My 2 Cents on Blizz HB and Bans

[culverMA]

Hello all,

Hopefully this thread wont get locked or deleted and maybe this is the wrong place for it but with recent events seems reasonable I put this here.

I have been following this recent "banwave" and certainly consider this to be more enlightening then the general ban posts by people who have been forum members for a month and suddenly they are banned. These bans are hitting top tier profile devs. They are not new to botting and seems way to coincidental that so many accounts belonging to so many devs are banned simultaneously.

I would like to posit a theory here that HB is detected. I know all the fanboys will be out swearing that if it was all would be banned, but lets just sit back a minute and think this through logically.

1. Botters pay for accounts. I would imagine that there are more botters with multiple accounts then non botters. Each of these making blizz 15 dollars a month.

2. Botters that are not participating in economy manipulation are relatively harmless to the WoW world. I imagine that most non botters do not give two shits about someone botting with the exception of AH and the Arena and Battleground stuff. I have almost never done any of that so I dont know much but when I looked at botting I watched some videos on youtube and many of them were people complaining and displaying how to spot a botter in a bg. AH obviously inteferes with the economy which WoW doesnt like however as a dev once explained to me if there were no botting going on the shit on AH would be so freaking expensive it really is a service to the normal players who dont want to pay 100G a stack for linen cloth or spend hours to grind it themselves.

3. This is an open forum. You dont have to prove your identity to join post read download or anything. There is really no way to keep Blizz from having someone just sitting back and watching the development of the profiles even participating.

4. HB doesnt care who buys and uses there bot. Again no way to know who is on the other end of the transaction. Could be a guy wants to bot could be Blizz.

5. Blizz makes a ton of cash and hires people who know what they are doing programming/networking all that.

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So taking these things into account if I were Blizz I would have at least a couple guys join the forum, buy HB keys and bot. Surely they can set up a closed server for their own personal experiments using the exact same offsets or whatever the public realms do. Then they can see what botting looks like and know for sure it's a bot because it's them doing it. They could also find markers in the way the bot works from the server side. Plus I would certainly imagine that their programmers are at least as good as HB's and no offense intended here but they are a huge corporation with plenty of money to throw at salaries for these guys. So these guys are seeing both sides of the equation what hb is doing how the servers respond to it and also they are in the forums and I would certainly assume that they are donating building rep even contributing to the development of these profiles.

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Now he is where all the fanboys come out and say if HB were detected then we all would be banned. Well my argument to that is botters contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscription fees and purchasing of wow accounts so why would they want to do that at all?? Now if I were blizz and of course Im just Joe Schmo here but if I were blizz I would say to myself hell these guys aren't so bad what are they really doing?? Now sure we can shut them all down easy flip a switch bam done. But thats a big hit to the bottom line. Seems like a better idea to just ban the really big problems, economy manipulation BG/Arena bots that type of stuff the ones that really piss off the non botting community. With Blizzcon coming up and a rumored expansion coming seems like the thing to do would be strike fear in the botting community hit the big devs. Thats gonna hurt profile development and strike fear into many botters keeping them a little lower key. Maybe not farming so long, staying away from BG's, stuff like that. Plus all those devs are gonna have to buy new accounts. Imagine that will help boost revenue too. So I just gotta think that A. It most likely is detected and B. They dont really care. It's in their best interest to monitor it, ban the really bad botters and every once in awhile, like new expansions, blizzcon, cheap battlechests, ban a bunch of bots. Looks good PR wise to the die hard wow non botters, like yeah we are cleaning the realms up for you guys, and yet they continue to have a very lucrative revenue stream from the botters.

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Now this is just my opinion and I am not a dev and no expert on any of this. I dont program and only have a vague understanding of how it works but I do know how finance works and no shareholder wants to hear you tell them that there shares are worth half as much because you decided to ban 25% of your customers from using your product. It may not be that severe but when you can make money why wouldn't you? Thats why they are in business to make money. I would say that if they did/could ban every single bot account that wouldn't satisfy or bring enough non botters back to the game to make up the loss in revenue. But as long as they keep a balance and show they are doing something to stop the problem then they continue to keep most of their customers who dont bot and they still get bot money.

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Oh and don't know if anyone noticed but Ceiling Fan Software the makers of Shadow Bot and Pocket Gnome recently lost a court battle with blizz over copyright infringement from there bots. I think the judgement came down on the 21st or thereabouts of October so little more then a week ago. Maybe means something maybe not. But I still and will always believe that they can and do know if you're botting and they just dont want to lose all the money from your subscriptions.

