wow November 10 Banwave

[Stan 5,020]

The banhammer strikes again. Thousands of bots have been either temporarily (for 6 months) or permanently suspended from the game. Prices of crafting materials should go up a little.

The banwave happens exactly six months after the last one in May 2016. Using third-party software does not come without a price.

Ornyx

We’ve recently taken action against thousands of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as “bots.” 

We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.

(Source)

[Mistmoore 9]

I hope this means all the gatherbots are gone.

[Stan 5,020]

18 minutes ago, Mistmoore said:

I hope this means all the gatherbots are gone.

Temporarily yes, but they will return as usual.

[Valks 2,373]

47 minutes ago, Mistmoore said:

I hope this means all the gatherbots are gone.

Unfortunately, if there is a reason to bot, demand will always resurface and buyers will always buy it. I'm glad to see Blizzard is properly taking action across their games though.

[mnime 17]

They should do this every month to completely make botters hopeless. The risk of botting should be so high that no one dares to do it.

As long as botters make enough money to ignore the accounts they lose they will keep doing it. Chinese botters buy 10 accounts, farm with bots, make enough money from selling the gold that they can buy another round of 10 before they get banned. This is ridiculous...

Oh wait that's money in blizzard's pocket, never mind then! happy botting!

Edited November 11, 2016 by mnime

[Valks 2,373]

10 minutes ago, mnime said:

As long as botters make enough money to ignore the accounts they lose they will keep doing it. Chinese botters buy 10 accounts, farm with bots, make enough money from selling the gold that they can buy another round of 10 before they get banned.

This is basically an eternal cycle. They also can't ban IPs, because the Chinese models work around the use of internet cafés.

[mnime 17]

14 hours ago, Blainie said:

This is basically an eternal cycle. They also can't ban IPs, because the Chinese models work around the use of internet cafés.

Obviously they can't ban IPs and they shouldn't! I studied software programming and I know exactly how easy it is to detect unusual behaviors, some of these bots inject into the client and that is a piece of cake to detect, some of them don't however. but the way these bots work is that they send packets of data to the server using the API, and the difference between datas from a bot and datas from a human is so much that they easily detect it. For example in StarCraft we have something called APM (Actions Per Minute), when you (As A Human) try to select a unit let's say you send X amount of packets to the server, however a bot send atleast 10 times more, as a bot you can have 2x better APM than the best player in the world. You only hold the W key to move forward in World of Warcraft, but a bot needs to use the API to click like 10 times in a second on the map to move to a specific point. 

I'm 99% sure that they haven't worked on "Warden" for ages. (the system that supposed to detect 3rd party softwares, LOL right?). These ban waves usually rely on player reports, they hang on it, blacklist the accounts and then they ban all the accounts in a day and call it a ban wave.

Bots keep getting updates to bypass Warden but Warden stays stupid. If they WANTED to prevent botting, they would have, no doubt. Riot Games have done a great job, the ban hammer there is more like Thor's hammer :-P well the game is free... They don't have to worry about bots bringing them money.

Edited November 12, 2016 by mnime

[Valks 2,373]

20 hours ago, mnime said:

Bots keep getting updates to bypass Warden but Warden stays stupid. If they WANTED to prevent botting, they would have, no doubt. Riot Games have done a great job, the ban hammer there is more like Thor's hammer :-P well the game is free... They don't have to worry about bots bringing them money.

The Overwatch team seems to be going the right way about it - there's a serious no tolerance policy there and they are picking up on the cheaters pretty quickly. I guess it is a lot easier to detect on an FPS though :p