This question isn't that stupid..cause indeed Blizzard "allows" botting...not in the meaning of "hey all you players out there feel free to bot". If Blizzard would really want to kill any possibility to bot they would
- remove "click to move"
I know that doesn't mean the end for bots as there are other ways of moving but sure it would instantly make some bots unusable.
- monitor / analyze player activities
But..they already do, don't they? No they do not! The only thing they do is logging
The meaning of logfiles
- IP
- last online time (just the date, no specifications of hours or something)
- last online location (coordinates)
- chat (whisper / say / trade / raid / bg / ....)
- trade ( just everything!)
- auction house trade (i put this separately as ah trade is logged but blizz doesn't interfere in ah tradings. *See example below)
This part is often misunderstood as people think:
Something is logged = results in any consequence
But that’s just wrong. Information being logged means nothing until someone looks at this information.
But if not - How are people being suspended / banned
They don't have any system / software or even a person that does logfile analyzing the whole day to check whether there are people that are online for more then x hours or something....until they have a reason to do that!
Most of the people are suspended or banned just because of other players reporting them.
A few years ago i bought gold from a vietnamese site..everything was fine...and 2 weeks later i lost my account(virus/trojan). I wrote a ticket..got everything back but then just another few days later i got contacted again by a gm. He told me that while investigating my account they found out, that i had traded gold with a player (vietnamese ip) and that i would get a 72hr suspension for buying gold) If i would not have written the ticket..there would not have been a suspension. As mentioned before...there has to be a reason for them, to check logfiles!
A few examples:
(some gm's react different and don't help you - but others do)
The logging of trade activities is kind of mysterious and i'm sure it will always be...but indeed like written above - everything is logged. It doesn't matter if you trade gold via ingame mail / face2face or anything else...it will be logged in any way.
You trade gold with a player face2face and he said give me 10k and you will get epic xyz. You give him the money and he says "lol thanks and runs away" -> you write a ticket, gm checks logs and you'll get your gold back.
You've got trojans, viruses and stuff like that on your pc and someone steals your password and transfers all your stuff (items, gold) to another char - a gm checks log and you'll get your stuff back.
AH trading, people often discuss about that, but in fact it doesn't matter if you sell 100 things via ah each day 1000 or 10000. Selling tons of shit every day is no reason for someone to be banned. As a bot user you think “i can’t put in thousands of herbs...this must be recognized” but remember, there are also people that make gold just with cheap buying and re-selling. Those people spend their time (almost the whole day) just with creating auctions...something like several thousand of parallel auctions is nothing unusual.
Online time
Same here, you can be online for 20 hours and perhaps be contacted by a gm...you don't response..he observes you for a while, watches your movement, spell using behaviour and decides to lock your account for further investigations...sure..but this could also happen after 1 hour of botting..
You can also stay online for several days without logging out one single minute (apart from 24h router disconnects) and nobody has your attention at all. It is not about how long you bot, whether 1, 2, 4, 8 or 20 hours a day...it's just a matter of luck some is reporting you or not. If you are botting smart and change your botting behave and spots regularly you won’t get any attention of other players. If you act smart, something like “i see this guy here every day and he is always just farming..must be a bot” will never happen.
There is no rule like “the more you bot = the higher the risk” NO!
It is just “botting = account risk”
Sure it matters where you bot and how. Botting in battlegrounds is a much higher risk then leveling a character somewhere.
What a big surprise - Blizzards best friend...
We - the bot users are the largest income for Blizard. As we all (the most) have several payed accounts. There are million bot/farm/hack accounts out there and they know exactly what they would lose if they would (try to) really take down every possibility of botting. People that do business with botting and get 20 accounts banned – just buy 20 new accounts. Sure sometimes they release press articles like "Several thousand accounts banned today" so that those who complain about bot users calm down, but in fact a few thousand accounts compared to several million is just < 1%, no one cares about that.
Just trash? No!
The things stated above (information about what’s being logged) are based on information i directly got by an blizzard employee which is (not only) responsible for server maintenance, especially for databases. I can not give you his name, as they are not allowed to give specific information on how things are handled and working in detail. All i can say is that i know him personally (for years now) and i trust him.
- dasoul
Good read, thanks for the information.
When you mean with "good read" that it was enternaining then ok, but I wouldn't call it informative because it's mostely outdated bullshit
that's just a very good example for a stupid post. If you disagree with something tell me what and we can discuss but this..sorry..just a flame.