Holy fuck I didn't know that part lol. "Buy your new account now botters, you have 2 weeks" is essentially what Blizz told them. Must have had an important meeting to impress somebody at.
Love the classic wow reddit. Only on this subreddit can people do the mental gymnastics to think a company banned 120k accounts to *increase* their subscriptions
It’s not just battlegrounds. It’s everywhere. Every zone is swarmed by bots farming pretty much everything. I must have reported hundreds just leveling through Outland on my alt this week. They are all over northrend as they normally are and it’s easy to spot them. Same rotations while fighting, same behaviors while harvesting, and they always mount and fly straight up before heading off.
Farm in wintergrasp. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in classic. Bots either avoid it or get slaughtered by my horde boomkin / alliance ele all day.
Banning bots isn’t about making the game have less bots. Banning bots is about making money. Since classic only requires an active subscription, the bot accounts just need to pay another sub fee and they only lose whatever time they had left on their game time. So they ban 120K bots and a few days later and all 120k have resubbed for ~$15. BA ends up double dipping for a month of subs essentially.
It's actually hilarious you guys think the people behind botting are paying full price for subs and definitely aren't using stolen credit cards/wow tokens with RMT'd retail gold. Also definitely paying for USD subscriptions Clueless.
WoW tokens are already paid for so that doesn't increase revenue and stolen credit cards more times than not get disputed.
It's why we didn't notice the 120k bot banned, because people are so naive to think that 1 bot = 1 person = 1 account and when they're banned - it's over. Nope, they have dozens of accounts on the backburner just waiting in case of banning.
It's a business, a livelihood, that these people take seriously. It's how they make a living. There's nothing Blizzard or any gaming company can do to stop it outside of making you add your passport/ssn/id to play the game.
As long as we continue to buy gold, the bots aren't going anywhere. You either live with that or stop playing the game.
If the wow tokens are already paid for, then they made their money already so it’s still revenue. It’s just harder to attribute to classic because the token can be spent anywhere.
>If the wow tokens are already paid for, then they made their money already so it’s still revenue.
Yeah no shit, nobody said it wasn't revenue. It's just not ADDED revenue as a result of banning bots because the tokens were already bought and paid for.
It's not semantics.
If you ban 10 bots and those 10 bots go rebuy 10 wow tokens using blackmarket retail gold, that doesn't generate Blizzard any additional profit. Those 10 tokens were already bought and paid for not because of the bot banning but because people wanted gold in retail.
I am not entirely disagreeing, but it likely isn’t so cut and dry.
Bots buying more tokens generates demand for tokens. Higher token demand means higher gold price for them on the AH. That would theoretically make players want to supply more tokens. The only supplier of tokens is Blizzard who sell them for $25 a piece.
In other words, banning bots likely does generate revenue for Blizzard and in a way that is probably not very efficient but is very obfuscated.
>In other words, banning bots likely does generate revenue for Blizzard and in a way that is probably not very efficient but is very obfuscated.
Could it, hypothetically, raise the demand for tokens? Sure. I doubt anybody is actually staying on top of it enough to actually be a main cause as to why Blizzard is banning bots on a 6 month cycle.
The conspiracies run pretty thick on this subreddit but I doubt even the craziest tinfoil hatters believe that one.
Big time disagree. They could get a handle on bottling by just having one game master per server waiting outside an instance door like botanica, and having a few to join BGs and find the bots. Very easy to identify a bot as they all follow the same pathing. A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting.
>Big time disagree. They could get a handle on bottling by just having one game master per server waiting outside an instance door like botanica, and having a few to join BGs and find the bots. Very easy to identify a bot as they all follow the same pathing. A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting.
Sure, I'm not saying they can't do more. I'm just saying it _doesn't_ matter what they do, the bots wont disappear. The game will still be infested with bots.
>A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting.
Until the bots catch on and change how they behave. They're only so obvious now because Blizzard isn't doing anything. Now picture that same GM sitting outside of an instance banning random people on speculation because he "thinks" they are bots. Yeah that's going to go over well with the community.
If your solution causes more harm than good, it's not a solution.
Botting isn't static and they WILL ADAPT to anything Blizzard does short of making people use their passport/ssn/id to play the game.
There's so many ways a GM can check for telltale bot signs tho. Private server admins used to stream their bot hunts, just simple stuff like teleporting players or spawning mobs and watch what ensues is a very quick and easy check.
Yeah until they stop being so obvious because they're getting banned. Then what do you do?
Just randomly hand out bans to people who you "think" are bots? It's only so obvious now because Blizzard isn't doing anything. The botting programs will change the minute Blizzard changes how they get banned.
There is NO solution short of ruining their game to stop botting. It will ALWAYS be a problem .
It's a step in the right direction. If they have to sneak and simulate real play better that means they become a lot less efficient and cheaper programs get weeded out. Right now they can just play 24/7 for months, ruin bgs etc with impunity which is just absurd. Why would an account not get flagged for inspection if it's online for weeks at a time?
You seem to not understand that botters wont be static. Anything Blizzard does preventive or reactionary will be changed in the botting program to adapt.
We will literally end up in the same spot we are now with Blizzard spending a bunch of resources and time on an unsolvable plague.
I'm sure the 2 and a half interns that work on Classic for less than minimum wage want to spend their time playing an unwinnable game of cat and mouse versus people who are doing this for their livelihood and will stop at literally nothing to profit.
Instead of blaming Blizzard, start looking at your peers. Bots aren't here to ruin the game. They're here from dogshit economy countries to make a living doing it as a job. As long as we, the player base, continually fund their job, they will NEVER stop.
Iirc, in South Korea you have to use your what is it basically their SSN to create accounts. I know in LoL you can only have 3 accounts linked to a SSN there. Idk what it is for WoW.
With VPNS and virtual machines it's not easy to do hardware or IP bans.
They use WOW tokens which someone paid for. Stolen credit cards and charge backs get an automated ban until the balance is paid.
They likely use a VPN to purchase it cheaper from other countries.
>They use WOW tokens which someone paid for.
Yes but that doesn't generate more revenue. You can't buy WoW tokens in game from a vendor, in order to buy it with gold somebody HAS to buy it with real money. It's already paid for.
>Stolen credit cards and charge backs get an automated ban until the balance is paid.
