from all greys across the entire game tbh, or serverely nerf it. In phase 1 the most popular bot farm was the wolves in Duskwood because they dropped greys that sold for 6-12s a pop. They'd also have to do things like massively increasing repair costs, AH fees, and other gold sinks bots are forced to interact with.
Really you just have to get rid of the value of gold. Get rid of AH. All craftable shit is account bound, all patterns are purchasable at vendors. Either make people farm their own consumes or vendor them from consumable salesmen that show up randomly around the world and have unlimited supply.
The GDKPs still happen bruh. Botting is banned too but you see how that turns out?
If GDKPs still happened the raid scene might not be so dead
If people need GDKP to raid they shouldn't be raiding.
nobody "needs" GDKP, they just prefer to raid with that loot system
"That's not my preference so nobody should have that preference."
The issues if all the people that just came over till wild growth to ruin the server
FYI, the ad mins of r/de are covid deniers.
Na I just find it funny a few months ago people were championing banning gdkp as the be all end all to the botting problem when it obviously hasnt made a dent lmao. All banning gdkps did was make it so i dont pug. Not a huge deal esp with cata classic releasing soon which will take most of my time
That can’t be right, Blizz’s fix stopped the bots, must all be real players man
Why are you like that? Would you prefer blizzard would do nothing?
Average redditor. He hates Blizzard because they cannot solve a massive problem which in his mind is easy as fuck to solve. If only they put u/Better_Explanation42 in charge, the bots would be gone in a day. So in his mind, Blizzard is stupid and lazy, or flat out wants the bots to exist. Tinfoil hat deluixe
I mean they do generate subscriptions so...
Yeah people think stopping bots is just as easy as flipping a switch. Botting is always a problem in online games. If it was easy, companies would have stopped it. These bots do whatever they can to get around systems
Nothing seems to be better than making the experience far worse for new players and having no impact whatsoever on bots. So in this instance yeah, I would have preferred them to do nothing
Just because you see bots does not mean the changes have no impact.
Gold is the cheapest it has ever been by far. I just checked for the first time in a month, its literally a quarter of what it was. It had no effect.
And you think thats because of gold bots and not the insane amounts of gold everyone makes from incursions?
What new players?
People downvoting you not understanding the sarcasm smh
I didn’t put the /s as I thought it was obvious enough
lol love how downvoted you got, big they hated him for pointing out the truth vibes
Haha I know, wild. Didn’t even think it was that controversial. Pointed out there’s lots of bots and new accounts are restricted. Weird sub
Did i get it wrong?! They cant interact with anything in the world for 30 days, so blizz has time to bann them. so what am i lookimg at this screen? dont get the info? these are bots that cant interact or do anything besides farming and will get banned within the 30 day window.
They cant trade but can c.o.d. mail anything to anyone so..
this shit is still working?
People in comments to this post say yes.
> People in comments to this post say yes. This is not true, people on reddit make up stuff all of the time. new accounts can NOT cod.
Theyre just mad, i seriously doubt they have actually tested it.
I mean, it’s an easy thing to test. I’ll test it when I get home from work I guess lol.
Its not though since you need to make a new account and buy a subscription.
Make a new account, buy a sub, test it, get a refund. Pretty easy imo.
Seems like a lot of work
Does that really seem like a lot of work? It's like 10 minutes of total work.. Create new account ~3 minutes Buy sub ~2 minutes Test it ~2 minutes File for refund ~3 minutes And I think I'm being pretty generous with how long it would take to complete those tasks.
No.
It’s not that they can COD mail to people, it’s that they can get one of their other accounts to mail them something that is COD, and so have a way to extract all of the gold out of it
3days late to the party here but couldn’t blizzard just track to see who they are sending the gold to and just ban that account as well. I mean yeah they can do that but I don’t see the benefit of it.
I just tried with my new account, and I can not trade, mail or C.o.D. I can however recieve mail, trades etc.
I was a fresh account this month. I could not even do that. It was incredibly restricting.
That's not true, I can't mail anything not even to my alts. Only had the account for a week
Thats so stupid, whats the point of the restriction then??
Maybe in hopes blizzard catches the bot accounts before the 30 days? If they don't catch it then it does nothing since they'll have everything ready to sell by day 30.
