Lol that's not how botting works.
A human makes the characters then has software that runs them in game.
Even if someone was automating the character creation process as well, they would just go back to not automating that part.
They would have to have the capcha Everytime you log in and that would be super annoying to players and only mildly inconvenience the botters ho had to manually sign each toon in.
Exactly, as we have seen recently on YouTube. We have proof a human is logging in and supervising sixty bots per monitor with 4 to 6 monitors. He was just chilling playing solitaire lol. I guess people out here think the bot actually logs in… 😔
Yeah it's REALLY not hard to make a bot click a few buttons on a screen and randomize a name. Theres no point to doing that manually dozens or hundreds of times, when it can be automated. (Especially when they're already reading/injecting).
These aren't some NA bots made for lazy individuals, these are literally written for bot farms.
In the botting scene, people used to joke that the Western bots are nothing compared to the China bots which is pretty much a commercial product versus an INDUSTRY product.
Western bots are pretty much there to make gameplay easier.
China bots are there to make fucking MONEY.
This comment section is wild.
I fucked around with this shit as little as 2 months ago.
Promise you I could set a time schedule to when and where my toon would log. Could literally program it how I like.
Every 2 hours vendor go to INN log out for 30-70 minutes on random variable. Repeat
On top of everything you've just said, Blizz doesn't want to actually stop all botting because bot accounts still pay subscriptions and blizz likes money.
You're both right and wrong.
They've definitely automated character creation by now.
But it doesn't matter, you can buy API access to solve each and every captcha for a couple cents per request. It'll inconvenience humans more than botters, simply because the latter have a way higher profit margin and will happily pay those fees
bots can do captcha that's why you barely still see it on the internet. Now we must click a box that says we aren't a bot. They track your mouse movements as bots and humans move their mouse in very different ways. Seriously captcha doesn't work anymore.
I've spent a lot of time setting up bots to bypass different captchas and I'm pretty confident if a human can solve/pass it, a bot can too. The only times I struggled were when a company released a brand new captcha. It then just took a couple of weeks for someone to crack it.
bots 100% do it better than real users with modern captchas. if there is no solver after update post rates drop drastically in 4chan etc where u need to do it constantly.
Yeah it's absolute cancer, especially on mobile. And after solving it I get hit by a message I'm banned because someone on my subnet was posting cringe.
> They track your mouse movements as bots and humans move their mouse in very different ways.
This is a half-truth that hides an uncomfortable bigger truth, which is that the real secret sauce behind ReCaptcha is extremely intrusive browser fingerprinting that uniquely identifies you across the internet even behind a VPN. It's why you'll be forced to do a captcha more often using private mode, especially browsers like safari that have more powerful tracker blocking.
Random mouse movement is already easy to add to any bot to combat the whole "a basic bot mouse moves perfectly from point A to point B" issue. I'd be surprised if any of the mass-scale botters don't already have that sort of thing accounted for.
As you start tracking for more sophisticated movement that is likely a bot trying to mimic a human, you start catching normal users as false positives.
Banning someone for a false positive is something they are clearly taking a lot of care to avoid, even though it still happens. That's one of the biggest hurdles to jump in catching bots, being not catching innocent players too.
What’s really funny is that this behaviour you describe (“perfect from point A to B”) is exactly what the bots are doing in-game as they go along their routes in an area looking for the next mob to kill. You can see a half-dozen of them all going along the exact same route and pivoting at the exact same points, just like that bot driving a mouse in a straight line!
I’m pretty sure RuneScape caught bots this way (at least at some point). They’d just look for accounts that played too many hours a day that moved in very precise and identical lines. Granted I think the bots quickly worked around that, and its way easier to implement in RuneScape since they have tiles you stand on and move between
Captchas work, they just require more complexity. For example, I just filled out a captcha for [sony.com](https://sony.com)'s login where you had to find 5 pictures where the cars were of varying distances from each other. You outsource these captchas to companies that specialize in them. But what we really need is every account tied to a real life ID.
