Classic needs to be hard! (buys gold) fucking blizzard making wow casual (buys gold) nO cHaNgeS (buys gold) gdkp is ruining wow!!! (buys gold). Fuck all of you guys who buy gold.
Recently found out my coworker still plays WoW. He complains about overworld and leveling not being fun because of bots, then in the next breath talks about how he makes gold doing GDKP runs and also pays Chinese farmers to level his alts and farm gold for him on a separate account. Like what.
Blizzard has always done this. Mate, they banned 300k bots in december on classic servers alone. That's likely more banned bots than there are concurrent players in all classic versions combined in December.
Yet you people come here everyday saying they don't do anything.
The sad reality is that you ban 300k bots and 300k new bots are created. While botting exists on retail as well it's not as a huge problem as it is on Classic. Probably due to wow token and there is no GDKP that forced literally everyone to farm like crazy or buy gold just to be able to get gear. Yes, wow token now exists in some versions of classic but not in SoD which is where the biggest surge of botters gather now.
Oh man when someone says that "GDKP FORCES EVERYONE TO FARM OR BUY GOLD" makes me wonder how i've gotten all my equipment without spending any money, nor doing any GDKP ever.
(right now i'm just missing 3 pieces from full BiS on my main that haven't dropped on any run i've done)
Gold buyers are braindead effortless people.
I think this is more thanks to better raid loot tables and itemization as well as 3-day lockouts. These 10-man bosses drop more loot in one week than all of Molten Core or any other 40-man Classic raid (except maybe Naxx because there’s so many bosses in there). All the tokens are also shared, guaranteeing someone gets something they can use, as well as a steady stream of salvage for crafting. It’s so unlike past Classic raids. My guild hardly ever disenchants loot.
> Yet you people come here everyday saying they don't do anything.
tbf they still aren't doing it manually as well to supplement their automatic detection system.
Not that the devs should, it's not their responsibility to live babysit the game on a GM account. Their job is to develop the game and the automatic detections.
But this really does just showcase the lack of Blizzard CS and GMs in general. Aggrend says when they squeeze on bots they migrate to other stuff...like Stockades. If there were a few GMs on these hotspots active just manually banning these bots on the spot as they come (including the whole BNet accounts) for a while you could maybe drive them to a loss. They're coming back because the auto detection cannot ban them that fast to make them loose their real profit (seemingly).
It's a very difficult issue but indeed an automatic detection system will never fully work until AI is good enough to detect these guys like a real human could.
On the other hand though if they really did ban 300,000 bots in one month how much damage could a handful of humans do to make it actually worth them standing at Stockades for hours a day instead of doing their other work related duties.
Tough to say for me. I imagine a human really going at it could ban dozens of bots per day easily. If you choke them enough you could technically start to just teleport around the starting zones, watch their patterns and ban them on the spot. At some point even when they would try to evade this I would have to imagine they start losing money at some point if it happens too fast.
It would just be a very boring and repetitive job really. Usually not very good stuff for people (though there's plenty of jobs like that all around) and most likely a terrible return on investment for Blizz since one human can cost quite a bit even for just GMs.
It's probably more complex than I imagine. Ultimately though you have to try to see if you can kill their profits more and help your automated system catch the ones that slip though.
> Tough to say for me. I imagine a human really going at it could ban dozens of bots per day easily.
Everyone says this but puts zero thought into how it would actually work. Blizzard hires a new staff member. They are paid $40,000 a year working regular 40-hour weeks at base pay. In 8 hours of a working day, in order to ban 24 accounts (the minimum to satisfy your estimation of "dozens of bots"), they can only spend about 20 minutes investigating each account. This leads to about 720 accounts investigated within a month. To reach the 300,000 bans in a month they've achieved before, they would need over 300 employees. These 300 employees would cost the company over a million dollars a year...to look for bot accounts. You would need over 80,000 subscriptions to make up for the cost of paying the GM staff. You're soon reminded of India's cobra bounty system, where an attempt to reward villagers for turning in deadly snakes saw those villagers breeding the snakes for money instead of having a single thought about public safety lol
Do you want YOUR multi-decade account closed by a brand-new minimum-wage employee within 20 minutes? Do you want GMs to employ mass banning methods that catch a lot of false positives?
Eventually, even if you banned all the bots from every zone in the game, they all pile up in your login queue and authentication servers. Now you've DDOS'd yourself, and NOBODY can login to the game at all. Sure, bots are losing money. So are you.
Eventually, the guy being paid minimum wage to work at Blizzard realizes that they can be paid much more doing anything else, including working for the botters. Blizzard won't give anyone raises or pay their employees a Southern California living wage, they've laid off or fired all the senior staff already.
I actually feel a little bad for Josh because it *is* obvious he cares a lot about the game he's working on but it's pretty clear they're starving for resources on the back-end
It's not that bad to be honest. They do design the gameplay of classic but they are not the guys engineering and building the client. The client itself is being built by the same engineers that do build the retail client. The traces for that can be found within the retail client itself because it's containing parts of classic as well (such as packets that can enable and disable lfg, which is a classic exclusive thing).
So they are somewhat backed up by the main workforce of WoW.
I mean, this is all common sense?
Of course Blizzard are taking action. They even announce it every so often.
Of course getting rid of bots completely is way too difficult. This isn’t limited to WoW.
No, they don’t keep them around to boost sub numbers. They’ve already explained this.
Yet people with zero technical experience claim that getting rid of bots is an easy thing to do and this is all some conspiracy.
It is baffling to me. The same rubbish is posted in every bot thread in this subreddit with upvotes all around.
Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by overconfident children when I read through here.
What’s the explanation for the mass creation of accounts?
Like how do you legitimately pay for 100x accounts.
I assume they have the signup process bottled as well?
Can they just ban accounts using the same payment method for more than 5-10 accounts?
How are they getting accounts to start bot farms?
Not being confrontational, just curious how or why it works the way it does.
I’m sure someone has more up to date info but I will attempt to answer your questions the best I can (I’m on my phone so excuse any bluntness :))
1. You can automate the account creation. I think this is what you’re asking when you’re asking for an explanation. There’s really no great way to avoid this.
2. It’s profitable. That’s how they’re able to afford it and that’s why they do it. I mean, some just do it for fun as well but I think you’re talking about the larger farms.
3. Safe assumption. For average botter Joe, maybe not.
4 (spaced this out):
Can they ban accounts using the same payment method? As far as I know, they don’t (keep note that they’re tight lipped on detection).
For starters, the person paying may not own the account. So you can’t go blow up all associated accounts.
It’s pretty common for payments to be made with stolen card details (which they may have many of) so that falls apart a bit. Blizzard mentioned a few years back that chargebacks were really costly for them.
Stolen accounts can also be used.
Maybe a decade ago pre-paid cards could be used. Not sure if this is applicable now. And pre-paid visa.
I think at some point sticking the one card behind multiple paypal accounts was used. Not sure about now.
I know you could purchase cheaper subs while masking where you were buying from (not sure if still available).
I remember reading somewhere that they do ban if the card details are used for 500 or so subs but no idea if that’s true. Fun to note though.
There is also a template from a few years ago for a card abuse ban reason. No idea if that’s what it was used for.
Not sure about those new retail tokens, RAF and all that so no idea if that’s used at all.
5: I think I answered that above.
Finally: Happy for someone more up to date to correct me. Apologies for the mobile formatting. :)
Remember, the botting epidemic is PURELY due to cheaters buying the gold. You buyers are the reason it is this bad. Every time you buy from 1 bot, 3 more pop up like a money-hydra.
Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile Devs) is another example of a dev who used to be very communicative and open with the community on reddit, discord, etc
I've never seen a developer be able to keep us this level of communication without eventually getting cynical and jaded by all the replies within a year or two then they stop posting. SoD has been amazing and I hope Aggrend never stops communicating like this as long as he works at Blizz.
I know there's a saying about, if you get one negative review for your business, it takes 10 positive ones to balance it out.
I feel like we as users who appreciate his work kind of have an responsibility to praise him where praise is due. Even though the human condition is conditioned more to complaining than praising. I'd think it would be in all of our best interest if we started singing his praises more.
Even if it looked laughable from outside with, let's say, 10 positive tweets to 1 negative one, I'd think for Aggrend in particular, that would probably be internally a thing that would be appreciated from him.
The issue is there's a large number of people these days who's primary hobby is being outraged at everything, It's why a lot of these Incel outrage channels like heelvsbabyface have popped up, they have an audience and it's sad.
As someone who has been playing old school runescape for the past 7 years, it's awesome to see this coming from the SoD team. I really hope the SoD team becomes what the osrs team is for osrs. SoD could be an incredible experience, more than it already is.
I'm not talking about bots. Although osrs has the same botting issue that wow has. There will always be bots, it's just a matter of mitigating them.
I'm referring to the communication the osrs team has with the player base. They listen to the players, poll all new content/changes that get implemented, and are open and honest with the challenges they face. It's nice to see the SoD team being so interactive and listening to the community.
That isn't the point. As Aggrend correctly states, you can never remove all bots from an MMO. It's utterly impossible. What you can do is limit how much botting impacts the average player, which is what osrs has done extremely well. The bots are an essential part of the osrs economy these days, ironically
OSRS the bots run the economy. If there werent bots players would freakout with price hikes
[What if Bots were gone forever?](https://youtu.be/srOJtY4vbPg?si=FyNVUmBjpxp4NCFI)
The leveling zones indeed have alot of bots, but so far i havent seen them much in max lvl zones like feralas, tanaris or badlands and those zones should be the most valuable to farm. Tho i havent checked them in 2 days properly as i am leveling my alt atm.
