Wrong, if you read the ban posts more carefully they ban bots that ARE RUNNING during the scan and are kicked out of bnet after being banned. As it has been said thousand times it is not DB detection, but it is bot behaviour scipt they use.
The way I see it (and that's just a wild assumption)
1. Blizzard sees botting as a virus and use anti-virus script to get it.
2. Script cannot see the virus by its characteristics /DB is not detectable by Warden/
3. Scipt works by behaviouristic analysis as it follows:
3.1 Checking the database for ONLINE players either with: a) 100m gold achievements, b) total time played, c) total up-time for the past few days
3.2 IF a player is ONLINE and meets any of the mentioned above, the script: a) notifies a LIVING EMPLOYEE that does further investigation, checks what the character is currently running, its moves & coordinates, game creation, anything that tells it's an automated program and not a real player; or b) the script goes in another mode and starts screening for the above "signs" of automation.
3.3 The blizzard script "screens" the account online session for xx time and based on the observations determines if it is a real player or a bot and then eventually bans.
And honestly what living creature would do Sark runs for even 1 hour with the same game create delay, not even with 2 min pause for a piss or a smoke? That yells "botting" and even if there is a chance for errors, it wouldn't be more than 1% which I'm sure they are ok to take it.
I have botted since early d2 days, when d2jsp came out, so I guess you could say im somewhat of a veteran? I'm not one who typically goes off speculation or sky is falling posts, but I agree with this almost 100%, for a few reasons:
A-You can see EU has been hit by this. Sure, some people that got banned probably did other things like sell to Chinese IPs, but there are some who claim they haven't used any other bot / hack / sold any gold.
B- AH bans from Auto-it based bots. Again, sure you could claim the constant querying was the main result of this, but I think there is more to it than that.
C-I'm not sure how many of you have botted wow on a mass scale within the past year or so, but at my peak i was doing 10-15 accounts at once. Before i got completely out of it, at random (outside of any other mass banwaves), i'd have 10+ accounts banned instantly at once. After appealing, i'd get all but
ONE of those accounts back. I always botted in random, low pop areas, never did 24/7, and mostly gathering type profiles in which i spent most of my time in the air. These bans, lead me to believe that there was some logging going on in which they set some threshold that'd flag accounts. IE: Collecting 500x nodes within 24 hour period. Once your account was flagged, they'd manually have a person do a review of the account. If it looked like it was botted, they would then look at something that tied all accounts together (IP, some hardware id, whatever) and banned the other ones as well.
After 4-5 of those big *individual* mass bans, i eventually gave up. The time needed to invest vs bans vs the price of gold just made it not profitable to bot anymore. I have had a few other "big" players confirm similar things happen to them as well (i was in this underground botting community for a while, where everyone had 10+ accounts that were botting at any given point). My assumption was this logging was partially triggered by the upcoming release of D3. They obviously knew how much d2 was botted, and they weren't able to do much about it (ya, bots got banned, but shit like mmobot (auto-it) would run weeks at a time without any fear of getting banned). They probably thought the next best thing to do would implement some sort of pattern detection to combat this.
Take this how you will, as i know many of you still refuse to ever even consider any sort of theory that Blizzard is doing anything but using warden / player reports to ban people. All i know is, i'm going to be working on my own form of randomized profiles.
