Ban patterns and has Blizz become more vigilant?

First a little background. I am a long time WoW player, dating back to the beta days. I have been botting on and off but got more serious during the Glider era. Never botted for financial gain, never sold gold, accounts or such. Purely because I enjoy botting. Over the years I probably have had 50-60 accounts banned for one reason or another. However in the last 4-6 months things seemed to have changed.

I used to bot very carelessly knowing the risks but never went too heavy on my main account which is all I cared about. Last year I stopped caring as much and eventually got my main account banned, I accepted the risk and outcome. Now in the more recent months the bans seem to come faster. 2 years ago I could bot for months and years in some cases with not even a suspension, last year on average my accounts would last 2-5 months. So far this year my accounts last 1-2 months and most recently days. I've had a few accounts get banned in less than 24 hours.

If anything I have tried to be more careful recently, I never bought in to the IP address, CPU ID, MAC address theories so I always botted many accounts, up to 15 concurrently at my peak on one machine from my home going out on 1 Comcast IP. In the last month I have changed things up. In early Feb I setup 5 new accounts after getting a bunch banned, towards the end of Feb I added 1 more account with a total of 6 going. The morning after I setup the 6th account all 6 accounts were banned at the same time, the 6th being about 12 hours old.

So starting last Friday I spent more time on my setup. I worked on a series of HBRelog profiles, setup VMWare and signed up for a VPN service. I setup 6 new accounts over the period of 3 days. Each instance of WoW ran in it's own VM and a VPN tunnel within that VM to different regions throughout N. America. This morning I woke up to 5 of the 6 accounts banned. Accounts 1-4 were setup Fri/Sat and account 5 & 6 were setup yesterday. Accounts 1-5 were banned sometime overnight last night and account 6 is still going as I type this.

So as always i'm trying to find a pattern and i'm struggling to do so. Here are some of the variables and constants to my behavior

Constants

- I always bot on the same server
- I almost always activate a new account with a battle chest key and WoD key at the same time. Ironically the 6th account that's still going I started with Battle Chest for 1 day then upgraded to WoD. Not sure if that has anything to do with it
- I always create a new email address in Gmail and a new Battle.net account associated with the new email address.

Variables

- I used to RAF my accounts. However in the more recent accounts I did not do RAF to avoid an association between the accounts
- I used to run 1-3 guilds and split the bots up within the guilds. In the last batch that just got banned I did not put them all in the same guild. They were all guildless.
- For the most part my botting profile in HBRelog is a 100% quest leveling until 100 using built in Kicks. Then I switch to a mix of BGFarmer Millz in Mixed Mode with a timber farming profile or a generic farming profile somewhere in Draenor.
- Some of the accounts I created a second character, usually a DK and would alternate the characters via HBRelog
- On average I would have HBRelog setup with a 3-4 hour play time then idle 5-7 hours

So like everyone i'm trying to figure out how Blizz is catching me so fast. Is my playtime in HBRelog just to much and frequent? I hear stories of people botting for 20 hours a day, but of course those are just stories and may not be true at all. The rumors that Blizz can detect HB now, or that they always could and are just now acting on it. I buy in to this to a certain degree but when things happen like this morning where 5 out of 6 accounts were banned makes we wonder, why not 6 out of 6.

Would love to hear feedback from others regarding your more recent experience with bans and any specific feedback on what i've been experimenting with.

Thanks.

 

Avoid BG/PvP like a plague, instances, raids or farming in crowded areas. In short, avoid situations where your bot behaviors can be seen/analysed by other players. Botting in BG/PvP scene is really pretty much asking for it.

Theories that I haven't got a time to try but you might want to test (if you're interested to try) and confirm for me
- Running 32 bit game client on 32 bit Windows instead of 32 bit client on 64 bit OS. Haven't got a time to format the box and reinstall Windows >_<
- Using other questing profile other than kick's. For me this is unfeasible given the amount of time needed for trial and error testing other profile or writing my own questing profile.
- Don't use GatherBuddy to farm herb/ore - use personally written questing profile. I plan to do this.

Regards,
JG

 

Lord. Right on pvp but in short bursts with BGFarmer is solid; the 32bit thing is hogwash, silly mawlarky. It's driven by the same level and line of thinking as people who believe bush brought down the towers.

 

Unless you know what the terrorists were thinking or have intimate knowledge of how blizzard conducts their searches nothing you said is credible. Didn't yo motha tell you to not open yo mouth unless you had some' important to say?