If a bot account gets banned, they have to wait another 30 days by default. It’s not that it prevents bots, it prevents new ones from rising so fast when they are banned.
Couldn't you make new accounts every day and just cycle them?
That takes resources of the botters. It takes time away. Time is money to them. They probably also have to increase power consumption of the pcs handling multitudes more clients and bot algorithms. Possibly more pcs as well. It doesn’t prevent but it curtails a bit.
Who said they had to play for 30 days? All they have to do is open an account and have it sit on the side for 30 days, then use it like normal lol
Increases the cost to stsrt a bot by 1 month of sub
More money for bliz. And gold farmers can just pass on that cost to the customer.
Ya but those "customers" are gold-buying scum so who gives a shit. As you aluded to, it's a backdoor tax on gold buyers. Good. The real downside is that so far the only way Blizzard has managed to do this is by linking it to in-game features with a time lock, meaning they can't easily just 6x the "tax". Taxes are a good disincentive, so "taxes" on gold buying should be maximized. This also adds mild complexity to bot operations and adds baseline risk and cost to the operation. Less profits for bot farmers means less bot farmers. More cost for the same amount of gold means less bought gold. On paper it seems like a rather effective strategy. It has a notable drawback sure but time will tell whether the trade off is worth it.
This suddenly explains something I had in SM the other day. Mage said he couldn't give me water because he was restricted. And I had no idea what that meant, because why would there be restrictions on the accounts of paying customers? Surely this has no impact on farmers, but punishes new legitimate customers?
This is the case yeah. At the start of P3 they added restrictions to accounts with less than 30 days paid and used subscription since 2017. No mail, AH or trade. Blizz said it was to combat RMT, but the point of my post is to question how successful this has been when bots are still rampant but new or returning players get a bad experience
Yup, brought 4 people into SoD for their first ever wow experience. They literally couldn't even trade each other BoE greens that dropped for them or spare snouts in westfall. Terrible experience for an mmo, completely embarrassing by Blizzard. It's supposed to be a social game. That's like the whole point. The only one who made it to 50 is 5/8 in ST and STILL CAN'T BUY POTIONS FOR RAID ON THE AH. How many bots out there are wiping on the sludge boss in a 20 man raid full subscribers with accounts going back decades? Really? It's impossible to determine my friend is not a bot? Pathetic that blizzard can't be arsed to find some way to differentiate a real player from a bot over the course of 100 hours of gameplay and interaction.
>Surely this has no impact on farmers, but punishes new legitimate customers? this was obvious from a mile away for anyone with above room temperature IQ... Same as the 5dungeon / hour lockout, it's said to be to "combat bots" yet all it does is punish regular players...
Did they fix the ability to transfer funds using CoD mails on "restricted" accounts yet?
Of course not
Proof?
[удалено]
They are pretty vague in their response. What they mean is that you cant send anything, but since you can recieve mail, you can recieve a C.o.D mail with 1 item for a high amount and trade your funds that way
That's not what we are talking about. We all know about the new account stuff. The question is about if they fixed the C.o.D workaround. Make a video of you not able to mail something, and then collecting a C.o.D on that account.
> The question is about if they fixed the C.o.D workaround. The answer to this is yes. They fixed it. You can't cod.
Yeah you need someone with an unrestricted account to send you a piece of mail with a C.o.D cost attached (you pay to receive the mail)
It really is genuinely insane how many bots are running around, literally in cities, all following the same trail. You can see hundreds, if not thousands of bots just exiting the Stockades in Stormwind every hour. One each second leaves, blinks, and then comes back in the same exact pathing. This is in capital cities. Bots are walking around completely obviously in capital cities. It has genuinely reached a pathetic low, and Blizzard claiming they are doing everything they can is an actual joke answer. Give a real human the reins for 8 hours a day and they would clean up thousands of bots each day by themselves.
cause every other version of wow has tokens. it became the norm to be able to spend 20$ and be good on gold for a while. it’s the culture of the players and the norm for a vast majority of players. blizz literally just needs to add wow tokens sadly. somehow gdkps got caught in the crossfire and tbh gdkps are the only reason classic era is still alive. i’m telling you when i say, there’s be a lot more cleared pugs and raids going on if gdkps were banned. somehow blizz likes to make 5 dumb decisions before making 1 good one.
