Is Honorbuddy compromised? Getting banned on a brand new account on the first day.

[RamGuy]

Greetings,


I'm starting to think Honorbuddy might actually be compromised. I've been using the bot for ages and I do know that it has featured a very solid anti-warden and whatnot capabilities to ensure that Blizzard can't detect the bot directly by any means. But as of late I'm starting to wonder is this is no longer the case.

I recently got all my six account's banned, they were all linked to various different Battle.Net accounts and didn't really have anything in common besides my external IP-address, but I guess Blizzard might be suspicious to accounts playing on the same IP, even though many people play from schools, dorms and whatnot that will often feature the same external IP for a bunch of people.


So I decide that heck, perhaps my heavy botting days has come to and end. So I decided to start up a fresh account, and only do botting 1-100 and only use it for combat routines and nothing else. No more AFK-botting, no more gold farming or anything. Lets just get a single level 100 character and play causally with Enyo to enjoy new content and new expansions and call it a day.

In order to make sure that my IP was not going to be flagged I turned-off my Internet modem for a few hours to make sure my ISP would drop it's IP-lease, thus giving me a new external-IP, which it did as I verified it afterwards. I also decides to play everything super safe so instead of creating a brand new World of Warcraft EU account, I decides to purchase everything from G2A in order to get a North American account instead of a European one, and I of course used a separate and completely new e-mail address along with a 60-day game card instead of my bank card so there was nothing linking this new account to any of my previous ones.


Everything was looking perfect so I created my new character, fired up Honorbuddy and started the levelling process using Singular and Kick's profiles and within 6-8 hours I got disconnected and my account received a permanent ban. Not a regular 72-hour ban, but a permanent one right of the bat. All I did was running Questing Bot, with Kick's profile, using Singular combat routine on my freshly created Blood Elf, Hunter. I was supervising the bot all the time, I might not have paid 100% attention all the time but I received no whispers, no nothing and it didn't really behave in any suspicious or "bottish" way during this period.



I've botted a whole lot over the years, I've had my very own 5-man botting team and I have botted every single class from level 1 to max on several occasions and I have never seen anything like this. How is it even possible to get permanently banned within such a short time-frame? Playing for 6-8 hour straight on a fresh account shouldn't really be anything suspicious and this was on a Friday which surely is one of the days with extended peak hours compared to Monday - Thursday. What gives?


Surely Blizzard need to have come up with some cleaver way to detect the use of Honorbuddy? How else would they be able to flag and permanently ban a fresh account within 6-8 hours of use? My previous accounts got banned due to me being naive and botting 24/7 for extended periods of time, another for farming BG's and my 5-man botting team for farming dungeons 24/7 for over 1,5 month so they were all quite obvious. But this time? I can't for the life of me figure how this is remotely possible unless Blizzard is capable of clearly flagging the use of Honorbuddy with the latest client in some way.

 

[tomcruise]

http://www.psychologistworld.com/superstition.php

coincidences happen all the time, they don't always mean something special

"Richard Feynman (a physicist) used to go up to people all the time and he'd say "You won't believe what happened to me today... you won't believe what happened to me" and people would say "What?" and he'd say "Absolutely nothing". Because we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special and significant."

 

[Nightcrawler12]

Do you actually have a dynamic IP?

Using Kicks? Using Singular? Fresh Account following the same patterns as literally every other hunter/whatever?

Been banned before so already on the watchlist?

HB hasn't been compromised; I've been botting maybe 16hrs a day for the past 2months doing everything from lvling to bg farming; read the forums mansies, there's a lot to learn

 

[chinajade]

Hi, Ramguy, and sorry for your loss.

What you describe can happen when a particular computer has been 'fingerprinted' (CPUID + DiskId + MAC addrs of primary adapter, etc.) and blacklisted by Bliz. New accounts on a blacklisted computer will be watched long enough to confirm misbehavior continues, and then the account is terminated. It usually takes some cleverness to work around this situation, if you want to keep using the same computer. Google is your friend in this regard. Modifying or masking these values is far, far beyond the reponsibilities of a bot.