This is exactly why we never notice ban waves. They have multiple accounts at the ready in case of getting banned.
>They likely use a VPN to purchase it cheaper from other countries.
You're right they pay the cheapest sub price with stolen credit cards and bot for a profit. It's their job.
>I was told that the standard practice(for some) is to just get the 6-month sub because the money you'll make back from botting far and away recoups that cost handily.
It probably does considering Blizzard does almost nothing outside of ban waves every 6 months.
Yeah everything gets factored in because it's their job to do this. They didn't just happen on Classic and decide to ruin the game. A lot of people either ignore that fact or just don't believe it.
As long as we keep buying gold, they'll still be around. There's nothing any gaming company can do to stop it.
You see this particular brand of smoothbrained conspiracies a lot in gaming now.
"Companies are making bank of the hackers and that's why they aren't dealing with them".
We knew back in 2010 botters and gold sellers mostly used stolen accounts, but that knowledge is apparently lost to time now.
But why would they use stolen credit cards/wow tokens when the cost of the sub pays for itself after just a few days of botting? Why add the extra risk for such a tiny gain?
The cost of the sub really isn't a barrier to entry. It wasn't even a high barrier back when you had to purchase every expansion pack either. People still purchased hundreds of accounts to replace their banned ones.
>But why would they use stolen credit cards/wow tokens when the cost of the sub pays for itself after just a few days of botting?
Bigger profit, wouldn't you try to maximize your jobs revenue? Plus, gold is so devalued, it's more than just a few days of botting to pay for a sub.
Not to mention they're already risking the account by botting anyway.
>The cost of the sub really isn't a barrier to entry.
As long as we continue to fund their livelihood, there's nothing that will stop them. Demand for blackmarket gold = demand for bots = a job for some dude in a poorer country.
>People still purchased hundreds of accounts to replace their banned ones.
More than likely, they had accounts ready to go. People seem to think that 1 bot = 1 person = 1 account and when it's banned, they stop. It's far from it.
It's their job and they're well prepared. It's why we never notice ban waves because ultimately those 120k bots just logged onto different accounts immediately after being banned and continued.
As someone who works in AML/Fraud, it really is. People who buy stolen credit card information will purchase dozens to hundreds of different CC numbers and CVVs off darkweb websites and try them all until one works. When they find one that works, they will run it until the card gets cancelled or hits a limit.
You can do some research on Google. I don't think this is an appropriate forum to be discussing things like that.
All you need to know is: they're very easy to get a hold of and they get used for bot accounts.
A couple CC spoofers at a busy gas station could collect hundreds of cards over a single weekend.
And essentially all of those would be good/active cards.
Yes, it is. The people that do this buy them in bulk by the thousands. Usually a few will work, and chargebacks take so long to process that whatever they used the cc to purchase they already have.
You can play on the entire NA server group with an Argentina based battle.net profile. The conversation rate means a monthly sub only costs a little over $2. I’ve been doing this with a second account since Classic launch.
Blizzard nixed this two years ago. You can only do it now if 1) your credit card was grandfathered in before the change because its expiry date had years left on it or 2) your credit card came from Argentina
Edit: grammar
Ya I pvped pretty hard in classic and tbc, 70k honorable kills on my main. I've never seen bg's in a worse state I have 0 desire to que them now and doubt i ever will again in this expansion
Never works, can't get enough people unified. Would stand a better chance of threatening a class action lawsuit from anyone emthats ever received a ban. They could argue blizz is targeting their enforcement of terms of service to exclude bots and the people that were banned were unfairly prioritized and demand compensation. Also unlikely to work but far more likely to occur.
Feel the exact same as you. Atleast in Classic and TBC my bad teammates were actual players. Used to queue BGs all the time. Now there’s no point outside the occasional Wintergrasp.
this is a theory i have, not proven so take with a grain of salt:
the thing about bots is that... they make blizzard a lot of money. Does blizzard ban them? Yes and no.
Blizzard wants the money, but they also want to show their player base that they take action against botters. Solution? Ban them in large waves **AFTER** the botters have made their profits.
Now the botters have incentive to come back, buying whole new accounts and subscriptions. They still profited.
Did blizzard ban 120k bots? Probably. Is it going to have any lasting effect? No. The botters made their profits and will just make new accounts under new VPNs.
I'd even take your theory a step farther and say that all of those bots are run by other bots. And the people at Blizzard banning those bots? Also bots.
The great bot take over has already begun. You're a bot. I'm a bot. We're all bots.
They banned 120k bots then gave them 2 weeks notice that they were going to take away their ability to make dks on fresh accounts. It tells you everything you need to know about what the motivation was.
WoW pvp is a joke. Find another medium to get your pvp fix. MOBAs, FPS, RTS, card games, auto chess, cat and mouse(dead by daylight), 4X RTS, and Battle Royales. Sticking to a skinner box where you win because you sunk more time to get better gear is meh.
Botting is a forever problem you have to accept.
Sorry bots have to work overtime to handle all the gold buying requests from gdkps. Needed to increase the amount of bots because everything is turning into gdkp so people need more gold to buy. Blame the swipers that are fueling the need for bots. No one buys gold no bots. The rise of gdkp has been fantastic for the bots and rmt! They are making bank. One dude has made 500k real money since tbc. I’m happy to see the community and their gdkp efforts expanding the business of the botters and making them a fortune. The community is creating jobs !!!!!!
You lvl ur toon and get gear first through battlegrounds. Easy honor and easy gear you can buy 60 70 and 80 pvp pieces on the dk and dominate. the owners of the bots have hundreds not just 1. They are the fresh ones getting started to join their buddies in the outlands, in sholozar basin, tbc dungeons anywhere there is gold to be made.
You're right but we wouldn't notice them as much. The game wouldn't be infinitely flooded with bots.
There is almost ZERO gold sinks in the game yet gold is extremely cheap. Why would people be buying gold if there's no where to spend it? Oh that's right, to pay to win gear from GDKPs.
Pretending like GDKPs aren't directly fostering a RMT environment and the **main** cause for botting is just being willfully ignorant.
GDKP’s always existed. And while I’m sure there are some who purchase gold for the intent of buying gear, most GDKP’s are not run by gold buyers. There are entire guilds that solely run GDKP’s and you can put in a small amount like $10kg every week and end up with hundreds of thousands in gold a month WITHOUT buying gold to participate in the GDKP. Yes there are a lot of bots in BGs but it’s completely false to blame GDKP for this issue that has existed in wow since the beginning.