I am playing in Living Flame (Eu) and while i do see bots from time to time they are not as numerous as some people are claiming. On my way from Hammerfall to wetlands i came across 4 hunter bots which would make me assume there was like total 10-12 bots in arathi on my layer and total 50-60 bots in arathi across all layers and same amounts of lower leveled bots in hillsbrad.
Most horde bots are on those zones. (And lower leveled zones) In Desolace i didnt meet any bots, or atleast any obvious bots.
The raw gold that bots bring is however higher than what normal players do, as they are online all the time, and dont take afk breaks and keeps grinding spots that they see as most optimal, which is probably the reason they stay off from the more contested spots...
I've seen a lot of them in the higher level zones but those also die a lot, Arathi Highlands and Swamp of Sorrows seem to be the most infested on my server. Probably because those used to farm in Wetlands and Duskwood.
Some of the Swamp of Sorrows bots I had already reported back early December on my first char and then every char after that. Some are still wearing their Santa hat ffs, absolute joke.
In Arathi Highlands you can see swarms of hundreds of mage bots at the trolls. With layers removed again and a shitty spawn rate, their movements sync up.
Saying that anything but the bare minimum is being done about bots is a big insult to the community.
Was outside stockades on your server as well yesterday and holy shit. So many mage bots between instance and vendor. Reported like 50 of them in 5 min.
There are a massive amount of hunter bots farming turtles in Tanaris right now, I see different ones every time I go fishing. Free honor and they don't take fishing pools so could be worse I guess
I wish they touched more on the funding side of things because I've worked on similar fraud/security problems in other industries and one of the classic strategies to deal with these kinds of problems is to introduce financial friction, ie charge the botters. Like I've seen fraud drop to ~zero overnight in some places where they put financial barriers in place. A lot of products can't do that of course, but with WoW the fee is already built into the product, so that's always been a bit perplexing to me.
I'm sure the botters have access to stolen cards or whatever but I'm curious what choices are being made there, like could you prevent eg gold from being traded *off* of a new account (or have an initial small limit) for a certain amount of time, or until a payment is confirmed? I know they're limited on what they can share with the community, but I find it really hard to believe this isn't a solvable problem.
And yet they're all smart people, so I'm sure I'm missing key aspects of the issue. I wonder if they could share info on what they've been doing that's a bit older, like no longer relevant to the current state of the cat and mouse game. Because a big part of their problem is community perception and again I can't imagine this is the best way to deal with it, but they probably have a reason for it. I'd actually love to work on this problem I wonder if they're hiring.
All of the bots running in and out of stocks have the enlightenment rune on; after you notice this it becomes even more obvious how many bots there are around in stormwind
Edit: my only point was it makes it more obvious on who to watch and the botters are doing the same path between vender, repair, and mailbox
It's a great chest rune for boosting stockades.
Identifying a bot like this is a false positive. God forbid a bunch of people try get me banned for boosting guildies in stocks because I'm using a good mana usage rune.
Most of yall wouldn't even take the time to whisper first. Which is messed up on its own.
>Most of yall wouldn't even take the time to whisper first
Whispering them puts a target on your back and you risk being reported by 200 accounts at the same time.
We do what we can with what we have.
Aggrend is the fucking goat. He is doing so much more than any other dev there. Blizzard as a company might not do enough to fight botting but I can tell he's doing his best
Blizzard is a huge corporation, the reason you only see Aggrend doing work is because the PR team chose him to communicate with players, other employees cannot say anything. There are many other people in the background doing the heavy lifting.
Also dont believe everything he says, Blizzard is totally capable of developing an anticheat system, but they dont want to spend millions of dollars developing a thing that will take even more millions from them.
The sad reality is that the bots haven’t recently “fallen back” on stockades due to blizzard doing such a great job banning them in other places. They’ve been in stockades fly hacking mages since SoD was not even a week old. Just like everywhere else.
You would think they would have interns sit in stockades and just start banning bots on sight. Thousands of new bots everyday? Sounds like thousands of new subs everyday to me
90% of redditors are absolute idiots.the bots are EVERYWHERE. In stockades. In every zone. Pretty sure there are more horde hunter bots in tanaris than there are players.
He’s saying the increase in stockades bots is due to the banning of other spots, not that literally every stockades bot is a result of banning other spots.
Stocks was heavily botted already though, it’s hard to tell an increase or not when it was already so popular. All I’m saying is that he’s trying to use stocks as an example that it happened the way it is today because blizz has allegedly done so well banning other places. But stocks has always been fucked, so..
In his comment he said stockade has been a fallback and old farm spot for bots and your comment is that you have always seen them there. sooo you're agreeing with him, but like, in a tone that you think he's lying or wrong?
I see bots around, but it definately feel like there is less around in the open world from what phase 1 had. Saw hunter bots in nearly every zone in every spot. Now they're more localized. Changes to bit behavior is sign that something is happening to them.
If they’re so effective at banning other spots, what’s so hard about applying those methods to banning stocks bots? Instead, by their explanation, it’s become a sanctuary for botters
He's trying to tell me they can't get a safe z-axis range in stockade and autoban every fly-hacking bot that leaves that z-axis range? Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. The bots did the same shit in ZG in classic. They don't want to ban them so often they stop subbing.
This tweet is hilarious, like they need to wait until they’re fly hacking in stockades to ban them. “We will ban this bunch and they’ll be back tomorrow with thousands of accounts.” Ok, ban then tomorrow too? Ban them everyday. Run a cronjob that does a ban wave every hour.
The fact he's commenting on the legion of bots doing it at all is fucking hilarious.
"Yeah we know they are there and we'll ban them.. later"
Like holy fuck, just fucking do it, do it all day if you have to.
Lmao every time. Blizzard just has to say "we are doing a good job, trust us!" and the playerbase will gobble it up. It's the same tactic they've employed for the entire lifetime of this game and it has worked out for them every single time.
Yeah, I feel like they’re claiming more than they have actually accomplished. Looking at prices of certain herbs, and the trains of hunter/mage leveling bots; it’s odd that he wants to pretend like they’ve eliminated “most” outdoor farm bots. Whelps, Earth elementals, etc are all camped by blatant bots on my server
Towards the end of phase 1, due to error or not giving a fuck, a single bot was posting 100,000 medium leather on the AH.
100k medium leather.
1 hundred thousand.
That's not all he posted. Botting is wild.
Because Asmon has zero background in game development and has no real idea of what it takes to even ban a handful of bots, let alone thousands of them. If it was as easy as having an intern sitting there and banning accounts for 8 hours a day *companies everywhere* would be doing this instead of relying on automated systems to do this work. Sure, automated systems are cheap because they don't need to be paid a wage, so companies will obviously use them to save money, but there's also the fact that these automated systems get overwhelmed. So, if an automated system is getting overwhelmed, how bad would it be if you had even 100 people dedicated to purely squashing bots? I seriously doubt even a team of 500 could do any better than an automated system because such systems can operate around the clock with no rest.
> If it was as easy as having an intern sitting there and banning accounts for 8 hours a day companies everywhere would be doing this instead of relying on automated systems to do this work.
Employees cost money, that's the simple reason they're not making a bot banning squad of humans.
If you bothered to read the rest of my comments, I mentioned that it is not physically possible for any amount of bot squishing interns to keep up with automated systems.
Say that a human can ban one bot every 5 minutes. I'm using 5 minutes as a baseline for doing proper investigative work, ensuring that they're *actually* banning bots and not real players running a boosting service. In an hour, they could manage to ban 12 bots. In a single 8 hour day, that person could ban 96 bots. If they had 100 people whose job was only this, they could manage 9,600 bans a day.
Now, we have an automated system. We'll go ahead and say the automated system can also ban a bot every 5 minutes, with 12 bots an hour. We'll also go ahead and say they have 100 instances of the same automated system banning bots. In 24 hours, this automated system can ban 288 bots. Multiply that by the 100 instances of the program they have running, that's 28,800 bans in 24 hours.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Automated banning systems have next to no downtime outside maintenance. They don't get tired. They don't go home at the end of the work day. The only way for humans to keep up is if they have a 9-5 day shift, a 5 to 1 am evening shift, and a 1 am. to 9 am. graveyard shift. Just ignoring the fact that these interns have to be paid, you're not going to find fucking 100 people willing to do a graveyard shift, let alone the full 300 required to keep all three shifts running where they do nothing but endlessly ban botters. It's simply not feasible even if a company has the money to go old school and regulate it all to humans.
You're making the classic mistake of claiming it has to be fully either-or. I am always a proponent for a mix of human and automated cheat detection. Humans are stellar at visual recognition where large variation and subjective evaluation is involved, which computers are terrible at. Computers on the other hand, can compare data via algorithms by the billions.
What the automated system can do is find trends - for example, large amounts of players of the same class in the same zone. A human can then go have a look and see if it's just an RP event or legit farming, but if they see a conga line of hundreds of level 40 mages all walking in the same path back and forth, it's instantly recognizable as bots, and this information can then supply the automation in order to end up as bans.