You may also want to consider another questing profile alternative (or another way to level). It is not hard to do server-side fingerprinting of heavily-used profiles. The key is to 'switch things up'... not only from your normal usage pattern, but from the usage pattern of the currently popular activities of fellow botters also.

Alternatively, you may have suffered from simple misfortune. Perhaps, you were AFK and got reported for being stuck or ninja'ing a skinnable mob, or somesuch.

In short, there's no way to be certain. We obviously feel the client-side is not detected; otherwise, we would disable the bot to preserve accounts.

cheers,
chinajade

 

[RamGuy]

Do you actually have a dynamic IP?

Using Kicks? Using Singular? Fresh Account following the same patterns as literally every other hunter/whatever?

Been banned before so already on the watchlist?

HB hasn't been compromised; I've been botting maybe 16hrs a day for the past 2months doing everything from lvling to bg farming; read the forums mansies, there's a lot to learn

I don't know about how things work in other countries, but here pretty much all consumers have dynamic IP's from ISP's. You need to pay extra in order to get a static one, and as I stated above I did indeed confirm and verify that I received a new external IP, it's not that hard to verify.



Thanks for are your replies. I suppose using Kick's profiles is not considered the safest and smartest thing to do as that's pretty much the same as everyone else is using. I did not know that Blizzard can "fingerprint" your hardware, and I did not know that they kept these tracked between regions (EU/US) so that might have something to do with it.

I don't really have any smart ways to bypass this other than start using virtual machines within Hyper-V or VMWare, but performance especially graphics tends to be utterly shit within virtual machines so then I risk hiccups while running the bot due to performance issues and there is no way I would play using Enyo within a virtual machine as that would kill the experience on my end.

 

[Kmica]

I don't know about how things work in other countries, but here pretty much all consumers have dynamic IP's from ISP's. You need to pay extra in order to get a static one, and as I stated above I did indeed confirm and verify that I received a new external IP, it's not that hard to verify.

As chinajade said, your PC is 'fingerprinted' by other means => (CPUID + DiskId + MAC addrs of primary adapter, etc.) and not by your IP address.
U want to google how to change them (as most of them can be changed)...

Virtual machines arent the solution, changing the values above is. Including a complete new download of the WoW installation (i would make sure all keys are deleted from registry before new install).
For extra paranoid i would make a complete new windows install, after changing the values above.

 

[huntersmoon]

100% compromised. NSA published everything to Blizzard HQ. 100% of HB users have been banned. It's over.
Anyone still using the bot isn't actually a bot. Rather, They are ghosts in the matrix.

 

[klepp0906]

They call it detection, old news.

Were you around this past May? (Rhetorical)

I reckon when blizzard and their dwindling pop is dumb enough to do another banwave each and every one of us is already on the list.

One final note - are you using a x64 capable cpu and OS? Did you dabble with wow tokens on the account at all?

I feel ya. Never lost an account in my life and have played since pre beta. Since May I've lost 4. Hb isn't in a good place IMO. Blizzard is Special.

 

[rtm125]

dynamic IP's are not really as dynamic as you think. Even from major cable providers in the US they normally will only release your IP every couple of months. I know this from requesting my IP to be switched from them several times. The time to renew the IP on the main servers is an extremely long time. It is not like they are running out of new IP tables to generate or even close too. The only truley dynamic every time you connect internet anymore is dial up. You will pull a new IP every time you connect.

I also took a long break after the may wave and they got 3 accounts from me just in that sweep. Previous to that, I was botting one account after another and was getting them taken out over and over, exactly as you are describing. Alot of them not even making it to lvl cap. All doing random tasks to level, not grouped and so on. I finally just admitted my IP or something had to be blacklisted and gave up botting for about 1 year before attempting again. This time I waited 6 months.

Never ever ever ever get attached to a bot account, that day will come, one day and its better to expect every time you turn on your account then get upset over it.