13 November 2015 "Unbanned"

[tamogennik]

Hi guys!

So soon we will have this great day for banned users and more than 3+ million accounts will be free... And I would like to ask your opinion about two cases:

1. Will YOU begin botting again after this banwave?
As I know 6 month is the last step before permanent ban and are you scarred that we have no any chance for mistake? It's means that we must do by ourself with borring farm and do not use the HB?

2. What was the trully reason of bans in May'2015?

- Was it the reaction on the defeat in the court with Bossland?
- Did Blizzard really improve the detection of bot soft?

Thanks for your replies and opinions!

 

[Sbaak]

I'm still fighting with myself, If I am going to re-sub to WoW. Friends have been asking me this whole time to get back in to it but I just did my longest hiatus from wow and it has had its grip on me since vanilla. Part of me wants to because there is no doubt that I enjoy it. I have not done PVE for years, strictly arena. I use HB for gold and if I must honor gear but even then I play mostly by hand. Maybe the random night of leveling.

Ah well, Nov 13 is my 26th birthday but its Friday the 13th this year is that a sign to play or to avoid.

I have only been playing counter strike and now rocket league since the ban.

 

[voltron]

Is it safe botting now?

 

[Puffmutti]

botting is never safe

 

[roboto]

more than 3+ million accounts will be free

can you point me the source of that number?

Will YOU begin botting again after this banwave?

never stopped

What was the trully reason of bans in May'2015?

no one really knows, but it sure had a huge impact on the whole botting community,
not just ingame prices increased, suddenly the wowtoken was much more worth (source: wowtoken.info, underminejournal.com - prices of common trading goods usally increased >+25%)
in addition competing bot developers and other services had a change to conquer the market (most failed as expected )

however, since that banwave date blizzward was - suprisingly - relucatant

people who know me, know i'm a staitistics guy

as you can see prior banwave blizzard banned way more people more periodicly.
after the banwave, they banned very very very low bans.

this can be explained in 2 (maybe 3) ways:

a) people moved away from honorbuddy, resulting in a decreased usage/decreased bot appearence of buddy products in wow - people moving to other bots
a.1) people just dont report bans anymore because they're fed up and dont even care anymore or dont consider the reports being worth it

b) blizzard noticed they lose too much money by banning botters, made the banwave so they got a little bit of PR for all those whiners in the forums

c) the increased anti-detection mechanismns in honorbuddy had an huge impact in hb being "no more detectable" / "not that easily detectable"


IMHO: (c) is the most probable answer to that question, honstly, why bother detecting "soooo many bots" and then suddenly stop banning botters. if they got a clean/proper way to detect honorbuddy, why not continue where they left off? get rid of all hb bots? hell yeah! people buying battle chests after battle chests starting over? way to go to make money!

my aio conclusion: we'll see what happens post Nov, 13th, i personally highly doubt that there will be another banwave shortly after, it just doesnt make sense to me.

disclaimer: all data and theories are my own and my very own. the data is - in no way whatever - linked to bossland gmbh or any official data.

 

[Jaqyt]

I'm not planning on coming back until Legion at least, if I do ever come back I won't be using Honorbuddy, with all the stuff I have on my account getting banned permanently would be a disaster.

 

[BaliOne]

I'm not planning on coming back until Legion at least, if I do ever come back I won't be using Honorbuddy, with all the stuff I have on my account getting banned permanently would be a disaster.

this
with token at legionif i back i'll have a bot account connect to my acccount just to farm mounts and stuff like this.
Also wondering if i should get a gold farm account.

 

[WolfpackPB]

1. I'll be playing my main account again, I will not inject into that account or even have Honorbuddy on my main machine. I will, however, continue "safely" botting on an alt account connected to my personal gbank for mats/gold.

2. I don't think Honorbuddy was detected by it's injection into the WoW Process but rather some algorithm (movement or behavior) run against reported accounts over a large period of time, then a mass ban wave to scare people away from botting by pretending like they have some technical method of certain detection.

