I know that botting is ALWAYS going to be risky, but until now, if you practiced discretion and botted intelligently, you had a very low chance of getting caught. I've been botting for almost 2 years, off and on. Really only when I needed to because I had other things to do and needed the free time. I've botted using Kick's profiles for leveling, different profiled grinding dungeons for mounts, gatherbuddy profiles for leveling herbing/mining and dailies profiles. Always on my main account, with no repercussions. The question I have is: Does anyone know if Blizzard is utilizing better bot detection software, because it seems like a bunch of folks are just getting caught. I haven't even turned on honorbuddy since 5.2, because I'm wary. What are your opinions/thoughts? inb4 "never bot on your main account. botting is always a risk". Thanks!
I don't work for Blizzard, so I can't really give you a direct answer. I (& everyone else on this forum) can only speculate what Blizzard do/do not do.
I apologize, but you sir are a dumbass. Not only you don?t understand what BAN REPORTS means, you also waste people time's and moderators with stupid question that have been asked before for the 1000th time, how about some fucking research!?... You need to stop behaving like children, you know that IT'S NOT SAFE and yes there is a possibility to get banned everyday, what do you want to know more?
Ignore this moron above me. I stopped botting around the 21st. Reason being (regardless what the admins/fanboys say) I feel like we're smack in the middle of a ban wave. One of the possible reason I believe is because these forums are not private. Anyone from Blizzard can come over here at their leasure and download any questing/grinding/gathering/bg/dungeon profile they like. I'm going to get some serious hate for this, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. I bot on my main account and I don't want it banned. So until I see a decline in the ban section, I will not be botting.
I appreciate the insight, guys. I thought I made myself explicitly clear when I said that I had not been banned, and was instead inquiring about other people being banned. I wanted to see if there was a pattern to the bans going out, and it seems like there aren't. Like Honors said, I think I'm just going to play it safe and refrain from botting for a bit, let things die back down and then start back up. Thank any of you who have tried to give me an answer that's helpful, and can understand where I'm coming from. Last I checked, that's what forums are for. If anyone else gets any developments or knows whats going on, please let me know! But until then, happy botting and good luck to everyone!
Its really hard to say what happened but the bans seem to have died down, which means either everyone was banned in the big push (right before the patch and a lil after(which they werent)) or the GM's put answering bot reports on high priority and had a sleepover to put the fear of god in us and make anti-botters happy (much more likely). If they had a means of detecting honorbuddy, everyone would be banned and there is still a very active botter community. My theory is there were a lot of people who thought they were invincible and went balls to the wall GB/BGbuddy while blizzard had a heightened bot ban priority. Not a dev not a blizzard employee, but my thoughts none the less.
My speculation is, given that multi-boxers and even a guy posting 100s of auctions using TSM were banned recently, is that Blizzard have implemented automatic systems server side that are tripped if you do too much of a certain activity, they are measuring nodes per hour or something like that. I've been banned twice in the last 2 weeks and bans were both overturned fairly quickly following fairly weak appeals. Also normal players are also more educated on the existence of bots and their behavior too leading to more reports.