Banned today

Banned today farewell

Just CR and manual movement. Zero profiles, leveling, just manual CR on one toon.

I am done throwing money away. Thats why theres no log file, ban form or any other info.

All the "Bots" are detected in my oppinion but whats that worth haa.

Going to miss the fun. Thanks for the last 4-5 years of it.

No animosity just moving on.

 

so you've never run anything on the bot except a CR and manual movement on your account? no levelling profiles or dungeons/grinding anything like that?

So you levelled the char by hand entirely then just used routines correct?

 

I am sorry to hear that Frayman.

Well, if it's any consolation I got banned today as well, and I have never botted for more than 2-3 hours and never botted without babysitting, and I guess yeah, all the bots are detectable now. They have probably found a new "Warden" that detects bots right away or whatever, because I don't think I've been reported, the moment I see someone near me I turn off the bot and play the character myself, but oh well you never know. As for me, I'm done throwing my money away as well, this is the end of the road for me boys n girls, it's been real and it's been fun! y'all take care!

 

I leveled by hand from a boosted 90 rogue, zero automation of anykind other than the CR i was running, I got spooked after the last Ban "wave" and decided to take the grinding automation completely out of the game. the Pvp i mainly did was all by hand about an hour or two per night and more on weekends just for the gear grind and the odd world pvp, thats it. I only had one character on this account.

I have played the game since the very early stage of WOTLK and I can honestly say the only wierd thing I see now is the random disconnects that happen waaay too often for my liking, and I'm not a computer genious but maybe its sending info back to Blizz when it does that IDK.

 

Sorry for the lost man,i was banned to,but it scares me that they can detect you with only a CR running.Looks like they upgraded their " hunting techniques "

 

From what I read here and all the other ban reports last night, it confirms my conclusion, that this is just-another delayed bans weekend, after more than two weeks, dried off ban reports.

Anyone being here for more than a few seasons, can recognize the Blizzard's patterns.

If Blizzard wanted to intentionally act harsh vs this or that bot, they usually do much more offensive move, than ban several hundreds of accounts.

From the botting numbers, we have seen in the recent years - usually 200 to 500k wow accounts are regularly using any kind of 3rd party tools for automation, either sophisticated bots like HB, growing unnamed bots, rotation-only bots (with no movement at all) or lua-unlockers and basic hacks.

This is 5-10% off the whole WoW population, maybe more, who knows.

Out of these, several hundreds, or even a thousand accounts with deployed bans in the last two weeks is marginally less than 1% off the botting population, and less than 0.01% off the whole WoW community.

So does anyone seriously think 0.5-1.0% banned bots for the weekend triggers a banwave? With this rate, we expect all the bots to get banned till the early 2018?

If anyone think these numbers are simple speculation, just check the corresponding ban section:

The current first page (20 reports/page) end 4 days ago, due to 16 reports in the last 24h



Then the 2nd page end 24 days ago: So we have 20 reports in 20 days timeframe!



The 3rd page end 41 days ago: Again 20 effective reports within 16 days time-frame.



Do I have to continue time-walking?

Even if we assume conservatively that just 1 out of 20 botters would care to report its ban in the appropriate section, this accounts for up to 800 bans in the last 30 days (Including the suicide accounts, running pure gold farming)

This seems quite inaccurate count, but still!

 

I would love that there were a way to verify the conservativeness of your assumption.

I know a few multibotters. More than 10, and less than 30. The amount of accounts involved goes beyond 500 , easily.

No one of them actually reports Bans. Nobody. Not a single one.

Mostly those who report bans are just first time bot users , or casual users. No pun intended at all. Just stating it. But if I had to set a estimated value of the percentage of botting accounts whose bans are reported.....it would be more likely 1/80 than 1/20. Honestly.

