Boom, headshot. 7/14 TODAY

[zonpan2lol]

So yeah, 7 gatherers gone a few minutes ago. All were using gb2 for no more than 4 hours a day. 100% Random hotspots with a private method, didn't seem to matter. US Region.

I will edit and provide more details when I'm home. Just warning peeps

This is the email template I got:

***NOTICE OF LICENSE TERMINATION***

Account: WOW1
Offense: Use of Bots or Third-Party Automation Software

Here's the Ban template you people consider so important:

1)Were you using Honorbuddy, Gatherbuddy or both on the account?
Gatherbuddy

2)If so, when was the last time?:
Yesterday, until 8-10 p.m. US time

3)What profile were you using?:
Private random generated profiles with custom profile loader

4)What combat class were you using? if None Just put Default then the Classname:
Singular, FightThisWay

5)What plugins are you using?:
ImpNav, Blacklister, Gankoff

6)How many hours per day did you bot for?:
2-4 hours normally per account, 6 hours maximum. Different timers.

6.5)What honest percentage of time did you supervise your bot?
90% of the time, I use two monitors, I watch them constantly for stucks, deaths, etc. I never turn them on if I'm not home.

7)How many auctions per day did you have?:
None, the mats were sent to crafters and then to AH bot.

8)Did you Use Any Other Bots, Hacks, or Mods?
I use a private program to generate random profiles and load them.

9)Was your account involved in gold selling?
None of them.

10)EU or US realm?
US

11)Is the banned account a Scroll of Resurrection or an actual paid account?
All paid to MoP (6) except one which was Battle Chest

Okay, I woke up today, during class I received 10 emails and I knew something was up. All were from Blizzard, my heart stopped.
7 of these mails said my accounts had been closed. As I said before, all of these were gatherers. No crafters / AH bots were touched.

As for the method I was using: It was GB2 botbase, however, I didn't use anything public. All my base profiles were made by me. We then developed a software that picked an amount of hotspots and an amount of profiles to generate. These were then rotated by a plugin during the bot session. Also, zones were changed every 20 to 60 minutes. The pathing was 100% random, no routes followed, just jumping from point to point.

Additionally, they banned my Paypal account from Battle.net. That means, I am no longer able to purchase anything from Blizzard with my paypal account.

My conclussions:

After botting for year and half, I am now able to reach the conclussion that there is in fact something wrong with GatherBuddy. Either that or Blizzard are just the most gigantic deuces ever. It isn't LCP that's banning people, it has to be something else. I had a flawless method to defeat LCP detection, yet I still got banned.

I believe it's the way GatherBuddy approaches nodes and goes from point to point in a straight line. The path from point to node is the worst, and the path from point to point is the best. Probably an awful combination, it should be the other way around.

I'm not paranoid, maybe I made mistakes, maybe not. If it was an IP ban then my AH bot and crafters would be banned right now, so it wasn't. My instance farmer is also active right now so it isn't that either. Guy leveling with Kick's profiles is also untouched. So..........

I am absolutely sure it's GatherBuddy that triggers something in their systems.

 

[Exploiter]

Just like i said in my old posts, random hot-spots will not prevent you from getting banned so everyone who have same experience like me, please post on forum so people can stop asking from developers to implement randomization and other things that do not cause bans and are only slowing down devs in creating something that can really help us to bot at least little safer.

 

[zonpan2lol]

Initial post has been updated with more details and analysis, flame ahead.

 

[zonpan2lol]

All under the same IP?

GMs may have been looking at your characters under the same IP, did a few ports and then banned. We'll never find out, because you were away, and not watching it anyway.

.... Are you stupid or do you just not read?

 

[theclash150]

.... Are you stupid or do you just not read?

Momma always said stupid is as stupid does.

 

[zonpan2lol]

Oops, yea, skipped that too soon. Well you probably deserved it anyway.

You probably meant flawed.

I'm done with you, failed smartass. Next time set up the troll post better.

 

[starl1te]

the paypal ban is pretty strange, never hear of that. did you dispute anything?

As for GB2... it's not a big mystery. the whole idea of "don't use public profiles, make sure to do LFR and chat in guild, change zones, different IPs, change your MAC blah blah blah" is a joke. *EVERYONE* can get banned with gatherbuddy, doesn't make any difference what profile or anything else.

It's very simple for blizzard: very very few human players gather herbs and ore *every single day*. even for 4 hours. It's trivial for them to simply tag everyone that does do it over some threshold. Now this is in ADDITION to all kinds of other ways to get tagged: player reports, running for 20 hours straight, etc.