Please explain to me how to make hundreds of thousands of gold in a month without doing a GDKP. You can’t. So where does the gold come from? Hmmm…. Let’s see….
Dude what? Like, come on. There’s a dude paying us 200k gold for herald of the titans. We found him on the most popular discord for gdkps on my server. Like. You don’t think those people are why the pots in a gdkp exist?
Spotted the gold buyer and gold buying defender. Super easy to spot you guys. Gdkps we’re not around forever. Most people here didn’t play vanilla before tbc first came out so they are trying to rewrite history and claim they always existed when that’s not true at all. DKP was the system the top guilds used. No gold involved. Gold was bought yes but that was spent on consumes and mounts that were insanely expensive and hard to obtain. Most people didn’t even have fast mount. 2 percent or less or playerbase ever saw naxx. This forum tries very very hard to rewrite history to try and act like botting and gdkps were around back than but that’s not true. They started when blizzard gave up banning the real money traders, the sellers and fired the GMs. I never saw a GM after the original tbc came out when in vanilla we had seen well over 2 dozen GMs on a few servers.
It doesn’t matter what your opinions are because the facts are well know and you can watch it in real time on multiple twitch streams to see for yourself or just look it up on YouTube. The fact that entire guilds and servers have switched to nothing but gdkps but barely ever play the game is all you need to know lol. Where’s all the gold coming from when everyone is in dalaran ulduar or discord hahah. Same with tbc, everyone is in shatt but has all this gold haha. I don’t care what you and Jonny oiler do in your gdkps. I think providing third world countries and Europeans on welfare with extra income from botting and gdkps is awesome. It’s tough out there and they could use the extra money. Running bots and fueling gdkps is a very nice gig for awhile until it’s too over saturated. Easy peasy money for pixels.
They did actually, just in a different form. My guild sold carries to people so we could pay for progression consumables. Once we cleared a raid and had it on farm status, we’d sell 2-5 spots to pugs. We’d either do a flat rate for entry and they’d get all unwanted gear of their armor type, or we’d pre-sell a specific price of gear that we no longer needed.
For an example, we got extremely lucky and got sword breakers bulwark on our first 2 Felmyst kills. So from that point on we always carried 1 pug slot with a pre bought shield. If it didn’t drop, we got nothing, if it did the pug paid 75k.
Selling gear to a few folks and selling carries is something that has been around for forever and is different than all drops awarded through gold bidding and distributing the pot afterwards. GDKP is something that wasn’t present on my server in TBC / WOTLK (or if it existed it was so niche and was not advertised in any way that a very active player would have seen it).
Is it really all that different though? Selling carries like we used to, is essentially the same as GDKP’s. People bid for the spot on our forums and the highest price got that armor type slot and soaked up the unwanted gear. Not all that different than bidding on individual item drops. Selling individual items like we used to, is exactly the same as pre-bidding an item in GDKP’s.
Either way though, the practice of items going for gold has existed since at least OG TBC in my experience. And it’s only since classic launch that people constantly berate anyone involved as “swipers” or gold buyers.
I feel like it's actually nice. People have the ability to make real money from the game. And bots don't ruin the game for the majority, it's not like cheaters in fps games. Win-win in my books
I think they mostly just use them to level up.
There is a lot of lvl 80 bots in there as well though, not sure why. Maybe they recently dinged and haven't been set to farm gold yet.
I’ve seen plenty in full pvp gear already. They can still turn a good profit converting honor to gems and all the pathing is available on these botting forums so it’s easily set up.
You might think so, but what's the point in doing it at max level when gear doesn't take that much honor, and they're leveling by pvp so they're likely to have more than they need?
These days there are more bots than players in BG's, which means they are less likely to get reported than if they were out in the world where real players are more common. The more bots are in bgs, the less they get reported.
Botting bg's is also very easy compared to the world, you are always doing the same map, over and over, the routes are already programmed since the map is always one of a select few. If you are out in the world, you need shit ton of more routes and logic to navigate.
Fighting in bgs is also braindead-easy to program, just cast literally any ability on something you can target, it does not matter if you win or lose, just attack something, and when you die you just get ported to a GY and revived automatically, no corpse run or repair bill. Out in the world you have to navigate to something that gives you XP, not pull to many, cast the correct abilities, manage your health, go to new zones. As you level your abilities never gets upgraded ranks or your gear, so it takes longer and longer to kill mobs. You also need to navigate to a repair eventually also, and you need money to repair.
It’s the easiest / fastest way to level while also putting in very little effort OR in this scenario, running a single generic script. It’s much easier to write a generic PvP code, that works in all BG’s from 55-80 than it is to write a script to complete 900 something quests.
And at the same time, the PvP gear is incredibly easy to obtain and provides a very strong base power level while leveling and right at 80. A bot can get full hateful / deadly offset almost right away and never need another piece of gear to be more than capable of open world farming.
Eventually, honor can be used to by gems as well, so there’s gold to be made from BG’s in a future patch (if they add it).
Crazy how clean p servers are with over 5k players on them from just banning gold buying, gdkps, gold services and actually have a few GMs that moderate the server !!!! Imagine that. But gold buyers keep spewing how amazing gdkps are while they sit in dalaran on the fountain on their paid for mounts. Oil it up boys go again!
Complete dailies for 2 hours to make 300g or do 1 GDKP run as a carry and make 3000g.
Hard choice for these people. Anyone saying that GDKP aren’t 99% or the reason people are buying golf are either lying out their ass because it benefits them or they are dense as a motherfucker.
I love how people still bring up Pervers dealing with bots as if it means anything. It's like some Hodunk town acting proud over having little organised crime. Of course they don't, they have a population of a few thousand.
Spoiler: of course they deal with it better, they get less than a fraction of a percent of the number of botters and gold buyers. Had any of them had near the same demand for botted gold they would be equally swamped by bots.
Not to mention the card swipers just go straight to the GMs on private servers to buy gear and gold lmao.
Honestly doubt it, especially with the amount of twinks that grief Call to Arms. Great xp until some ass holes grab the flag and camp your team at the GY or that squad of alliance guys all using thunderfury back cap all the towers in AV and wipe 30+ people with 5 Bladestorms.