Bot with care or not but remember botting is like gambling never wager what you can't afford to lose.

Love to the Devs.

 

[Botanist]

Interesting.

 

[Mewly]

Interesting points made. I would have to agree. If I I was someone who made business decisions that affected the bottom line for Blizzard, I would definitely see no logic in getting rid of people who are either attempting to abuse the product or just using it to reduce their own time spent on the product (the amount payed remains the same).

I have always been of the opinion that leveling is such a dead and stupid part of the game. Most people know how to play. If they don't, then give them 5-10 levels to figure out the spells. People who can't just play a character and work out what everything does in 10 levels are not going to have much hope after 90. This is all wasted time doing a task that people like myself abhor. PVP is where it's at. Enough with the PVE and leveling!

I understand this would cause a flood of cap level characters, but that is where the game is mostly played at. So why try hold people back from enjoying the game? It has stopped me a few times from coming back to play simply because I would of had to level up once again.

 

[AtomX]

You know, I would have to say there may be a grain of truth behind this. My account that I actively raid on and level toons on is from 1.2 and has never been touched.

My farming accounts get hit all the time, and I don't try and hide them on *** or VB, they run right in windows. I've seen my farming toons across different servers get hit and my "Main" account that I actually play normally and bot to level never get touched.

 

[Ryzon]

Here's my 2cp on this discussion. Blizzard is only reactionary in regards to how many complaints their customer service is getting about bots. It seems to me like there's a cycle to this. When a new expansion comes out, there's a lot more people actually playing the game for the new content and all the complaints about bots dies down. Now that MoP is old hat, there's a ton more people running bots to level up their alts, so naturally it's more obvious and there's a lot more complaints. Once a certain threshold is reached in their forums for non-botting players cancelling subscriptions, they ***** down and ban accounts, file lawsuits, etc...

 

[BotOperator]

I have been following this recent "banwave" and certainly consider this to be more enlightening then the general ban posts by people who have been forum members for a month and suddenly they are banned. These bans are hitting top tier profile devs. They are not new to botting and seems way to coincidental that so many accounts belonging to so many devs are banned simultaneously.

I am happy you put "banwave" in quotes because there was no real banwave now for a long looooooong time

I would like to posit a theory here that HB is detected. I know all the fanboys will be out swearing that if it was all would be banned, but lets just sit back a minute and think this through logically.

I understand where you are coming from but would like to describe it differently. IF!!!, if Blizz wants they can easily setup detection methods for every bot on the market.
At the moment their bans are >90% based on other users reports or people overdraw things by 24/7 botting etc.
Blizz bans are more or less publicity to show "yes we do something against botters" but I do not see any reason why they should push harder than they do at the moment, because like you stated correctly: Every botter is minimum one more paying customer! With subscriber values going down they cannot afford loosing more customers.

1. Botters pay for accounts. I would imagine that there are more botters with multiple accounts then non botters. Each of these making blizz 15 dollars a month.

Not 100% correct. Most of the botters use accounts in china where the monthly fee is a lot lower. Blizz had to create an own chinese company in order to be allowed to make business there
and fees are set to a much lower rate due to the high amount of MMO competitors in that region.

2. Botters that are not participating in economy manipulation are relatively harmless to the WoW world. I imagine that most non botters do not give two shits about someone botting with the exception of AH and the Arena and Battleground stuff. I have almost never done any of that so I dont know much but when I looked at botting I watched some videos on youtube and many of them were people complaining and displaying how to spot a botter in a bg. AH obviously inteferes with the economy which WoW doesnt like however as a dev once explained to me if there were no botting going on the shit on AH would be so freaking expensive it really is a service to the normal players who dont want to pay 100G a stack for linen cloth or spend hours to grind it themselves.

100% agree. Economy "manipulation" is also done by people using TSM or auctioneer massively. I know people playing WoW as economy simulation and not as MMO. The only thing they do is move from post to bank and vice versa.
Excel and AH addons are their best friends. Bot is only used to do profession work like milling 1000 stacks of whatever. Can be done with macros and macro able hardware like Logitechs G510 too for example ^^

3. This is an open forum. You dont have to prove your identity to join post read download or anything. There is really no way to keep Blizz from having someone just sitting back and watching the development of the profiles even participating.