Then they analyze everyone so tagged, and probably finalize the analysis for those selected by a human GM. could be any vulnerability that gives it away, sure as hell it's not just click to move and using the same waypoints. maybe its the way the bot mounts/dismounts, or loots, or turns, who knows. something they have in their server side logs, it's not like they are observing the bots live. point is, out of all the many thousands busy gatherers they tag... they can somehow exclude the human players and positively ID the bots. mind you it's not just GB2 - there are a dozen bots and they all get banned too.

 

[zonpan2lol]

Heres what I THINK MAY have happened. And im only going to assume for now and you can maybe fill in the details when you get a chance.

Were all those profiles you were using, were you using them constantly? Like you have 6 farmers right? So do you have all 6 just share those profiles with each other?
Also, are you running all those bots under a same IP and MAC address? Its possible that Blizzard is *****ing down on obvious botters IE maybe they just have a way to find that "hey this guy is running 6 WoW's from 1 IP/MAC" is definitely obvious. Also, you right when you say that the BOT is way to obvious when it comes to farming the ores/herbs and really, all it takes is ONE GM to simply inspect you and they KNOW what a bot looks like so thats also possible. A GM just came on and seen all your 6 accounts botting. Its really hard to say.

One thing for sure though and im not saying this to be like "omgtroll im still running and no bans" but ive been farming very very casually for quite sometime now but im using Robots random profiles changing every 30 minutes. I run 1 account so my chances are slim to get caught but it definitely has something to do when your running multiple accounts to farm with. Not only that the sale they are recently having explains everything.

To answer your questions:

1. I had an unlimited number of profiles which were re-generated repeatedly every 20-60 minutes (automated). I had a list of 500 hotspots per zone, the program picked a certain amount of hotspots and made a specified amount of profiles. These profiles were loaded into GatherBuddy every 3 to 5 minutes with a plugin. In addition, the program picked a new zone (In pandaria) every time it generated new profiles.
Long story short, every profile was completely different, with different and randomized hotspots. The route was 99.999% random, in fact, there was no route.

2. Yes, all of these bots are ran under the same IP and MAC address. However, so are the crafters, grinders and auctioneers. They only banned the GB bots.

3. I just wanted to point out, with no offense to anyone, that my method is theorically significantly better (in terms of randomization) than Roboto's.

the paypal ban is pretty strange, never hear of that. did you dispute anything?

As for GB2... it's not a big mystery. the whole idea of "don't use public profiles, make sure to do LFR and chat in guild, change zones, different IPs, change your MAC blah blah blah" is a joke. *EVERYONE* can get banned with gatherbuddy, doesn't make any difference what profile or anything else.

It's very simple for blizzard: very very few human players gather herbs and ore *every single day*. even for 4 hours. It's trivial for them to simply tag everyone that does do it over some threshold. Now this is in ADDITION to all kinds of other ways to get tagged: player reports, running for 20 hours straight, etc.

Then they analyze everyone so tagged, and probably finalize the analysis for those selected by a human GM. could be any vulnerability that gives it away, sure as hell it's not just click to move and using the same waypoints. maybe its the way the bot mounts/dismounts, or loots, or turns, who knows. something they have in their server side logs, it's not like they are observing the bots live. point is, out of all the many thousands busy gatherers they tag... they can somehow exclude the human players and positively ID the bots. mind you it's not just GB2 - there are a dozen bots and they all get banned too.

Thank you for your input. With my experience in botting I am able to identify a botter immediately and it's pretty easy. Even if they are monitoring their characters, it's still pretty easy to know who's using a bot and who isn't. And I agree that gathering for 4 hours a day is still a dangerous move since a regular player wouldn't do it. I also am not sure if they put a GM on the task to watch you manually or just have a system that reads logs.

I read a Blue post last night from Zharym (US forums) saying that identifying an offender (in this case he was referring to LFR trolls) is not an easy task since they have to go through logs, read the code and interpret it to finally achieve a conclussion. He described this as a rather very difficult task for a GM, with a lot of time required. I imagine this can be extrapolated to Gathering, although I have no idea what their logs look like. They found 7 of my bots, and a lot of other people's too. Judging by the GM's post, I would think it's easier to identify a bot by just watching it play as soon as it logs on (assuming something flagged the character for investigation).

That's my theory so far.

Edit: Here's the forum post: Blizzard says it's ok to be a jerk - Forums - World of Warcraft

 

[jordi1104]

Quite a few people use roboto's plugin or other randomization and not all of them have been banned it's for lowering automatic detection chances.

