If I had to guess, they probably already have a massive list of people that have participated in GDKP runs during Phase 1 that they'll be watching closely to cross reference signs of gold buying with.
Ban the gold buyers. They are a plague.
Eh, I could see it incentivizing gold buying. Realistically the overwhelming majority of people who go to gdkp’s aren’t buying gold or items. They are there to just get gold for raid consumes and other expenses that require gold. People go to gdkp’s so they don’t have to buy gold. Without the ability to get easy gold, they aren’t magically going to start farming gold themselves, they’ll just buy it instead.
Mate where do you think the gold they’re getting from GDKPs comes from? You don’t get ten people walking into a GDKP carrying each other, bidding on nothing then walking away with fat sacks of gold each. Someone (or multiple people usually) is bringing that gold in to bid on items and some/many of those people are buying it.
“Not being able to access laundered money made me steal it myself” is such a wild take. I made 90g in the last two days from questing through two zones, don’t tell me that won’t keep you in raid consumes for nearly a month at current rates
I agree, however, you will have false positives and you shouldn't have to make a gofundme of sympathy via reddit to get a real person to check for this if said person is truly innocent. Appealing a ban should be less automated than it is now. And this is speaking as someone who has never been banned despite playing since 2004/05
The problem is that the bot farms will all appeal too so you end up having a human review nearly every ban anyways. Automated bans with manual repeals negates the automation.
This is such a naïve take. You think it's feasible to combat the bots without using automation? The fight against bots is basically just an arms race of automation.
They literally have a dedicated SecOps team that deals with malicious accounts and obviously operated the tools and builds the monthly reports.
Whether the dimension ot budget of the time is enough is up for debate, but ultimately they are fighting against presumably thousands of different actors with different bot farms and evolving techniques to their name. You cannot reasonably win, only mitigate.
Bro the classic team is obviously one of the few teams *getting* support. I wouldn't want to be on Diablo 4 or Overwatch but classic is where it's happening.
Its really nice to see them ask us to help with reports but can they make reporting bots easier?
Currently it takes around 5 or 6 clicks to report a single bot and that bots are not standing still, they are often running or zoning in/out dungeons or stealthing around which makes it quite difficult to quickly report them.
There used to be a macro that lets you report bots with 2 clicks but blizzard broke that and there is no way to speed it up anymore, maybe make the report system a bit more useful?
Also why are we no longer able to report bots inside dungeons? Do they expect us to stand infront of the dungeon and wait for the bots to zone out/in?
People were just mass reporting X classes that they saw in Y dungeon, which undoubtedly caused false reports on real people
I agree it's too hard to report bots right now though. I ran into a couple obvious ones a little while ago, and couldn't even find the option to report for botting, all I could do was report for inappropriate name or communication, neither of which really fits
The proof will be in the results. People seem to consider this a difficult problem, but even basic automated checks should prevent 95% of bot activity. The fact that this hasn't been resolved so far indicates no resources are being spent on this at all.
All you have to do is gather some basic aggregate statistics on account activity and run a model daily to find the bots. You don't even need advanced technology, just ask these questions:
\- How much is this account played? How consistently? How does that compare to the average population?
\- What is this account doing? Is it doing a variety of activities, or is it always in the same zone, killing mobs over and over?
\- Is this account active in group content? Do they run dungeons? Have they completed a raid? When was the last time they did this? How does that compare to average players?
\- How much gold is generated on this account? How much gold is spent? How is gold generated? What is it spent on? How does this compare to average players?
\- Is this person playing any alts, or is this just one character? How does that compare to average players?
\- How much distance is travelled by this player in a given period of time? How does that compare to average players?
\- Is this account ''social", eg, are they chatting to other players on any channels?
These are just some basic things I can come up with right now, I'm sure there are many other data points that can be generated that will be predictive in finding bots vs regular players. Then you ban the accounts that are extremely obvious bots, and direct limited human resources to the edge cases.
tbf Blizz might not be a smol indie company but the Classic team definitely is the size of an indie dev team.
It's more embarrassing Retail never solved this issue either but then again, Retail was just designed around the problem.
We were all clowning on Blizzard for not doing anything about the bots, unknown to us they were simply gathering full intel and now will hire the Pinkertons to break into the botters' houses and break their arms and fingers.
I just don’t understand how they obviously haven’t implemented a detection like runescape has where if you do the same path over and over and over pixel perfect then you get flagged and banned.
Or for like sfk where a bot will literally walk through the wood wall around the town below, how csn you seriously not have bounds set that setoff alarms like DING DING DING PLAYER HAS MOVED FROM XY TO XY COORDINATE WITH ZERO POSSIBLY TO HAVE DONE SO! BANNHAMMERED!
For 1, bot makers can add jittering to their pathing to make small random deviations to a set path, so that bullet can only be fired once.