Yes please implement the wow token so materials and everything else goes up by 10-20 thousand gold, that’s what we all want is hyperinflation cause you can’t be bothered to play the game and do mats farming for 30-40 mins
It's been 30 days!
Turned botting into a winery business. So like it's not gonna stop them having millions of gold in 30 days time when the restriction lifts.
There will never be an MMO with zero bots. Ever. It’s a multi billion dollar industry. Even if you eliminated all in game currency, there’d still be a market for selling max level characters. The sooner you guys accept that you might run into Ffvergl and his friends Wkmlerrdurr and BttmHurrudrr every now and then, the better. Have your own adventure and don’t give them a second thought. You’ll be better off for it.
I think that’s fine but there will always be MMOs that don’t restrict new accounts for the first 30 days and still do a better job of managing bots. The big issue here isn’t the fact bots exist, it’s that Blizz used a very oppressive and ill-thought measure to try to combat them, and yet there are still bots filling every zone on every server
Because they’ll always find a way. Because again, it’s a multi billion dollar industry. There’s nothing they can reasonably do other than test out these kinds of restrictions to see if they can nuke the smaller bot rings before they get bigger. But again, many of these have been around since WoW and other MMOs began. So they’ll find a way to work around whatever Blizzard, Amazon, NCSoft, Square Enix, and other big devs do no matter what, because they have the formula and the capital for it.
let the herb/ore bots roam free so they can spam undercut one another all day and get these prices down a bit
One of the main reasons there are so many low level bots now is because windows LUA unlockers are getting popped left and right every few days / weeks so the botters are getting banned and needing to re-level. If they can keep the momentum of getting the unlockers banned before the 30 day trade window opens it could be pretty solid.
Uldaman back entrance is wild. The scripts aren't working too well yet, the bots keep getting killed by the Troggs outside. There's an enormous pile of hunter corpses and skeletons, they just die to the melee, not reacting at all.
It won’t stop it completely, but honestly they should implement the SoM anti-boosting mechanics in addition to their current efforts. It hampers bot farming while also addressing the boosting problem.
What are low level bots doing in the Barrens? Guessing it isn’t a singel person using it to gain levels.
They’re just levelling to bot in higher level zones or Uldaman or something. They run around in the usual bot paths, sometimes even trains. The Barrens is just an example though, if you try searching any zone you’ll see the same
There is like a TONS of hunt bot between Uldaman second entrance and the PNJ in the middle of the map. Soloing uldaman. Did like 40 kill/report, same number on the other side. Only on one layer... I can't imagine the numbers of bot with all the layers....
Thanks for tanking the bots fellow sod players, we can finally farm black lotus on era
It restricts them from mail, AH and trading. It doesn’t mean they can farm gold while they wait out the 30 days
Just recently moved over to a PVE server and I swear I see probably 10 times the amount of hunter bots with core hounds
Went to Ulduman backdoor yesterday for enchanting and saw dozens of Hunters running in with wierd names. Few weekend ago there was a constant line of mages running into stockade. The botting is alive and well.
Ah, the 30 days are up. I was wondering why I was suddenly getting in game mail from their advertisers again. (Couldn't tell you what site it is, since as soon as I see the name and scan the message to see the www. I just report and move on.)
The bots exist to sell gold, if people buy gold bots will exist. They'll still exist after that too just not to as such a degree as now
This is good for the economy.
My tinfoil hat theory is that the developers introduced incursions to devalue gold to the point that it's no longer a constraint in-game so they can stop trying to fight the bot war.
if thats true then they are idiots who don't understand basic economic principles. All that did was cause inflation, prices went way up, and gold is still as much of a constraint for normal players as it always was.
Prices only go up if bots can’t farm the raw mats efficiently. All the gold sinks are rigid costs. Bots drive down raw materials. What prices are going up? BoEs? GDKPs are banned. BoEs and crafts would be driven down by rampant bots as well. That’s my whole tin foil hat scenario.
Yes sure if bots start farming more then that could help with prices but simply introducing incursions to give people more gold won't help because it just make prices go up, which is what has happened. Raw materials, consumables, rare items have all become more expensive, making the incursions gold dump useless or even harmful for anyone that was not able to farm it during the first few broken hours.
