I must say that I am a bit concerned about how we got busted. I was not online at all for 6 days. then I got a email notice on my phone saying that I got banned. my main account got 6 months as well my 2 farming bot account. What really gets me is that one of the accounts ban. Had not been online for 9 days. That account had never ever had any contact with the other 2 account. It was also on a different computer altogether. So this would tell me that it was at least a week long process by blizzard. Some of my Btag friends that got banned had not been on for 4 days at least as well. To be honest im not sure if I will ever play wow again. Game is kind of broken and very boring now. I don't have time to mess with the Garrison at all. So to keep up with gold I had to bot to get gold. only got on for raids so like 8 hours a week max. I did not bot when I raid cause as a tank to many issues with Cd timing and such. The fact that HB has ran this long and this is the first time this happen is actually impressive. Also the fact they did not perm ban everyone also tells me a lot about the current state of WoW.
I came back to the game 2 weeks before the ban wave - and immediately started leveling (via default profiles) and doing random BGs. I was only going 6 hrs a day, constantly monitored. I feel like it just ABSOLUTELY had to be a scan - some program they installed to view active processes or something.
Someone mentioned earlier that HB produces a lot of lua errors that spam blizzard. I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is it would be pretty easy to figure our whos running HB even with enyo and a CR.
Yes, that's one detection method of blizzard to detect a program automating tasks. All Blizzard has to do is change a GUID for one common spell on each class to cause HB to throw errors.
I lost my love for wow after wrath soon as I seen cata expansion. I like how I read through some forums of people wondering why we play and pay for a game to have a bot do everything for us, but what these people should acknowledge is they pay for a game to manually do chores, we just free up our days to have some sort of a life and still are able to manually play the game when we choose and are able to keep up with the pace.
There's three lines of speculation so far, and, all 3 are dubious. At the moment, it's still circlejerking for a possible answer, because the detection isn't known. First, is that it could be that the battle net launcher services are detecting apps, or its a less elaborate detection than warden, possibly along the lines of DNS detection, code that doesn't hook into currently watched methods. This would mean that bliz has a pretty good newcomer to the warden team that has copies of the bots and works around the tripwire and warden system to find what hooks HB or relogging uses while the game or the launcher is open. The only way to know is either to decompile or packet sniff the network of a machine running the battle net launcher services to know if it's sending data at irregular intervals after it logs into battle net services, comparing a clean setup to a detected setup. And since the launcher isn't part of the game, it can download and update the malware cyclically, only running the code during times when the game is inactive, or keeping it obfuscated in other processes, ie triggered by server side commands to poll for certain kinds of changes, then handshake back with an older or newer protocol if it finds something it shouldn't. Second is LUA errors being sent back while the client is still logged in. This seems dubious, but it could be part of a more elaborate system. Third, is telltale movement and movement over time. This was the oldest speculation out there, and because of the size of the banwave, unlikely. Unless otherwise known, not everyone banned was using the same tasks or scripts or bots. Fourth, because hb was taken down after the wave, HB has no idea how many people weren't banned. So, instead there's only speculation. From anecdotal evidence, it seems to have started around early April to mid may in detecting accounts. And fifth, it may be that the detection malware has been removed over a month ago , and is only added occasionally, in the case of it being part of the launcher. It's really only speculation. Nobody has any other ideas, so there's a lot of time to pontificate.
Don't think they banned people based on how many errrors they got. That would be insane. I think they did something in patch 6.1 which installed something on our computer that was scanning if something was injected into the WoW client.
Hey guys, now before you start talking about my posting rate or join date, these details mean nothing, im just not an active poster, if I have something to say I will post if not I wont now onto what I was going to say anyway I personally have 4 botting accounts active at the moment, only ever had 1 ban and that was for economy abuse, flooded the ah with farmed herbs I do not farm since this ban which was a few years ago I do quest/dungeon bot to lvl chars I do pvp bot in bgs I do bot the garrison I do not sell on ah I do vendor everything I do not need to earn gold never play during standard working hours for my country I bot on average 8hrs a day (randomized log ins and outs) login to every char on each account manually throught my login session all 4 characters play together on same machine and have done so for years (dynamic ip from isp) I do not leave battle.net app open always set to close before wow.exe is opened always played wow in 32bit even manually always played wow with ctm active even manually always played wow in windowed mode even manually always played wow on lowest gfx settings, even manually and always have a monitor plugin active to catch whispers etc and allow response none of my 4 accounts have been banned/ suspended I always run honorbuddy first without wow to check for an honorbuddy update, never update with wow running I hope this info is helpful to the buddy team to help pin point where how and if we were actually detected and if I can bot daily for roughly 8hrs a day every day im pretty sure its a number of things that got a lot of us flagged for the banwave, not anything specific although if I were to pinpoint something specific id say the bnet app itself might be the culprit ( I know that if you use arelog or hbrelog you don't use the bnet app) so my thoughts on the app are what if blizzard are monitoring the app, it could read your processes, could you have it running when you botting, for those that only login to the app to update wow, the low bnet app access rate for your account could also be a way to flag your account, if your constantly logging into wow (via relogger) and not using the bnet app to launch wow these are of course only thoughts and nothing has been proven but they might be areas to look into regards your friendly neighborhood botterman
I feel all the threads saying thank you for removing arena support or vice versa should be pointed to this post... No one knows if it were arenas that caused the ban or if it was something else entirely. We should not throw anything under the bus so to speak until it's officially concluded, which will be never.
We all know that it was the careless overuse of the bot that attracted attention as time went on which is what caused HB to gain so much attention. Over the past few months, the reports on the Blizzard forums got so overwhelming that Blizzard finally acted in targeting HB as it seems everyone specified that anyone using a bot was using HB. That is why.
I feel some combo of these must be true. I was botting when they pulled the plug on HB, had been for a day or two. Still no ban. Hadn't been playing at all for two months before. There had to be a window that was shut before the ban wave, and there had to be something doing the detecting that a non-active account wouldn't trigger.