Do you like it this way or do you prefer a closed community?

4. HB doesnt care who buys and uses there bot. Again no way to know who is on the other end of the transaction. Could be a guy wants to bot could be Blizz.

Correct. For your security there is no match between your forum account and key/wow account and having a username here matching a wow char name does also not say anything.

5. Blizz makes a ton of cash and hires people who know what they are doing programming/networking all that.

I remember how they started and that on a maintenance day servers could be down for days. Blizz became better and better in regards of this.
MoP is far the best addon they ever released. There are tons of things to do and PVE/PVP or casual/pro gamers they all find things they like.

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Now this is just my opinion and I am not a dev and no expert on any of this. I dont program and only have a vague understanding of how it works but I do know how finance works and no shareholder wants to hear you tell them that there shares are worth half as much because you decided to ban 25% of your customers from using your product. It may not be that severe but when you can make money why wouldn't you? Thats why they are in business to make money. I would say that if they did/could ban every single bot account that wouldn't satisfy or bring enough non botters back to the game to make up the loss in revenue. But as long as they keep a balance and show they are doing something to stop the problem then they continue to keep most of their customers who dont bot and they still get bot money.

Stated that above.
I also know a lot of people only playing WoW because they can bot on a second account.
They farm raid mats for example to be able to play once a week with their guild.
Those are mainly adult people having a good job and a family so they have more money than time.
In order to be able to play with their mates on a raid day they bot from time to time to farm mats.
No harm to the economy, no gold selling or disturbing other gamers.
Would be stupid from Blizz do ban those people.
Botting is no crime and there might be good reasons to do so beside earning money or getting an unfair advantage.
For sure there are a lot of bot haters who have no clue and compare a bot with a cheat allowing to do things a normal player cannot do. This is wrong but some people will never understand or do not want to understand that

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Oh and don't know if anyone noticed but Ceiling Fan Software the makers of Shadow Bot and Pocket Gnome recently lost a court battle with blizz over copyright infringement from there bots. I think the judgement came down on the 21st or thereabouts of October so little more then a week ago. Maybe means something maybe not. But I still and will always believe that they can and do know if you're botting and they just dont want to lose all the money from your subscriptions.

Different law in each country. We monitor such things for sure but they have nothing to do with our case.

There is one point I really really do not understand.

People bot to farm mats, honor or whatever.
People bot to get gold and you can also get it on Ebay.
Why the hell does blizz not expand their own webshop? They sell mounts and pets there already but they could undercut each price of each chinese gold farmer or other company dealing with mats/services for wow.
For Blizz it's only a database entry.

So why not offering all the stuff people want for a lower rate? They earn more money and get control about that stuff because as long as there is a demand, there will be a company making things available.
Instead of banning people blizz could offer things on their own. Sooner or later this would mean other companies do not generate revenues with wow stuff anymore because they are always more expensive.
A lot of the botters which have more money than time would be gone instantly, only the ones botting because they like the technique or do not know how to play all their classes best on their own will stay.

Blizz can do a lot but they do not push hard enough and as you said, it would also make no sense to do so.
As long as WoW is not Free2Play and each botter is a paying customer I am sure it will stay like it is at the moment.

Regards
BotOp

 

[Giwin]

Keep in mind that I had a working TeleportDetector too, so I know If I got teleported I would have responded back.. leading me to believe that it was solely on player report as I believe they have reduced the amount needed for a ban.

 

[culverMA]

@botoperator You sir are a man after my own heart. Money is money is money is money. My bullet points were merely to set my belief of the way things as as far as I know. I neither agree with or disagree with them at all. Well thats not totally true. I very much agree with this being an open community and there being nor verification about someones identity. And truly even if you knew the person on the other end didn't work for blizz how would you ever know there intentions.

Also I just had this discussion with an rl friend of mine recently that I couldn't understand why they dont just sell the gold or mats or whatever. I can see maybe not wanting to sell all the mats and whatnot because that would basically make professions about worthless not totally. But at least to some extent you wouldn't be able to use your prof to make anything. However if they sold gold just like they do mounts then they would not really injure the economy because many people just like now wouldn't buy it because they can just earn it and it's more about the journey then the destination if you get my meaning. Sure tons of people would but that would really help the people who dont because if everyone has gold its worth less and stuff will cost more.

