IMO, botting isn't much of an issue, it allows you to get materials easier. I feel it's part of WOW economy.
I'm not a game developer, but one would think that it would be possible to design a machine learning algorithm to efficiently identify botters? Bots should have game patterns that are very different from real players and you could use player reports/GM bans as training data for the algorithm. Perhaps there is an obvious obstacle that prevents such an algorithm being put in place?
Activision-Blizzard has been reducing staff over the last few years "in non-dev positions", aka GMs. In fact, the second largest group in EU, german, doesn't even have community managers anymore, what's left is someone with a title "ambassador" and news postings that are relevant are translated posted about 2 to 4 days later after they were available on 3rd party sites. While forum staff has not that much influence over the game itself, it's very visible and obvious that the operation side of WoW is just automating everything away and leave stuff half-arsed.Activision-Blizzard just doesn't want to invest the resources required to fight bots on more than a very low effort basis. Just as they didn't invest more time in evaluating proper amount of realms for Classic, or did react timely to factions dying out on realms due to their very arbitrary and unreflected addition and removal of layers on realms with significantly more players on them than original Vanilla ever supported on the same sized world.So all I expect is some marketing speak reaction from A-B and the worst fears will exactly come to pass, because otherwise they actually would have to invest money in resources they currently deem unneccesary. Sad but 15 years ago their customer support and operations was more than twice as good and on the ball.
The solution has always been to crack down on both sides of real money transactions. However Blizzard has never done so. Because the player base would decline. There are always thousands of our fellow players who want the easy way out. It's how there are 500 different leveling/profession/farming/BIS gear guides generating clicks and donations every month. Blizzard isn't going to piss off part of their paying player base if they can keep both sides happy. As long as we smile and take our GDKP payouts this will continue. As long as we take our gold for boost runs and Mythic+ carries this will continue. As long as the majority of the player base refuses to take a stand against the minority enabling the gold selling parasites, Blizzard isn't going to hurt their bottom line to fix something we don't even value more than 16 year old 0s and 1s in a box.
I think this old Nyhm song pretty much sums up this article and speculations: `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dkkf5NEIo0`
Really reaching for content aren't we? Or do you just enjoy having to heavily moderate the inevitable toxic screeching in the comments?
so suddenly players care about botters huh? when you buy all that gold for dollars as an excuse to buy boosts,raid gear and to support all that dkp runs then its fine. Thousands of gold laundered every day in the game is fine. Edgemaster's gloves for 5k, riiight, an amount that no player can normally farm in the game when full dungeon runs amount for like 20g? Maybe farming methods exploiting terrain to make mobs move back and forth in endless circles to slowly drain their life can make 200g/h. Yea sounds so much fun, thanks for making this game PAY TO WIN. It's not blizzard's fault, Blizzard just wants to please you, it's Your fault.
And...here I come saying that's one of the main reasons I dont play classic.Everyone is paying to win. Know what's worse? Players are not paying for blizzard.That's kind of development WoW is.
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Actiblizz has not cared for long time. Non-automated CS is starting to become myth.What TBC will be is like how retail is currently.BFA full on superspawns and shadowlands has on every zone material farm bots. On bastion and ravendreth there has been same bots since launch going around. Nothing done.Even those "thank you for reporting" mails are just bot(heh) answering to people to reassure them when in reality nothing happens
TLDR: Very. Very very bad.
Just remove the feature which allows players to pay gold for subscription. Then you will see less gold farming bots, forcing them to pay 30 accounts/mo. Many of them probably wont be able to keep up with that. LOL!
Not even close, there are plenty more that aren't just fishing bots. There one running around epl right now in a perfect rotation grinding mobs.
Nothing will stop the botting and it will exist in TBC. Unless Blizzard takes extreme measures which I don't ever see them doing.If they were to do so best way to add some automation and much harder punishments. For example they could do what GW2 did which was to auto scan every player's computer processes while playing and if any sort of software used for botting is detected, the system would auto perma-ban the account right away.Then any appeals could be done via human interaction if they wanted but that's one option to mass catch botters without solely relying on reports from players.Just an example of something they could but won't do.