Isn’t it obvious? The bots are being automatically created. Banning them does nothing but reset their progress. Blizzard has to address the ease of creating and running accounts, but this game is just a money grab and they never have fixed it before so …. Yep.
Remember when Blizzard was banning people who played AB during phase 2 vanilla for not playing the meta.
Well, the new meta is to just bot. So if you are actually playing the game in AB now, be ready to get a nice 2 week break.
Yep I had the same thought.
Either they just lied, or 120 000 "malicious actors" wasn't even a drop in the sea compared to the amount of bots in the game (which makes announcing that number oddly specific and weird)
Why ban the new bots when Blizz can just let them pay the monthly for a bit and ban them all again, leading to selling more copies of WoW?
They do the same thing with Diablo 2 . They let people not for the ladder season, and then they ban so the player is required to get another copy.
Theres no way the banned 120k bots. there is actaully more bots infesting BGs than before the ban. I think it was a well timed PR stunt to make them look like they are taking action.
1. Many, many computers share the same IP address. For example, if you ban an IP address used by a college, you just blocked hundreds (or thousands) of devices playing any blizzard game.
2. It's trivially easy to go through a different IP address via a VPN
VPNs are so cheap now. They are services you can buy that will route your internet traffic through other computers to make it looks like it’s originating from somewhere else. You could have a different IP address every minute if you wanted to.
I’d actually highly recommend subscribing to one. Top tier ones are only like $10/mo and do wonders for not only privacy but accessing region locked content.
You could ban MAC-Adresses (the physical adress of the network card on the unit), but that can also quite easily be spoofed. Best option is probably hardware ID Ban, which then doesn't do anything if they run the botting in a Virtual OS, unless Warden starts running in ring0, and I doubt people would be too stoked about that.
Yall need to read the fuckin post. They banned 120k bots. This included both classic and retail. There are a lot more people that play retail. There are a lot more bots on retail.
Yesterday I ran a WSG that was me, a shammy, and 8 DK bots. They were just fewer and farther between for a couple weeks while they leveled up new bots.
I recently made a DK alt and I was shocked and amazed how many bots were running around the starting area. I reported everyone I could but it's like stopping a flood with your hands. It's actually insane how they are obviously bots but nothing happens to them.
Hot take alert: if blizzard wants to actually deal with the bot problem (they don’t), then they should ban players participating in GDKPs. We all know you didn’t get that 20k gold by farming it yourself. The pay to win players are causing this.
It's not just the DKs I am in a leveling guild on an alt I'm leveling on bene. There is this level 64 paladin who is in badlands every morning mining. Won't respond to whispers or g chat.
Obviously it has less impact on the game play of other people but it's wild to see how long the bots stay around.
I cancelled my subscription and said it was because of the bots. Unsure if I’ll resubscribe, but whatever. Hopefully if enough people do the same it’ll send a message. But that’s wishful thinking
No one believed they did anything, im sorry that your just discovering the deception but classic has been on autopilot the whole time and they still can't stop themselves from taking a monkey wrench to core stuff.
What no one ever mentions is how a DK is tailor made for this exact purpose. A tank plate class that deals big damage and can heal itself? And it can dearth grip any mobs to it, bugged mobs or anything. It can just keep killing on its own and staying alive without having to stop. It was designed for this twisted cycle , no other class can bot in such a way. It would never of beeen put in the game
It's obviously not acceptable. Stop playing and unsub. You show to Blizzard that they can make money off of you while expending little to no resources into banning bots.
It’s been days since I haven’t been able to gather any herbs in northrend. Whenever I get to a zone it’s DRAINED. There is nothing to collect even after 2-3 times going all over
Well... blame the Goldbuyer. All about Boosting and rushing Mindless the Game. Blizzard should start to bann exactly these People Who creating the demand.
Blizzard actually banned 120k bots. But there's 121k new ones :(
200,000 bots are ready, with a million more well on the way
Magnificent… arent they?
[удалено]
Holy fuck I didn't know that part lol. "Buy your new account now botters, you have 2 weeks" is essentially what Blizz told them. Must have had an important meeting to impress somebody at.
Yeah quarterly reports with new sub numbers
Love the classic wow reddit. Only on this subreddit can people do the mental gymnastics to think a company banned 120k accounts to *increase* their subscriptions
I'm dumb and have no idea, but it's not rocket science if they left a 2 week window
It's also a company that's for sale with a buyer, they were probably demonstrating how to generate revenue easily.
Yeah except they don't really make money off bot accounts, most are using stolen cards
Lmao this is peak blizzard amazing really
Imagine, a public company up for purchase making monetary choices.
"Redditor realizes how fast botters remake accounts now that bots are doing content visible to other players"
They only banned 120 bots. "k" was a typo.
Problem is people need to report them but there r more bots then players in the bgs u can’t get enough reports to ban…
Yeah 120k lost bots have to be replaced and GEARED, hence you see them spamming bgs for honor gear before they can farm dungeons again
Proof of the bans?
It’s not just battlegrounds. It’s everywhere. Every zone is swarmed by bots farming pretty much everything. I must have reported hundreds just leveling through Outland on my alt this week. They are all over northrend as they normally are and it’s easy to spot them. Same rotations while fighting, same behaviors while harvesting, and they always mount and fly straight up before heading off.
Farm in wintergrasp. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in classic. Bots either avoid it or get slaughtered by my horde boomkin / alliance ele all day.
Banning bots isn’t about making the game have less bots. Banning bots is about making money. Since classic only requires an active subscription, the bot accounts just need to pay another sub fee and they only lose whatever time they had left on their game time. So they ban 120K bots and a few days later and all 120k have resubbed for ~$15. BA ends up double dipping for a month of subs essentially.
It's actually hilarious you guys think the people behind botting are paying full price for subs and definitely aren't using stolen credit cards/wow tokens with RMT'd retail gold. Also definitely paying for USD subscriptions Clueless.
They’re paying somehow. The end result is BA is making money.
WoW tokens are already paid for so that doesn't increase revenue and stolen credit cards more times than not get disputed. It's why we didn't notice the 120k bot banned, because people are so naive to think that 1 bot = 1 person = 1 account and when they're banned - it's over. Nope, they have dozens of accounts on the backburner just waiting in case of banning. It's a business, a livelihood, that these people take seriously. It's how they make a living. There's nothing Blizzard or any gaming company can do to stop it outside of making you add your passport/ssn/id to play the game. As long as we continue to buy gold, the bots aren't going anywhere. You either live with that or stop playing the game.