And that's not taking into account that the userbase of the bot was hugely diminished with the banwave and the difficulties in dungeon farming. We'll probably never get the real numbers on how many people use Honorbuddy daily, but It is a safe bet that the HB population has dwindled to 1/5 of what it was a year ago, or two years ago.
So, in relative terms, to be able to compare with those dates, you would have to multiply the reported bans x5.

 

While generally you are correct, it is very misleading to compare the professional botters, gold-farming with 5-10-100 accoounts as their living with the casual botter.

For several reasons:

First and the foremost - The gold-farmer do not care for the accounts - its just numbers for him - He is happy as long as they break their price and give him profit!

The above gives obvious fundamental difference in the botting style.

While gold-farmer accounts do survive usually from a week to a month, the casual ones is supposed to get none to little administrative attention, if botter safely.

While the gold-farmer have no hard feelings on the bans, the casuals feel pretty bad after it - since their passion and desire is suspended.


Anyone can point much more differences, but the main topic is, that we cannot just count the gold-farmers total bans summed with casual ones. If so, the total conclusion will be too much inaccurate!

Just like when pulling statistics for the annual car crashes on the streets to include the number of car-crash tests, ran by the Automobile manufactures into the account.

 

I cannot but heavily disagree with you here. Most gold farmers with a brain don't 24/7 anymore.

Why you consider our bans should not be taken in the equation is beyond my rationality.

Some gold-faming accounts of mine, and YOURS TOO as you have specified, have survived long time even when sharing Hardware with other offending accounts.

Let's say I own 30 Hb sessions. I paid for every single one of them, just like 30 one bot people. Why my bans are not supposed to be taken into consideration when evaluating the safety?

I think that if you only get one part of the userbase, the one that better suits your personal preferences, when you evaluate banning amounts or percentages, it is you who is being completely innacurate in you conclusions, friend.

 

mee too

I am casual player, but in the last week, I put an account to farm gold for personal use, and use bot casually 3 more accounts in the same battlenet, only the farm account has been banned, 4-5 hours daily farm. After banwave (1 account suspended for 6 months, my main account) not formatted pc or new installation of wow.

 

If they were able to detect the bot then all my botting accounts would be banned. Your logic is flawed, as most hysterical bot users. You were reported, they monitored your toon's reactions while you were playing. simple.

 

i just got banned, I havent played in 2 weeks and always monitor when bottin, major bummed as only been botting a few months, just made the boring aspects of game better and allowed me to enjoy the parts i enjoyed.

 

If Blizzard wanted.

What is so difficult to understand in that? They ban in waves. They get their info, then they ban WHEN they want, IF THEY WANT. That's a known fact.

The logic of the people that use this argument (If they could detect it my accounts would be banned....) is the one that is seriously flawed.

I don't even know why to reply to that, someone will be back using that dumb argument within hours. Is just the easiest yet completely wrong logic. A logical fallacy.

 

Pimpampum, I see you are around for more than a season, then please, do refresh your ban memories, and check the past Blizzard's ban records.

So far, in the last 20 years, Blizzard ALWAYS had banned all accounts, detected for exploitation in timely matter - no matter if it was botting/duping or random minor minor exploit.

So the belief that Blizzard do NOT want to detect some behavior or do NOT to ban if detected ... is just immature and not correlated with the real world.

 

And your logic isn't flawed? Oh boy...

If Blizz was able to detect the bot they are not automatically to ban everyone now, instant, at the same time. That's not even a flawed logic, it's no logic at all. There are uncountable reasons for a company to not act immediately, to not ban everyone at the same time. To take time to investigate all the botting and behavior further. Being able to detect third party software is a great thing for their abuse department to monitor the situation. They're not little kids who get something and immediately overuse it without thinking about the further advantages they could get out of it. Thinking Blizzard would ban everyone instantly just because they are able to detect the bot is the most stupid assumption of all.

 

No real reason to discuss this because....

Neither you nor me know a crap about it.

making a statement like you just did, " in the last 20 years, Blizzard always had banned all accounts detected for exploitation in timely matter" is wrong in every word, buddy.

