Analysis of the Ban Section forum from 2010 to date

[Gqpies]

Humans have an uncanny ability to find apparent "patterns" in things, even when it is complete nonsense. Prime examples are seeing faces in Clouds and a 'House that looks like Hitler'.

The same may be true for the current hype around the "banwave", so lets find something objective we can use to look at this better. Ok, how about we use the "Number of new threads in the Ban Section each Month" as a measure for how many people are talking about bans over time. It's not perfect, I am not counting the number of reported banned accounts, and some of the threads we count may be discussion and not ban-reports but it is better than nothing.

I wrote a little script to:

• fetch each page of threads from the Ban Section
• parse out the date each thread was created
• count up the number of new threads created for each date

Here are the results:

• the forums have been much busier in the past (February 2013 had 416 new threads)
• the average number of new threads each month is 98.97
• October 2013 was 'above average' with 147 threads
• so far this month there have been 48 new threads
• the most new threads (by date) was February 14th 2013 with 38 new threads (on valentines, lol)
• the average number of new threads each day is 4.96
• with the exception of yesterday (18 threads) November is around average on a daily number of new threads

Number of new threads in the Ban Section by month:



Number of new threads in the Ban Section by date:




While it feels like there is a "banwave" going on at the moment the numbers illustrate a different story.

I've published the Google Spreadsheet if you want to see the underlying data or use the charts interactively.

 

[razer]

haha, this is funny "banwave" no you forgot to include the stats of how many users are using HB. 1 million + maybe and with only 400 posts I find that too make your spreadsheet a flaw and pointless since it does not put too the fact of how many people use hb and how many people get banned.

 

[Gqpies]

haha, this is funny "banwave" no you forgot to include the stats of how many users are using HB. 1 million + maybe and with only 400 posts I find that too make your spreadsheet a flaw and pointless since it does not put too the fact of how many people use hb and how many people get banned.

razer, I spelled it out pretty clearly that I was just looking for a relative measure of activity in the Ban Section there are at least 140,000 members on this forum and I'm sure many more HB users that never discovered the forum as yet. Rather than trying to do a "finger in the air" calculation of how many accounts/players have been banned, it was easier to look at the number of threads talking about bans.

The point I was attempting to illustrate is that while activity on the forum right now may be "above average" it is not nearly as busy as it has been in the past. In my humble opinion the vast majority of bans are the usual PEBKAC.

 

[razer]

Its the forum, people can say all they was doing is using a CR but they was probably using BG bot as well, So really all in all its blizzard getting a team together too look at botters.

from blizzard

"Blizzard wants to look at more efficient and better ways of providing customer service for WoW. Efforts are being put towards improving the self-help opportunities so that there is less need for players to contact support."

So they are working on something, it wont say "removing botters from the game" because they want to tell people they already have them under control

 

[JMurray08]

Razer what are you talking about? Al he is saying is that people are freaking out thinking something huge is going on because of all the post in the forums. When in reality the forums are barely about average in posts. I agree with you that a lot of the people saying that they are only using CR are probably full of shit but that has nothing to do with this post. That Blizz quote is pretty far fetched to automatically think that means they are coming after botters more to me it looks they are trying to make their whole CS as automated as possible which in my opinion is great for us because we are well aware how oh so effective warden is.

 

[razer]

I say the more automotive they get, the more time they have to go for botters That way they don't have to deal with the peddy shit in the game.

 

[Suxxyduck]

• so far this month there have been 48 new threads

Do you mean this month? Because we are only 7 days into this month and 48 topics are pretty high for only one week.(And there are also some threads with 10+ people tells they're banned and they do not make an individual banned form, like me, but that's not important, your data is still good)

I'm pretty sure something is being done by blizzard, who obviously have a very professional programmer team focused on bringing botters down lately. And lets have some common sense here. Blizzard is a billion dollar company, even a gaming company specialized in programming. And what is bossland actually? There are barely 10 people working on it and some of them are freelancers too. I think it's not nonsense when I say, blizzard is on a crusade, and winning it.

Now you might try to find some ways to relax yourself and other botters, I respect that, you did very good on those charts. Really, brava. But...
I think bossland customers have to push harder on bossland employees, they should be bringing more updates.
TO HELL WITH THE UPDATES, they should bring some info, insight on things going on or whatever.
But they just keep calm and act like nothing's happening, because no money-making firm would like to see its customers leaving. Even when their product is no longer valid as it used to be.

 

[Aion]

Do you mean this month? Because we are only 7 days into this month and 48 topics are pretty high for only one week.(And there are also some threads with 10+ people tells they're banned and they do not make an individual banned form, like me, but that's not important, your data is still good)

I'm pretty sure something is being done by blizzard, who obviously have a very professional programmer team focused on bringing botters down lately. And lets have some common sense here. Blizzard is a billion dollar company, even a gaming company specialized in programming. And what is bossland actually? There are barely 10 people working on it and some of them are freelancers too. I think it's not nonsense when I say, blizzard is on a crusade, and winning it.