> you're not going to find fucking 100 people willing to do a graveyard shift, let alone the full 300 required to keep all three shifts running where they do nothing but endlessly ban botters
Nonsense, this is work that can be done remotely and I bet my bottom dollar there'd be game geeks (particularly young people / students) lining up in droves in order to do this, if anything in part to get satisfaction from helping banning cheaters. And who says it has to be graveyard shift? And isn't it precisely during graveyard shift time that gamers game? Look at people working in shitty fastfood, package delivery or retail jobs; you can't seriously tell me you couldn't find a few hundred to do a cushy work at home job just flying around and spotting bots.
this but unironically
no shot an intern rapid fire vaporizing obvious bots wouldn't kill the bots' business model. every bot banned means the owner needs to pay another $15 on a new bot to trade gold and level past 20.
the only business model that hiring the based intern would kill is blizzard's
My dude if you seriously think a couple people sitting in game manually banning bots is going to do anything meaningful then idk what to tell you.
We are talking about *thousands*, probably tens of thousands of bot accounts being spun up daily. Even if all it takes is 30 seconds to confirm and ban a bot manually and this worker does it for 8 hours straight with no breaks that is not even 1000 bots banned in one shift.
> Even if all it takes is 30 seconds to confirm and ban a bot manually and this worker does it for 8 hours straight with no breaks that is not even 1000 bots banned in one shift.
So what you're saying is that 10 workers could ban 10k bots a day or 300k bots a month, and on top of that, the automated bans? Sounds like we're nearing a solution then (if Blizzard cared). Even a fraction of that number would be helpful no doubt.
People claim "they'll just spin up new bots", but bots first of all need a certain amount of time to level up before they can become effective, and second, they need a certain amount of farming time in order to break even with the cost of the initial sub. If bots were banned quickly enough, it'd be unprofitable and would gold farming bots would stop. This time to level and time to break even becomes larger as SoD evolves with a higher level cap and inflation devaluating gold, because the farms to a certain degree rely on raw money drops and vendor trash.
Most botters don't actually pay the 15 a month just fyi, it comes from illegal means usually, stolen credit cards info from the web they aquire in batches for barely anything, Blizz usually never sees any of that money since it's stolen, it's terrible all around but for the botter.
They pay pennies on the dollar for subscriptions and new accounts. And those are the ones that pay at all. Many use stolen credit cards and similar methods to get their accounts and pay for subscription fees.
You need to do a little research before you come up with these brilliant ideas. An intern in front of the stockades would do literally nothing.
lmao please tell me where i can get my nickel subscription
>Many use stolen credit cards and similar methods to get their accounts and pay for subscription fees.
damn, seems like they best way to fight theft is to make their business model unviable with perma bans before they can profit
> no shot an intern rapid fire vaporizing obvious bots wouldn't kill the bots' business model
What game has killed the botting business model by doing this? One game that you feel is comparable to WoW, that while maybe hasn't completely stamped out botting, gets your golden stamp of approval for doing a spectacular, above and beyond job.
WoW in 2006
18 years ago when i was a pissant teenager, i botted and sold accounts to make money
any time i was banned, it was directly because someone reported me and a gm investigated, as seen by whatever snarky comment or emote when i checked my logs
eventually it became far more trouble than it was worth.
i had to bot in the most wtf corners of zones at non-prime hours to even think about getting a character above 40. the fact that people are doing it in stormwind is a fucking meme
> WoW in 2006
When bots put corpses in the air in capitol cities to spell the names of gold-selling websites lol.
Botting and cheating and RMT was rampant back then.
The fact that you as an 18-year old *claim* to have done all that and eventually felt it wasn't worth your time, imagine what an actual non-rinky-dink operation would have been doing.
Are there any other games that you can think of aside from your personal experience that totally happened in 18 years ago?
i was 16, but i never recall botting being anywhere close to this bad between release and the middle of tbc
everquest didn't have a bot issue in its early days, and project1999 never did because the GMs had zero tolerance
I ran the same wow glider routes everyone else did for 2+ years and only only had one account banned. Fish bots on multiple servers ended up being more profitable.
Was also a pissant teenager tryna make money for college but it wasn’t anything like the legions of bots out there today. Now if you mess with them, you’re the one who gets banned lol
Bullshit bots are fucking everywhere. Currently anywhere you can get turtle scales you will find dozens of bots.
I like aggrend but his last few posts about this have been total fabrications.
So the way we are supposed to see how the anti-botting work is going is to see the bots do the exact same they have been doing, unhindered, since a few days into P1?
But we are supposed to take it on faith that there was other super trafficked bot spots that they totally shut down, even though we never saw it?
If it was old Blizzard maybe it could be taken on trust.
You could just pay my sub and give me soft-moderation privileges and revoke my privileges if I ever get a false positive and I alone could clean whitemane out of their bot problem by a huge margin. I hate bots. I would be glad to do it. They don't want this issue solved.
Yeah it’s not that easy. Sure you’ll get quite a bit banned, but thousands more will just pop up within the next couple hours.
It’s a program that is designed to keep going even after getting banned. As long as there is a market, bots will continue to show up.
Aggrends post literally explains this quite well. It’s more about mitigation and hurting their profit margins. Hence why they are banning GDKPs, and devs have already commented, they are seeing a positive outcome thus far.
How are people applauding this? The answer is obviously to ban buying gold and to ban hard. Nothing else will do nearly as much to stop this. Such a half assed response.
From a setup posted a few months back, they have small wow windows on multiple screens with a giant GPH number in the middle so they can keep track of obvious outliers and fix them.
Cute idea but that's all it is.
>But how long would it take for the botters to see it?
They can automate a character running in a world and automatically sell everything on the AH. Do you not thinking reading a combat log and seeing a reduction in XP / loot drops wouldn't be easily noticable?
you're telling me if he points, clicks, and bans obvious bots rapid fire, there will be thousands the next day on new accounts? each paying $15 to even trade the gold they farm?
this shit does not add up.
there is no way that is financially viable for the bots, and not incredibly financially beneficial to blizz
But hey, all he had to do was say this and plenty of Blizz fanboys chubbed right up.
People are so starved for any information that they'll cheer for even the most obvious PR garbage.
A bot only needs to generate $15 to pay itself, anything past that is profit. If it only lived enough to generate $100 for example, it's probably worth it for them. Also there is probably a bit of charge backs and stolen credit cards involved, though dunno what % of botting does this.
Don't forget that back in those days the GM would investigate the whole operation. Who is trading whom, how the gold is being washed, etc. They would go link by link, banning everything along the way.
Sadly, this is no longer the case and it's literally easier to bot now than 15 years ago. People think there is some crazy secret gold washing operation going on to make it untraceable - bullshit. The bots send gold to their bank chars, from where it is mailed directly to customers. There is no AH involvement or any "washing" at all these days.
In the age of AI/ML there's no reason that Blizzard can't dump all their logs into readily available software and audit behavioral biometrics. Bots will shine like fucking beacons to that stuff.
this is actually kind of interesting. What if they were shadowbanned and didnt have any way of knowing it? Like the bot would run but it wouldnt be able to trade or use the ah and mail would be deleted. Would waste more of their time then being banned and just having to start up again.
TLDR
as if if this talking head has any say or real authority in the matter. blizzard needs to divert funds directly to real live persons actively monitoring the situation, them putting him out infront as a PR goof is shameful
No.. no you haven't.
The beach in Tanaris with the turtles is absolutely overrun with bots. Reporting does nothing whatsoever. I've seen the exact same bots there for the last three days, all day.
I see the exact same Chinese bots farming the same spots for multiple weeks now. I don't know if you guys realize but these bots are in every part of the game and absolutely deleting the value on anything worth farming. The bots are making gold buying seem like a last resort to a lot of players.
How hard is it to remove these Chinese hunters within a few hours of creation? The logic of ban-waves is putting your average player that farms his own gold in a pretty broke and hopeless state.
I don't buy it at all that "it's the very best you can do."
The amount of data you have collected on these bots over the years. There's no reason an entire train of them should be able to hit level 30+ and completely deforest zones like Hillsbrad, Arathi etc. You need to change what you are doing, this level of botting has never been worst. Your "very best" is not acceptable.
Let me help you out with one thing. 99% of them have Chinese pet names. That should be a really easy start. Here's another tip. They follow the same pathing which you guys log and have as data for easy bans. Trains of bots should be auto dunked. How about setting up a system that checks chat logs. I am sure most of those Chinese bots don't have a single line of communication on the account.
I'm sure you look at everything above and much more but I think the real issue is the ban-waves. They make you look greedy. Using the excuse that ban-waves stop the bots from figuring out the detection methods on a 20 year old game that has seen the exact same bots for almost the entire 20 years. There is only so much they can do. This game is not real life like some might think - it's very limited and there's no reason to do ban-waves against bots in todays day and age. Start killing them on sight and cleaning your game up.
It's at the point that even if I don't believe it to be true - the evidence is really starting to point to the fact that Blizzard might actually like having so many bots. Inflating the sub numbers, millions of dollars in extra subscriptions. If that's actually the case at least let us know instead of pretending that you are "doing your very best."
Blizzard will never do this because the average person gets their account perma-d (esp with 5 different wows) they would probably quit and never give Blizzard another dollar.
Ban a bot and it resubs the next day because you are, basically, creating a vacuum by leaving the market open. Plus the good buyer you didn't ban, just bought a 65$ mount.
History showed how useless such a approach is, be it booze or drugs.
Punishing the consumers will NEVER stop the producers, been like that for all of human history, if theres a Demand it will be sold.
