Fpsware's Grinding vs Questing Experiment - The result.

its been said around the forums "a bot is not obvious to a player that does not bot"
i don't agree with players be able to determine if a player is botting from watching it from afar.
from my experience when bots do not respond to interactions is what gets them in trouble

 

fpsware kudos for running this experiment. I think the entire community would only benefit if more people did experiments like these.

 

thx fpsware for the info, subscribed to this thread...

ya, aside from the grinding vs questing, i think the ban has something to do with blizzard internally (aka something like prejudice to certain country IP ie China, if you played from china IP for xx hours, they'll check your account etc etc...)

also, i have grinded 15 vanila accounts since april this year, all botted same profile, using same cc (now revert back to default cc and using hb1 grinding) , i can say for my own experience, the ban rate is somewhat 75% ... i lost 12 accounts before i could reach lv80 to farm gold and sell...

 

Also are you using gamecards to pay for these accounts or a personal credit card?

 

My opnion about your experiment:
Even though both accounts got flagged (randomly reported by a player or by some other way), once checked, the gm's prolly have notice a normal activity (doing quests) in one of them and an unusual activity in the other one (thats why it got banned).


The experience that happened to me...

I was in a high pop realm with my char, used HB for 10 days and got a 72 hours suspension (luckly not a ban).
After that I transfered my character to a low pop server and voul?! Botting 24/7 for a month now and not a single warning.
Players report? I don't know but I can say that there are none on my location when I search for them with "/who".
In my opnion this is more related with gm's in charge, that usually draw more attention to high population realms, of these issues related to botting.

 

One of the most obvious signs of botting that i see is your toon is just running along surrounded by mobs, passing by serveral. Finally one enters your pull range, your toon drastically changes direction to attack that mob. Rinse and repeat over and over. No one is that selective. And you run directly towards a mob not drastically changing direction. I know that there are limitations to a bot. Just is obvious.

 

obvious to a person that bots yes. people that do not bot or are not looking for bots to not go to that extent to look at things like that.
there are a verity of things that we "us a botters" can spot that make it obvious.
ie: quick turns via way points or in pvp while a player is running in circles around us. Theres no way to avoid this.

 

Both accounts were on a 'normal' population US server. I play during off peak times as I'm in a different country. The next test will be conducted on a low population server.

EDIT: The test next week will use 2 new accounts as well as the currently unbanned account. I will have a total of 3 characters running, 2 grinding and 1 questing. If someone is willing to donate a vanilla account - preferably unused as not to 'taint' the outcome - I'll happily run 2 griding and 2 questing just to even things up.

 

A lot of combinations that would be interesting to try - finances and time rule them out though. Would be nice to try questing on a high pop server and grinding on med / low. I play on a medium population server (I hardly ever see a soul outside cities though so not sure how that works) and haven't had any problems yet.

The last couple of characters I levelled by hand was done by grinding - not on outdoor mobs but in instances. Maybe the algorithms they use (although I doubt they do, I have no doubt they use the information once someone appears on the radar but I don't think they use that info to put people on the radar) look at how many instances you've completed too. I'd quest until I was 15 them just use LFD tool. I've levelled two new 80's by botting and I follow the same recipe. I run quests manually til I have around 50 quests then just grind up to 80. Touch wood no problems so far.

 

Exactly the same I do when I bot!
Additionaly I run a few Instances from time to time, chit chat in capitals, add players to fl and il. With my first toon bot (running wowglider) I joined a newb guild and let it run ~8-10hrs a day.
From time to time I would join them to do stuff like instances or help them with group quests, but not too much and, touch wood, nobody noticed.
I think if you're a little careful you won't get into trouble!

 

Another thing you may want to look into is add on's, i use badboy as it reports the gold spammers for you, makes you look more human (does to me any way).

 

leveling my latest bot account with questing only, seems to be prety suave so far.

 

What did blizzards email say to you about the bannings. what was the reason?

 

Ahhhh... something tells me that that would be suspicious. Why would someone in EU be on a US server?

 

nice project unlucky about the accounts tough. So how much played you got now on bot 2 account and what lvl?

 

He's in New Zealand. Oceanic and US players can choose which region to play on, so it's not suspicious at all.

 

TKNM is correct. I am not in EU.

 

Cheers fpsware. Nice test. That is why i do not use grind/quest bot anymore. Sticket with a gb.

 

This was an interesting test... Thanks for posting!
I attempted to use a quest leveling profile many times, but I too noticed they mess up 80% of the time and require A LOT of manual involvement. However, purely grind leveling profiles are way easier. I can literally set it and forget it. Leave it running for hours without any interaction. But I agree, it does look far more suspicious to other players and GMs for a player not doing any quests.

I'll continue using the grind leveling profile, but to be safe I'm going to follow everyone else's advice and do the following:
Won't bot my toon for more than 8 hours a day,
Join a noob guild, chat sometimes (chat in trade chat too),
Every few levels, manually complete a few quests,
Every once in a while, do a dungeon or two with the noob guild,
Trade random lowbie crap with other lowbies,
Duel random strangers I come across.

Anything to make my account "look" normal, in case a GM starts looking at my recent activity.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

 

yup bought a new wotlk account got the druid to 80 by grinding, was banned. questing is safer and so is grinding but account age does matter.