Blizzard's Onto Us

Lore's (the CM) Post:

Link: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/16773748032#17

They know how good the Dev team here is, the question is how long can botters stay ahead of Blizzard?

 

Interesting post. We shall see if more bans come out this week.

 

Nothing new there. They will always try to catch us.. and we will always elude them.

DX123

 

Buck Flizzard

 

How is this new to you? of course they don't reveal their methods, the devs here do the same thing, and they will both always be against one another and trying to out program one another.

 

HB has an insider

 

That's the same response they always give.

 

Catch me if you can (2002) - IMDb

 

blizzard unto us? are you trying to cause mass hysteria or panic with your stupid post?of course theyll tell theyre players they already know how to catch botters unless theyre stupid and say" what are botters?and how do we catch them?" seriously dude,your post is so dumbif blizzard has been unto us well they surely took them very long years,and still the botters are here.

would you tell a patient your not treating his sickness?just like blizzard they treat theyre players like patients and they will tell anything they can to make them feel better and continue paying,

 

"Blizzard Onto Us" - did the lawsuits give it away?

If blizzard wanted to catch us they could, like... not being able to create more accounts when you've been banned for botting over 20 times.

What's with the paranoia threads lately, bot or don't.

 

They can't stop anyone from creating accounts. I don't pay blizzard a dime for my bot accounts. I get my keys through a source and my gametime though another.

 

honestly, to me this sounds a bit like they do not rely on player reports anymore, because they have another way to detect botters. he couldn't have said it any clearer (in his position).

 

of course they have a way to detect botters. you're deluding yourself if you think otherwise.

i suspect that they've looked at the numbers of people botting (gold, pve, pvp) and would take an enormous financial hit if they banned all of them.

 

It's all conjecture until 20k+ people get banned.

 

right, that's my opinion too. they didn't or don't ban everyone or thousands of people at the same time for a reason. they could if they wanted to, but they won't. banning too many people at the same time would probably be worse for Blizz than for the botting scene

 

You're kidding right? You actually think Blizzard is scared to ban us because we make money for them? Seriously?

They said they have 10 million subs. Let's say 8 million, since some players left. HB is rumored to have 20k accounts. Let's say 50k accounts of botters (which equals 1 wow account per HB account). At this point BOssland GMBH made its first million euro in sales (more like 1.25 mil). Probably double with store sales.

Let's say blizzard has a way to close all the HB accounts at once, so they lose 50k accounts, that's 0.6% out of their player base. That's shit. No one will notice the bots being gone financially, a 0.6% decrease might yield a higher increase in returning people if the word goes out that they banned 50k accounts for botting. I'd suspect a MUCH higher increase.

Until now, there was absolutely no financial reason to ban or to keep us. We were non existent to them from a financial PoV. However, once the token hits, their financial status might go down if the CASUALS decide to pay for subs with botted gold. Even if people bought subs with botted gold before, the sub was still payed with CASH by someone, somewhere. That's why they hit the casuals with 6 months bans, so that the rest of the casuals still botting will stop and they will just pay for the subs with money and not botted gold.

My 0.02 gold is that blizzard would ban all of us if they had the chance, but there are a lot of negatives coming with that action, so they prefer not to.

On the positive side we would have:
*casuals would return to the game since the botters are gone (just imagine the Kotaku headline here)
*people would not farm gold for tokens, hence stealing revenue from them
*good PR
The negatives:
*you have to be 100% sure that your detection method is accurate and it has 0% false positives. Otherwise, this will turn out into a horrible PR stunt. Imagine 50k botting accounts closed AND 10k legit accounts of people who have no clue what a bot is. Just horrible.
*customer service nightmare. 50k people putting up tickets every x minutes. Add this to the tens of hundreds of people putting up tickets because they're stuck at the last boss in RFC and don't know how to teleport out.
*in-game economy crash. On my realm there are 54.000 Raw Beast Hide and 42.000 true iron ore being sold in the AH every day (info from wowauction), among others. How much % of that is botted? In less than a week, all markets will crash since there will be not enough raw mats in the AH to fuel all the professions. If they ban us gradually, the market will not suffer so hard, when mats go high in prices, normal people will start making alts for gathering professions.

That being said, it makes sense to ban us one at a time, instead of 50k accounts at once, but expect the number of bans per day to grow with the token coming out. Anyway, always remember that we are just 0.6% out of blizzards sub base. Stop thinking that we are #1 on his priorities list.

 

Coocks, You give way less credit to the amount of botters.
Im casual i don't bot to sell gold, i bot to buy mounts. I have between me and my wife 15 wow accounts.
I bot 2 accounts sometimes 5 accounts depending on what i am doing.

Do you know how many people Bot just to buy stuff.
Do you know how many casual players might have more then 3 or 4 account each because they where $5 and they wanted to RAF them ?
A lifetime honorbuddy allows you to bot more then on at a time.
I dont think your giving credit to the multiples.

At the very very very very very very very least i would say 1 million bots, honorbuddy isnt the only bot program out there and how many people do you think use programs that have one purpose like fishing ?

Blizzard does not have 8 million subs. The active players has dropped below the active players they had back towards the middle of SoO.
At the end of the day WOW has shareholders and these tokens are nothing more then a way to try an inflate sales and the 6 month bans are the result of We have to punish you but we don't want you to go we need your subs!



Back in the day the man in charge said cheating will not be tolerated and will be a permanent ban no exceptions. Now the same no toleration is a 6 month suspension?

 

Great reply! And you're correct- Blizzard won't ban 50K+ players at once. Too many risks.

I used to do anticheat for PunkBuster years ago. I learned a lot about how a/c operations work. Blizzard knows that banning that large a number of players at one time would have serious repercussions. Take, for example, PunkBuster's massive ban wave last year. They silent-logged players for almost two weeks, and then had a massive ban wave. Thousands of players were banned for cheating. Turns out there was a problem with that- some of those "hits" from PunkBuster were false positives, caused by proggies that were NOT hacks or cheats. They spent the next month trying to clean up the mess it caused and were forced to overturn hundreds of bans.

Can you imagine the WoW community reaction if Blizz threw out that many bans, only to turn around and say, "oops!"?

 

You have 5 bot accounts, so there must be at least 1 million bot accounts. Logic, right?

 

Punkbuster, oh the anticheat client that banned people for their IRC chat client.