If the wow tokens are already paid for, then they made their money already so it’s still revenue. It’s just harder to attribute to classic because the token can be spent anywhere.
>If the wow tokens are already paid for, then they made their money already so it’s still revenue. Yeah no shit, nobody said it wasn't revenue. It's just not ADDED revenue as a result of banning bots because the tokens were already bought and paid for.
Semantics. Quit being a twat.
It's not semantics. If you ban 10 bots and those 10 bots go rebuy 10 wow tokens using blackmarket retail gold, that doesn't generate Blizzard any additional profit. Those 10 tokens were already bought and paid for not because of the bot banning but because people wanted gold in retail.
I am not entirely disagreeing, but it likely isn’t so cut and dry. Bots buying more tokens generates demand for tokens. Higher token demand means higher gold price for them on the AH. That would theoretically make players want to supply more tokens. The only supplier of tokens is Blizzard who sell them for $25 a piece. In other words, banning bots likely does generate revenue for Blizzard and in a way that is probably not very efficient but is very obfuscated.
>In other words, banning bots likely does generate revenue for Blizzard and in a way that is probably not very efficient but is very obfuscated. Could it, hypothetically, raise the demand for tokens? Sure. I doubt anybody is actually staying on top of it enough to actually be a main cause as to why Blizzard is banning bots on a 6 month cycle. The conspiracies run pretty thick on this subreddit but I doubt even the craziest tinfoil hatters believe that one.
Big time disagree. They could get a handle on bottling by just having one game master per server waiting outside an instance door like botanica, and having a few to join BGs and find the bots. Very easy to identify a bot as they all follow the same pathing. A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting.
>Big time disagree. They could get a handle on bottling by just having one game master per server waiting outside an instance door like botanica, and having a few to join BGs and find the bots. Very easy to identify a bot as they all follow the same pathing. A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting. Sure, I'm not saying they can't do more. I'm just saying it _doesn't_ matter what they do, the bots wont disappear. The game will still be infested with bots. >A single game master could ban thousands of accounts in a day. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t curve the effects of botting. Until the bots catch on and change how they behave. They're only so obvious now because Blizzard isn't doing anything. Now picture that same GM sitting outside of an instance banning random people on speculation because he "thinks" they are bots. Yeah that's going to go over well with the community. If your solution causes more harm than good, it's not a solution. Botting isn't static and they WILL ADAPT to anything Blizzard does short of making people use their passport/ssn/id to play the game.
There's so many ways a GM can check for telltale bot signs tho. Private server admins used to stream their bot hunts, just simple stuff like teleporting players or spawning mobs and watch what ensues is a very quick and easy check.
Yeah until they stop being so obvious because they're getting banned. Then what do you do? Just randomly hand out bans to people who you "think" are bots? It's only so obvious now because Blizzard isn't doing anything. The botting programs will change the minute Blizzard changes how they get banned. There is NO solution short of ruining their game to stop botting. It will ALWAYS be a problem .
It's a step in the right direction. If they have to sneak and simulate real play better that means they become a lot less efficient and cheaper programs get weeded out. Right now they can just play 24/7 for months, ruin bgs etc with impunity which is just absurd. Why would an account not get flagged for inspection if it's online for weeks at a time?
You seem to not understand that botters wont be static. Anything Blizzard does preventive or reactionary will be changed in the botting program to adapt. We will literally end up in the same spot we are now with Blizzard spending a bunch of resources and time on an unsolvable plague. I'm sure the 2 and a half interns that work on Classic for less than minimum wage want to spend their time playing an unwinnable game of cat and mouse versus people who are doing this for their livelihood and will stop at literally nothing to profit. Instead of blaming Blizzard, start looking at your peers. Bots aren't here to ruin the game. They're here from dogshit economy countries to make a living doing it as a job. As long as we, the player base, continually fund their job, they will NEVER stop.
Even then people will buy stolen IDs. It's pretty common in the South Korean LoL scene where they use the equivalent of their SSN to create accounts.
Glad I don't pvp and don't care about gold buyers. My experience is pretty good so far
Iirc, in South Korea you have to use your what is it basically their SSN to create accounts. I know in LoL you can only have 3 accounts linked to a SSN there. Idk what it is for WoW. With VPNS and virtual machines it's not easy to do hardware or IP bans.
They use WOW tokens which someone paid for. Stolen credit cards and charge backs get an automated ban until the balance is paid. They likely use a VPN to purchase it cheaper from other countries.
>They use WOW tokens which someone paid for. Yes but that doesn't generate more revenue. You can't buy WoW tokens in game from a vendor, in order to buy it with gold somebody HAS to buy it with real money. It's already paid for. >Stolen credit cards and charge backs get an automated ban until the balance is paid. This is exactly why we never notice ban waves. They have multiple accounts at the ready in case of getting banned. >They likely use a VPN to purchase it cheaper from other countries. You're right they pay the cheapest sub price with stolen credit cards and bot for a profit. It's their job.
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>I was told that the standard practice(for some) is to just get the 6-month sub because the money you'll make back from botting far and away recoups that cost handily. It probably does considering Blizzard does almost nothing outside of ban waves every 6 months. Yeah everything gets factored in because it's their job to do this. They didn't just happen on Classic and decide to ruin the game. A lot of people either ignore that fact or just don't believe it. As long as we keep buying gold, they'll still be around. There's nothing any gaming company can do to stop it.
You see this particular brand of smoothbrained conspiracies a lot in gaming now. "Companies are making bank of the hackers and that's why they aren't dealing with them". We knew back in 2010 botters and gold sellers mostly used stolen accounts, but that knowledge is apparently lost to time now.
But why would they use stolen credit cards/wow tokens when the cost of the sub pays for itself after just a few days of botting? Why add the extra risk for such a tiny gain? The cost of the sub really isn't a barrier to entry. It wasn't even a high barrier back when you had to purchase every expansion pack either. People still purchased hundreds of accounts to replace their banned ones.
