How effective is it for Blizz to ninja patch 3 or 4 times a week?

So if on every small patch Blizzard fucks the bot for possibly up to a day long, how effective would it be for them to do it just for that sole reason? A small, meaningless patch and a switch of offsets - Hours of research time by the Buddy Team before the bot can be run again?

I know its probably an investment of time that Blizzard wouldn't concern themselves with, just wondering what would happen if they did. I can't imagine it would take that long to scan a small file for security discrepencies, but it would be quite annoying.

 

I feel like even if Blizzard did this for only a month, it would drive away a large amount of bot/hack customers which may be worthwhile in the end. It would also confuse the authors of said programs as to which patches actually contain important changes as they would be pressured to release as fast as possible.

 

Its a scary concept, one which I highly doubt Blizzard would put the time or resources into it...but scary nonetheless.

But, bot developers and bots survive because they adapt, guess we'll just have to see what Buddy Devs have in store if Blizzard is sort of leaning towards this style of cyber war.

The ninja patches do seem ever more common then they use to be.

 

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keep in mind that it also takes some evort to keep chaning everything and that means that they need a a group of men that just does that and that cost much money.
and it maybe also keeps many bugs into the game

 

Blizzard has stated ever since we got the new Mists launcher that they'd be able to put out patches very frequently. It's a burden on some players with restricted internet and get lots of controversy on their end. Specifically (besides players with restricted internet) players who dislike such rapid class changes and Blizzard being able to swiftly remove support for the lower end hardware. It also takes lots of work and a need to deploy these patches instead of simply waiting. [Conquest bugs lately and such]

In terms of Honorbuddy id say this is as quick as it will get. Expansion and major content patches will be faster than past expansions, but that's rather long term. I seem to absorb the idea that they dislike botters in their game, but have no decisive way of getting rid of them without heavy resources needed just to lose a ton of money in accounts.

War is a rather off way to describe it. You're basically playing with someones toys at their house, but you're doing it a certain way that's "impeding" other people, so they get pissed and sue you.

 

I, along with many others I'm sure, would simply quit playing the game. When Blizzard really wants to win this war, they will. But at what cost?

 

its more annoying then anything

 

Figure that 1 mil people quit playing wow because of this or because they got caught botting over the course of a year thats 144 Million dollars not in their pocket. I'm sure they don't like bots and botters but is it worth the loss of all that money if they ban waving people. I think unless botters are doing something BLATENTLY disruptive i.e taking advantage of the economy by a bug i think they turn a blind eye most of the time from what i have seen/experienced.

 

They've done ban waves previously lol, and they would most certainly do a ban wave of this if they could detect it 100%.

They know 90% of botters just get new accounts, and they look good to the legit players by making their claims of how many accts are banned for botting.

 

[h=2]"The problem with Internet quotes and statistics is that often times, they?re wrongfully believed to be real."[/h]? Abraham Lincoln

 

+rep

 

looking for a hubby? /swoon

 

wai to piss in my cheerios

 

@Liferose
Nice quote =) I sold Abe his AOL account he used to post that originaly

 

You guys really over sell the annoyance of these small patches to the general public. Hell, even the larger ones. As long as it doesn't cause severe server down time and/or down time outside of normal expected server maintenance. Aside from the people that just like to bitch to bitch, not that many people care. Ya know, the people that complain about the servers going down Tuesdays like it's something brand new and Blizzard is doing it to them personally to screw them out of their day off? Then complain that the maintenance only took 7 hours when they said 8 and they planned their day accordingly and now they got screwed out of playing for an hour? Those people. Most of the time they aren't even noticeable. I logged in today not even realizing there was another patch until I came here.

And they could do this a lot more often than they do. Nor is it as expensive or man power heavy as you think either.



EDIT: Not saying I'm for them. They do annoy me. But if it wasn't for the fact that it disrupts my HB activities, I honestly couldn't care less about it.

 

hasnt stopped most botters, as alot of bots are updated within an hour of the patch.

 

Not to attack your post but we typically get double the downtime for regular patches, and saying not many people care about patches on a botting forum is rather odd.
For serious botters it's extremely noticeable. A lot of the botters don't care about the servers, they want to bot regardless of purpose it's some kind of income or loss. I'm not even very sure where the tuesday maintenance thing comes from, as that's not complained about much on here. Also please enlighten me on your extensive knowledge of how a Blizzard developer undergoes bug fixing and the probably insanely secure and lengthy strains of code checking and people to forward it to just to get it deployed. Their definition of easy is in regards to the fact they can just tell the launcher to update WoW quickly.

 

Do believe I said "general public" and yap...just looked, I did. These posts pop up all the time stating Blizzard would and will lose millions of subscriptions because of tiny little patches because they're oh so annoying and the world comes to an end every time they come out! And since I was referring to the "general public" in my post, that's what I was referring to. Odd, right? And yes, most major content patches require longer than they estimate, but most of the time the little crap takes shorter amounts of time, not longer. And oddly enough, there I mentioned "maintenance", referring to the general Tuesday maintenance which rarely takes the amount of time they post, let along "double" to do.

And fairly certain all they have to do is push the same exact build they have now with a different patch number and it would screw with HB. But you're right. That would take hours and at least a dozen, if not 2 dozen developers and probably a Bishop to arrange - right? Even if that weren't the case, they could easily manipulate small patches that would totally screw with HBs up time and it wouldn't be all that difficult to accomplish.

I didn't mention a thing about "bug fixes", just pushing different builds.

 

I had assumed when you said that "You guys really over sell the annoyance of these small patches to the general public." you had targeted the people on this forum. If the comments you're referring to Blizzard losing subs over these small patches aren't on this forum then the relevance of your post is questionable, as it branches quite harshly from the topic relating non-botters in with this. I dislike ambiguous nouns for groups of people, especially when I'm somehow not supposed to assume it's the general public.. of the forum we're on. Shorter time or not, my whole premise on this argument a page back is it would probably be difficult for Blizzard to maintain these little patches without a good reason why it can't wait for the next content patch. If they were to be serious with getting rid of HB they would dedicate more work in on it besides new opcodes and could probably seriously injure the bot. I personally believe it's so cost inefficient that they're resorting to the slow legal battle. I mean when you truly get down to it all big companies simply want money *cough*Activision*cough*, no matter how much the developers love their program.

 

They have been doing this starting from the moment 5.2 was launched. I remember making a post similar to this and low and behold here we are it is still happening. I know I had some nay sayers but it turns out I am right and I refuse to even take into consideration that they're doing these ninja patches for any other reason than to stop the bots. It's easy to watch these forums and as soon as they see a release made they get ready for their new ninja patch.