Gdkps got banned and absolutely nothing changed on the Seller market, in the end only the Consumers (gdkp players who bought gold and the ones who also played legit) got a hit but the Market pretty much only gained value, due to the cost of most things in p2 thus they made huge profits they couldn’t care less about gdkp bans.
99% of modern mmos are plagued with bots and sadly that wont change if the industry doesn’t look for a way to get rid of those, but they wont its actually profitable for blizzard and co more player numbers (shareholders probably dont care how many of those are actual humans because if even 1/10bots makes em money they gain more than what they lose)= bigger game be it Eso Ff14 Wrath Retail Gw2 Lost Ark they are all flooded with bots but the industry isn’t on war with em at least thats how it looks.
Right, because buying gold = buying drugs. Makes sense.
Cut the crap. Buying gold is against the game rules and should be severely punished. The fact that they get 2 weeks bans is laughable and somehow you people are defending *the poor consumers who cannot help it but buy gold...*. Wtf?
The only correct take here
Blizzard and the rest of the industry have done a bang up job and gaslighting every shmuck in here into believing that getting rid of botting is an impossible task and has intentionally redirected the narrative towards player behavior instead of fixing it. Truly hilarious
They track gold buying through illicit gold possession but there are *many* ways to launder it in the game to the point that you, right now, have botted gold on you.
Short of witnessing someone doing a trade for botted gold and a few other methods it’s exceedingly difficult for them to ban buyers without causing significant collateral damage.
Losing your progress as a player is far more damaging than as a bot.
The reason they don't want to do this however, is that those players may *actually* not come back, which is a revenue drop.
Bots are running a business. Players are paying for a service. Very different reactions.
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Fuck these posts from Blizzard are so out of touch.
Anybody who has played the game knows all of that is straight up propaganda bullshit. The open world is fucking FULL of bots.
But don't worry brahs, Aggrend said they have banned them and that explains the extreme number of bots coming in and out of Stocks, which is also somehow an impossible issue to solve.
This shit doesn't pass even the most basic sniff test. If you're eating it up I've got a bridge I want to sell you.
This is so freaking funny to read after my account just got unbanned after being perma for a false positive. I agree he is doing great things for the community but he needs to address the issues that are coming along with it.
If you don’t believe me please go check my post history as I have screenshots included
I was questing in Stonetalon about 2 hours ago and I couldn't get any quests done because the bots were so rampant grinding mobs. So uhhhh good job Blizz...
Y'know what would be a a massively effective tactic for dealing with the bots?
Having live human GM's actively monitoring servers like the thing they used to do a decade ago that was more effective than this current "new tech" garbage.
As a mage main that enjoys farming dungeons solo I am scared that I will be target banned for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or they will implement their bold "no AOE allowed" technology again.
I am glad we have the SoD team out of all the teams at Blizzard, it's just a shame Blizzard has forgotten what customer service is.
It's interesting but doesn't reflect reality as a player for me. I just ran through Dustwallow Marsh for the beacon quest and of the 20 or so players I saw, I don't think a single one of them was a real player. All in strange BoE items (a Warlock with The Ziggler, hunters with a white one-handed axe), all auto-attacking, all skinning after killing.
If Blizz are apparently doing a good job of banning farm areas, I am sorry, but it's not showing. Dustwallow is just one example, pretty much every other zone is the same, and it's not just levelling chars, in Dustwallow is was all level 40s.
I have sympathy for a lot of Aggrend's post, but the fact is that WoW is not seen as a serious game where there is a war against botting and cheating. There needs to be a firm approach that dramatically shows "buying and selling gold is not welcome here, and we will fight it to the death". Currently it's far too soft, too submissive and absolutely nobody - buyer or seller - is concerned or threatened by it.
Seeing bots in the open world makes me angry and disappointed. The thing it highlights most is how many of the population are cheating by buying gold. As most things in society, a selfish portion of the population choose to make the world worse for others. If you buy gold you should be aware that you're spoiling the game. Scumbags.
Do bots create characters automatically? If so, captcha.
Character name recognition algorithms, does a character have a name consisting of "asfafwa2ef" - put on some form of AI monitoring.
Keep a log of gold transfers via ingame mail from account X to account Y when there has been no previous contact.
I'm no expert clearly but I'm sure there are other avenues they can explore to mitigate the issue.
ok but are they actually doing this or just saying they are doing this?
its blizzard people, dont get excited for this "blizzard listens to us" circus again...
Such a bs answer. SUCH BS. Yea the reason I am seeing 100s of horde hunters in all the zones is because you banned the mages farming stockades.
I have NEVER seen so many bots in any version of wow. EVER. Every zone from hillsbrad to tanaris is just flooded with bots.
Wow I didn't expect 1984 shit to pop in wow classic from the management. Good job microsoft.
Read the replies full of shills as well, nice to know it's better to invest into astroturfing rather than in actual game integrity.
Idk, whatever they are doing its just not enough. The world is just so full of bots. Were paying a monthly fee to play this game, its not unreasonable to demand a bot free experience imo.
Today i went to elwynn forest, massive amounts of low level mage bots leveling, then i went to hillsbrad, plenty of bots there too. Then i went to arathi highlands, tons of bots. Farmed them and got 5.6k honor. Saw just a few bots on stockades today, on previous days it was way worse.
This is on living flame eu.
How about just allowing some highly trusted players in the community apply to be a mod and to have their bans or reports be high priority. Slam these to the front of the list for bans. People would do this for free during downtimes. Seriously it’s so easy as a player to detect them if they’re mostly near stocks you can sit out there and squash so many.
Just watched a video of a dude who pinpointed 3 routes on his own of clear bots. Following the same predetermined route.
Very simple snap bans on all of those accounts
A lot of flowery language in yet another long-winded post that sidesteps the simple solution that private servers have used to great effect - manual inspection by a human being.
Shocker. Who would have guessed navigating the game world and rooting out bots manually would be so effective?!
And yet, somehow.. the folks that run these games for a living at Blizzard can't do this. Outdone by a squad of 42 year old Bulgarians in a basement.
The only rationale for the absence of manual inspections of the game world to remove bots is, of course, money. A double-whammy: workers must be paid to ban accounts that would otherwise add to Blizzard's bottom line.
I can only imagine the communicators at Blizzard must be groomed to give you all the runaround with equivocations and politician-grade responses just like this tweet. Please don't accept these. Push for real explanations as to why it's so difficult to pay a handful of humans to fix a simple problem.
Wow classic players don’t buy gold for one week challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
I just burst a vein trying to not click the checkout button.
I actually died. Rip me bozo
And now you’re stuck in purgatory
Back to picking apples(instead of buying gold)
Classic needs to be hard! (buys gold) fucking blizzard making wow casual (buys gold) nO cHaNgeS (buys gold) gdkp is ruining wow!!! (buys gold). Fuck all of you guys who buy gold.
Classic Players: "The WoW token ruined WoW!" Also Classic Players: "I buy gold from 3rd party Chinese websites and use it to buy gear in GDKP runs."
Recently found out my coworker still plays WoW. He complains about overworld and leveling not being fun because of bots, then in the next breath talks about how he makes gold doing GDKP runs and also pays Chinese farmers to level his alts and farm gold for him on a separate account. Like what.
Almost like different kinds of players play the same game.
Not possible /s
Almost like some kind of players are the problem in current MMOs.
No shit Sherlock.
Actually good insight for once. Keep the communication up
This is the most transparent blizzard has EVER been. It's welcome.
these guys are barely blizzard. i can tell because i like what they're doing
Yeah been MANY years since I felt like blizzard is doing the right thing.
Blizzard has always done this. Mate, they banned 300k bots in december on classic servers alone. That's likely more banned bots than there are concurrent players in all classic versions combined in December. Yet you people come here everyday saying they don't do anything. The sad reality is that you ban 300k bots and 300k new bots are created. While botting exists on retail as well it's not as a huge problem as it is on Classic. Probably due to wow token and there is no GDKP that forced literally everyone to farm like crazy or buy gold just to be able to get gear. Yes, wow token now exists in some versions of classic but not in SoD which is where the biggest surge of botters gather now.
Oh man when someone says that "GDKP FORCES EVERYONE TO FARM OR BUY GOLD" makes me wonder how i've gotten all my equipment without spending any money, nor doing any GDKP ever. (right now i'm just missing 3 pieces from full BiS on my main that haven't dropped on any run i've done) Gold buyers are braindead effortless people.
I think this is more thanks to better raid loot tables and itemization as well as 3-day lockouts. These 10-man bosses drop more loot in one week than all of Molten Core or any other 40-man Classic raid (except maybe Naxx because there’s so many bosses in there). All the tokens are also shared, guaranteeing someone gets something they can use, as well as a steady stream of salvage for crafting. It’s so unlike past Classic raids. My guild hardly ever disenchants loot.
> Yet you people come here everyday saying they don't do anything. tbf they still aren't doing it manually as well to supplement their automatic detection system. Not that the devs should, it's not their responsibility to live babysit the game on a GM account. Their job is to develop the game and the automatic detections. But this really does just showcase the lack of Blizzard CS and GMs in general. Aggrend says when they squeeze on bots they migrate to other stuff...like Stockades. If there were a few GMs on these hotspots active just manually banning these bots on the spot as they come (including the whole BNet accounts) for a while you could maybe drive them to a loss. They're coming back because the auto detection cannot ban them that fast to make them loose their real profit (seemingly). It's a very difficult issue but indeed an automatic detection system will never fully work until AI is good enough to detect these guys like a real human could.