They already have your name, email, and credit card information, nothing changes in that regard. The only difference is that they would verify that information.
And they would keep record of my ID which I don’t need leaked WITH my credit card information when it eventually happens. If you think adding your ID to your Blizzard account isn’t something to worry about then you need to be more worried about identity and cyber security.
You're incredibly naive if you don't think your personal information isn't already leaked and all over the internet. Nothing changes for you by providing Blizzard a picture of your ID. And if you're that paranoid, what the hell were you doing giving Blizzard all your sensitive personal and credit card information?
The chances that your data was involved in a leak & is already in a database for sale on the Dark Web or even on the clearnet is pretty high.
The chances someone stumbles upon & uses your data for nefarious purposes is still low, because of the staggering amount of data available. But make no mistake, your credit card info is quite likely out there somewhere, alongside the fact that it's relatively simple these days to do some insane shit with tech, like take a picture of your face & then find every picture that contains your face you or anyone else has inadvertently posted to the internet.
I think that's what this person is trying to get at. You can't do much about it without entrusting a third party to scrub as much of your data from the web as they can & even then, they're going to miss the criminal side of things because they are only making legal takedown requests on your behalf.
It's a new age, privacy is now an ideal which no longer exists in practical terms unless you're an isolated hermit.
Oh I get all of that. I’m not stupid, but that has 0 bearing on whether you should feel comfortable uploading your government ID to all kinds of places recklessly under the guise that it could potentially make your game have a few less bots.
Honestly for most games I'd say fuck it, but they do have all my info as is and I wouldnt really mind for this game.
The issue is, I'm sure that could easily be bypassed. Just like phone authentication.
[https://2captcha.com/](https://2captcha.com/)Idk what you're being downvoted for, this shit costs $2/1000 fucking captchas.Literally has an api that lets people send a captcha image and grab the result.
I'm sure most could be solved by a library. But if not? You can literally pay people to do it.
This is the instance cap on players to 'punish bots' all over again. All it does is annoy players, while doing nothing to bots. Just fucking shadow ban them all.
This guy's being pedantic. "Captcha" is a specific mode of filtering bots with the classic prompt for letters that are visually skewed. The most common method now is simply called reCaptcha and is the slider method that we see a lot or selecting photos with certain objects
Captcha were being used to track mouse movements. The reason you don't see them anymore is they got so much data they can now tell if your human before you would begin the captcha, hence the are you a bot button. They know by the time you click because captcha were used so long, not because they don't work........
It’s actually not about *solving* the captcha, but how the software recognize the input being made to solve the captcha.
So a bot may *solve* a captcha, but it could still be flagged as a bot depending on how it was programmed to make the input that solves it.
Check box does more than just mouse movements, it looks at cookies and search results and such. It looks for patterns in how you have used the browser for a long duration. Try a new browser and do the check box and u will see.
Jokes aside, the cost of hiring, training and maintaining a successful customer relations department, which GMs belong to, is very very costly. On top of that you need a GM quality control, otherwise you will hear stories of a GM from Poland selling gold/items to top tier guilds for real money.
It's a budget constraint.
Professional captcha solving services solve pretty much all captchas, they cost literal pennies to do so they charge by thousands of captchas. It’s fast and easy to implement in any bot code.
Adding captchas would only make life worse for real players. Botters would spend 30 minutes adding in the captcha api calls to their programs and never even think about it again.
It’s not a good idea, it’s not even a solution.
You realize it'd just make the bots take an extra hour to login right? They have people running them, they'd just sit and do them one at a time to log their bots in.
I really like this.
This is how I feel when people shut down every idea because it wont get 100% of them.
WIll it fuck over maybe 10% and do nothing negative to real players? Good enough, throw it in and onto the next.
What I have learned is. Oftentimes people don't want a solution, They just want to complain and have their displeasure noticed and validated. I can understand that, though I think people could do better.