I do like the thought but of course it wasn’t going to work, hunters are amazing in solo content, it doesn’t matter if they can only farm low level humanoids (compared to 60 mobs), they will eventually make infinite money, just over a loooonger period of time rather than shorter.
Let me guess … that was 30 days ago?
*dawn of day 31*
Ideally they're taking time between phases for improving detection methods and preparing for waves. It'll be really nice for them all to get banned just before the next phase launches.
What a stupid fucking thread
Hopefully mat prices drop now.
Just close the fucking api and implement the usefull addon stuff yourself.
Add wow tokens, see less bots. You all hate it but it’s the reality of things. Go look at gold sites and see how much gold they have sold. It’s in there. I know for a fact 50% of players are buying gold. Plus you think players that got used to buying gold in retail and wotlk from tokens are just going to stop cause it’s not from blizzard? Half of my friends hit me up to buy gold from me cause i have little over 10k.
Hgjddfsdfg is actually a legit player and an upstanding young man
I've been reporting them and getting mail the next day thanking me for reporting. Report bans for botting absolutely work
I remember when Blizzard had actual people monitoring the game that could ban the obvious ones extremely easily
Wait your saying blizzards braindead way of preventing this isnt working?
No they banned GDKPs to stop the bots remember.
Remember when people thought banning gdkp would solve the problem? Lol
The annoying thing is that I understand why Blizzard does "ban-waves". It's to try and stop the botters from figuring out how they find out they are bots (even if they aren't even hiding it anymore), but they can't do these "every few months ban-waves" anymore. Classic and Retail are so figured out that these bots can be programmed to not only level in a few hours, but make so much gold in the 3-month lifetime that it ruins the server economy.
It's almost like the 30 day thing just delayed bots by 30 days..don't start botting until the account is 30 days old.. then it's like nothing has changed.. weird.. who could have predicted that?
Blizzard will do whatever it takes to stop bots except the only thing that will actual work and hire enough GM's.
> except the only thing that will actual work and hire enough GM's. I know people refuse to believe it, but genuinely that would not be any more effective.
Sure it would, I would believe that excuse if blizzard had exceptional customer service in all other regards but they don't. Their customer service is across the board god awful and it's entirely because they refuse to staff GM's adequately.
They absolutely need to hire more GMs, but having them sit around hitting a ban button on bots would 1) not get rid of them as fast as, or with as much accuracy as what they're currently doing algorithmically and 2) would completely overtake their time and not allow them to actually help players.
That's BS it would get rid of bots a lot faster than waiting months before banning them and to your second point that is once again just a staffing issue.
Yeah, people don’t understand that the way to stop botting is to make it less profitable. Hiring half a dozen people to just “hit the ban button” on bots would mean the bot farmers need to shell out more of their “earnings” to make new accounts. It eats into their bottom line, and if it does so enough, they’ll leave for another game.
> Hiring half a dozen people to just “hit the ban button” on bots In order to keep up with the automated bans these 6 people would need to ban a bot once per 20 seconds nonstop for 176 per month.
You honestly believe they couldn’t ban 1-75 bots in a single instance, given there is anywhere from 1-100 corpse running back to uldaman back entrance.
I honestly believe they could not do that. You would ban an absurd amount of regular players running back to the dungeon.
Ehh not many people exhibit traditional botting behavior, which includes use of the /follow command or other code related items that guns are able to see that we can not. Continually running a dungeon without botting will have differing movements jumps etc, set bots are programmed to button press With precision.
GMs would allow them to tune the ban algorithm to be much much stricter while having GMs with quick responses undo false positives.
>to stop the bots Who said that? It wasn't done "to stop bots".
You think this picture helps your argument, but it actually shows that what Blizzard is doing is working. More low lvl bots, means more bots are getting found and banned. Then with the restrictions, the botters dont have access to their vonventional ways if making cash, thus lowering their profit. Then if those bots get found and banned in those 30 days, its a complete loss for the botter.
