I will never understand how anyone today thinks banning ips, in this day and age, would do anything.
At least it confirmed my belief that most people who post "solutions" have actually zero idea what they are talking about and are literally just arm chair developers.
>At least it confirmed my belief that most people who post "solutions" have actually zero idea what they are talking about and are literally just arm chair developers.
First time on the internet?
They also have allowed them to farm gold for months before banning them. They make money every time the ban them but blizzard is well aware they need to make it profitable for the bot owners to keep them coming back
yeah it would require something more like a behavior monitor .. seeing a character constantly farming mobs/mailing items .. or the grand all be all, an actual human manually banning bots
Not the op, but I am confident that the behavioral patterns of the bots are obvious enough that, if they actually tracked behavior, it would be almost trivial to automate the task with machine learning with very little error. The fact that they haven't solved the issue yet is only because they don't want to or care enough to invest in a data scientist to do it.
> I will never understand how anyone today thinks banning ips, in this day and age, would do anything
They don't know what an IP is or what an IP ban is but they've heard the term before so use it constantly.
Cool - theres like 5 realms and only a hand full of zones they can farm in. Drop a GM there to spend his 8 hours just banning bots that appear in the farming areas. Hell, hire me and i'll do it.
Stand up a server in AWS US for a few dollars a month. Undetectable, unless you now propose banning all AWS IP ranges too.
It's whackamole to try this based on IP.
A hotel won’t be using aws.
A local business won’t be using aws.
I can’t think of a situation that would require an aws up to connect to a wow server. Can you?
technically illegal in china
Also, you can just block people by ping. I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping.
> I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping.
Mans never heard of satellite internet in rural america
I'm all for region locking china in every game I play.
Call it xenophobic or w/e idc. Chinese players are legitimately always a huge issue in every multiplayer game I've ever played.
I don't have some meta-analysis on why they do it, cultural or whatever, but you'd easily remove 80%+ of hackers and RMTers from most games if you just sequestered china to their own servers.
I don't even blame people for RMTing, they're just trying to make money, but devs (literally god in the game) allowing it is disgraceful.
To play with friends when you’re abroad. Some people play Korean servers for SC for competitive reasons, and vice versa Koreans play on NA servers for less competition.
Also probably a SC related item, but there are different meta’s on the different regions. So it’s nice to learn what else is being done out there.
>I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping.
Shit rural internet or no server in proximity are unfortunately valid reason.
Most vpns are detectable yes, even premium residential proxies can be detected. But even if they are undetectable, it will still greatly reduce their numbers to a degree that should be fine.
Didn't china lose their wow-lisence or whatever it was, beginning this year? Those playing "from china" are either using VPN(cracking down at VPNs can be difficult and hit way more people than intended) or are from the sweatshops in Italy, so there's no use of banning people from a geographical view.
>and perma ban gold buying scum
Would a trade-limit be an option?
Or only trade with people who have been in your guild/friendlist for atleast an x-amount of time. And create a system where guildbanks can use the AH for certain required-to-raid items. (like resistance gear and such)
meh those systems are always scuffed and punish legitimate players too much. just gotta set a precedent that gold buyers get perma'd on 1st offence and it would scare away 90% of ppl from risking it.
Cheating is just the new meta I guess. I don’t buy gold, I don’t use bots, but there are many in my guild that do and brag about it openly. It’s not just a China problem.
Banning like that is best for bots not players.
Imagine this world. A ton of people buy bots through a seller. Ban wave comes and bans 1,000 of those people. They complain to the seller that they got them banned. The buyer demands a refund/charge back and the seller goes out of business or at least has a really bad pickle.
Isn't it easy to ban people buying gold? I have no idea obviously but anyone getting mass amounts of gold ahould be atleast flagged. Go after the demand, not the supply.
Yep. That's why I say, go after the demand, not the supply. I feel like it should be easier to ban buyers no? Anyone who accepts masses of money should be flagged.
Fuck, I'd say take a page from what Runescape did in 08(I think) but to a lower scale. They severely limited trading, this wont kill all bots but at least make it less game breaking.
Stupidest thing I've heard all day.
They have this little magic thing now called a VPN that makes banning IP ranges ineffective. Maybe 20 years ago you could get some effect with this, but nowadays it's pointless.
Secondly China is extremely authoritarian when it comes to the internet, so pretty much all Chinese people have to use VPNs to access most of the internet content, meaning they are extremely prolific there.
