"You can still see the video in an Asmongold reacts video, because of course Asmongold reacted to it"This is the best line in the whole Text .. OFC ..he HAD to react to it hahaha
Blizzard needs enhanced verification servers. Let the bots pay to play and let people who want to play on bot-filled servers do so but have other servers (a lot of them) that are enhanced verification access only. To access them Blizzard should require a valid credit card (no game-time) so they get a name they can tie to things and follow it up by requiring a valid address in the US (for US servers, feel free to have servers for other regions) and send to that address a form that requires filling out and signing then mailing back attesting to the fact that the person who lives there holds that account. Then run a basic background information check that the person who filled out the form and the credit card holder's name appear to from public records live at that address. Use basic services like voter files, utilities, etc, it costs almost nothing at scale, the real cost will be the mailing. Those who fail that check should be sent a letter informing them they couldn't be verified and offering to allow them to send in electronically via a web form a valid government ID to prove their identity. Further they should restrict these people to say two to four classic/classic TBC accounts per person with the option to lift that for people who pay a minimal one-time processing fee ($20) and submit their ID for deeper background checks.The problem with this of course is that it would cost money. Money Blizzard doesn't care to spend. They could contract out the mailings and background checks to a specialized company of course which would lower costs on their end but it would still cost a bit of money.
Botting is as bad as the players buying gold make it, and it takes way more than a few players buying gold to make it worth their time.No sh*t, no flies!
If they weren't so obvious I might be able to ignore them. But their movement is weird in the open world, there are nodes vanishing in front of my eyes and if there is a an imbalance of classes in certain places I am sceptic.Do we want to punish players that manually do the same tricks for farming money though?
The last sentence in this pretty much sums it up of how to rtesolve the botting issue "Blizzard wants the bots to continue to be an issue, so eventually, the community starts to think WoW Tokens might be a good idea... Oh, no. I will agree just incorprate the token system in wow classic and bc and beyond and that solves the issues then the players can control the direction of how the money flows.
You kinda just have to accept the fact that bots will and always exist. What should have happened is cracking down on buyers. People were buying gold and no one was getting banned for it so they kept getting more and more buyers
Blizzard just don't care they'll do reported bots because otherwise it'd look bad.. every 3-4 month ban waves cause it looks like something but its all about money, how much money does it make them to keep botting effective enough to keep coming back for, imagine if they allowed players to become gm's for an hour a day to report players inside dungeons it'd cost very little it'd drive off many bots but.. it'd tank the monthly subs because the 3 month rotation is cost effective.I don't expect blizzard will do anything besides surface level changes.
Outsource a team that just checks regular points of interest for bots. Could do it in like India for in total a cup of coffee an hour. You cant defend blizzard on this when it could be such a low skill job to just have an actual person keep an eye on say Mechanar on multiple servers. This is not banking or whatever, it's a video game. Just hire anyone with a pair of hands.
I hate this but I have to agree with you, there a lot of ppl in classic now, I played the last year of vanilla wow, I was a newb back then didn't make gold easy, bought my 40 mount when I was almost lv 50, then played tbc, was a noob in making gold, only in wrath I get the trick of making gold, but in classic I come back in the first week and make 100g when my pally hit lv 40 then leave because my friend also leave, come back because of TBC announce and make 500g in my warlock leveling from 28 to 40, easy gold, because of the market is a joke, price way to high, of course things would be better this time ppls know how to make gold, have better addons, but the amount of ppl with gold cap is ridiculous, ppl sell boost left and right, this is getting me really worried how TBC gonna be. Ppl using DKP runs in Kara, selling boost. I can only hope things get better, but I doubt
The only solution to bot problem is banning players that buy gold. No demand - no supply. We only have bots, because we buy gold from them.
I remember botting for cobra scales in nagrand back in TBCThat was fun
crazy
How about Blizzard trusting players by now, and there's a thing about "certain players" having a clean slate in their player history and that Blizzard allows such players to get flagged for in game "MVP" status with special ability to blanket flag a zone as "swarming with bots" and such a player would just land in the middle of the bots, they type in a secret command they'd know from being given it by Blizzard, and they then cause a DC of the group of bots there and they'd disconnect from the server and when they come back all their gold is gone, they lost their gear, they lost the items in their bags, guild is disbanded, all their auctions are deleted, and they're reset to level 1... yep, the last one would cause them to get pounced by the mobs of the place? I think there would be other genuine players besides me who would volunteer to do this task. Yep, super crazy idea, but if you want to get something like this solved in this game, maybe it's time to get players to be involved in the effort to fight back... Just go for the people who have a clean slate, get them to sign an NDA and then make your selections based on their general behaviour and play style in the game. In a way, this is already in place whenever people report AFKers in battleground. Make it into a proper system to help improve things in the game in terms of how the game is treated by people.
What should Blizzard do against bots in TBC? I don't know... maybe not give them a boost option.From what I've seen with the XP nerf to leveling it's already quite fast to level 1-60/70, so this boost is only helping all the lazy people and mainly the botters. In fact I'm 100% sure Blizzard are aware that probably 60%-70% of the boost purchases will be from botters. Perhaps because of that they might send ban waves more often, so that botters spend more money on boosts.Now for a real solution to botting... honestly it's quite easy. Hire few people(GM's) for each server that can be called IMMEDIATELY when there is a suspicion of botting and they can make a video and proceed to ban the bot if it doesn't prove it's not a bot. They have video evidence and it takes seconds(1min total if they are also making a small video as a proof) to handle a bot. In their spare time(when there are no reports coming in) they can find bots by themselves like the ones that farm dungeons.Hire freelancers that would gladly do it for really cheap from countries with lower standard of life and in 2 months there won't be anymore bots. After all when botters are constantly getting their accounts banned before they can make any profits they will eventually give up. Botting isn't cheap and if they aren't making any profit they won't last long.Would Blizzard do something like that? No, of course they wouldn't. TBC will be a massive success without them doing anything about it and since they don't care about the longevity of the game it doesn't make sense for them to actually bother taking real actions against botters.
Presumably they can use the same bot detection software that private servers use, but I don't think there's enough interest unless an employee that cares gets a promotion or something. There's no incentive for blizzard to quickly ban botters if they'll always make money just paying for another account and starting over.