Now you might try to find some ways to relax yourself and other botters, I respect that, you did very good on those charts. Really, brava. But...
I think bossland customers have to push harder on bossland employees, they should be bringing more updates.
TO HELL WITH THE UPDATES, they should bring some info, insight on things going on or whatever.
But they just keep calm and act like nothing's happening, because no money-making firm would like to see its customers leaving. Even when their product is no longer valid as it used to be.

You still dodge to see the big picture. But you cannot, indeed, just like me, as any of the regular forum members and HB customers here.

There is 48 topics this week, make them even 100, out of the regular playerbase, using Honorbuddy, im sure its round to nothing. Few examples:

Just join a single BG, you will see 10-20bots running bgbuddy. And there are thousands of concurrent BGs running on, which stands for thousands of bgbots ran every minute, and most people run them for few hours daily, so u can multiply them with these resting offline.

The same apply with gather bots. Enter any popular MoP zone in random WoW server, and you can see 20+ bots running there for several hours, not counting again these "resting". And we have around 500 WoW servers in EU+US.

And thats only 2 of the botbases, not counting the popular questing, archeology or dungeonbuddy.

Now, we could safely assume we have thousands of bots running concurrently in every moment! And what are even a 100bots banned weekly, or daily? Dust in the wind ...

 

[whatcha413]

I am 100% positive Honorbuddy is Detectable.

I had 10 accounts. i run all 10 on 12 hour sessions. But i had 4 of them turned off that morning for some reason. and all 6 of the accounts i had logged in Got banned. the 4 that where not logged in did not get bans. The bots started there session only hour and a half prior to bans. So only Logical Explanation is they detected the Bot and banned the accounts logged in. the ban was also use of third part software not the normal Exploiting economy ban. I never sold gold on the 10 accounts.

 

[handnavi]

I am 100% positive Honorbuddy is Detectable.

I had 10 accounts. i run all 10 on 12 hour sessions. But i had 4 of them turned off that morning for some reason. and all 6 of the accounts i had logged in Got banned. the 4 that where not logged in did not get bans. The bots started there session only hour and a half prior to bans. So only Logical Explanation is they detected the Bot and banned the accounts logged in. the ban was also use of third part software not the normal Exploiting economy ban. I never sold gold on the 10 accounts.

I stopped reading after your second sentence. So you play 10 chars? Each 12 hours a day? At the same time?
Come on...

 

[whatcha413]

Simply explained. 10 accounts bot for 12 hours a day.

 

[tangledlight]

I don't think we have a full scale banwave on our hands. The HB forum, if not entire website, would be brought to it's knees by the amount of people flooding onto the site to find out what's going on.

Let's take a look at the graphs. The big spikes are the ban waves, with the last having been in February of this year. Prior to that, you may notice that there's an increase in activity starting somewhere in October, trending upwards in December and January, with the banwave happening in February.

Compare that information to what we're starting to see right now. Activity was at a low point in September - maybe Blizzard was in a slow slump before a hiring period of new GMs/investigation teams, maybe students weren't botting as much because they were focusing on studies. For October, we were kind of so-so, activity picked up mostly towards the end of the month and now November is trending to be more than previous months since May.

Taking the information from the previous two waves, both of which happened in February of their respective years, I am fairly confident that we are on the verge of another banwave in a couple months. I predict sometime late winter/early spring, we'll see the culmination of all of this activity.

The majority of the bans that you are seeing now is the result of data collection and an evolution of how they are identifying the bot.

Aside from Warden, Blizzard has another system that is involved in tracking trends, behaviors, and data comparison called Guardian. I believe many of the bans we are seeing within the past few weeks are the result of more dedicated updates to this system, particularly since the 5.4.1 patch. The accounts that are at the highest risk are, of course, anything popular that uses waypoints: GB2, BGBuddy, public Questing profiles, because many developments are being made lately on comparing data and pathing. Other accounts that are at risk are ones that have been banned before, which is why I suspect that we're seeing a trend towards Tyrael/Lazyraider bans. If you've been banned before, chances are it's flagged for either Guardian and/or GM monitoring, and that's why they're being picked up. While I don't believe that HB is immediately detectable, I do believe that it can be easy to discover that it's being used once you're being looked at.

If you're going to bot, bot smart. Don't bot on accounts that you care about losing, separate botting accounts away from main accounts, and use something to mask your IP such as V*P*Ns.

tl;dr, we're trending towards another banwave in late winter/early spring, so please take precautions.