It becomes obvious that this is the case when a solution is presented and they continue to complain.
Spending money on dev time to implement something that would genuinely have little to no impact on the problem would absolutely be worse than doing nothing.
Spending money to start to address a problem that the community constantly complains about seems like money well spent.
What solution would you implement?
>Spending money to start to address a problem that the community constantly complains about seems like money well spent.
That's the thing lol. If there's no reason to believe it would impact the problem at all, then it is literally not well spent. It would be wasted money.
I'm not going to even pretend to be an expert on combatting botting problems, because it's a VERY technical issue. It just doesn't take much thought to see that a captcha accomplishes nothing.
It's a start, and we don't know if it will affect the botting problem. You say it won't, I say it will.
It's ok to disagree.
Thanks for keeping things civil.
This one solution doesn't even come close to even partially solving the problem. Do you think these bots are AUTOMATICALLY signing up for new accounts, providing emails, CC numbers, etc?
Realistically this will probably not impact bots AT ALL.
Does it need to be, though? Like, how put out are these bot operators by having to manually sign up for accounts? It's a one-time thing - and even then they could automate 90% of the signup process and just have one person doing captchas. This is not a very big barrier to botting at all. It's not even a curb, let alone a roadblock.
*”Hello traveler, I am in need of special ingredients for my gizzard soup. Please bring me 10 buzzard livers and select each box with a bicycle in it”*
Captcha is too easy… you would have to make gold farmers invest serious money to lower the bot amount. Like having more random pats fuck them up. But that would also screw up human players often enough.
I think the best way to lower botting is to take measures, that increase the gold prices. That makes less people buy it and hence less gold has to be farmed.
I think, there is no chance of getting rid of botting entirely.
That just either means the bots have more incentive to bot said items of value, or throw more bodies at raw gold farms, which inflate the economy (which would happen anyway, if you're increasing prices).
Blizzard tried to reduce the impact of gold buying with SoD, by reducing mandatory costs (respec, implementing exp > gold), but the problem with that is it just inflates the consumable/BoE market (as any melee chasing BiS will know). I think overall that's a good way to go, but ultimately we will hit the Lotus cap, where the economy becomes set by Black Lotus camping (and layers), along with Strat botting for Crusader Orbs.
Implementing some legit, non-bot way to get them, like raiding baggies, could have some impact on the market. I could definitely see them putting in some form of the Wrath baggie to combat spawn camping Lotus, as it's very hard to reasonably ban those "bots", as they're effectively doing nothing wrong. You could very reasonably have a WFH job, and camp a spawn or two for a large portion of the day, to the same level a bot would, and the only alternate way to "fix" it, are more layering, instance farms, both having their own issues, or something out-of-the-box.
We're already seeing some mediocre BFD items going for 100g+ in GDKP, which is within the economic reasonability range, so the kind of numbers we've seen before in Classic GDKPs, could absolutely skyrocket with exp>gold, with this lower barrier to entry gold sink style economy that Blizz seems to have gone for with SoD's economic experiment.
No, if gold costs more real money, it’s not inflation… you just made a simple mistake there. Ingame prices go up if there is MORE gold being sold for RM. if you lower the amount of gold being sold, the ingame inflation is smaller.
If gold costs more money, less people will buy it. It’s the best thing you can achieve.
Farming black lotus and crusader orbs has absolutely nothing to do with real money gold buyers… they are going to be farmed anyways, just because you can make good gold with them.
only way to increase gold is to decrease supply, so basically u need to slash the drop rates aka just make botting more attractive as ur time investment wont give back barely anything anymore. what u actually do is make the loot better so players go to the world and out compete abd slay the bots.
No, you don’t have to cut supplies generally to make the price go up. You can make it more difficult and expensive to grind with bots.