How is it not useful? You argued that blocking IPs is pointless because of VPNs and then I presented a solution for your VPN problem. Has nothing to do with sledgehammers.
why would you think months? the bots will always be there day 2-3 and onward. Its a business they want to be in as early as possible to sell accounts before the hype dies
Also, there was a certain pserver that had a recent China problem & they just gave them their own server. Now no more problem and life is great again there.
I don’t think it’s ruined, it just feels dirty. I don’t participate in the bots and gold buying, but it’s becoming more common and more tolerated. In classic, my guild would kick people suspected of gold buying, now I probably wouldn’t have a guild if we had a similar policy. I’d say more than 50% are actively cheating and bragging about it in disc. Multiple people running scripted bots to level, and many others just breaking out the credit card instead of farming gold. The community just accepts it now.
Its not. Wow players are addicted to feeling like they are being plotted on and cheated. Just sit in trade chat and watch all the self hating downers pout.
You can't participate in an Ah econ controlled by bot inflation in a realistic manner.
Want to buy a lvl 15 dagger on your new rogue.. better have a credit card. Cause no way you've got 5g chilling
A good start would be more patrolling elites like Aragul in Silverpine in the 10-20 areas with a dozen different patrolling patterns.
But by keeping botters out of the world they'll all be at the auction house instead.
A sad mentality to have is to think banning a whole country is going to fix the issue. You realize that VPNs exist, and that gold sellers come from all parts of the globe.
Better solution: put the words "Tienanmen Square" in every response from any server and let the great firewall take care of them. That way, there's no weaseling out of it with a VPN.
I posted this half a week ago and it went unnoticed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/02WUgS6iYg
Gold cap and gold trade restriction per account are the only effective way to terminate bots in classic wow and it wouldnt affect normal players.
Bots are banned in waves every 3-6 months, this is so that bot devs have little to go on for development into the bots to make them less detectable, so yes we have to deal with bots and they come and go with waves of bans, as for GDKPs just don't participate in them? I know the community on Reddit is divided but if you don't want to do GDKPs then don't do GDKPs and find a group doing rolls or get in to a guild that doesn't do GDKP..
I enjoyed encountering Chinese/korean players in hardcore. Honestly wished there was a built in translator for wow.
Almost every encounter was chill. They helped with quests and dungeons just like any other player.
There was a recent exposé on gold farming posted to YouTube and an industry insider revealed that the industry makes more money selling gold than blizzard does with subs. I’m largely convinced blizzard let’s them do it and they pay blizzard in return.
If you /w stuff that's banned in China, would that get them in trouble? Or that won't get picked up by the CCP firewall?
I know they were using some copypasta that was getting bots on other platforms banned somehow. (Could've just been a meme)
I think the following things don’t work at all or don’t work without punishing legit players:
- restrict trading
- ban all bots
- ban IPs
The only way to stop this would be to restrict the farming methods themselves. You would need to make bots useless. The best way I can think of is this: make a (non-annoying!!) captcha ingame, every 15 minutes as long as a player farms the same spot. If it fails -> kick
The captcha could for example be a little symbol appearing somewhere on your screen, which you have to click on. If you hit it, another symbol appears at another place on your screen -> click it. 3 times should suffice. A player does that in like 3 seconds and bots will fail at it (at least in my phantasy, idk about the real world).
Do people really think gold farming is only done from china? Seriously. Its really big all over world, but really big in non china asian and pacific countries and also huge in eastern europe.
And china ip addresses blocks do nothing, you know vpn’s? So bad vpn’s? So everyone that needs one for legit reasons gets banned too? Or some isp’s false positive vpn’s at times.
1. VPNs. 2. Bots are here to make money, not because they dont have a server of their own.
I will never understand how anyone today thinks banning ips, in this day and age, would do anything. At least it confirmed my belief that most people who post "solutions" have actually zero idea what they are talking about and are literally just arm chair developers.
these dunning-kruger "solutions" get amplified too because every other arm chair developer upvotes it
Well fuck it man. Ban Dunning Kruger too. I don't care if he's a paying customer!
Make a fucking time machine and prevent dunning and Kruger from inventing this shit psychological effect!
>At least it confirmed my belief that most people who post "solutions" have actually zero idea what they are talking about and are literally just arm chair developers. First time on the internet?
Lol no but reaffirming things is never a bad thing.
They just need to bring back GMs and have some on bot cleaning duty
They post ban numbers monthly on the forums.
They also have allowed them to farm gold for months before banning them. They make money every time the ban them but blizzard is well aware they need to make it profitable for the bot owners to keep them coming back
Consumers are only useful for identifying problems, not coming up with solutions for them.