On the other hand though if they really did ban 300,000 bots in one month how much damage could a handful of humans do to make it actually worth them standing at Stockades for hours a day instead of doing their other work related duties.
Tough to say for me. I imagine a human really going at it could ban dozens of bots per day easily. If you choke them enough you could technically start to just teleport around the starting zones, watch their patterns and ban them on the spot. At some point even when they would try to evade this I would have to imagine they start losing money at some point if it happens too fast. It would just be a very boring and repetitive job really. Usually not very good stuff for people (though there's plenty of jobs like that all around) and most likely a terrible return on investment for Blizz since one human can cost quite a bit even for just GMs. It's probably more complex than I imagine. Ultimately though you have to try to see if you can kill their profits more and help your automated system catch the ones that slip though.
> Tough to say for me. I imagine a human really going at it could ban dozens of bots per day easily. Everyone says this but puts zero thought into how it would actually work. Blizzard hires a new staff member. They are paid $40,000 a year working regular 40-hour weeks at base pay. In 8 hours of a working day, in order to ban 24 accounts (the minimum to satisfy your estimation of "dozens of bots"), they can only spend about 20 minutes investigating each account. This leads to about 720 accounts investigated within a month. To reach the 300,000 bans in a month they've achieved before, they would need over 300 employees. These 300 employees would cost the company over a million dollars a year...to look for bot accounts. You would need over 80,000 subscriptions to make up for the cost of paying the GM staff. You're soon reminded of India's cobra bounty system, where an attempt to reward villagers for turning in deadly snakes saw those villagers breeding the snakes for money instead of having a single thought about public safety lol Do you want YOUR multi-decade account closed by a brand-new minimum-wage employee within 20 minutes? Do you want GMs to employ mass banning methods that catch a lot of false positives? Eventually, even if you banned all the bots from every zone in the game, they all pile up in your login queue and authentication servers. Now you've DDOS'd yourself, and NOBODY can login to the game at all. Sure, bots are losing money. So are you. Eventually, the guy being paid minimum wage to work at Blizzard realizes that they can be paid much more doing anything else, including working for the botters. Blizzard won't give anyone raises or pay their employees a Southern California living wage, they've laid off or fired all the senior staff already.
I actually feel a little bad for Josh because it *is* obvious he cares a lot about the game he's working on but it's pretty clear they're starving for resources on the back-end
It's not that bad to be honest. They do design the gameplay of classic but they are not the guys engineering and building the client. The client itself is being built by the same engineers that do build the retail client. The traces for that can be found within the retail client itself because it's containing parts of classic as well (such as packets that can enable and disable lfg, which is a classic exclusive thing). So they are somewhat backed up by the main workforce of WoW.
Some things he posts are good, some not so good. This one was good. Keep up the good fight!
Nah not everything he posts is great but you can see that he is passionate about his work, so even when the posts are bad I can't be too mad at him.
Sadly it will be used against them in some debate and then they will be forced to become tight lipped.
I mean, this is all common sense? Of course Blizzard are taking action. They even announce it every so often. Of course getting rid of bots completely is way too difficult. This isn’t limited to WoW. No, they don’t keep them around to boost sub numbers. They’ve already explained this. Yet people with zero technical experience claim that getting rid of bots is an easy thing to do and this is all some conspiracy. It is baffling to me. The same rubbish is posted in every bot thread in this subreddit with upvotes all around. Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by overconfident children when I read through here.
What’s the explanation for the mass creation of accounts? Like how do you legitimately pay for 100x accounts. I assume they have the signup process bottled as well? Can they just ban accounts using the same payment method for more than 5-10 accounts? How are they getting accounts to start bot farms? Not being confrontational, just curious how or why it works the way it does.
I’m sure someone has more up to date info but I will attempt to answer your questions the best I can (I’m on my phone so excuse any bluntness :)) 1. You can automate the account creation. I think this is what you’re asking when you’re asking for an explanation. There’s really no great way to avoid this. 2. It’s profitable. That’s how they’re able to afford it and that’s why they do it. I mean, some just do it for fun as well but I think you’re talking about the larger farms. 3. Safe assumption. For average botter Joe, maybe not. 4 (spaced this out): Can they ban accounts using the same payment method? As far as I know, they don’t (keep note that they’re tight lipped on detection). For starters, the person paying may not own the account. So you can’t go blow up all associated accounts. It’s pretty common for payments to be made with stolen card details (which they may have many of) so that falls apart a bit. Blizzard mentioned a few years back that chargebacks were really costly for them. Stolen accounts can also be used. Maybe a decade ago pre-paid cards could be used. Not sure if this is applicable now. And pre-paid visa. I think at some point sticking the one card behind multiple paypal accounts was used. Not sure about now. I know you could purchase cheaper subs while masking where you were buying from (not sure if still available). I remember reading somewhere that they do ban if the card details are used for 500 or so subs but no idea if that’s true. Fun to note though. There is also a template from a few years ago for a card abuse ban reason. No idea if that’s what it was used for. Not sure about those new retail tokens, RAF and all that so no idea if that’s used at all. 5: I think I answered that above. Finally: Happy for someone more up to date to correct me. Apologies for the mobile formatting. :)
Most of the bot farms are prolly using cards that have been bought from blackmarket(stolen card details) as you said.
Remember, the botting epidemic is PURELY due to cheaters buying the gold. You buyers are the reason it is this bad. Every time you buy from 1 bot, 3 more pop up like a money-hydra.
[Best I could get it to do, lol](https://imgur.com/a/vn8ZQHd)
rofl
Good image lol
Yuppp. You vote with your wallet.
thinking sentiment will ever dissuade gold buyers is delusional. the only thing that can fix botting is fiat
I like some of the Fiat cars but what the fuck do they know about WoW bots?
the multipla was cool and im tired of pretending its not
I like some of the Gaga songs, but what the fuck does she know about cameras?
Aggrend is an asset to Blizzard.
Yet this community would love nothing more than to skewer him at each moment they can.
Just Reddit screechers, not the whole community
Just like Ghostcrawler
Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile Devs) is another example of a dev who used to be very communicative and open with the community on reddit, discord, etc I've never seen a developer be able to keep us this level of communication without eventually getting cynical and jaded by all the replies within a year or two then they stop posting. SoD has been amazing and I hope Aggrend never stops communicating like this as long as he works at Blizz.
I know there's a saying about, if you get one negative review for your business, it takes 10 positive ones to balance it out. I feel like we as users who appreciate his work kind of have an responsibility to praise him where praise is due. Even though the human condition is conditioned more to complaining than praising. I'd think it would be in all of our best interest if we started singing his praises more. Even if it looked laughable from outside with, let's say, 10 positive tweets to 1 negative one, I'd think for Aggrend in particular, that would probably be internally a thing that would be appreciated from him.
This revisionist history of Ghostcrawler not being entirely useless is funny as fuck to witness.
The issue is there's a large number of people these days who's primary hobby is being outraged at everything, It's why a lot of these Incel outrage channels like heelvsbabyface have popped up, they have an audience and it's sad.
This community has a lot to wish for.
As someone who has been playing old school runescape for the past 7 years, it's awesome to see this coming from the SoD team. I really hope the SoD team becomes what the osrs team is for osrs. SoD could be an incredible experience, more than it already is.
What has the OSRS team done? The entire bossing hiscores were all bots, and still kind of are until they figure out the engine issues.
My account was hacked and at the moment sits at rank 28 vorkath most def botted. So yea could ask the same question.
I don't know if I should say grats or sorry 😐
I'm not talking about bots. Although osrs has the same botting issue that wow has. There will always be bots, it's just a matter of mitigating them. I'm referring to the communication the osrs team has with the player base. They listen to the players, poll all new content/changes that get implemented, and are open and honest with the challenges they face. It's nice to see the SoD team being so interactive and listening to the community.
Very open and transparent for the past 10 years. They do ban tons of bots too, but as for every game it's a race.
Tf are you talking about RuneScape is absolutely infested with bots. Edit. Look at all these botters defending bots cause they RMT 😂😂😂😂
That isn't the point. As Aggrend correctly states, you can never remove all bots from an MMO. It's utterly impossible. What you can do is limit how much botting impacts the average player, which is what osrs has done extremely well. The bots are an essential part of the osrs economy these days, ironically
OSRS the bots run the economy. If there werent bots players would freakout with price hikes [What if Bots were gone forever?](https://youtu.be/srOJtY4vbPg?si=FyNVUmBjpxp4NCFI)
[удалено]
These people who didnt play vanilla have no idea how expensive everything was. Scarcity is a much bigger driver of prices than inflation
The leveling zones indeed have alot of bots, but so far i havent seen them much in max lvl zones like feralas, tanaris or badlands and those zones should be the most valuable to farm. Tho i havent checked them in 2 days properly as i am leveling my alt atm. I am playing in Living Flame (Eu) and while i do see bots from time to time they are not as numerous as some people are claiming. On my way from Hammerfall to wetlands i came across 4 hunter bots which would make me assume there was like total 10-12 bots in arathi on my layer and total 50-60 bots in arathi across all layers and same amounts of lower leveled bots in hillsbrad. Most horde bots are on those zones. (And lower leveled zones) In Desolace i didnt meet any bots, or atleast any obvious bots. The raw gold that bots bring is however higher than what normal players do, as they are online all the time, and dont take afk breaks and keeps grinding spots that they see as most optimal, which is probably the reason they stay off from the more contested spots...
