Blizzard Loves Botters

[eZsp]

Hi everyone,

Here is a link to an article that I thought was interesting. Although it is somewhat old, the author discusses an unorthodox view regarding the 'Warden' software and some thoughts about Blizzard's unusual (and most uncertain) stance towards botters and hackers. Be warey that I am not claiming ownership over this article or any of the authors views. I just merely thought it was a good read and wanted to share!

Blizzard Loves Botters | Digital Castration

Peace and love.

 

[CodenameG]

FTA: tl;dr; Warden is an ineffective anti-cheating method by design and is employed as a means to reap profit.

​yep thats what i would say. scare tactics.

 

[eZsp]

FTA: tl;dr; Warden is an ineffective anti-cheating method by design and is employed as a means to reap profit.

​yep thats what i would say. scare tactics.

Indeed. I definitely agree. I also found this quite suspicious (and funny if true):

Coincidentally, Warden 2.0 was released on June 23, 2010 in the middle of the quarter when their profits were the lowest they've seen in 21 months.

There was a huge BLITZ on banning accounts, Blizzard got some good PR and gave the impression that they're making WoW safer for players and stopping hacks, but nothing has really changed at all. Banned players have re-activated their accounts and Blizzard received a massive spike in profits from the "returning players."

Hidden agenda perhaps?

 

[mephuser1000]

FTA: tl;dr; Warden is an ineffective anti-cheating method by design and is employed as a means to reap profit.

​yep thats what i would say. scare tactics.

I would agree with you. Warden is like a legitimate way for Blizzard to make you buy another set of CDKeys when they ban your current set due to "Warden positives".

 

[HBfanboy1980]

BUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA GOOD F'In ARTICLE LOL.

 

[Obliv]

I doubt they have the resources (or care) to do so. I'm sure they actively use Warden, even if only to gain information so they can do massive ban waves. If I ran a company where the main game I have accounts for 90% of my revenue, is 8 years old, and losing subscribers; you better believe I'd be shifting my focus to find something new. I'd be using what I learned on the old project to make sure the new project got it right, including Warden. I honestly think it's just a shift of focus. Plus they have other avenues, such as going directly after the company in charge of the bot and getting them shut down.

"Revenues associated with the World of Warcraft franchises accounted for 90% of Blizzard's consolidated net revenue during the year ended December 31, 2011, respectively." - Reuters

"I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible." - Blue Post

 

[CodenameG]

I would agree with you. Warden is like a legitimate way for Blizzard to make you buy another set of CDKeys when they ban your current set due to "Warden positives".

besides the fact that it isn't working and isn't effective, our product has never had a ban wave from positive warden detection. yea it worked for other products, but if the goal was to get ALL botters and cheaters in that goal they failed. the only thing they did that has been effective, and i use effective VERY loosely, is server side statistics and detection, the problem is that with this there has been a huge cost for them in terms of servers (i wouldn't doubt that the extra cost to the servers to log that information costs more then they put into warden 2) the downside has been that they are catching NORMAL players, so in that respect, they AGAIN failed.

if it comes down to revenue, here is the problem, yes we buy copies of the game, probably more then people who legitimately multi-box, but in terms of what we do to the in game environment (annoying players, server loads from more then average activity, ect.) overall we put a lot of costs back on to blizzard. there's them paying more Gm's to handle botters and player report from botter related incidents (botters reporting other botters), to paying programmers to come up with technology's like warden, paying lawyers to fly and knock on bosslands door. that's just a few examples. but im willing to bet we cost them a lot of money, probably more then they gain.

in the end we just dont know, they keep their numbers so secret, but think about it, they have 10.3 milll subscribers. lets call it 10mill even. there are 600,000 registered users on the board. that means that 6% of their subscriber base are botters. the battle chest on amazon is going for roughly $20, and the catclysm is on sale for $17 right now, so lets say you went out to retail to buy them maybe on sale maybe not. overall lets call it $40 for your expansion. $2,400,000 thats 2 mill just in game sales. im willing to bet thier costs are more then that. yes i could go into more, but whats the point, you get the picture. not only that but there are 16k people on the fourm right now, so thats like 2.6% not the 6% i used an example.

i guess what im saying is, blizzard doesn't like botters and they just suck at dealing with them.

 

[kaiwho]

Hi everyone,

Here is a link to an article that I thought was interesting. Although it is somewhat old, the author discusses an unorthodox view regarding the 'Warden' software and some thoughts about Blizzard's unusual (and most uncertain) stance towards botters and hackers. Be warey that I am not claiming ownership over this article or any of the authors views. I just merely thought it was a good read and wanted to share!

Blizzard Loves Botters | Digital Castration

Peace and love.

Very interesting, thanks for the post!

 

[Toopsyy]

That was interesting...

 

[Tiama]

Download SysInternal's Process Viewer to check out what Warden does. Warden also employs a new root kit, so a lot of it's activities are hidden. There was also an application called "The Governor" back in the day, but it didn't capture everything (some activities hidden) and it's pretty old now so I don't know it's up-to-date.

Argh! That's just not true. A root kit means to modify either the mainboards programming or the operating system files and that's a very severe copyright violation. The last corporation who tried that was Sony and they were sued by Microsoft and Sony lost (actually it was settled out of court). The same would happen with Blizzard.
By the Way Sysinternals was bought by Micosoft.

 

[Vimse2009]

I doubt they have the resources (or care) to do so. I'm sure they actively use Warden, even if only to gain information so they can do massive ban waves. If I ran a company where the main game I have accounts for 90% of my revenue, is 8 years old, and losing subscribers; you better believe I'd be shifting my focus to find something new. I'd be using what I learned on the old project to make sure the new project got it right, including Warden. I honestly think it's just a shift of focus. Plus they have other avenues, such as going directly after the company in charge of the bot and getting them shut down.

"Revenues associated with the World of Warcraft franchises accounted for 90% of Blizzard's consolidated net revenue during the year ended December 31, 2011, respectively." - Reuters

"I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible." - Blue Post

Actually the tactic of "milking the cow dry" instead of shifting focus is a known tactic by game license holders to get everything out of the money eh game they can, ive seen it crash smaller game comunities hard . and its not like blizzard is known for being modest with their money profits, second thing beliving what blizzard is saying to the press is like beliving EA when they say they arent greedy and btw they just won the Golden poo award ..

 

[brainAbuddy]

To be clear:

- Blizzard does NOT ban by IP Address (they know if it's static).
- Blizzard does NOT ban by MAC Address (very easy to do, highly effective).
- Blizzard does NOT ban by user name, address, credit card information or any other unique info.

w00t !

 

[Jianyu]

Banning an account every once in a while will (in most cases) result in the purchase of another complete expansion set and yet again a subscription.