kettlecorn - there were ban reports 16/7 and even 12/7 and 8-10/7. U made ok post, but forgot about one important thing. if 90% ppl do 24/7 what percentage of ban reports will have 24/7?
I agree with you, there were ban reports for less hours, I have said that already. But how do you know 90% of people are doing 24/7? I dont think that's the case. That means 9/10 people using demonbuddy and on this forum is going 24/7 and that percentage doesn't seem to be true. But who knows, there's no real answer to this.
If you think the bot doing 12 hour farming from x time to y time every day 5 days a week, is not just as easily tracked as botting 24/7. You used a lot more intellect writing your post then you should get credit for.
If you think that running a bot or playing a game for 24 hour/ 7 days a week looks human and won't be picked up by blizzard's antihacking rules and algorithms compared to 12 hour farms/5 days a week (YOUR example, not mine. also which is 100% what many gamer's habits look like), then maybe worrying about other people's intellect is a hindrance in your ability to employ common sense.
Blizzard flags accounts based on certain patterns and behaviors. Period. You don't need to listen to the interview with Markee Dragon and blizzard's antihacking team to know that. No company simply has enough manpower to human investigate everything. Computers have rule and algorithms and it was said from the horse's mouth that every mouse stroke, every key stroke, every conversation is recorded and logged. Don't misconstrue that has "being investigated". There are trillions if not more actions being logged everyday into a database. The KEY to finding botters and hackers for Blizzard is to filter based on various rules of violation and to do it WITHOUT banning legitimate players.
And the only way to be sure is to flag on various tiers, things that we know are already on their list. We don't know the details or exactly how, but things like game limit, 24/7 gameplay for extended periods of time, gold limits or too much gold in a very short time period, and whatever else people have suspected got them banned. Once the computer flags certain accounts for suspicious activity, only then can a human being go into it and investigate to make sure it's not a legit player or a nonissue. I'm sure they get a lot of those as well.
How do YOU think the process works? Cause from what I'm telling you this is based on common sense, business logic, and directly what's been evidenced and admitted by the antihack team. You think they just have 10000 workers sitting at multi-workstations inspecting random people's account, watching their moves and to see if they have weird movement and monitor their ACTUAL gameplay? Yeah right, if you think that's how it's done, that's analogous to thinking shoes are assembled by a team of elves on a conveyor belt. Business, corporations are different. Data and data analysis is the key here and that's not something I'm making up. The focus on anti hacking is nearly 100% on data and user behavior analysis. Only in the final stages it gets the privilege of the human touch.
So tell me does running ANY account for 24 hours 7 days a week sound like something you WOULDN'T put on a high tier flag list from Blizzard that will make it more LIKELY to get a future human investigation? And please read, MORE LIKELY. I never said guarantee. I know that if it was my job on the line at Blizzard, 24/7 gameplay is the first thing to be on the flag list with the highest rating. But I bet you even then there are too many of THOSE to weed through so yes, due to the large numbers of botters, hackers, exploiters, etc. versus the limit in manpower, it is "random". I don't believe Blizzard to be holding back anything in their ability to find and uproot botters except for the slight possibility of maintaining an economic or business finance reason.