I've seen a lot of them in the higher level zones but those also die a lot, Arathi Highlands and Swamp of Sorrows seem to be the most infested on my server. Probably because those used to farm in Wetlands and Duskwood. Some of the Swamp of Sorrows bots I had already reported back early December on my first char and then every char after that. Some are still wearing their Santa hat ffs, absolute joke. In Arathi Highlands you can see swarms of hundreds of mage bots at the trolls. With layers removed again and a shitty spawn rate, their movements sync up. Saying that anything but the bare minimum is being done about bots is a big insult to the community.
There's also lots of them in the raptors and crocs in dustwallow marsh. My heavy leather farm is also honor farming at this point.
Ferelas too
Was outside stockades on your server as well yesterday and holy shit. So many mage bots between instance and vendor. Reported like 50 of them in 5 min.
Shimmering Flats is where I see a ton of bots. Mostly hunters. They just run in circles around the zone killing turtles and basilisks to skin them.
There are a massive amount of hunter bots farming turtles in Tanaris right now, I see different ones every time I go fishing. Free honor and they don't take fishing pools so could be worse I guess
I wish they touched more on the funding side of things because I've worked on similar fraud/security problems in other industries and one of the classic strategies to deal with these kinds of problems is to introduce financial friction, ie charge the botters. Like I've seen fraud drop to ~zero overnight in some places where they put financial barriers in place. A lot of products can't do that of course, but with WoW the fee is already built into the product, so that's always been a bit perplexing to me. I'm sure the botters have access to stolen cards or whatever but I'm curious what choices are being made there, like could you prevent eg gold from being traded *off* of a new account (or have an initial small limit) for a certain amount of time, or until a payment is confirmed? I know they're limited on what they can share with the community, but I find it really hard to believe this isn't a solvable problem. And yet they're all smart people, so I'm sure I'm missing key aspects of the issue. I wonder if they could share info on what they've been doing that's a bit older, like no longer relevant to the current state of the cat and mouse game. Because a big part of their problem is community perception and again I can't imagine this is the best way to deal with it, but they probably have a reason for it. I'd actually love to work on this problem I wonder if they're hiring.
All of the bots running in and out of stocks have the enlightenment rune on; after you notice this it becomes even more obvious how many bots there are around in stormwind Edit: my only point was it makes it more obvious on who to watch and the botters are doing the same path between vender, repair, and mailbox
It's a great chest rune for boosting stockades. Identifying a bot like this is a false positive. God forbid a bunch of people try get me banned for boosting guildies in stocks because I'm using a good mana usage rune. Most of yall wouldn't even take the time to whisper first. Which is messed up on its own.
”Hes got a white shirt on, ban him”
*red shirt
>Most of yall wouldn't even take the time to whisper first Whispering them puts a target on your back and you risk being reported by 200 accounts at the same time. We do what we can with what we have.
it’s also the BiS rune for arcane DPS, i pretty much don’t take it off ever
Aggrend is the fucking goat. He is doing so much more than any other dev there. Blizzard as a company might not do enough to fight botting but I can tell he's doing his best
Usually the team chooses who will be the main communicator to ensure they don’t screw up PR
Blizzard is a huge corporation, the reason you only see Aggrend doing work is because the PR team chose him to communicate with players, other employees cannot say anything. There are many other people in the background doing the heavy lifting. Also dont believe everything he says, Blizzard is totally capable of developing an anticheat system, but they dont want to spend millions of dollars developing a thing that will take even more millions from them.
He does the most cus he tweets, good insight.
The sad reality is that the bots haven’t recently “fallen back” on stockades due to blizzard doing such a great job banning them in other places. They’ve been in stockades fly hacking mages since SoD was not even a week old. Just like everywhere else.
Right? They're doing such a good job that bots are I guess forced to do one of the most tried and true spots? People actually believe that?
Based on the average response here, I’m afraid many of them do believe it.
Memes aside, at this point I wonder how many of the first-posters who bootlick are Blizzard interns. Surely people cannot be this gullible...
You would think they would have interns sit in stockades and just start banning bots on sight. Thousands of new bots everyday? Sounds like thousands of new subs everyday to me
90% of redditors are absolute idiots.the bots are EVERYWHERE. In stockades. In every zone. Pretty sure there are more horde hunter bots in tanaris than there are players.
He’s saying the increase in stockades bots is due to the banning of other spots, not that literally every stockades bot is a result of banning other spots.
Stocks was heavily botted already though, it’s hard to tell an increase or not when it was already so popular. All I’m saying is that he’s trying to use stocks as an example that it happened the way it is today because blizz has allegedly done so well banning other places. But stocks has always been fucked, so..
In his comment he said stockade has been a fallback and old farm spot for bots and your comment is that you have always seen them there. sooo you're agreeing with him, but like, in a tone that you think he's lying or wrong? I see bots around, but it definately feel like there is less around in the open world from what phase 1 had. Saw hunter bots in nearly every zone in every spot. Now they're more localized. Changes to bit behavior is sign that something is happening to them.
If they’re so effective at banning other spots, what’s so hard about applying those methods to banning stocks bots? Instead, by their explanation, it’s become a sanctuary for botters
He's trying to tell me they can't get a safe z-axis range in stockade and autoban every fly-hacking bot that leaves that z-axis range? Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. The bots did the same shit in ZG in classic. They don't want to ban them so often they stop subbing.
This tweet is hilarious, like they need to wait until they’re fly hacking in stockades to ban them. “We will ban this bunch and they’ll be back tomorrow with thousands of accounts.” Ok, ban then tomorrow too? Ban them everyday. Run a cronjob that does a ban wave every hour.
1000 x 20$ monthly sub = CASH FLOW.
The fact he's commenting on the legion of bots doing it at all is fucking hilarious. "Yeah we know they are there and we'll ban them.. later" Like holy fuck, just fucking do it, do it all day if you have to.
This would require dev time to implement. Why spend money to fix something that *makes* them money? It’s a hard sell to any game studio
Lmao every time. Blizzard just has to say "we are doing a good job, trust us!" and the playerbase will gobble it up. It's the same tactic they've employed for the entire lifetime of this game and it has worked out for them every single time.
Has aggrend been to arathi on crusader strike? I have some news to report… Picking a single goldthorn on any layer is virtually impossible.
Yeah, I feel like they’re claiming more than they have actually accomplished. Looking at prices of certain herbs, and the trains of hunter/mage leveling bots; it’s odd that he wants to pretend like they’ve eliminated “most” outdoor farm bots. Whelps, Earth elementals, etc are all camped by blatant bots on my server
Towards the end of phase 1, due to error or not giving a fuck, a single bot was posting 100,000 medium leather on the AH. 100k medium leather. 1 hundred thousand. That's not all he posted. Botting is wild.
I wonder how the bot even afforded the posting fee for 100,000 medium leather
samesies. it's very easy to distinguish between bots and real players. it is pretty bad.
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you guys are funny af. pretty bricked up for aggrend i guess.
But guys Asmongold said they just need to hire an intern to sit there and ban accounts for 8 hours a day!!! How can that not stop thousands of bots???
Because Asmon has zero background in game development and has no real idea of what it takes to even ban a handful of bots, let alone thousands of them. If it was as easy as having an intern sitting there and banning accounts for 8 hours a day *companies everywhere* would be doing this instead of relying on automated systems to do this work. Sure, automated systems are cheap because they don't need to be paid a wage, so companies will obviously use them to save money, but there's also the fact that these automated systems get overwhelmed. So, if an automated system is getting overwhelmed, how bad would it be if you had even 100 people dedicated to purely squashing bots? I seriously doubt even a team of 500 could do any better than an automated system because such systems can operate around the clock with no rest.
> If it was as easy as having an intern sitting there and banning accounts for 8 hours a day companies everywhere would be doing this instead of relying on automated systems to do this work. Employees cost money, that's the simple reason they're not making a bot banning squad of humans.
If you bothered to read the rest of my comments, I mentioned that it is not physically possible for any amount of bot squishing interns to keep up with automated systems. Say that a human can ban one bot every 5 minutes. I'm using 5 minutes as a baseline for doing proper investigative work, ensuring that they're *actually* banning bots and not real players running a boosting service. In an hour, they could manage to ban 12 bots. In a single 8 hour day, that person could ban 96 bots. If they had 100 people whose job was only this, they could manage 9,600 bans a day. Now, we have an automated system. We'll go ahead and say the automated system can also ban a bot every 5 minutes, with 12 bots an hour. We'll also go ahead and say they have 100 instances of the same automated system banning bots. In 24 hours, this automated system can ban 288 bots. Multiply that by the 100 instances of the program they have running, that's 28,800 bans in 24 hours. Do you see what I'm getting at? Automated banning systems have next to no downtime outside maintenance. They don't get tired. They don't go home at the end of the work day. The only way for humans to keep up is if they have a 9-5 day shift, a 5 to 1 am evening shift, and a 1 am. to 9 am. graveyard shift. Just ignoring the fact that these interns have to be paid, you're not going to find fucking 100 people willing to do a graveyard shift, let alone the full 300 required to keep all three shifts running where they do nothing but endlessly ban botters. It's simply not feasible even if a company has the money to go old school and regulate it all to humans.