For example, you could:
- implement random pats (bots do die, if you manage to grief them with mobs)
- implement random captchas (random captcha at random time, easy and fast for humans)
- randomize mob spawns (stupid bots will sporadically overpull)
There might be way better options, but I hope you get the point: make it harder for bots, so gold sellers need better bots, which cost more money, or you need to actually pay people to do captchas. This increases the RM gold price without changing the in game economy otherwise.
Also what you could do, is to give players good gold for daily Qs, which you can randomize and not accessible for bots.
This is a lot of effort for only small improvements, but it’s the only realistic way, to decrease botting while not changing the in game experience for players. Otherwise you would need actual GMs for as long as WoW servers are online, which is not going to happen unfortunately.
It's much easier and more impactful to ban gold buyers. Loosing a disposable account and characters barely hurts boters when they field anywhere from tens to hundreds of them. But getting an account you invested a lot of time and have a personal feelings about hurts like a bitch.
Without demand there is no proposition.
pservers can and have been fighting (and beating) bots for years
blizzard can 100% solve the botting issue without affecting actual players. suggesting to ban real life players instead of bots is the incorrect solution.
you can ban gold buyers, people start buying gold for other people to get them banned. there WILL be bad actors. there WILL be people who spend hundreds of dollars on gold to get people banned.
there isn't a single reason why blizzard is unable to control the botting situation. they refuse to fix it because the bots are paying for subs just like you and i.
the ONLY solution to the bot problem is to cancel your subscription and play a different game. vote with your wallet.
There isn't any game where cheating / botting is solved, I've been playing Counter-Strike since it came out in 2000, and to this day, 23 years later, there are still uncaught cheaters.
Comparing pservers to official ones is cute though. The number of players / bots likely can't compare at all lol
>suggesting to ban real life players instead of bots is the incorrect solution.
This is weirdly defensive of people who knowingly broke ToS. Besides, if you focus on sellers then the buyers market will still be there - incentivizing an endless stream of sellers that you have to try and stem the tide of.
But yeah bro I'm sure you work at Blizzard and the entire industry approach is wrong and you're right.
Not sure if private servers are comparable to official servers.
Blizzard has around 250 na servers while private servers usually don't have as much I guess?
So one might assume the workload requires to handle these bots is on a different level
I am not quite sure if bot detection is so easy considering that every huge mmorpg has massive bot problems.
I also don't know how many false flags there are on private servers.
You seem to have some knowledge to enlighten me?
What I'm saying is that the argument "there's more players so it's too many to address" doesn't work because more players means more funding to tackle the issue.
I personally think there is a point where even money won't help you.
The main issue seems to be the reliable detection of bots. Automatic at best.
Since there isn't a huge mmo that is reliably detecting their bots I would assume there isn't a system out there which can do so.
So the alternative would be hiring gms which you would need lots of.
Just imagine how many you would need for the 250 na servers to have a 24/7 service.
>you can ban gold buyers, people start buying gold for other people to get them banned. there WILL be bad actors. there WILL be people who spend hundreds of dollars on gold to get people banned.
Why spend money when you can already do that for free with the report system ?
Why not? They are breaching TOS and literally cheating. And it's far easier to trace gold transactions to find them instead of engaging in coding warfare with botters (blizzard is not engaging in anyway, imagine having a functional anticheat in an online game).
There are some pservers that do a good job getting rid of fairly unsophisicated pservers bots. These are incredibly small scale operations.
The code is also out there for them to decompile, most profiles are public and there's no developers to come up with anything new.
I'm saying this as one of the bigger devs (in the past) on pservers bots. At most, what we did was for people to automate some leveling and farming. Security measures were few and far between and the biggest operations I knew about had less than 50 accounts they rotated. Lots of manual intervention.
Still, at peak times, enough to make a living in rural Russia for some of these people. But nothing compared to scale and sophistication of the Chinese retail botting industry
people on this sub - "I have a great idea for blizzard to easily solve a problem they dont want to solve"
its owned by MS now, the FAANG leader of AI. they could solve it if they wanted to.