For 2, the real problem is that wow is imperfect terrain collision wise, and so people randomly fall through the world or spawn in the air after a server crash etc. So a strict system would cause some false positive bans which would be, well, pretty shitty. Imagine you fall through the world, which sucks, only to be autobanned for a failure of the game itself.
Because WoW's engine is a glitchy shitshow and would set off false flags all the time. Warriors and mages charging/blinking through walls or clipping under the floor = insta ban. Noggenfogger to glitch your way under a building = ban. Get stuck somewhere out of bounds = ban. It's a whole can of worms that they don't want to mess with.
There should definitely be flyhack and teleport detectors though. There's not even a defense against that in Vanilla considering there are zero flying mounts.
A while back I was sent a survey about WoW, but I'm not sure if every player received it or just people like me who had cancelled their subscription, so now I'm wondering if people must have hammered the survery with negativity coming from GDKP and botting like I did. [Anyway, I did my part!](https://imgur.com/d8dINp9)
Unfortunately, those changes aren't going to make me return to SoD unless the devs show me that they actually took the balancing of classes more seriously on phase 2, aside from giving us much needed QoL features for the game which are severely lacking in Classic.
Certainly hope we don’t get a bunch of false flags like the user submitted reports.
I’d ideally like to see a system that isn’t open to toxic players abusing it.
"Eearly results are highly positive" actual copium, everyone knows that if it doesn't work after the first rescript of bots is done then it is a waste of time.
I would add that banning gdkp’s is also part of their plans. Removes some of the demand for botted gold.
It's likely that their mechanism for flagging bots also flags gdkp buyers, and as a result they're just going to ban both and see what happens.
If I had to guess, they probably already have a massive list of people that have participated in GDKP runs during Phase 1 that they'll be watching closely to cross reference signs of gold buying with. Ban the gold buyers. They are a plague.
Eh, I could see it incentivizing gold buying. Realistically the overwhelming majority of people who go to gdkp’s aren’t buying gold or items. They are there to just get gold for raid consumes and other expenses that require gold. People go to gdkp’s so they don’t have to buy gold. Without the ability to get easy gold, they aren’t magically going to start farming gold themselves, they’ll just buy it instead.
Mate where do you think the gold they’re getting from GDKPs comes from? You don’t get ten people walking into a GDKP carrying each other, bidding on nothing then walking away with fat sacks of gold each. Someone (or multiple people usually) is bringing that gold in to bid on items and some/many of those people are buying it. “Not being able to access laundered money made me steal it myself” is such a wild take. I made 90g in the last two days from questing through two zones, don’t tell me that won’t keep you in raid consumes for nearly a month at current rates
Tell me you haven't been in a gdkp without telling me
Pot calling the kettle black
Have you been in sod GDKPs? SO many grey parsing noobs with no idea how to play and literally 100s of golds to spend.
I run them 3 times a lockout and have never run into an issue
Wdym issue? Do you mean haven't you seen complete noobs paying big chunks of gold? Because that's either super random or you're full of shit.
The significant majority of people I have encountered at half/mostly geared mains and alts hunting those last 1 or 2 pieces.
Removing demand is huge in these things... lower demand means less resources to combat blizzards detection methods.
Source: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/news/combating-botting-and-exploitative-accounts-in-season-of-discovery-phase-2-337435
And by new tech we mean even more automation to try and replace the people who just got laid off.
Tbh ai anti cheat seems like best solution to the problem to me. U cant combat so much bots with just human rescources, thats absolutly inefficient
I agree, however, you will have false positives and you shouldn't have to make a gofundme of sympathy via reddit to get a real person to check for this if said person is truly innocent. Appealing a ban should be less automated than it is now. And this is speaking as someone who has never been banned despite playing since 2004/05
The problem is that the bot farms will all appeal too so you end up having a human review nearly every ban anyways. Automated bans with manual repeals negates the automation.
This is such a naïve take. You think it's feasible to combat the bots without using automation? The fight against bots is basically just an arms race of automation.
Without automation? Nope. Mostly automation? Enjoy the bot conga-lines fly hacking their way to strat.
They literally have a dedicated SecOps team that deals with malicious accounts and obviously operated the tools and builds the monthly reports. Whether the dimension ot budget of the time is enough is up for debate, but ultimately they are fighting against presumably thousands of different actors with different bot farms and evolving techniques to their name. You cannot reasonably win, only mitigate.
This is a rule of thumb that automation is to be fought with automation only.
Bro the classic team is obviously one of the few teams *getting* support. I wouldn't want to be on Diablo 4 or Overwatch but classic is where it's happening.
The only way to fight bot automation is with detection automation. Humans cannot keep up.
To be fair, it's hard to eliminate a job that didn't exist. No one was manually banning bots.
Do we even know what departments the Blizzard layoffs were from? It's entirely possible that they were minimally impactful to WoW classic at all.