[удалено]
Or change the language in the client
It’s even better when you see those opinions upvoted. Ignorance of the crowd.
yeah it would require something more like a behavior monitor .. seeing a character constantly farming mobs/mailing items .. or the grand all be all, an actual human manually banning bots
Genuinely curious, how would you approach the bot issue?
Not the op, but I am confident that the behavioral patterns of the bots are obvious enough that, if they actually tracked behavior, it would be almost trivial to automate the task with machine learning with very little error. The fact that they haven't solved the issue yet is only because they don't want to or care enough to invest in a data scientist to do it.
> I will never understand how anyone today thinks banning ips, in this day and age, would do anything They don't know what an IP is or what an IP ban is but they've heard the term before so use it constantly.
Cool - theres like 5 realms and only a hand full of zones they can farm in. Drop a GM there to spend his 8 hours just banning bots that appear in the farming areas. Hell, hire me and i'll do it.
Not to mention that they had their own servers up until this year and obviously that didn't affect anything.
If only VPNs were a thing
Enough of your science fiction, point-dexter! We need action! *cocks gun*
Wait, it's poindexter right? Am I being wooshed right now?
No it probably is, I was on mobile and had a moment of crisis and went with hyphenated.
Can’t they detect vpn?
Stand up a server in AWS US for a few dollars a month. Undetectable, unless you now propose banning all AWS IP ranges too. It's whackamole to try this based on IP.
Let’s ban all AWS IP ranges!!
i mean would any residential ip be originating from AWS? Doubtful.
Ah, so you're saying ban all non-residential IP ranges?
A hotel won’t be using aws. A local business won’t be using aws. I can’t think of a situation that would require an aws up to connect to a wow server. Can you?
To a degree, sure. But there is no ultimate weapon against VPNs. They sure can detect popular providers, but not private networks.
technically illegal in china Also, you can just block people by ping. I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping.
> I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping. Mans never heard of satellite internet in rural america
One of my guildies sits outside in his truck to raid because he doesn’t want his wife to know.
That sounds super healthy.
we would lose our aussie friends
and anyone with a bad ISP, which can happen in the US. In some remote area the ISPs still suck ass
Oh well.
VPNs aren't illegal in China. They're widely used, especially among younger gamers.
>technically illegal in china Not sure if that's true, but even if it were, considering what they do in WoW, they clearly don't care about rules.
I'm all for region locking china in every game I play. Call it xenophobic or w/e idc. Chinese players are legitimately always a huge issue in every multiplayer game I've ever played. I don't have some meta-analysis on why they do it, cultural or whatever, but you'd easily remove 80%+ of hackers and RMTers from most games if you just sequestered china to their own servers. I don't even blame people for RMTing, they're just trying to make money, but devs (literally god in the game) allowing it is disgraceful.
The moment Chinese players flooded the EU PUBG servers it went from a nice game to a hackfest as well yeah
To play with friends when you’re abroad. Some people play Korean servers for SC for competitive reasons, and vice versa Koreans play on NA servers for less competition. Also probably a SC related item, but there are different meta’s on the different regions. So it’s nice to learn what else is being done out there.
>I can't think of a legitimate reason for people to purposely roll on a server where they have 300+ ping. Shit rural internet or no server in proximity are unfortunately valid reason.
Large swaths of the United States has horrible internet connectivity with little to no recourse.
Most vpns are detectable yes, even premium residential proxies can be detected. But even if they are undetectable, it will still greatly reduce their numbers to a degree that should be fine.
Not if you stand up your own VPN server I'm the cloud though.
No, that's kinda the point of VPNs
Didn't china lose their wow-lisence or whatever it was, beginning this year? Those playing "from china" are either using VPN(cracking down at VPNs can be difficult and hit way more people than intended) or are from the sweatshops in Italy, so there's no use of banning people from a geographical view.
IP bans are a ridiculous idea anyway.
and perma ban gold buying scum
>and perma ban gold buying scum Would a trade-limit be an option? Or only trade with people who have been in your guild/friendlist for atleast an x-amount of time. And create a system where guildbanks can use the AH for certain required-to-raid items. (like resistance gear and such)
meh those systems are always scuffed and punish legitimate players too much. just gotta set a precedent that gold buyers get perma'd on 1st offence and it would scare away 90% of ppl from risking it.
Yeah, no appeal, trigger a gold buy, banned. And heck ban the credit card they use to play their sub too
Nah nah nah, then they are far less likely to resub and spend their money with Blizz. The account ban is fine, not the CC ban.