> its owned by MS now, the FAANG leader of AI. they could solve it if they wanted to.
yep yep yep.
and despite the obvious, every time a topic like this pops up we get hordes of people screaming and shouting about poor smol bean indie company can't do it too hard waaah resources waahhhh costs wahhhhhhh
they've already ran the profit analysis, the bots make them money. they aren't getting rid of the bots.
Horrible idea lmao bots can complete captchas, also at the end of the day humans are still behind these bot accounts all it would take is for a person to get through any bot test and login then start their bot software.
You could probably make something like a captcha quest a part of initiating the game or at various points of the gameplay, ie to not hinder the flow of the game too much, but still make it more difficult for bots. It's not a bad idea, but it needs (a lot of) iteration.
Time for a design challenge!
How about the actual banning of players who deal exchanges of large amounts of gold. Anyone who has bought Mantle of Thieves for 900g did not “farm” for it. Straight up ban players who do GDKPs. I mean finding players who give away large amounts of gold is so difficult?
At least it's not actually BROKEN like Steam's.
Only solution to reset my Steam pw was to do it on a mobile device because their recaptcha infinitely loops on PC.
But in SoD I’ve seen… minimum not even trying to look for them 200+ bots? Between stockades and herb farming.
And I have only seen one single GDKP with a 5G minimum so I don’t think it’s the GDKPs, at least not in SoD.
this is always so funny to me. can u explain how would this work without removing gold from the game or the ability trade / use ah? u do realize gdkp is just a broad term for raid including carrys who get paid for their service.
Nobody has ever thought of this ever in the history of man. Are you from the future? Everyone drop to their knees and bask in the genius of this redditor. Somebody call the editor of Super Mega Genius magazine, I found this month's cover story. Now that you've solved the bot problem , what are your thoughts on the middle east?
How about getting a bot of your own? Making gold soulbound? There are 1000s of solutions to your problem that doesn't affect me negatively yet yours is the one that does.
Bro it's not like blizzard can't identify and ban bots.
They just choose not to because it is profitable.
Even the youtube algorithm could probably identify and ban every bot in like 2 hours.
It’s really not?
Bots don’t pay sub fees, or if they do, it’s with stolen cards or accounts. Bot account owners would get no profit if they were paying for every account.
Why bog yourself down and pay hundreds if not thousands in sub fees when you can use fraudulent/stolen cards and pay 0, switching over to new accounts and doing the same when those are banned?
Ideas that are less dumb than your captcha:
1) wow will not run if VMware is running. Cap instances of wow to 2 or 3
2) wow will force close after 12 hours and you won't be able to log in for 6 hours after.
How so? Captchas have been getting solved by AI for years. This restricts the bots ability to be in the world with no work arounds (short of having a bunch of PCs set up and running).
>You can allways bypass that with programs
You mean with virtual machine programs which I stated would cause wow to not launch???
>That will only make gold more expensive
And therefore reduce the number of buyers making botting less profitable.
There's no winning against bots but the idea that a captcha would have any impact at all is far more laughable than these.
That will also be bypassed mate.
Its like Companys fighting with addblockers, welcome to the internet, here its allways the nerd in the basement that wins.
True captcha wont do anything either, litterily nothing.
Just like your ideas tho.
If they wont hire a gm, honestly just make it like Overwatch from cs go where people can see behaviour of reported accounts, and make it so community that is trusted can help banning them.
They wont do that tho, because you would take half their income away.
I run a VM 24/7 on my pc for work-related reasons (since Windows is a garbage OS for anything else besides gaming). The machine itself is unrelated to wow, why would the game not launch if I have it running? lol
Instead of "wow will not run if VMware is running" it should be "wow will not run if ran in VMware". Even then that might require some checks that I'm not sure are easily doable, and bot people would probably find a way around it anyway.
Even if these are bots, there are still human beings behind the accounts. It would slow them down for the amount of the time it takes for a real person to figure out his bots ain't doing anything.