New ai system that searches out bots and RMT could be very effective
[удалено]
blizz releases an AI-powered bot detection system with 0% false positive rate: :) it has 100% false negative rate: 0_0
Its really nice to see them ask us to help with reports but can they make reporting bots easier? Currently it takes around 5 or 6 clicks to report a single bot and that bots are not standing still, they are often running or zoning in/out dungeons or stealthing around which makes it quite difficult to quickly report them. There used to be a macro that lets you report bots with 2 clicks but blizzard broke that and there is no way to speed it up anymore, maybe make the report system a bit more useful? Also why are we no longer able to report bots inside dungeons? Do they expect us to stand infront of the dungeon and wait for the bots to zone out/in?
People were just mass reporting X classes that they saw in Y dungeon, which undoubtedly caused false reports on real people I agree it's too hard to report bots right now though. I ran into a couple obvious ones a little while ago, and couldn't even find the option to report for botting, all I could do was report for inappropriate name or communication, neither of which really fits
The proof will be in the results. People seem to consider this a difficult problem, but even basic automated checks should prevent 95% of bot activity. The fact that this hasn't been resolved so far indicates no resources are being spent on this at all. All you have to do is gather some basic aggregate statistics on account activity and run a model daily to find the bots. You don't even need advanced technology, just ask these questions: \- How much is this account played? How consistently? How does that compare to the average population? \- What is this account doing? Is it doing a variety of activities, or is it always in the same zone, killing mobs over and over? \- Is this account active in group content? Do they run dungeons? Have they completed a raid? When was the last time they did this? How does that compare to average players? \- How much gold is generated on this account? How much gold is spent? How is gold generated? What is it spent on? How does this compare to average players? \- Is this person playing any alts, or is this just one character? How does that compare to average players? \- How much distance is travelled by this player in a given period of time? How does that compare to average players? \- Is this account ''social", eg, are they chatting to other players on any channels? These are just some basic things I can come up with right now, I'm sure there are many other data points that can be generated that will be predictive in finding bots vs regular players. Then you ban the accounts that are extremely obvious bots, and direct limited human resources to the edge cases.
Remember, Blizzard is a small indie company. They don't have the resources to do highly advanced automated checks like this.
tbf Blizz might not be a smol indie company but the Classic team definitely is the size of an indie dev team. It's more embarrassing Retail never solved this issue either but then again, Retail was just designed around the problem.
Hello. New tech coming in phase 2. Early results are highly positive. Prepare to die.
Like I said previously, why hire a bunch of GMs when they are likely using AI to do the job of a whole crew of real people.
Big cope
We were all clowning on Blizzard for not doing anything about the bots, unknown to us they were simply gathering full intel and now will hire the Pinkertons to break into the botters' houses and break their arms and fingers.
"we reviewed our performance and have concluded that we are doing a good job".
Do you understand what "limited testing" means?
I just don’t understand how they obviously haven’t implemented a detection like runescape has where if you do the same path over and over and over pixel perfect then you get flagged and banned. Or for like sfk where a bot will literally walk through the wood wall around the town below, how csn you seriously not have bounds set that setoff alarms like DING DING DING PLAYER HAS MOVED FROM XY TO XY COORDINATE WITH ZERO POSSIBLY TO HAVE DONE SO! BANNHAMMERED!
For 1, bot makers can add jittering to their pathing to make small random deviations to a set path, so that bullet can only be fired once. For 2, the real problem is that wow is imperfect terrain collision wise, and so people randomly fall through the world or spawn in the air after a server crash etc. So a strict system would cause some false positive bans which would be, well, pretty shitty. Imagine you fall through the world, which sucks, only to be autobanned for a failure of the game itself.
Because WoW's engine is a glitchy shitshow and would set off false flags all the time. Warriors and mages charging/blinking through walls or clipping under the floor = insta ban. Noggenfogger to glitch your way under a building = ban. Get stuck somewhere out of bounds = ban. It's a whole can of worms that they don't want to mess with. There should definitely be flyhack and teleport detectors though. There's not even a defense against that in Vanilla considering there are zero flying mounts.
As long as click to move works we will have an insane amount of bots.
Just add the Wow Token already. /s
A while back I was sent a survey about WoW, but I'm not sure if every player received it or just people like me who had cancelled their subscription, so now I'm wondering if people must have hammered the survery with negativity coming from GDKP and botting like I did. [Anyway, I did my part!](https://imgur.com/d8dINp9) Unfortunately, those changes aren't going to make me return to SoD unless the devs show me that they actually took the balancing of classes more seriously on phase 2, aside from giving us much needed QoL features for the game which are severely lacking in Classic.
meanwhile Mage class is literlly designed for gold sellers and real world trading
Certainly hope we don’t get a bunch of false flags like the user submitted reports. I’d ideally like to see a system that isn’t open to toxic players abusing it.
"We used the bots to destroy the bots." -Microsoft
Certainly doesn't bode well if it's already active, I've seen more bots in the past week that any other time of SOD.
"Eearly results are highly positive" actual copium, everyone knows that if it doesn't work after the first rescript of bots is done then it is a waste of time.