 

Following that logic Mr Turdmagnet, nobody should ever comment on anything or anyone other then themselves as we don't know what they were thinking.

But in all honesty, empirical evidence and an extensive history give some of us a different position to discuss blizzard and their banning policies.

 

Well, that's why I said they're just theories

If OP willing to try then it's his/her choice, no harm in testing it. If it doesn't work - it doesn't increases the risk. If it does work - it's good.

Regards,
JG

 

Long time lurker almost never a poster I can say out of most people on these forums you're one who lacks empirical evidence and extensive history. You're more of a "Hop on the sheeple train" type of person with always agreeing with everything they say here. If bossland says HB can't be detected you believe it through and through without a single doubt in your mind. You believe it so much you're going to make another post to tell me it can't be detected and how you're so sure it can't be despite having no evidence to back up your claims except what the official sources have said here.

Do you know why my forum handle is turd magnet? Cause im really good at finding pieces of shit.

 

I just came back to WOW and HB one week ago. I got 4 MOP accounts which were botting almost 24/7. After one week, these four account got banned, along with my non-botting guild master account.
After that I set up 2 new accounts and ran instance power level up with a WOD lvl 100 account. But all accounts got banned again in about 15 hours (haven't hit lvl90 yet)
The WOD account is under same BattleNet with the 4 banned accounts. I guess Blizzard was monitoring that BattleNet account, so they caught me so quickly, or they may have recorded my IP because I was botting on same PC and IP.

 

Well, you do realise that hardly any normal human being play 24/7? It's been said that if your bot behave like non-human, it'll attract attentions.

Regards,
JG

 

I know I was suicide botting, and I'm not surprised when the first 4 accounts got banned.
What I concern is how they track me down after I setup new accounts.

 

My guess would be because the new account is done through the same Battle .Net account and within short period of time after the first one was banned?

Regards,
JG

 

I guess so. I won't set up new accounts until next week. But what I'm afraid is they may record my IP, because I'm not able to change IP unless using VPN.

 

They became more vigilant about a year ago. About at the same time wow tokens were released. Since then it's impossible to bot for cash - it's just not doable. Not using honorbuddy at least.

 

Do you mean that detection is the problem or that Honorbuddy is lacking some capabilities that other bots have?

What ruined the business for me was last year's increase in bans for gold selling, even when playing by hand. It makes any long term setup non-viable.

 

The reason they ban fast these days is that ppl buy new accounts right after the ban and they earn even more money It´s that simple.

 

The chinese ruined it for everyone through a committing credit card fraud and creating an environment wherein anyone not willing to commit a federal crime or two is unable to produce gold at a rate to make it worthwhile.

Nope; it's true they love your money from buying new accounts, but the seemingly increased amounts of bans and the waves might very well just be because every time they lose a judgement in court against HB they come through and clean off the "retail" users to anger the base.

 

Thanks for all the great responses, minus the bickering.

So far account 6 is still going strong. I've setup 5 new accounts so i'm back to 6 going in total. Some of the feedback i've taken is i'm trying a few instances with 32-bit Win. I figure that was an easy change. I've also increased the idle time in HBrelog on each account and significantly reduced the time I spend in BG's.

Let's see how long this bunch lasts.

 

Generally for me:
- Use realistic player names (don't name your character 'Qnjljrgnbk')
- Put the characters in a guild (your own or any)
- Monitor as best you can (so you can fix a stuck bot asap)
- Don't 24/7
- Don't RAF (this was a big one for me for some reason. Whenever I used to RAF I had my accounts banned within a week - I no longer RAF)
- Never use anything other than a CR in PvP
--> and disable auto-interrupts in PvP
- Use new emails and battle.net accounts
- If possible, only have one bot running at a time. My ban rates are significantly lower when only one account is connected at one time.

This is all speculation but it's what works for me. You're going to get a lot of responses from people for what works for them - barely anything will be objective fact. The best thing to do is to experiment and see what works for you. Also, don't listen to the people who say you can't bot for gold anymore. I'm making over 500k a month and I'm doing this as minimally as I can at the moment due to time constraints. Where there's a will, there's a way .

 

How many bots do you run to make 500k? Using AH I presume?

Regards,
JG

 

RAF is safe; it just goes through periods like all kinds of botting.

Have as many bots as you want connected; makes no difference.

Your bans largely depend upon player reports for casual players; pure and simple.