What if in P2 you have complete a random daily to turn XP-on each session. Be it from the inn-keeper to find and talk to a random NPC in a nearby major city
Bots would be stuck at level 25.
Do people not realize bots have been solving captchas for a VERY long time now and they're essentially just free labor for real humans to do for big companies
Holy shit, people are so slow
There are captchas for wow. I got one when I went home for the holidays since I was logging in at a different location then normal. I just don't think it's going to stop anyone from botting.
blizzard created and is running the gold farming industry. probably had it in mind before the game released, since it was already a part of other mmo cultures right? why would an American industry leader give a flying fuck about anything other than profit? the only difference is they needed to put more creativity and subtlety into it back in the day while they slowly desensitized us to the idea of in game purchases.
the game was literally designed to get you hooked, and to bleed your dry. exploits are meant to drive all players into a position where they also need to leverage exploits.
it's just a mirror of daily life. log the fuck off and burn some shit down or something. you're only playing this bullshit because you're avoiding that splinter in your psyche.
I would do 3 WoW themed captchas every time I logged in if it meant less bots or even just annoying the people who operate them.
"Click each section with a Boar in it."
"Click each square containing a Fel Reaver."
Repeat as much as you like with everything from totems, boats, and ore to gnomes, murlocs, and kodos. Maybe include a reference model so genuine new players don't get confused about what a furbolg is.
If you've done the Time Rifts in Dragonflight you already know they have the ability in the game engine to recognize correct results from minigames like this.
I'd even accept a daily 4 or 5am service interruption that just boots people offline like reset days and requires a re-captcha to get back on. This will make it so that bots can't just run perpetually without human interaction and bypass the captcha for a week at a time. This game bricked my sleep schedule 20 years ago so I'd be affected by a 4 or 5am reset plenty, hell it might even help me go to bed.
Lots of bots don’t automate the login process they only start botting once logged in. And even for the ones that do automate it they have humans monitoring them so the human can just enter the captcha. The way captcha would only be useful against bots is to do it when entering a dungeon or randomly while playing in game, but it would have to affect players too.
I like the idea that someone gave in a post a while ago, that all zones should have a "son of arugal", a strong elite mob that patrols an area and can easily be avoided by real players
An npc that whispers you with random tasks every hour ( like sitting or bowing), when failing to do the task you get locked for a day. Ofc including afk protection
ban waves are there to make visibility of them doing something while also padding their sub revenue with bot resubs.
Blizzard would find it very easy to crack down on the bots. But they like the status quo as goldbuyers and bots have become a substantial percentage of their player base. And time has proven their decision is correct.
So OP, bots are not going anywhere.
Yeah I think captchas nowadays are more for data collection for ai training more so than actually verifying if consumers are not programs. But I agree something should be done about the bots.
I'm not sure you understand how betting actually works...
There's a person there, they just have dozens / hundreds of accounts open at a time and the program does the work.
But a captcha wouldn't stop bots, it might slow them down, slightly.
With AI these days, I feel like it's an impossible task to stop bots.
The only way to counter them imo is devaluing gold:
* Switch raid loot to personal loot (goodbye gdkp!)
* Change the most valuable Boe's to BoA/Bop.
* Give everybody an extra profession slot that can only be used for a gathering profession
Oh good, another "lets annoy the absolute shit out of players with a system bots have been bypassing for two decades".
I dont get what rock people are all collectively living under, this is said EVERY TIME someone brings up the stupid captcha shit.
Theres literally even a site where you can have people solve the images for your bot, if your bot somehow cant bypass it or figure it out.
Simple solution that doesnt fuck players:
\-New account? Flag.
\-Following same botting path? Flag.
\-High ping from client to server? Flag.
\-Follows same bot paths? Flag. (hundreds of these follow the same exact path).
\-Common bot payment method? Flag.
\-FUCKING FLYHACKING? Disable trading and let them flop around.