Coming from a guy with a wife two kids and another on the way with running my business and everything else I dont have time to play WoW like these High School kids do. I will never be able to devote the amount of time playing this game by hand that they do and be able to farm the mats or the drops like they can. I have maybe a couple hours a day at most to play and I dont want to be spending then flying from node to node for week after week just to be able to make the pots or flasks I need for the raid. Blizz needs to rethink the way they run WoW. They are down clients so why not open a real money store to buy gold. Boost that bottom line.

Anyways great work here at HB can be frustrating when a patch comes and you have to get updated but shit thats life sometimes stuff breaks and has to be fixed.

-"Without despair can we truly know joy."

 

[happyfriet]

Wall of text that was actually interesting enough to read it all through =)

 

[WaCk0]

Exactly my thoughts, I've had this idea for years as well.
Anyone is plain ignorant if they think this bot, or for that matter any other bot, is undetectable. A company like Blizzard has enough resources and knowledge in their possession.
When i run my bot i see enough stuff happening that could be flagged if Blizzard would want to find out who's botting, and my guess is they probably are.
My reasons for botting are plainly time and i like "cheating". Buying gold would cost me more then i lose at botting and getting banned on occasion (I haven't been banned for botting yet in all of my 3 years and still have HB lifetime, so it's extra cheap).

 

[Gqpies]

You raise some excellent points culverMA, thank you for sharing.

Ultimately you are spot-on ... Activision Blizzard, Inc is accountable to its shareholders. I have absolute confidence that they have some very talented and innovative developers there, without a shadow of a doubt they could do many things to prevent bots / cheats / exploits from working.

But it all comes down to "Return On Investment" (ROI), if they took a *****-team of senior software engineers off the product development solely to work on anti-cheating measures they would have to write-off the cost of their salaries ($120k-130k each), and then the revenue from all the bot subscriptions - hundreds of thousands, likely millions of dollars - all in the vain hope that "cleaning up" the game will make some players come back.

When you think about it, whole reason gold-farming/selling exists is because there is a demand for buying gold with real money. Much like in the real-world, the free market economy will eventually sort things out - matching demand with supply. Even in The Burning Crusade all the top-raiding guilds were kept afloat with food, flasks and pots from buying farmed gold.

Blizzard had an opportunity to meet this demand and provide a legitimate way to buy in-game gold with real money, but to this day they don't on some "purist" grounds ... and so the free market economy responded.

If they stopped botting overnight, not only would they loose all the bot subscriptions but the hardcore players that buy gold would all leave because they can't be bothered wasting their precious time grinding to buy mats. Then their share-price would plummet and their investors would be up in arms.

My take on the recent "banwave" is that there are two interesting patterns/correlation's,

1. Gatherbuddy - and it's simple waypoint navigation may be setting off alarm bells using some form of server-side bot detection algorithms, the actual banning may not be 100% automatic but it may flag you for review by a GM.

2. Combat Routines - even the most seasoned raider, or arena junkie won't interrupt *every* cast, *every* time. Human reaction time is generally never much faster than 100-200ms (several game frame-ticks). Bots on the other hand can detect and react within a single frame-tick. If I were Blizz another no-brainer server-side detection routine I would write is looking for a player that is consistently reacting / spell-casting within milliseconds of an action, faster than any human could do.

If I were Blizz ... I would essentially "give up" trying to do client-side bot/hack detection. The game client is running in a "hostile" environment you cannot control and bots/hacks will continually evolve to avoid all your client-side checks. If I really wanted to stamp-out botting I would put in place as many server-side bot detection techniques as I could think of, flag suspicious accounts for review by GM's and then selectively investigate connected/related accounts by IP history, billing information, etc. etc.

Doing this leaves the developers / users guessing as to why and how they were caught, at the same time the GM's can make a judgement call on whether or not to ban an account - taking into consideration what activity you've been doing - just questing / levelling? or, "manipulating the economy" and selling gold.

 

[face21]

jeez that is a lot of people with a lot to say.

 

[webhond]

a lot of people feeding blizzard as well, since thats what you are doing expressing like this and stating what you should and should not do.

Theres some valid points made, we dont know why people got banned now. Could be a wave from all reported tickets in the last weeks / month
or could be that they are scanning. Could be the interrupting, routine, framelock or whatever.

Gonna see if i can still log in. One thing is for sure. Laying low for a bit now. Normally my bot is on 24/7 if im playing. Will turn it on and off at least now
every time when going in and outside a rated one.