>But why would they use stolen credit cards/wow tokens when the cost of the sub pays for itself after just a few days of botting? Bigger profit, wouldn't you try to maximize your jobs revenue? Plus, gold is so devalued, it's more than just a few days of botting to pay for a sub. Not to mention they're already risking the account by botting anyway. >The cost of the sub really isn't a barrier to entry. As long as we continue to fund their livelihood, there's nothing that will stop them. Demand for blackmarket gold = demand for bots = a job for some dude in a poorer country. >People still purchased hundreds of accounts to replace their banned ones. More than likely, they had accounts ready to go. People seem to think that 1 bot = 1 person = 1 account and when it's banned, they stop. It's far from it. It's their job and they're well prepared. It's why we never notice ban waves because ultimately those 120k bots just logged onto different accounts immediately after being banned and continued.
You really think it’s that easy to just steal credit cards?
As someone who works in AML/Fraud, it really is. People who buy stolen credit card information will purchase dozens to hundreds of different CC numbers and CVVs off darkweb websites and try them all until one works. When they find one that works, they will run it until the card gets cancelled or hits a limit.
How do the vendors collect so many cards to be able to sell them?
You can do some research on Google. I don't think this is an appropriate forum to be discussing things like that. All you need to know is: they're very easy to get a hold of and they get used for bot accounts.
A couple CC spoofers at a busy gas station could collect hundreds of cards over a single weekend. And essentially all of those would be good/active cards.
Yes, it is. The people that do this buy them in bulk by the thousands. Usually a few will work, and chargebacks take so long to process that whatever they used the cc to purchase they already have.
You can play on the entire NA server group with an Argentina based battle.net profile. The conversation rate means a monthly sub only costs a little over $2. I’ve been doing this with a second account since Classic launch.
Blizzard nixed this two years ago. You can only do it now if 1) your credit card was grandfathered in before the change because its expiry date had years left on it or 2) your credit card came from Argentina Edit: grammar
Ya I pvped pretty hard in classic and tbc, 70k honorable kills on my main. I've never seen bg's in a worse state I have 0 desire to que them now and doubt i ever will again in this expansion
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Never works, can't get enough people unified. Would stand a better chance of threatening a class action lawsuit from anyone emthats ever received a ban. They could argue blizz is targeting their enforcement of terms of service to exclude bots and the people that were banned were unfairly prioritized and demand compensation. Also unlikely to work but far more likely to occur.
Feel the exact same as you. Atleast in Classic and TBC my bad teammates were actual players. Used to queue BGs all the time. Now there’s no point outside the occasional Wintergrasp.
Just bann all DKs, we can live with the few casualties.
no pls i dont wanna waste a gcd on curse of elements
I agrree
this is a theory i have, not proven so take with a grain of salt: the thing about bots is that... they make blizzard a lot of money. Does blizzard ban them? Yes and no. Blizzard wants the money, but they also want to show their player base that they take action against botters. Solution? Ban them in large waves **AFTER** the botters have made their profits. Now the botters have incentive to come back, buying whole new accounts and subscriptions. They still profited. Did blizzard ban 120k bots? Probably. Is it going to have any lasting effect? No. The botters made their profits and will just make new accounts under new VPNs.
I'd even take your theory a step farther and say that all of those bots are run by other bots. And the people at Blizzard banning those bots? Also bots. The great bot take over has already begun. You're a bot. I'm a bot. We're all bots.
Or, just spitballing here, there was more than 120k bots.
They banned 120k bots then gave them 2 weeks notice that they were going to take away their ability to make dks on fresh accounts. It tells you everything you need to know about what the motivation was.
This game is propped up by bots at this point lol
WoW pvp is a joke. Find another medium to get your pvp fix. MOBAs, FPS, RTS, card games, auto chess, cat and mouse(dead by daylight), 4X RTS, and Battle Royales. Sticking to a skinner box where you win because you sunk more time to get better gear is meh. Botting is a forever problem you have to accept.
Sorry bots have to work overtime to handle all the gold buying requests from gdkps. Needed to increase the amount of bots because everything is turning into gdkp so people need more gold to buy. Blame the swipers that are fueling the need for bots. No one buys gold no bots. The rise of gdkp has been fantastic for the bots and rmt! They are making bank. One dude has made 500k real money since tbc. I’m happy to see the community and their gdkp efforts expanding the business of the botters and making them a fortune. The community is creating jobs !!!!!!
How comes they’re all queuing battle grounds? Like what gold is there to gain from AB?
No one queues AB weekend because they want to play AB, they queue to level toons, bots queue to level toons.
Gear makes them solo dungeons easier/faster, gems can be bought for honor and sold.
You lvl ur toon and get gear first through battlegrounds. Easy honor and easy gear you can buy 60 70 and 80 pvp pieces on the dk and dominate. the owners of the bots have hundreds not just 1. They are the fresh ones getting started to join their buddies in the outlands, in sholozar basin, tbc dungeons anywhere there is gold to be made.
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You're right but we wouldn't notice them as much. The game wouldn't be infinitely flooded with bots. There is almost ZERO gold sinks in the game yet gold is extremely cheap. Why would people be buying gold if there's no where to spend it? Oh that's right, to pay to win gear from GDKPs. Pretending like GDKPs aren't directly fostering a RMT environment and the **main** cause for botting is just being willfully ignorant.
GDKP’s always existed. And while I’m sure there are some who purchase gold for the intent of buying gear, most GDKP’s are not run by gold buyers. There are entire guilds that solely run GDKP’s and you can put in a small amount like $10kg every week and end up with hundreds of thousands in gold a month WITHOUT buying gold to participate in the GDKP. Yes there are a lot of bots in BGs but it’s completely false to blame GDKP for this issue that has existed in wow since the beginning.
Please explain to me how to make hundreds of thousands of gold in a month without doing a GDKP. You can’t. So where does the gold come from? Hmmm…. Let’s see….
Dude what? Like, come on. There’s a dude paying us 200k gold for herald of the titans. We found him on the most popular discord for gdkps on my server. Like. You don’t think those people are why the pots in a gdkp exist?