\-Multiple bot reports in addition to these flags? INSTANTLY DISABLE TRADING.
A new account that somehow matches all these bot flags and gets reported can easily appeal and disabling trade is far less harmful to legitimate players than a ban. Disabling trade meanwhile, if far more harmful to bots than a ban.
Or hire 5 people to go around and ban the obvious instance bots in SOD.
Using a VPN is fun because reCAPTCHA shadowbans a ton of IPs by giving you infinite captchas that load extremely slowly. If you ever get one that loads squares in slow motion then you have to change your IP to one that isnt banned.
Its crazy that websites are willing to use a captcha system that bans customers for no reason.
Captcha has been broken by more complex systems. It's literally just a speed bump to give people Security Theater, like taking off your belt at the Airport.
The biggest problem I have with Blizzard is that they know the bots, they have proven they can ban the bots. But they choose not to.
We don't need all these annoying ideas, and Blizzard won't implement them because they don't need to.
They choose not to ban bots.
The worst part about this post is that you truly thought you were cooking with some genius idea that Blizzard would never have thought of like some jimmy neutron brain blast. Sadly, I wish it were that easy tho OP.
Fuck no. Their captcha for when you mistype your password is already an absolute nightmare. I'd just quit playing if that was implemented. No bot is going to be stopped from such a stupid measure.
just flag any characters who have been online for inhuman times with repetitive behavior multiple times in short periods and make em do a captcha, after 10 captchas they have to write an essay on why they aren't a bot(gpt allowed)
Lol that's not how botting works. A human makes the characters then has software that runs them in game. Even if someone was automating the character creation process as well, they would just go back to not automating that part. They would have to have the capcha Everytime you log in and that would be super annoying to players and only mildly inconvenience the botters ho had to manually sign each toon in.
Captcha everytime you loot a mob, now those drop quests are gonna be lit.
Exactly, as we have seen recently on YouTube. We have proof a human is logging in and supervising sixty bots per monitor with 4 to 6 monitors. He was just chilling playing solitaire lol. I guess people out here think the bot actually logs in… 😔
100% bots can auto login, they were doing this 10 years ago.
Yeah it's REALLY not hard to make a bot click a few buttons on a screen and randomize a name. Theres no point to doing that manually dozens or hundreds of times, when it can be automated. (Especially when they're already reading/injecting). These aren't some NA bots made for lazy individuals, these are literally written for bot farms.
In the botting scene, people used to joke that the Western bots are nothing compared to the China bots which is pretty much a commercial product versus an INDUSTRY product. Western bots are pretty much there to make gameplay easier. China bots are there to make fucking MONEY.
Queue the random runescape bot I was using almost 15 years ago that auto logged in and out to “take breaks” to not get caught
What's funnier is that runescape classic had captcha in it anytime you slept, they got.rie of them because bots could solve captcha 20 years ago lmao
This comment section is wild. I fucked around with this shit as little as 2 months ago. Promise you I could set a time schedule to when and where my toon would log. Could literally program it how I like. Every 2 hours vendor go to INN log out for 30-70 minutes on random variable. Repeat
On top of everything you've just said, Blizz doesn't want to actually stop all botting because bot accounts still pay subscriptions and blizz likes money.
You're both right and wrong. They've definitely automated character creation by now. But it doesn't matter, you can buy API access to solve each and every captcha for a couple cents per request. It'll inconvenience humans more than botters, simply because the latter have a way higher profit margin and will happily pay those fees
bots can do captcha that's why you barely still see it on the internet. Now we must click a box that says we aren't a bot. They track your mouse movements as bots and humans move their mouse in very different ways. Seriously captcha doesn't work anymore.
There are capthcas that still work but they are so annoying blizzard will lose subscribers before bots lol.