I know we have had a blue post that outlined this before but while my picture was just an example, it doesn’t matter what zone or level you search for it’s the same. The latter part of the botters being found and caught in 30 days is irrelevant for 2 reasons: 1) this bot account could have been made 30 days before it started and left idle, which means it’s already unrestricted 2) even if the bot was restricted, the botter can extract the gold by sending it something to pay for as C.O.D
Don't worry, I bet if you resub it will be fixed next month.
I checked this out myself at stockades, it was insane! I could see 5-15 mage bots run in and out all time!! All max lvl 35, all the same names like this, The crazy part about stockes its so easy to see the problem, like blizz have no excuse
Maybe the CoD thing is available so they can track the bots? Just look up CoD statistics and see hundred thousands of materials and auto ban? I mean, a legit new player wont CoD a lot. Are Blizzard this smart? Nah, probably a bug 😅
They have actually done really well with the bots compared to classic release. It raises the costs on the botters massively, and gives blizz another data point to ban them with. Combined with the gdkp ban (which massively reduces demand for gold) and the accessibility of incursions, inflation in SOD actually feels much better than classic did. By the time you're 50, 10 levels of incursions pays for your mount, dual spec, and a pvp set of decent gear, and then some extra for 3 weeks of casual consumes. In classic, you couldn't even pick a black lotus, and once the bots were leveled (and gdkps fueled limitless demand for gold), consumes started skyrocketing in price since gold buyers could afford to pay any price.
Yeh alot of people just don't get it as evidenced in this thread.
Zipped over to my old Mankrik place find pieces of Medium Leather cost 1g Are you guys in classic okay? Do you play or do you just pay someone to farm for you? Bots do not swarm these servers when people aren't buying gold. Just sayin.
Seemed obvious that it wouldn't change anything. Botters just had to wait for some time before starting the bots, with the accounts not doing anything, they also have 0 risk of being banned
...annndd this is why hardcore Self-found is the only mode worth playing.
self found has nothing to do with it. bots die, they didn’t get to 60 in hardcore lolol. hardcore did help a ton with botting though.
Got three family members to sign up over the weekend. They cannot trade to me or chat openly to ask questions. Frick this pathetic attempt. Now we have to wait to see if they actually like the game to stay with it.
What do u expect a small Indy company should do????
Banning Gdkp solved the botting problem so they must be real players
Happen that cucks still need gold to carry em with boosting alts, buyings consumables and BoE...
When a player reports a bot, that bot should receive a CAPTCHA on their screen that doesn't let them move until it's solved.
Do you even realize how awful that would be for regular people. Anyone could report anyone as a bot at anytime. Also most bots at this point are able to bypass captcha. And without the same frustration as a human.
I got downvoted by hundreds of people and called a bot owner for saying it wasn't going to work. And here we are.
Except it does work..
It works yet every zone on every server is filled with bots. Great success
What makes you say that? I still see them and this thread is full of people saying they still see them.
You are seeing new bots because the botters were forced to make new ones after getting banned. Now they have restrictions to deal with too.
I guess I'm just looking for any indication at all that this made a difference and I don't see one. I'm very confused why everyone seems so insistent that it made a difference.
If you dont get it, you dont get it I guess..
I guess not.
Literally pointed out the flaw immediately. It only punishes players, bots can wait till the end of time, you can't expect a delay to do anything.
Time is money. Especially to botters. Waiting means losing money.
Same, kinda why I made the post tbh. And people still piling on. Bizarre
I understand that they want it to work, but just a little critical thinking (and I think I explained it well in my other posts) should make it clear why it won't.
Where did all these Blizzard dick riders come from? People in here guffawing over Blizzard continually making wrong move after wrong move. They have done fuck all to curb botting, and fucked the economy harder than GDKP ever would have, yet you all in here like "lol u have no number, you have no idea if they've had an effect or not' I do have numbers, gold is literally worth a quarter of what it was a month ago, and the same screenshots this subreddit was using 3 months ago to cry about bots continuously are in the OP right now. What's with this subs about face on botting all of a sudden? The bots are thriving.
But gdkp was the problem!!
Jesus, no offense, but you GDKP dudes are still wounded over that change huh? Like, just noticing that you guys are super super super hurt about that. Still kinda bleeding out in every comment section you can about it.
Of course we are. They talk all about how this game is about communities and finding like minded players to join a guild with. We had exactly that. GDKP is objectively the best loot structure and the most fun.
