The whole back and forth discussion on Warden, Detection and Law items made for some entertaining reading . However Warden policies ARE restricted hence you can't have access to how it actually works, there is no way of finding that out (nor should it be as it would be opening dev's the door to circumvent it) so if asrah is so gun ho on saying he positively knows the conclusion that can be made are the following (no particular order)
1.- He either is /was a former member of Blizz Dev staff or affiliated to a company that gave access to , and as such due to massive NDA"s he is not at liberty to openly say it (but he can simple state assessment one could be correct, which legally would not be a traceable breach of NDA).
2.- He has access to this so called educated information , be it restricted or not. (maybe due to same NDA's) and I would appreciate the sharing of those informational parts be it in PM or by providing good search criterias, I for one always give the benefit of the doubt to people. so would welcome any breadcrum he can provide so we can go educate ourselves as he has stated multiple times.
3.- It is a matter of fact that botting of any form (be it Questing, Farming or Combat routines = Cheating and considering that we may represent say 100K or less on a base of 10 Mill subscribers give or take) it is very well understandable that from a ROI and TCO of detection programs (be it manual automated or otherwise in between) is indeed not financially feasible as such, however!:
4,- I will contradict one thing from a technical perspective though; considering the heavy decline of subscriptions and the insane amount of servers they physically own it IS very much possible to create full logs of servers and have dedicated sniffers on those logs to purge it . (criterias beind 32bit, Click to walk and Frequency , these are simple statements that are easily run on flat files) So making an adamant statement about Blizz not being able to do log analysis not true.(again TCO/ROI for this is not up to me to consider but Blizz internally probably has)
5.- On existing repetitive botting things like Kicks, it is fairly easy to trace and ban based on item 4, these I totally get from Blizz perspective (the so called low hanging fruit) ; the puzzling thing is about things that are more complex to track like combat routines...but then again ...I did my research and a combat routine can do basically continuosly an above average amount of 'clicks' per minute, 10 sec interval, which then make it also easy to trace by Blizz. you look at combat logs ; and again witht he subscription decline they have plenty of hardware to run those logs ; and run a battle log algorithm to that effect too
6.- He has stated that he is undetectable, that is not true we all are one way or another because simply put, 32 bit plus click to move and the frequency of clicks to move is constant (yes I did analyze this myself!) hence simply this part of how we work with HB and any subprogramming thereof IS detectable (is it worth the hassle and effort? see above )
7.- He does enjoy responding repetitvely to trolls statements in same trolling fashion ; so before I get a reply please don;t tell me to educate myself !; tell me where and how to get your insight ; I align to some of your statements but I also concur with some of the responders with the same question ; give us intel on where to get it , or how to search for it to get to your level of education/understanding.
and to finalize; HB is a great aide to circumvent the endless grinding and questing ; but Bossland has stated it always, BOTTING IS ILEGAL; if you value your account don;t do it! and if that means you can't keep up with the pace well ....that means you probably have a life in reality ....and that is a good thing too! (even blizz states that)
To all in this thread I say; detectable or not, it does not matter!; if you value your account don;t do it, if you do and get caught don;t whine about it! new account or walk away ...Blizz will not condone it as it did in the past and that iIS A FACT!...Have a great 4th of july all.
#1 I have family that works for Blizzard and family that used to work for Blizzard. I cant exactly go and ask just anyone in Blizzard for information on Wardens functions/methods, but i CAN ask people who have made headway into hands on research. Thats where private server devs start to come in, as well as a couple of friends of mine who used to play WoW with me back in Cata.
#2 Ehh, if you hang around the right private server devs long enough youll learn things about (previous) versions of Warden. One pserver actually used Warden with version 5.0.4 Its not exactly difficult to find out basic information about how Warden works just reading private server forums for long enough. Pre WOD Warden (presuming theres been any changes since i believe 5.1, the last version that community managed to get Warden working as is), is pretty well understood. All you have to do is look for the information. In addition, various 335a servers were using Warden for a couple years. Obviously im not going to go linking to threads on other forums. Warden is part of the client, and its also a bunch of server side functions. Warden itself isnt a "program" in the traditional sense, i dont think. Yes, its a process, however theres more to Warden than that process in a task list.
3# No argument there
#4 Its possible yes, but still rather unlikely unless Blizzard wants or has dedicated at least a bloc to logging. Theres a metric fuckton of events per second on any given server. Id estimate in the hundreds of thousands per second, for high pop CRZ. Thats ALOT of CPU power taken up by logging, if the logs are close enough to real time to get any cut and dry evidence of bot-like movement, or strings of objectives. I dont think they do it, but i could be wrong. Even if they do i highly doubt they have real time logs. I suppose they could log only specific quests taken/done, general coordinate data, etc, to paint a picture. Its not like that wouldnt be pretty convincing to a reasonable person. Its just that the more concrete a case they want out of their logs, the more CPU its gonna take to make those logs. Sure they could only log for accounts that are flagged for possible cheating. That wouldnt take nearly as much CPU power, and may even be able to be done with overhead depending on the population count/realm activities/etc.
#5 Tied to #4, and yes, ive been thinking that its more likely that whatever logging/other form of information they work with points them to a conclusion of repetition and efficiency thats reasonably considered non human. Obviously botting in battlegrounds or for gathering results in less overall data to sift through to come to a conclusion. HB is a computer program, it does what its told to do. Theres inherently the weakness of being repetitive in the manner in which it completes tasks. Even minor nuances such as taking a different route to each node of your gathering route can tip the odds in favor of Blizzard thinking its a human behind the actions, not a bot.
#6 I didnt state that my botting activities are undetectable, i said HB the program isnt being reported to Blizzard as a detection of a cheat/bot/hack/whatever program. From what ive heard HB hooks into Direct X and issues commands to the client via Direct X. Same as your computer would send keystrokes to a game via SDL.
#7 Ehh, only thing i set out to prove was that the HB community, in general, isnt giving the dev team anything of value to work with. Before we as a community can pitch in any actual help, first we need to understand what were up against and how it all works. Thank you for responding with actual counterarguments instead of the same tired "its speculation cause everyone says so" approach.
Edit: Interesting note.
15 B. WHEN THE GAME IS RUNNING, BLIZZARD MAY OBTAIN CERTAIN IDENTIFICATION INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR COMPUTER, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR HARD DRIVES, CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT, IP ADDRESS(ES) AND OPERATING SYSTEM(S), FOR PURPOSES OF IMPROVING THE GAME AND/OR THE SERVICE, AND TO POLICE AND ENFORCE THE PROVISIONS OF ANY BLIZZARD AGREEMENT.
Completely unenforceable in any US court of law. Theres no guideline of what "purposes of improving the game and/or the service" are. Thats not legal grounds in Blizzards favor, it puts the consumer at an unfair disadvantage if Blizzard were to actually utilize that clause.
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