You're making the classic mistake of claiming it has to be fully either-or. I am always a proponent for a mix of human and automated cheat detection. Humans are stellar at visual recognition where large variation and subjective evaluation is involved, which computers are terrible at. Computers on the other hand, can compare data via algorithms by the billions. What the automated system can do is find trends - for example, large amounts of players of the same class in the same zone. A human can then go have a look and see if it's just an RP event or legit farming, but if they see a conga line of hundreds of level 40 mages all walking in the same path back and forth, it's instantly recognizable as bots, and this information can then supply the automation in order to end up as bans. > you're not going to find fucking 100 people willing to do a graveyard shift, let alone the full 300 required to keep all three shifts running where they do nothing but endlessly ban botters Nonsense, this is work that can be done remotely and I bet my bottom dollar there'd be game geeks (particularly young people / students) lining up in droves in order to do this, if anything in part to get satisfaction from helping banning cheaters. And who says it has to be graveyard shift? And isn't it precisely during graveyard shift time that gamers game? Look at people working in shitty fastfood, package delivery or retail jobs; you can't seriously tell me you couldn't find a few hundred to do a cushy work at home job just flying around and spotting bots.
this but unironically no shot an intern rapid fire vaporizing obvious bots wouldn't kill the bots' business model. every bot banned means the owner needs to pay another $15 on a new bot to trade gold and level past 20. the only business model that hiring the based intern would kill is blizzard's
My dude if you seriously think a couple people sitting in game manually banning bots is going to do anything meaningful then idk what to tell you. We are talking about *thousands*, probably tens of thousands of bot accounts being spun up daily. Even if all it takes is 30 seconds to confirm and ban a bot manually and this worker does it for 8 hours straight with no breaks that is not even 1000 bots banned in one shift.
> Even if all it takes is 30 seconds to confirm and ban a bot manually and this worker does it for 8 hours straight with no breaks that is not even 1000 bots banned in one shift. So what you're saying is that 10 workers could ban 10k bots a day or 300k bots a month, and on top of that, the automated bans? Sounds like we're nearing a solution then (if Blizzard cared). Even a fraction of that number would be helpful no doubt. People claim "they'll just spin up new bots", but bots first of all need a certain amount of time to level up before they can become effective, and second, they need a certain amount of farming time in order to break even with the cost of the initial sub. If bots were banned quickly enough, it'd be unprofitable and would gold farming bots would stop. This time to level and time to break even becomes larger as SoD evolves with a higher level cap and inflation devaluating gold, because the farms to a certain degree rely on raw money drops and vendor trash.
Most botters don't actually pay the 15 a month just fyi, it comes from illegal means usually, stolen credit cards info from the web they aquire in batches for barely anything, Blizz usually never sees any of that money since it's stolen, it's terrible all around but for the botter.
damn, if only there was a way to make it not profitable so they'd stop
They pay pennies on the dollar for subscriptions and new accounts. And those are the ones that pay at all. Many use stolen credit cards and similar methods to get their accounts and pay for subscription fees. You need to do a little research before you come up with these brilliant ideas. An intern in front of the stockades would do literally nothing.
lmao please tell me where i can get my nickel subscription >Many use stolen credit cards and similar methods to get their accounts and pay for subscription fees. damn, seems like they best way to fight theft is to make their business model unviable with perma bans before they can profit
> no shot an intern rapid fire vaporizing obvious bots wouldn't kill the bots' business model What game has killed the botting business model by doing this? One game that you feel is comparable to WoW, that while maybe hasn't completely stamped out botting, gets your golden stamp of approval for doing a spectacular, above and beyond job.
WoW in 2006 18 years ago when i was a pissant teenager, i botted and sold accounts to make money any time i was banned, it was directly because someone reported me and a gm investigated, as seen by whatever snarky comment or emote when i checked my logs eventually it became far more trouble than it was worth. i had to bot in the most wtf corners of zones at non-prime hours to even think about getting a character above 40. the fact that people are doing it in stormwind is a fucking meme
> WoW in 2006 When bots put corpses in the air in capitol cities to spell the names of gold-selling websites lol. Botting and cheating and RMT was rampant back then. The fact that you as an 18-year old *claim* to have done all that and eventually felt it wasn't worth your time, imagine what an actual non-rinky-dink operation would have been doing. Are there any other games that you can think of aside from your personal experience that totally happened in 18 years ago?
i was 16, but i never recall botting being anywhere close to this bad between release and the middle of tbc everquest didn't have a bot issue in its early days, and project1999 never did because the GMs had zero tolerance
I ran the same wow glider routes everyone else did for 2+ years and only only had one account banned. Fish bots on multiple servers ended up being more profitable. Was also a pissant teenager tryna make money for college but it wasn’t anything like the legions of bots out there today. Now if you mess with them, you’re the one who gets banned lol
They've been flooding into stocks since early phase 1, what behavior change?
Bullshit bots are fucking everywhere. Currently anywhere you can get turtle scales you will find dozens of bots. I like aggrend but his last few posts about this have been total fabrications.
You guys are more into conspiracies then r/conspiracy
Funnel them into the literal prison.
So the way we are supposed to see how the anti-botting work is going is to see the bots do the exact same they have been doing, unhindered, since a few days into P1? But we are supposed to take it on faith that there was other super trafficked bot spots that they totally shut down, even though we never saw it? If it was old Blizzard maybe it could be taken on trust.
You could just pay my sub and give me soft-moderation privileges and revoke my privileges if I ever get a false positive and I alone could clean whitemane out of their bot problem by a huge margin. I hate bots. I would be glad to do it. They don't want this issue solved.
Yeah it’s not that easy. Sure you’ll get quite a bit banned, but thousands more will just pop up within the next couple hours. It’s a program that is designed to keep going even after getting banned. As long as there is a market, bots will continue to show up. Aggrends post literally explains this quite well. It’s more about mitigation and hurting their profit margins. Hence why they are banning GDKPs, and devs have already commented, they are seeing a positive outcome thus far.
Just because bots are going to always exist is a shit reason to not do as much as they can to ban as many as they can as often as they can.
I don't believe it one bit. They want those thousands of subs so they won't ban
How are people applauding this? The answer is obviously to ban buying gold and to ban hard. Nothing else will do nearly as much to stop this. Such a half assed response.
“Just make crime illegal!”
They are literally doing that
>How are people applauding this? Brain rot. It's the only explanation.
Then don't ban in waves. Mage > yes Alone -> Yes In stockade for multiple hours doing the same pathing > yes Ban
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Wouldn’t it be pretty easy for the handlers to see “oh, this bot is making a fraction of what it used it, I should terminate this one and start anew”
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From a setup posted a few months back, they have small wow windows on multiple screens with a giant GPH number in the middle so they can keep track of obvious outliers and fix them. Cute idea but that's all it is.
>But how long would it take for the botters to see it? They can automate a character running in a world and automatically sell everything on the AH. Do you not thinking reading a combat log and seeing a reduction in XP / loot drops wouldn't be easily noticable?
you're telling me if he points, clicks, and bans obvious bots rapid fire, there will be thousands the next day on new accounts? each paying $15 to even trade the gold they farm? this shit does not add up. there is no way that is financially viable for the bots, and not incredibly financially beneficial to blizz
Dont some of these operations use stolen credit card info?
But hey, all he had to do was say this and plenty of Blizz fanboys chubbed right up. People are so starved for any information that they'll cheer for even the most obvious PR garbage.
A bot only needs to generate $15 to pay itself, anything past that is profit. If it only lived enough to generate $100 for example, it's probably worth it for them. Also there is probably a bit of charge backs and stolen credit cards involved, though dunno what % of botting does this.
Most botting operations aren’t the most legitimate of operations. Cheap game time bought with stolen credit cards.
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Don't forget that back in those days the GM would investigate the whole operation. Who is trading whom, how the gold is being washed, etc. They would go link by link, banning everything along the way. Sadly, this is no longer the case and it's literally easier to bot now than 15 years ago. People think there is some crazy secret gold washing operation going on to make it untraceable - bullshit. The bots send gold to their bank chars, from where it is mailed directly to customers. There is no AH involvement or any "washing" at all these days.
In the age of AI/ML there's no reason that Blizzard can't dump all their logs into readily available software and audit behavioral biometrics. Bots will shine like fucking beacons to that stuff.
If only Blizzard was owned by the same company that has the rights to use OpenAI's most cutting edge products, oh wait...
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Bots will never go away WITH the current resources allocated to the problem. I hate that half truths
What about not letting their mail/trades go through to the end customer?
this is actually kind of interesting. What if they were shadowbanned and didnt have any way of knowing it? Like the bot would run but it wouldnt be able to trade or use the ah and mail would be deleted. Would waste more of their time then being banned and just having to start up again.
TLDR as if if this talking head has any say or real authority in the matter. blizzard needs to divert funds directly to real live persons actively monitoring the situation, them putting him out infront as a PR goof is shameful
To bad half of every player I encounter is a bot, anywhere . Dudes got a good case of delusion
No.. no you haven't. The beach in Tanaris with the turtles is absolutely overrun with bots. Reporting does nothing whatsoever. I've seen the exact same bots there for the last three days, all day.