Becouse there are tons of ways to get banned nobody knows for sure what triggered it.


Another question were the other accounts that weren't banned online during the period you got banned in could explain why they're left untouched?

And otherwise it's harder for a gm to ban for shuffling and things like that I think if you only use it a few hours a day becouse gb2 is very botlike and shuffling isn't as much.

How long did the accounts last from beginning to end?

 

[zonpan2lol]

Quite a few people use roboto's plugin or other randomization and not all of them have been banned it's for lowering automatic detection chances.

Becouse there are tons of ways to get banned nobody knows for sure what triggered it.


Another question were the other accounts that weren't banned online during the period you got banned in could explain why they're left untouched?

And otherwise it's harder for a gm to ban for shuffling and things like that I think if you only use it a few hours a day becouse gb2 is very botlike and shuffling isn't as much.

How long did the accounts last from beginning to end?

1. All of the accounts were online in the period of time yesterday. The bans were issued today, when NONE of them was online. With none I mean not a single account in my possession.

2. Yeah I guess shuffling is safer but still, pisses me off because now I'll have to buy from kids in trade chat and that isn't automated.

3. Hmm, 3 of them lasted for 2 and a half months. Other three for about a month, maybe less. The Battle Chest for a month and a half.

 

[loves2bot]

Wow. 6 bots. That means you are 5X more likely to get caught botting than i am using my single questbot. Here's what I've realized in my very short time botting. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT BLIZZARDS DETECTION METHOD IS.

So you did your due diligence and lets say you have LCP detection fooled (probably not, but let's say you do). What you don't have fooled are the legit farmers running around from node to node by hand not getting any nodes because your SIX bots are eating everything. That person either knows for a fact you're a bot, or maybe they just suspect you. No problem. Doesn't hurt them at all to click report you. Only takes 1 sec.

Now back to the fact that NO ONE KNOW WHAT BLIZZARDS DETECTION METHOD IS. The two popular ideas I see kicked around is local process/memory scan or some server side detection. How it's done doesn't really matter. What I believe is going on, and this is just conjecture, is that when you are click-reported, that either generates an automatic process/memory scan or a lil window pops up on a GM's screen saying go check this guy out. Either way you are now on blizzards radar. I imagine you were reported and Blizz decided to check a little deeper. They saw there were 6(SIX!!!) gathering bots running from the same IP and decided to chop your head off. I think that *most* people running 6 bots from 1 IP are botters and i'm pretty sure blizz know this also.

The fact that they blocked your pay-pal tells me this was not some ploy for them the generate more money by forcing you into buying 6 new accounts, but they in FACT want you gone from WOW forever. They have decided you are not a player at all, but a gold farmer and are better off without your money.

 

[jordi1104]

I read about the paypal ban this means this wasn't fully automated but they really took the time to make sure you cannot buy any more accounts with that paypal.

Change your ip address mac address and battle.net and payment method for the future.

2.5 months is pretty long let me explain if I get catched by an automated script it takes around 1 week for a ban for me atleast so they would've banned you much sooner if it was lcp tbh.

 

[zonpan2lol]

I read about the paypal ban this means this wasn't fully automated but they really took the time to make sure you cannot buy any more accounts with that paypal.

Change your ip address mac address and battle.net and payment method for the future.

2.5 months is pretty long let me explain if I get catched by an automated script it takes around 1 week for a ban for me atleast so they would've banned you much sooner if it was lcp tbh.

I forgot to mention these 3 accounts had been banned twice in the past. The first was really dumb, I used a public 1-600 profile. The second one I was in doubt, but this third made me sure.
The other accounts had never been banned before though.

 

[zonpan2lol]

The fact that they blocked your pay-pal tells me this was not some ploy for them the generate more money by forcing you into buying 6 new accounts, but they in FACT want you gone from WOW forever. They have decided you are not a player at all, but a gold farmer and are better off without your money.

That's so mean I feel bad now

 

[zonpan2lol]

Coming back only to say that I appealed all 7 accounts.

All of the appeals got rejected (twice).

On a side note, also made a paypal dispute for the game-time I paid for the day before my accounts were closed.

 

[huntersmoon]

Im convinced after reading the past few ban threads GB is detectable in some way - must be something the bot does that triggers a flag.

 

[dc2lol]

.... Are you stupid or do you just not read?

I literally spit my coffee all over my screen reading that, and laughed until I threw up. GG