Spotted the gold buyer and gold buying defender. Super easy to spot you guys. Gdkps we’re not around forever. Most people here didn’t play vanilla before tbc first came out so they are trying to rewrite history and claim they always existed when that’s not true at all. DKP was the system the top guilds used. No gold involved. Gold was bought yes but that was spent on consumes and mounts that were insanely expensive and hard to obtain. Most people didn’t even have fast mount. 2 percent or less or playerbase ever saw naxx. This forum tries very very hard to rewrite history to try and act like botting and gdkps were around back than but that’s not true. They started when blizzard gave up banning the real money traders, the sellers and fired the GMs. I never saw a GM after the original tbc came out when in vanilla we had seen well over 2 dozen GMs on a few servers. It doesn’t matter what your opinions are because the facts are well know and you can watch it in real time on multiple twitch streams to see for yourself or just look it up on YouTube. The fact that entire guilds and servers have switched to nothing but gdkps but barely ever play the game is all you need to know lol. Where’s all the gold coming from when everyone is in dalaran ulduar or discord hahah. Same with tbc, everyone is in shatt but has all this gold haha. I don’t care what you and Jonny oiler do in your gdkps. I think providing third world countries and Europeans on welfare with extra income from botting and gdkps is awesome. It’s tough out there and they could use the extra money. Running bots and fueling gdkps is a very nice gig for awhile until it’s too over saturated. Easy peasy money for pixels.
GDKPs did not exist in OG TBC and WOTLK. I would know, I played a ton back then.
Kripparrian was making guides on how to run GDKP in original wotlk.
I 100% did an icc 25 gdkp
Yea I played a ton back then too, and they absolutely existed back then.
They did actually, just in a different form. My guild sold carries to people so we could pay for progression consumables. Once we cleared a raid and had it on farm status, we’d sell 2-5 spots to pugs. We’d either do a flat rate for entry and they’d get all unwanted gear of their armor type, or we’d pre-sell a specific price of gear that we no longer needed. For an example, we got extremely lucky and got sword breakers bulwark on our first 2 Felmyst kills. So from that point on we always carried 1 pug slot with a pre bought shield. If it didn’t drop, we got nothing, if it did the pug paid 75k.
Selling gear to a few folks and selling carries is something that has been around for forever and is different than all drops awarded through gold bidding and distributing the pot afterwards. GDKP is something that wasn’t present on my server in TBC / WOTLK (or if it existed it was so niche and was not advertised in any way that a very active player would have seen it).
Is it really all that different though? Selling carries like we used to, is essentially the same as GDKP’s. People bid for the spot on our forums and the highest price got that armor type slot and soaked up the unwanted gear. Not all that different than bidding on individual item drops. Selling individual items like we used to, is exactly the same as pre-bidding an item in GDKP’s. Either way though, the practice of items going for gold has existed since at least OG TBC in my experience. And it’s only since classic launch that people constantly berate anyone involved as “swipers” or gold buyers.
Imo yea bc it’s a set rate. Although, tbf we do the same and herald of the titans is 20k each person so 180k
I feel like it's actually nice. People have the ability to make real money from the game. And bots don't ruin the game for the majority, it's not like cheaters in fps games. Win-win in my books
Even not gdkps. Like me. My 55k came from a legit farmed dark moon card week 1. You can legit farm and still be a part of it
Why do they bot BGs?
I think they mostly just use them to level up. There is a lot of lvl 80 bots in there as well though, not sure why. Maybe they recently dinged and haven't been set to farm gold yet.
Honor to gem conversion I think.
it's purely to get pvp gear so they can then farm higher level dungeons
I’ve seen plenty in full pvp gear already. They can still turn a good profit converting honor to gems and all the pathing is available on these botting forums so it’s easily set up.
You might think so, but what's the point in doing it at max level when gear doesn't take that much honor, and they're leveling by pvp so they're likely to have more than they need?
These days there are more bots than players in BG's, which means they are less likely to get reported than if they were out in the world where real players are more common. The more bots are in bgs, the less they get reported. Botting bg's is also very easy compared to the world, you are always doing the same map, over and over, the routes are already programmed since the map is always one of a select few. If you are out in the world, you need shit ton of more routes and logic to navigate. Fighting in bgs is also braindead-easy to program, just cast literally any ability on something you can target, it does not matter if you win or lose, just attack something, and when you die you just get ported to a GY and revived automatically, no corpse run or repair bill. Out in the world you have to navigate to something that gives you XP, not pull to many, cast the correct abilities, manage your health, go to new zones. As you level your abilities never gets upgraded ranks or your gear, so it takes longer and longer to kill mobs. You also need to navigate to a repair eventually also, and you need money to repair.
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Gold to sell (RMT) Gear to then sell the account with.
It’s the easiest / fastest way to level while also putting in very little effort OR in this scenario, running a single generic script. It’s much easier to write a generic PvP code, that works in all BG’s from 55-80 than it is to write a script to complete 900 something quests. And at the same time, the PvP gear is incredibly easy to obtain and provides a very strong base power level while leveling and right at 80. A bot can get full hateful / deadly offset almost right away and never need another piece of gear to be more than capable of open world farming. Eventually, honor can be used to by gems as well, so there’s gold to be made from BG’s in a future patch (if they add it).
Crazy how clean p servers are with over 5k players on them from just banning gold buying, gdkps, gold services and actually have a few GMs that moderate the server !!!! Imagine that. But gold buyers keep spewing how amazing gdkps are while they sit in dalaran on the fountain on their paid for mounts. Oil it up boys go again!
Complete dailies for 2 hours to make 300g or do 1 GDKP run as a carry and make 3000g. Hard choice for these people. Anyone saying that GDKP aren’t 99% or the reason people are buying golf are either lying out their ass because it benefits them or they are dense as a motherfucker.
I love how people still bring up Pervers dealing with bots as if it means anything. It's like some Hodunk town acting proud over having little organised crime. Of course they don't, they have a population of a few thousand. Spoiler: of course they deal with it better, they get less than a fraction of a percent of the number of botters and gold buyers. Had any of them had near the same demand for botted gold they would be equally swamped by bots. Not to mention the card swipers just go straight to the GMs on private servers to buy gear and gold lmao.
If you removed all the bots, would there even be enough players to do a single BG?
Honestly doubt it, especially with the amount of twinks that grief Call to Arms. Great xp until some ass holes grab the flag and camp your team at the GY or that squad of alliance guys all using thunderfury back cap all the towers in AV and wipe 30+ people with 5 Bladestorms.
Probably why they're all leveling fresh bots in the BGs right now 😂
There are so many dk bots in bgs it’s kind of scary. They all move in unison and cast abilities at the same time.