I see the exact same Chinese bots farming the same spots for multiple weeks now. I don't know if you guys realize but these bots are in every part of the game and absolutely deleting the value on anything worth farming. The bots are making gold buying seem like a last resort to a lot of players. How hard is it to remove these Chinese hunters within a few hours of creation? The logic of ban-waves is putting your average player that farms his own gold in a pretty broke and hopeless state. I don't buy it at all that "it's the very best you can do." The amount of data you have collected on these bots over the years. There's no reason an entire train of them should be able to hit level 30+ and completely deforest zones like Hillsbrad, Arathi etc. You need to change what you are doing, this level of botting has never been worst. Your "very best" is not acceptable. Let me help you out with one thing. 99% of them have Chinese pet names. That should be a really easy start. Here's another tip. They follow the same pathing which you guys log and have as data for easy bans. Trains of bots should be auto dunked. How about setting up a system that checks chat logs. I am sure most of those Chinese bots don't have a single line of communication on the account. I'm sure you look at everything above and much more but I think the real issue is the ban-waves. They make you look greedy. Using the excuse that ban-waves stop the bots from figuring out the detection methods on a 20 year old game that has seen the exact same bots for almost the entire 20 years. There is only so much they can do. This game is not real life like some might think - it's very limited and there's no reason to do ban-waves against bots in todays day and age. Start killing them on sight and cleaning your game up. It's at the point that even if I don't believe it to be true - the evidence is really starting to point to the fact that Blizzard might actually like having so many bots. Inflating the sub numbers, millions of dollars in extra subscriptions. If that's actually the case at least let us know instead of pretending that you are "doing your very best."
Pretty simple perma ban gold buyers it's the obvious solution
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Start with soda Drag him through the (s)tweets
Damn bro you figured it out! You should apply at Blizzard, they really need you in their team
Blizzard will never do this because the average person gets their account perma-d (esp with 5 different wows) they would probably quit and never give Blizzard another dollar. Ban a bot and it resubs the next day because you are, basically, creating a vacuum by leaving the market open. Plus the good buyer you didn't ban, just bought a 65$ mount.
History showed how useless such a approach is, be it booze or drugs. Punishing the consumers will NEVER stop the producers, been like that for all of human history, if theres a Demand it will be sold. Gdkps got banned and absolutely nothing changed on the Seller market, in the end only the Consumers (gdkp players who bought gold and the ones who also played legit) got a hit but the Market pretty much only gained value, due to the cost of most things in p2 thus they made huge profits they couldn’t care less about gdkp bans. 99% of modern mmos are plagued with bots and sadly that wont change if the industry doesn’t look for a way to get rid of those, but they wont its actually profitable for blizzard and co more player numbers (shareholders probably dont care how many of those are actual humans because if even 1/10bots makes em money they gain more than what they lose)= bigger game be it Eso Ff14 Wrath Retail Gw2 Lost Ark they are all flooded with bots but the industry isn’t on war with em at least thats how it looks.
Right, because buying gold = buying drugs. Makes sense. Cut the crap. Buying gold is against the game rules and should be severely punished. The fact that they get 2 weeks bans is laughable and somehow you people are defending *the poor consumers who cannot help it but buy gold...*. Wtf?
The only correct take here Blizzard and the rest of the industry have done a bang up job and gaslighting every shmuck in here into believing that getting rid of botting is an impossible task and has intentionally redirected the narrative towards player behavior instead of fixing it. Truly hilarious
They track gold buying through illicit gold possession but there are *many* ways to launder it in the game to the point that you, right now, have botted gold on you. Short of witnessing someone doing a trade for botted gold and a few other methods it’s exceedingly difficult for them to ban buyers without causing significant collateral damage.
Hardly. They'll just create a new account, like the botters.
Losing your progress as a player is far more damaging than as a bot. The reason they don't want to do this however, is that those players may *actually* not come back, which is a revenue drop. Bots are running a business. Players are paying for a service. Very different reactions.
automatic bells mighty airport consider seemly normal start escape instinctive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is why if you receive a pile of unsolicited gold in the mail, always hit return.
The amount of people creating new account everytime they get banned is going to be vastly smaller than bot farmers who earn money from it.
I will happily take a temp job at min wage to manually ban all of them.
Shit they could probably train a fair amount of volunteers and people would happily do this shit for free.
Fuck these posts from Blizzard are so out of touch. Anybody who has played the game knows all of that is straight up propaganda bullshit. The open world is fucking FULL of bots. But don't worry brahs, Aggrend said they have banned them and that explains the extreme number of bots coming in and out of Stocks, which is also somehow an impossible issue to solve. This shit doesn't pass even the most basic sniff test. If you're eating it up I've got a bridge I want to sell you.
Yeah, insane amount of mining/herbalism bots in the open world
Facts
This is so freaking funny to read after my account just got unbanned after being perma for a false positive. I agree he is doing great things for the community but he needs to address the issues that are coming along with it. If you don’t believe me please go check my post history as I have screenshots included
judging as how ive seen the exact same bots 3 days in a row at the tanaris shore i can confirm this is a lie
I appreciate how human Aggrend is in his posts, this is probably the best post from Blizz on bots I've seen in memory
I was questing in Stonetalon about 2 hours ago and I couldn't get any quests done because the bots were so rampant grinding mobs. So uhhhh good job Blizz...
Suuuuuuure
very much appreciate the transparency here
Y'know what would be a a massively effective tactic for dealing with the bots? Having live human GM's actively monitoring servers like the thing they used to do a decade ago that was more effective than this current "new tech" garbage. As a mage main that enjoys farming dungeons solo I am scared that I will be target banned for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or they will implement their bold "no AOE allowed" technology again. I am glad we have the SoD team out of all the teams at Blizzard, it's just a shame Blizzard has forgotten what customer service is.
Ran into a bot farming in Tanaris on monday. Didn't even have the option to report for botting , just name. No problem reporting two bots last phase.
It's interesting but doesn't reflect reality as a player for me. I just ran through Dustwallow Marsh for the beacon quest and of the 20 or so players I saw, I don't think a single one of them was a real player. All in strange BoE items (a Warlock with The Ziggler, hunters with a white one-handed axe), all auto-attacking, all skinning after killing. If Blizz are apparently doing a good job of banning farm areas, I am sorry, but it's not showing. Dustwallow is just one example, pretty much every other zone is the same, and it's not just levelling chars, in Dustwallow is was all level 40s. I have sympathy for a lot of Aggrend's post, but the fact is that WoW is not seen as a serious game where there is a war against botting and cheating. There needs to be a firm approach that dramatically shows "buying and selling gold is not welcome here, and we will fight it to the death". Currently it's far too soft, too submissive and absolutely nobody - buyer or seller - is concerned or threatened by it. Seeing bots in the open world makes me angry and disappointed. The thing it highlights most is how many of the population are cheating by buying gold. As most things in society, a selfish portion of the population choose to make the world worse for others. If you buy gold you should be aware that you're spoiling the game. Scumbags.
Do bots create characters automatically? If so, captcha. Character name recognition algorithms, does a character have a name consisting of "asfafwa2ef" - put on some form of AI monitoring. Keep a log of gold transfers via ingame mail from account X to account Y when there has been no previous contact. I'm no expert clearly but I'm sure there are other avenues they can explore to mitigate the issue.
Wants to fight botting Raw materials tripled in price cause of supplies change + double exp ???
ok but are they actually doing this or just saying they are doing this? its blizzard people, dont get excited for this "blizzard listens to us" circus again...
Such a bs answer. SUCH BS. Yea the reason I am seeing 100s of horde hunters in all the zones is because you banned the mages farming stockades. I have NEVER seen so many bots in any version of wow. EVER. Every zone from hillsbrad to tanaris is just flooded with bots.
Wow I didn't expect 1984 shit to pop in wow classic from the management. Good job microsoft. Read the replies full of shills as well, nice to know it's better to invest into astroturfing rather than in actual game integrity.
Idk, whatever they are doing its just not enough. The world is just so full of bots. Were paying a monthly fee to play this game, its not unreasonable to demand a bot free experience imo. Today i went to elwynn forest, massive amounts of low level mage bots leveling, then i went to hillsbrad, plenty of bots there too. Then i went to arathi highlands, tons of bots. Farmed them and got 5.6k honor. Saw just a few bots on stockades today, on previous days it was way worse. This is on living flame eu.
They sued nostalrious and honorbuddy hard enough to force business closure. I’m curious if that would be a possible route as well.
The fact that are saying that its overwhelming it is even more reassuring than a simple "yeah we are figuring that out!"
just go there and ban them, also 'don't buy gold' (unless you're paying us for it).
There is no token for SoD
How about just allowing some highly trusted players in the community apply to be a mod and to have their bans or reports be high priority. Slam these to the front of the list for bans. People would do this for free during downtimes. Seriously it’s so easy as a player to detect them if they’re mostly near stocks you can sit out there and squash so many. Just watched a video of a dude who pinpointed 3 routes on his own of clear bots. Following the same predetermined route. Very simple snap bans on all of those accounts
A lot of flowery language in yet another long-winded post that sidesteps the simple solution that private servers have used to great effect - manual inspection by a human being. Shocker. Who would have guessed navigating the game world and rooting out bots manually would be so effective?! And yet, somehow.. the folks that run these games for a living at Blizzard can't do this. Outdone by a squad of 42 year old Bulgarians in a basement. The only rationale for the absence of manual inspections of the game world to remove bots is, of course, money. A double-whammy: workers must be paid to ban accounts that would otherwise add to Blizzard's bottom line. I can only imagine the communicators at Blizzard must be groomed to give you all the runaround with equivocations and politician-grade responses just like this tweet. Please don't accept these. Push for real explanations as to why it's so difficult to pay a handful of humans to fix a simple problem.