 

[roboto]

2. I don't think Honorbuddy was detected by it's injection into the WoW Process but rather some algorithm (movement or behavior) run against reported accounts over a large period of time, then a mass ban wave to scare people away from botting by pretending like they have some technical method of certain detection.

sorry to deny your theory, but - since we're on the "theory-train" again

i had one banned, used hb for questing for about 2 minutes (mule account) which got banned so it can't be reported nor detected by movement

 

[webhond]

2. I don't think Honorbuddy was detected by it's injection into the WoW Process but rather some algorithm (movement or behavior) run against reported accounts over a large period of time, then a mass ban wave to scare people away from botting by pretending like they have some technical method of certain detection.

ofc they detected that way, your algorithm way sounds way to complicated, why would they invest so much time / money if
all blizzard depends on for bot reporting is the playerbase.

 

[starlite68]

There was a small banwave March 23, a few days after some "Tripwire Triggered" event. that was also the first time we saw the 6 month ban. I wasnt online for tripwire, also was not banned

However that bugged me so I moved my main from WOW1 to a brand new, untouched WOW4 account. Of course later the big May 13 banwave hit - and it got my WOW4 account, that only existed for 6 weeks or so. the WOW1 which I've been botting on for a couple years nonstop, was untouched.

So there was some kind of detection in place in the weeks before May 13. Everyone that touched the bot during that time, got hit. Accounts that didn't - like my WOW1 that stopped botting about April 1st - untouched.

What I don't get is why they don't keep at it. Either bosslands actually figured out the detection method or Blizz is on some sneaky business strategy where they could banwave every HB user, but decided not to for now.

Either way I'm no longer raiding or doing anything really so I will never use HB on my main when it gets unbanned. My guess is - another wave is coming. It's 10 years now of Blizz doing a nonstop, expensive battle vs bots and HB is by far the biggest, most annoying one. I don't see how they will just stay hands off with all these CRs in arenas and garrison / tanaan etc bots running around.

 

[WolfpackPB]

ofc they detected that way, your algorithm way sounds way to complicated, why would they invest so much time / money if
all blizzard depends on for bot reporting is the playerbase.

I'm not sure why you think it's so complicated.

Blizzard has 100,00 accounts which have had player reports for botting, they know Honorbuddy has a sample of 40 specific behaviors in common, therefore if an account has performed 5+ of these Behaviors then ban. It would take very little work to do this and would probably save the investigation team considerable time. From the technical side this is decently complicated but nothing that can't be done by a single Dev.

The only reason that leads most of us to think it is not detected, is that if it were we'd be getting banned consistently and honorbuddy would be out of business. And Roboto, a sample of 1 is not overly convincing, I thought you were a statistic guy? Why would I believe the one case in thousands to be evidence of anything?

 

[obzzcure]

only 2 days and my main account is unbanned ^^

 

[roboto]

I'm not sure why you think it's so complicated.

Blizzard has 100,00 accounts which have had player reports for botting, they know Honorbuddy has a sample of 40 specific behaviors in common, therefore if an account has performed 5+ of these Behaviors then ban. It would take very little work to do this and would probably save the investigation team considerable time. From the technical side this is decently complicated but nothing that can't be done by a single Dev.

The only reason that leads most of us to think it is not detected, is that if it were we'd be getting banned consistently and honorbuddy would be out of business. And Roboto, a sample of 1 is not overly convincing, I thought you were a statistic guy? Why would I believe the one case in thousands to be evidence of anything?

sorry but you're thinking way to small.

imagine, 5.5m online/paied accounts, in this example, 1 account only uses one character assume 10% get reported of banning (people are also mis-using that report function, remember that!)
now carry a flag (or better a counter) across a non-centralized database (reaslms got their own database servers/blades)

taken the flag which - supposed - to be an int32 - takes 32 bytes * assume we got 550k reported players in total => 17187,5 KB alone for that flag
now add some sort of audit to that player, logging his every keystrokey, nav points and whatever not => assume it takes 250KB per 15 minutes played
assume a player bots 8 hours per day on average weather the bot's attached or not.
cary that data over 2 weels to analyze

so you got

1 player * 14 days * 8 hours per day * (250KB sample data per 0.25h *4) => we get (assumed, roughly) 110MB Data per Player
Not take those assumed 550k reported players
=> you get 60500000MB of Data to analyze => this equals 59082 GB or ~58TB data all over the infrastructure alongside with backups, regular logs and whatever.