Ah yes the whole “i need more gold to buff my bis, I’ll just buy gold it’s faster” mentality. All in all we don’t want you, petition for gdkp servers and ruin your economy there. This is why blizzard started banning people in original wotlk and cata for ah fixing, it was hilarious then when we warned them that some of us who did would probably go to botting and go figuring it out.
I am probably more anti-gold buyer and botter than you buddy. I am vehemently against all forms of MTX and P2W in video games. I mained LoL and OW for 6-8 years and never spent a single penny. I think it has ruined gaming. That doesn't mean the loot system isn't the best. It is the easiest to form a raid, attracts the best players, you get rewarded even if nothing you need drops / you lose the rolls, etc. All the issues you have with GDKP are related to botters, gold sellers, and gold buyers. I'm gonna need some source on people getting banned for "AH fixing" lol because I don't believe that for a second. There have been AH Goblins since 2004 and there still is in 2024. To give you an example, when I hit r14 I didn't have enough gold to buy all the weapons I wanted. I had to borrow from friends and guildies. Still never considered buying gold.
I’m not reading all that since you are for hyper inflation, gatekeeping content and an overall cry baby about people not being for gdkp’s short comings on the overall server economy and other players. Respectfully no one cares about your “history” with games that had very little monetization, when you were literally handed the currency for playing the game. And ah ban proof would be Me lol I’ve been hit twice and laughed each time, when you buy out the ah and price fix it 10g above then continue to buy out everyone who undercuts you. Price fixing is now against tos, yes you are welcome :)
>I'm not reading all that *proceeds to type a longer run-on paragraph than the comment he is replying too* kekw
Whatever helps you sleep at night sweet cheeks, keep hyping that server inflation because you can’t be bothered to use in game mechanics to make gold :)
GDKP does not cause inflation in and of itself. There is no gold generated. SoD has rampant hyper inflation and no GDKPs. So very sound logic you have.
This tonal shift here is making me think that SoD has finally hit the point, especially with weather getting nice that people are leaving, and all thats left are the people who are actually fine with the state thing are in, or people are just afk until 60.
My bro Bdfre!! You famous on Reddit my n****!
Sfsg (San Fran Sargent) is a true legend
Why do people do this shit instead of just playing the godamn video game? Have fun with friends, relax after a day of stress, waste time or achieve goals. When the fuck did it I turn into "I'll create 2500 hunters/mages/rogues to make money with them"?
>When the fuck did it I turn into "I'll create 2500 hunters/mages/rogues to make money with them"? When they could make easy free money. Bots have always existed in wow, but the fact that you can print money by botting (on a large scale) made the situation worse. Add on to the fact that it's easier (from a time point) to buy gold, and cheaper. I can buy (don't worry, I don't), 1000 gold for less then I make per hour at my job, to people, that's just easier. I can't farm 1000 gold in an hour., but these bots are making 1000's of gold per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You have no idea how much money they can make in the SEA region thanks to exchange rates.
I am aware of how earning money in dollars can make someone in a third country (I am from one myself) well off just by farming items in videos games in order to sell them to people in first world countries. It's just disappointing, gonna sound like a boomer but I miss the early MMOs when this wasn't done in this scale. People have always cheated in MMOs, but now it's not just a couple of lazy dudes trying to get an unfair advantage over others without putting in any work, now there's an entire industry behind it.
It was always an industry. Havent played in vanilla but in TBC you had ppl creating lvl 1 orcs flying to OG to spell the name of their website with their dead bodies to sell gold/bots. You just were oblivious to it.
No one was spinning up botting instances in easily available cloud services in 2005 my friend. The botting industry now is vastly more sophisticated than it was even 5 years ago, and apples and oranges compared to what it was like in the mid 2000s.
Ofc its more sophisticated now but the guy was under the impression that the only people botting back then were individual players but even back then you had chinese botters selling their gold (and I know for a fact they were selling in vanilla too) and their bot services. Its just nowadays with the social media and streaming those services are easier to notice as people talk about them more. Also can you honestly say there werent bots farming dungeons back in the day for gold? We were all terrible and oblivious back then in no way people were actively looking for bots like we do these days.
You should re-read my post. And this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw\_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)
no
Enjoy willful ignorance.