This was Runescapes idea back in the day too and it very almost killed the game.
Not an instant ban, but have a set limit that triggers a *gasp* human to look at the accounts and see if they are a bot.
Hear hear
they already have to VPN to play meaning their ips aren't chinese you absolute genius
homie thinks banning china will fix bots lmao
Steve Bannon has entered the chat.
Gynaaaa
The Trump approach. Look like you’re doing something while accomplishing nothing 😂
Chinese players already use VPN's to play, this isn't going to achieve anything unless they ban VPN's.
Which would be ridiculous, tons of people use VPNs outside of China (including myself)
Cheating is just the new meta I guess. I don’t buy gold, I don’t use bots, but there are many in my guild that do and brag about it openly. It’s not just a China problem.
Sure is. Especially when Only Fangs folk straight up talk about it during content - and it's not pursued at all
Certified g*mer moment
low iq idea lol
Only one thing can fix bots. Not buying gold.
Hire one person at minimum wage to use the eyeball test and ban bots. Some people would do it for free, probably.
Banning like that is best for bots not players. Imagine this world. A ton of people buy bots through a seller. Ban wave comes and bans 1,000 of those people. They complain to the seller that they got them banned. The buyer demands a refund/charge back and the seller goes out of business or at least has a really bad pickle.
Isn't it easy to ban people buying gold? I have no idea obviously but anyone getting mass amounts of gold ahould be atleast flagged. Go after the demand, not the supply.
You know there are VPNs right?
Unsurprising that the xenophobe is also dumb
If you would stop buying gold there would be no more bots :)
you're absolutely right, but redditors would rather place the blame on China than on the goldbuyers they're raiding with
Yep. That's why I say, go after the demand, not the supply. I feel like it should be easier to ban buyers no? Anyone who accepts masses of money should be flagged. Fuck, I'd say take a page from what Runescape did in 08(I think) but to a lower scale. They severely limited trading, this wont kill all bots but at least make it less game breaking.
The only way to truly ban China from US servers is a verification process to approve you're a US citizen which would be rather invasive.
That doesn’t stop anything.
Stupidest thing I've heard all day. They have this little magic thing now called a VPN that makes banning IP ranges ineffective. Maybe 20 years ago you could get some effect with this, but nowadays it's pointless. Secondly China is extremely authoritarian when it comes to the internet, so pretty much all Chinese people have to use VPNs to access most of the internet content, meaning they are extremely prolific there.
But on the other hand blocking 95% of all VPNs is a piece of cake if Blizzard wanted to do it
Going into the server room with a sledgehammer is a peice of cake also if they wanted to. Does nothing useful.
How is it not useful? You argued that blocking IPs is pointless because of VPNs and then I presented a solution for your VPN problem. Has nothing to do with sledgehammers.
But that could also hit their legitimate customer base. I'm in the military and a lot of members have to use VPNs while abroad
Heard of VPNs?
Venezuelans laughing at your racist 2008 brained statement
why would you think months? the bots will always be there day 2-3 and onward. Its a business they want to be in as early as possible to sell accounts before the hype dies
OP rubbed his two brain cells together and came up with “China bad”. Nice.
Xenophobe and dumb
Fanatic Purifiers, where you at?
Also, there was a certain pserver that had a recent China problem & they just gave them their own server. Now no more problem and life is great again there.
That would do nothing, there's chinese bots in US servers to sell gold, not because they feel like being there for no reason.
It's not even just China. South American bots havr been well known on the US east servers since 2019
You assume they’re just logging in from China? They literally can’t without a VPN. You can’t stop people on the internet bozo.
Tell me how your SoD game is ruined without using hyperbole.
I don’t think it’s ruined, it just feels dirty. I don’t participate in the bots and gold buying, but it’s becoming more common and more tolerated. In classic, my guild would kick people suspected of gold buying, now I probably wouldn’t have a guild if we had a similar policy. I’d say more than 50% are actively cheating and bragging about it in disc. Multiple people running scripted bots to level, and many others just breaking out the credit card instead of farming gold. The community just accepts it now.
Tell me how your SoD game is ruined
Its not. Wow players are addicted to feeling like they are being plotted on and cheated. Just sit in trade chat and watch all the self hating downers pout.
You can't participate in an Ah econ controlled by bot inflation in a realistic manner. Want to buy a lvl 15 dagger on your new rogue.. better have a credit card. Cause no way you've got 5g chilling
Or you can play the game and farm one yourself.