There are people with accounts surviving every single wave until now, and having botted since 2010. Extremely rare, but true.

We don't know how Blizzard operates, we just speculate. Making statements about it is plain dumb. Plus, 20 years? In D2 world, that goes back to botting as far as I can personally remember, banning patterns had nothing to do with what seems to be the norm now. At all, and anyone that was botting back in the day will tell you so.

There has been a massive banwave recently. This banwave, that apparently was survived by a few people, was a one-time event thankfully. Considering this is Blizzard's common procedure, when it hasn't for the last 5 years, is shortsighted.

What we do know, is different penalties were applied in the past to different actions. So, they have their ways to identify an account measure of offense and they do act accordingly. They don't blindly ban anyone they detect, as you say.

They do ban when they want, who they want. At 1 point in the last 5 years they banned everybody they could detect; the rest of the time, they have been acting like I stated.

We are talking about a multimillion company here; thinking their procedures are easy to detect and determine is naive. Too many complex aspects come into play here, including suscription numbers, bot effect on the economy, closeness of an addon / expansion....so many things.

Another way of looking at this is the manual investigation. What Blizzard claims, is when they ban an account it is previosly checked by several Gms. So , they check in game behaviour for botting patterns. There is a huge degree of subjetivity in there; what GM 1 considers obvious botting, won't be what GM 2 considers it. Plus, There is a number of actions (like setting jump intervals, close player targetting and so on) that will make even more difficult to visually determine if one player is a bot.
Bottomline: while bot1 could have been considered a bot by gm1 and gm2 and then is banned in the next wave, bot2 could have been flagged by gm1 and spared by gm2, giving it a time to survive and keep botting until further investigation is done.

That's where the subjetivity of "Who they want" comes. It has nothing to do with personal preferences or friendships. Both bots could have been "behaviorally detected" at the same scan or moment in time, yet they won't be banned at the same time.

 

This. I could elaborate further but it's not worth it.

 

These are all great and true statements that generalize how we should bot and I am in no way minimalizing them, however on the exact same week of the initial ban's I recieved a few weeks ago I noticed ALOT of malware on my PC that somehow miraculously my McAfee Internet Security somehow missed and continues to miss..infact at this moment I have glitches on the HB webpage itself with embedded ads in peoples profiles on the forum page. Now this is all crap you guys dont want to hear or perhaps useless info, and I know someone will refer to my "tinfoil hat" but you can go fuck yourself actually. What I am getting at is I think in some underhanded way Blizzard was behind this.

https://www.thebuddyforum.com/honorbuddy-forum/221318-blizzards-hidden-malware-blocked-new-post.html

 

Your post history shows a record of using automated Ashran profiles, which I can only assume use the magic (and very unsafe) Click To Move feature which is going to obviously leave an identical, traceable (to a Profile) pattern for Blizz to find. You used this as early as May, which was prior to the last banwave, but still in line to get caught by whatever detection method they might have had running in the last few weeks. Food for thought.

I don't know if that's what truly got you, but that's what my money's on. Even if you only hand leveled and used a CR for your rogue, your account itself already has a very recent history of using that feature. I've always seen it as a death trap for accounts and, for the life of me, I can't understand why people use it save for suicide accounts using RaF to level up quickly and farm on. Also keep in mind that some CRs might still be using unsafe LUA, which most of the top developers have been careful to remove given the suspicion around it after the May banwave. It's up to you to make sure the developer(s) of the CR you were using took those precautions and if not, to ask why the developer(s) didn't in their thread so they have to publicly respond to it.

 

Sad but true, since my last ban i'm taking extra care using public profiles, always editing paths and some other stuffs. I believe Blizzard is really doing their best to fck our accs. They probably have ppl checking every report by player they receive, and when they check if they find something rare they just add your account to their list, then when they ban day come PUM! 6 month/permaban, the old 72h shit is dead. Botting is a lot more risky than before...