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Blizzard Announces Crackdown on Bot Farming Locations, Bots Move to Dungeons

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We had an interesting bit of insight into the behind the scenes adjustments made to fight bots in Season of Discovery in particular. Senior Game Producer and SoD Lead Josh "Aggrend" Greenfield talked about just why players are seeing so many bots heading to dungeons recently (as we covered with the recent Stockades bot parade). As it turns out, it's due to the very successful work on removing open world botting spots, so let's dive in. 

I am loathe to comment on this because I can never give a satisfying answer, but the reason this is like this is because we've been effective and squashing most other farms elsewhere for now. This is sort of the constant fallback for these clowns. The reality is when we squash a few different farms, a lot of times they fall back to the next best thing and in this case its currently stockades.

We are of course watching stockades, and we'll ban this round, and then they will be back tomorrow on thousands of new accounts. Trust me, its discouraging for us too, but we just have to keep plugging. The reality is, the more effective we are, the more visible these things become. We ban thousands of accounts, you see more bots leveling in the outdoor world. We fix an exploit in area or dungeon, it funnels farmers into a single or a few other dungeons.

The fact we are seeing behavior change again and these guys move from other spots to stockade is a good thing. It's just hard to perceive on a player's end because its in a city and so visible.

Again, not satisfying. Bots will never, ever go away. You can only mitigate, not solve. It's all about just making it more costly for them to continue and that's the very best we can do. This is another reminder not to buy gold and create a market for them. That's more damaging still, as it lowers their profit margins and makes it more expensive to write new bots, hacks, and maintain their farms.

As I said, it's difficult to comment on this because it's never going to be enough, and it feels like lip service, but I am because I am genuinely proud of what our Game Security Operations and Server teams have accomplished this patch. It's so frustrating not to be able to share the progress and behavior trends they report to me nearly every day and how much of an impact it has had on these farms' throughput. Our security folks work tirelessly for this in the very literally most thankless job in games, but they make a huge impact.

- Josh Greenfield 

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Wish they'd crack down on bots in retail, Zaralek is filled to the brim with them.

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He's right.

A sudden influx of bots usually means the anti-bot measures are working. That a ban wave happened or an exploit got fixed, and now the botters are scrambling to level new characters or find new farming spots. Problem is, from the player perspective it looks like there are suddenly a million new bots everywhere and "OMG why isn't Blizz doing anything about it!?!?!?" The devs can never really win here.

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It's like other crime. The cops get wise, they pick a new spot or scam. This has been going on since humanity has been around.....

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