of course its fear tactics! as far as them doing that to increase sales or whatever remains to be seen, we dont know what game they are playing or what plan they have in place. here the problem, anything we "hear" that blizzard is doing is just rumor, we can take very educated guesses, and rule out what we know and what we dont know. so heres a small list.
we know there is nothing going on in diablo 3 or warden that is making our bot detectable via software (there's no reason for them to play cat and mouse with us if that's the case they would ban everyone all at once even if you only launched the bot and never actually used it while diablo 3 was running.
we know they have some kind of software and logging going on, on their wow servers, since cataclysm, they added achievements and log things like gold, kills, deaths, that's a lot of information they have just stored about your character that can be used by some other software to decide "Ok, thats not a human" or like the bartender of a guy thats drinking "I think you've had enough pal" and trigger a suspension or a ban. (like diablo 3) legit human players get caught by this kind of monitoring. not to mention the stuff they are logging that we have no idea about.
we know that they tend to save up and make a list of accounts to be banned and will purge them all at the same time, (they've done this in wow for years) the fact that a they would do this in diablo 3 is not a surprise not only that but then you get a lot of people screaming banwave and then they get the bonus of people being unsure and doubting, and that's what they want.
Let's check this list together.
1. I agree, that if it was a special software to detect bot, the game would not started with bot on pc\started on. But we have several thousands of people banned in one day. I hope you agree, that they can't check manually everyone. Even of they had like 20-40 supporters on it. It is too much, even for prepared wave. So, they had used a marking system or something like that.
As example. I was working on several games (dunno you know em or not, but will try to explain). It's l2 and rf online. The bot mechanics in rf was like using special coordinates. Like +1000 on Y out of location. What we get from this - the bot would not get hited by mobs. But in logs all pickups and rest were on this coordinate. So, you just check, port on it and ban. Nice and easy.
On l2 bot was working same as hb\db. It was no special coordinates and gm tool sometimes found strange characters. But we didn't understood how in works and nc couldn't explain (yes, lol). So we were working on "eye". Hope you agree, that you can see see bot, who is moving on coordinates and legal character. I had 12 people on it and we could find only 30-50 bots\day.
2. I disagree with that, because achiev is good, but you have all info in game statystic (loot\mobs\bosses). It was before cata release.
3. Well, the main rule is fear. The louder people are screaming - the better wave was. (as example, several mounthes we didn't have any night-gms, but from time to time we did night raids to ban users after. It was really fun to read surprised posts in the morning).
But again, i am 70% shure, that they have changed their ban politics. I mean, that they were not active with banning single-bot users, but now even they are gone. And after this we should ask ourselves 2 questions.
1. Was it a single wave to make botters fear, to decrease overall paragon level, or it is a new poilics. I am pretty shure, that soon we will know about it - after people, who using bot only on main acc will start botting again. We need time for this.
2. How hard for Blizz anti-bot team to get the logs about illegal users again (mb they used some special info from DB servers with help of IT-department). And this was just a single event.