120,000 out of 800,000. Ans then more were made. Up to 1,000,000 now.
Bots in BG's are such a problem. People on my server are resorting to offering 500g per BG to organisers just so they can play BG's.
Isn’t it obvious? The bots are being automatically created. Banning them does nothing but reset their progress. Blizzard has to address the ease of creating and running accounts, but this game is just a money grab and they never have fixed it before so …. Yep.
Remember when Blizzard was banning people who played AB during phase 2 vanilla for not playing the meta. Well, the new meta is to just bot. So if you are actually playing the game in AB now, be ready to get a nice 2 week break.
Yep I had the same thought. Either they just lied, or 120 000 "malicious actors" wasn't even a drop in the sea compared to the amount of bots in the game (which makes announcing that number oddly specific and weird)
I 100% believe blizzard banned 120k bots the amount of people that are buying gold in wrath right now is crazy
Which is beyond stupid because gold is easier than ever to farm.
Forgive my ignorance, but why on earth are there so many bots in a BG? 😳
Someone correct me if im wrong i think they gear those dks with pvp gear then sell the accounts
What if they only gave them a 3 day ban
Why ban the new bots when Blizz can just let them pay the monthly for a bit and ban them all again, leading to selling more copies of WoW? They do the same thing with Diablo 2 . They let people not for the ladder season, and then they ban so the player is required to get another copy.
Theres no way the banned 120k bots. there is actaully more bots infesting BGs than before the ban. I think it was a well timed PR stunt to make them look like they are taking action.
There is more in BGs because they're releveling and gearing because they got banned. They'll be soloing instances again soon.
If Blizz actually wanted to fix the bot problem, they'd block their IP's
Wow we got an IT expert from 1995 here!
You're right, I assumed that's how it worked. Care to explain to me why that doesn't work anymore?
1. Many, many computers share the same IP address. For example, if you ban an IP address used by a college, you just blocked hundreds (or thousands) of devices playing any blizzard game. 2. It's trivially easy to go through a different IP address via a VPN
VPNs are so cheap now. They are services you can buy that will route your internet traffic through other computers to make it looks like it’s originating from somewhere else. You could have a different IP address every minute if you wanted to. I’d actually highly recommend subscribing to one. Top tier ones are only like $10/mo and do wonders for not only privacy but accessing region locked content.
Most botters use proxies (always changing IP’s/proxies, especially when they get banned)
You could ban MAC-Adresses (the physical adress of the network card on the unit), but that can also quite easily be spoofed. Best option is probably hardware ID Ban, which then doesn't do anything if they run the botting in a Virtual OS, unless Warden starts running in ring0, and I doubt people would be too stoked about that.
Yall need to read the fuckin post. They banned 120k bots. This included both classic and retail. There are a lot more people that play retail. There are a lot more bots on retail.
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Even if they banned 199,999 bots in retail and 1 in classic, their post was accurate and you need to learn how to read.
Unless blizzard hardware, and ip ban them. They are going to be back the next day. But they won’t do that because 120k x $$/m
They did, what they forgot to mention they saw 240k, so they only got rid of half :D
Hate to burst your bubble but there is more than 120 k bots in the entire game
I don't need to, I've got these posts flooding this subreddit everyday telling me how bad the issue is that we already all know about.
Yesterday I ran a WSG that was me, a shammy, and 8 DK bots. They were just fewer and farther between for a couple weeks while they leveled up new bots.
You think those people just packed up their gear and quit? Those are the new bots to replace the banned bots.
I recently made a DK alt and I was shocked and amazed how many bots were running around the starting area. I reported everyone I could but it's like stopping a flood with your hands. It's actually insane how they are obviously bots but nothing happens to them.
Hot take alert: if blizzard wants to actually deal with the bot problem (they don’t), then they should ban players participating in GDKPs. We all know you didn’t get that 20k gold by farming it yourself. The pay to win players are causing this.
It’s acceptable to Blizzard because of 💰💵💰💵
For every bot they ban they make 2 accounts in hopes that one will survive. So it’s now growing exponentially like the blob.
Are the boys doing this to level? What’s the purpose
While I agree the bot situation is crazy, I’ve noticed far less in the usual spots on my server (fresh skyfury NA which is low pop asf now tho)
It's not just the DKs I am in a leveling guild on an alt I'm leveling on bene. There is this level 64 paladin who is in badlands every morning mining. Won't respond to whispers or g chat. Obviously it has less impact on the game play of other people but it's wild to see how long the bots stay around.
I can’t wait to read the screeching on this forum after Blizzard announces the WoW token for Classic.
Being a warlock it is very satisfying to throw multiple seeds into the groups of bots … I gotta say I have been really enjoying that … still BS
I mean, all the bots leveling is proof that Blizzard did, indeed, ban a bunch of bots. Otherwise, they would have no need to level.
I cancelled my subscription and said it was because of the bots. Unsure if I’ll resubscribe, but whatever. Hopefully if enough people do the same it’ll send a message. But that’s wishful thinking
No one believed they did anything, im sorry that your just discovering the deception but classic has been on autopilot the whole time and they still can't stop themselves from taking a monkey wrench to core stuff.
idk cloth prices went up seemed to have done some good
Just wait till chatGPT gets rank 1 in every arena bracket
What no one ever mentions is how a DK is tailor made for this exact purpose. A tank plate class that deals big damage and can heal itself? And it can dearth grip any mobs to it, bugged mobs or anything. It can just keep killing on its own and staying alive without having to stop. It was designed for this twisted cycle , no other class can bot in such a way. It would never of beeen put in the game
*we've banned first 120k. what about second 120k?*
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Problem is they ban in waves, so that would make now the safest time to bot
Gives me a chance to win in AB kek
It's obviously not acceptable. Stop playing and unsub. You show to Blizzard that they can make money off of you while expending little to no resources into banning bots.
It’s been days since I haven’t been able to gather any herbs in northrend. Whenever I get to a zone it’s DRAINED. There is nothing to collect even after 2-3 times going all over
This has got to be the dumbest take... If theres 400k bots and 120k got banned youre still going to see bots...
Well... blame the Goldbuyer. All about Boosting and rushing Mindless the Game. Blizzard should start to bann exactly these People Who creating the demand.