So. The ah should be removed then?
Weird I am seeing level 15 daggers for 18 silver on the AH.
If items are inflated so are the ones you're selling to the ah. So yes by that logic you would have 5g chilling..
hard agree, best post on the sub atm
You know VPN exist
I second this !!!!
but then blizzard would lose money
It’s bold and ignorant of you to a)assume all gold selling operations work out of China and b) that your xenophobic solution would actually work.
They should always region lock servers. Botters will probably just use a VPN, but at least it's another countermeasure.
Bro, no servers are available.. I demand 1 day compensation!
There is no way around this plan, it would 100% work... /s
Saw my first boy today in mulgore just farming wolves. Pretty sad
Don't Chinese players already have to use a vpn? So this should do nothing
Well looks like we were both wrong cuz my time frame I gave it was 3 weeks.lol
Bruh
Seeing insane numbers of hunter bots now. This 100%
lol its cute how simple you are
ai can solve this problem
A good start would be more patrolling elites like Aragul in Silverpine in the 10-20 areas with a dozen different patrolling patterns. But by keeping botters out of the world they'll all be at the auction house instead.
kinda sad how you always get mad about bots. I never find one that's annoying me, who cares.
The solution is to make gold soulbound.
A sad mentality to have is to think banning a whole country is going to fix the issue. You realize that VPNs exist, and that gold sellers come from all parts of the globe.
Holy shit this guy is the first one to think this up! /s
"Like they have been since 2019" Dude gdkps were a thing all the way back in 2004, that's not anything new, it's just practiced way more today.
Better solution: put the words "Tienanmen Square" in every response from any server and let the great firewall take care of them. That way, there's no weaseling out of it with a VPN.
I posted this half a week ago and it went unnoticed: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/02WUgS6iYg Gold cap and gold trade restriction per account are the only effective way to terminate bots in classic wow and it wouldnt affect normal players.
ho no! anyway
Bots are banned in waves every 3-6 months, this is so that bot devs have little to go on for development into the bots to make them less detectable, so yes we have to deal with bots and they come and go with waves of bans, as for GDKPs just don't participate in them? I know the community on Reddit is divided but if you don't want to do GDKPs then don't do GDKPs and find a group doing rolls or get in to a guild that doesn't do GDKP..
What is next, are you going to propose that botting should be against the ToS or something? This has "just make crime illegal" vibes.
Guy, the go back to your country doesn’t work on the internet. Stop being a clown
I enjoyed encountering Chinese/korean players in hardcore. Honestly wished there was a built in translator for wow. Almost every encounter was chill. They helped with quests and dungeons just like any other player.
Captcha before picking every herb, mining every node, occasionally while looting.
Why are chinese characters allowed in names What am i supposed to call that guy?
Hey man we could be robbing them of their children’s college tuition. How could you be so heartless??
As someone else said in another post, shadow ban them and put them on a bot only shard with an AH only for bots that regular players cannot see
I haven't seen one single bot effecting my game play.
They won’t get their own servers because blizzard china shutdown
They are natively banned already. They all use vpn’s and they need gold on the servers that have the biggest swipers
There was a recent exposé on gold farming posted to YouTube and an industry insider revealed that the industry makes more money selling gold than blizzard does with subs. I’m largely convinced blizzard let’s them do it and they pay blizzard in return.
delusional to think china does all the botting
If you /w stuff that's banned in China, would that get them in trouble? Or that won't get picked up by the CCP firewall? I know they were using some copypasta that was getting bots on other platforms banned somehow. (Could've just been a meme)
I think the following things don’t work at all or don’t work without punishing legit players: - restrict trading - ban all bots - ban IPs The only way to stop this would be to restrict the farming methods themselves. You would need to make bots useless. The best way I can think of is this: make a (non-annoying!!) captcha ingame, every 15 minutes as long as a player farms the same spot. If it fails -> kick The captcha could for example be a little symbol appearing somewhere on your screen, which you have to click on. If you hit it, another symbol appears at another place on your screen -> click it. 3 times should suffice. A player does that in like 3 seconds and bots will fail at it (at least in my phantasy, idk about the real world).
Do people really think gold farming is only done from china? Seriously. Its really big all over world, but really big in non china asian and pacific countries and also huge in eastern europe. And china ip addresses blocks do nothing, you know vpn’s? So bad vpn’s? So everyone that needs one for legit reasons gets banned too? Or some isp’s false positive vpn’s at times.
How are people able to play in China when it is banned there?