now get that data from several datacenters together or process it on site (take 1/3 to make it easier with eu, us, asia)
so you got 20TB of data per region, now have fun alayzing that data and finding patterns within 1 week (i think one of the blueposts stated that it was a sample stopped collecting one week before banwave hit)

honestly, you cant analyze that much data reliable, nor does it make sense to even create such a pattern.

detections in other systems (punkbuster, vac2, name it) usally create honeypots, scan memory, watch for processes, hased window titles, generic thumbprints and memory pattern but they never (at least i dont know of any) ever ever analyze a players pattern) [edit: dont count that actions per minute system of SC2/HOTS/LOL - it's a completely different genere]

last but not least, taken the above example, we assumed one botter only uses one character.
now, make that 2.5 chars per bot on average => boom you got 145TB - multiply or divide that as you like

just my 2 cents

 

[WolfpackPB]

They don't necessarily require audit data so defined that it records all Navigation / Interaction within the game for all cases at all times. They already store plenty of data on each character by default; such as quests completed and completion time stamps. Basically anything to do with Achievements has to be stored in an easily accessible way.

Use these statistics to narrow down the reports to the most likely HB culprits, then start to run audits on those accounts. Take a sample of that Audit to actually analyze, we don't need to see what someone did for an 8 hour time period, maybe only 2 random 30 minute sections. Data cut down by that much would / could still highlight which Accounts have been using HB reliably while still being manageable. I also assume they spent more than a week pulling together all these flagged accounts into the Ban Bin to be hit with the Hammer. I would assume they have been doing this for many months.

I'm not saying what I'm suggesting is 100% the way Blizzard Banned via Wave but it's the type of method I think they used; maybe even hope because if not, and Honorbuddy is detected, we may see 6 Month bans on the regular and the slow death of HB and it's community.

Thanks for the well thought out response Roboto, you are correct, it would be a pain in the ass, but given enough time it is feasible and imo just as possible as putting malware on all our PCs or fooling the Bosslands team for the first time in 5 years or etc...

 

[inspektor]

Hi all, I'm a little puzzled. I would also like you got a letter this account World of Warcraft will be reactivated on November 13, 2015. However, if I try to go to this account, written This World of Warcraft account has been permanently closed and is no longer available for use. He wrote an application to the support, said wait November 13, and then open an inquiry.
All written that This World of Warcraft account has been permanently closed and is no longer available?

 

[tomcruise]

2. I don't think Honorbuddy was detected by it's injection into the WoW Process but rather some algorithm (movement or behavior) run against reported accounts over a large period of time, then a mass ban wave to scare people away from botting by pretending like they have some technical method of certain detection.

just stop with these dumb theories. bossland said like 2 weeks after the banwave it was detected via software and that blizzard must have slipped in some malware that beat their tripwire, which is why they took the next week or two to improve it. that there have been no further banwaves obviously invalidates your retarded theory because if they could detect people by patterns and nothing has been done to protect against it then there would have been subsequent ban waves, whereas steps were taken to reduce the chance of further software detections which explains why so far they have not been able to do it again. Please get a brain

 

[Madcatz]

Is it safe botting now?

LMFAO why would u ask that. its never safe bot at your own risk LOL this made my day ty

 

[WolfpackPB]

@inspektor If you are asking if your account will come back on the 13th, then yes you will. Most of us got e-mails for the 6 month ban but all of us have Permanent on our account pages. Blizzard just doesn't have a classification on their account management outside of 72 Hour / 3 day / Permanent.

just stop with these dumb theories. bossland said like 2 weeks after the banwave it was detected via software and that blizzard must have slipped in some malware that beat their tripwire, which is why they took the next week or two to improve it. that there have been no further banwaves obviously invalidates your retarded theory because if they could detect people by patterns and nothing has been done to protect against it then there would have been subsequent ban waves, whereas steps were taken to reduce the chance of further software detections which explains why so far they have not been able to do it again. Please get a brain

I never saw that, link please? Last i heard Bosslands did not know or were not going to reveal any discoveries they have made. Also, no need to be a jerk, you are only proving your own stupidity in a public forum by making posts with that sort of tone.

 

[inspektor]

@inspektor If you are asking if your account will come back on the 13th, then yes you will. Most of us got e-mails for the 6 month ban but all of us have Permanent on our account pages. Blizzard just doesn't have a classification on their account management outside of 72 Hour / 3 day / Permanent.

Thanks, you saved me from a nervous breakdown!)