Anybody else get that feeling Honorbuddy is about to go through a ***** down? Botting is sort of getting a little crazy, when you go into bgs and see 50% of each team are bots or you go for a cruise around and see multiple leveling toons running around the same spot for hours on end, bugged. Queue into an arena and the warrior at 1500 never misses a reflect or focus kick. It's just stupidly hard to miss now days. I get the feeling Blizz are getting sick of people whinging about it and we are in for hard times.
Well, I have a mixed feeling about that. Yes Blizzard seems to be hunting bot users more than ever, but on the other hand when the Tripwire event occured A LOT (so much people that realm population changed instantly) of people stopped playing. And by people I mean real players, not gold sellers or service traders. I can understand that Blizz is banning gold sellers, but will they risk losing hundred of thousand "small" botters (and the income they create) ?
Holy shit the number of people who come out with this logic is amazing, it can only be some kind of self-delusion They just tried to ban the entire HB user base, do you think they are investing the time to build detection methods into the wow client for fun? The only thing that stopped thousands of people being banned last week is the tripwire, the fact HB had to release a patch to improve security shows what a close shave it was, and yet you think Blizzard are going to be like "holy crap, we had no idea there were that many botters! we better stop going after them!!".
For all the newcomers for Honorbuddy in this thread: Welcome on board! With every noticeable change on Blizzard's side, either Patch, Expansion, etc - including today's WoW Token patch, Blizzard do proactively hunt and close down plenty of accounts - this time, the innovation are these 6 months-long suspensions. Some of the accounts are just flagged, other are delayed on a "queue" for ban etc. We will never know officially how they "choose" which accounts to apply penalty to. But that could explain the 6 months suspensions on plenty of casuals in the Ban Report section, which indeed looks very odd. TLDR: We have to face it, survive it and move on! As usual.
Think about it, if I was a big business going to target a rival how do I put it out of business? Target the primary consumer base, if they assume the primary person buying HB just uses it casually, or to do menial things and aren't serious hardcore 24hour gold farmers. What better scare tactic then queueing up as many of these accounts as you can find and tie it to a patch. Cheeky fuckers.
All of these 6 month bans that seem related to the tripwire event last week seems really odd. A few who only ever used Enyo and CRs (according to them). Disturbing?
@ Tyrantp i like where you are going with that. but its a fine line when your 'rivals' are also your customers. i do like the idea of 'shaking the bushes to see what falls out' on blizz's part. No big bans, but still collecting data on how HB reacts to a threat.