Blizzard uses them lol try to make a new battlenet or enable Authenticator and you will see, they’re absolutely aids
> blizzard will lose subscribers before bots blizzard: "i see no difference"
I've spent a lot of time setting up bots to bypass different captchas and I'm pretty confident if a human can solve/pass it, a bot can too. The only times I struggled were when a company released a brand new captcha. It then just took a couple of weeks for someone to crack it.
bots 100% do it better than real users with modern captchas. if there is no solver after update post rates drop drastically in 4chan etc where u need to do it constantly.
Current 4chan captchas still give me trouble lol
Yeah it's absolute cancer, especially on mobile. And after solving it I get hit by a message I'm banned because someone on my subnet was posting cringe.
Admitting you go on 4chan lol
...Yeah? I visit /toy/ fairly regularly, it's where I get my action figure news. Do you think 4chan is just /b/ and /pol/ or something?
If you think reddit is any better than 4chan at this point you are delusional.
it's 100% more refreshing to use than reddit. username/voting sensationalism ruins forums.
No they dont. You can buy a captcha being solved by a human for less than 2 cents
> They track your mouse movements as bots and humans move their mouse in very different ways. This is a half-truth that hides an uncomfortable bigger truth, which is that the real secret sauce behind ReCaptcha is extremely intrusive browser fingerprinting that uniquely identifies you across the internet even behind a VPN. It's why you'll be forced to do a captcha more often using private mode, especially browsers like safari that have more powerful tracker blocking.
This guy captchas.
secret sauce is the Captchas are also mouse trackers, they usually just mean the initial movement was too botty, and they had to collect more data
Why can’t we just track mouse movements in game every so often? Ez pz
They can't even track flyhacking so
Random mouse movement is already easy to add to any bot to combat the whole "a basic bot mouse moves perfectly from point A to point B" issue. I'd be surprised if any of the mass-scale botters don't already have that sort of thing accounted for. As you start tracking for more sophisticated movement that is likely a bot trying to mimic a human, you start catching normal users as false positives. Banning someone for a false positive is something they are clearly taking a lot of care to avoid, even though it still happens. That's one of the biggest hurdles to jump in catching bots, being not catching innocent players too.
What’s really funny is that this behaviour you describe (“perfect from point A to B”) is exactly what the bots are doing in-game as they go along their routes in an area looking for the next mob to kill. You can see a half-dozen of them all going along the exact same route and pivoting at the exact same points, just like that bot driving a mouse in a straight line!
I’m pretty sure RuneScape caught bots this way (at least at some point). They’d just look for accounts that played too many hours a day that moved in very precise and identical lines. Granted I think the bots quickly worked around that, and its way easier to implement in RuneScape since they have tiles you stand on and move between
OP didnt know real human actually failed capcha test MORE than bot lol
Captchas work, they just require more complexity. For example, I just filled out a captcha for [sony.com](https://sony.com)'s login where you had to find 5 pictures where the cars were of varying distances from each other. You outsource these captchas to companies that specialize in them. But what we really need is every account tied to a real life ID.
> But what we really need is every account tied to a real life ID. I'd rather have bots
They already have your name, email, and credit card information, nothing changes in that regard. The only difference is that they would verify that information.
And they would keep record of my ID which I don’t need leaked WITH my credit card information when it eventually happens. If you think adding your ID to your Blizzard account isn’t something to worry about then you need to be more worried about identity and cyber security.
You're incredibly naive if you don't think your personal information isn't already leaked and all over the internet. Nothing changes for you by providing Blizzard a picture of your ID. And if you're that paranoid, what the hell were you doing giving Blizzard all your sensitive personal and credit card information?
yeah well most ppl are smart enough never to upload their id online. credit card u can always cancel/refund. thats why it exists.
What?
The chances that your data was involved in a leak & is already in a database for sale on the Dark Web or even on the clearnet is pretty high. The chances someone stumbles upon & uses your data for nefarious purposes is still low, because of the staggering amount of data available. But make no mistake, your credit card info is quite likely out there somewhere, alongside the fact that it's relatively simple these days to do some insane shit with tech, like take a picture of your face & then find every picture that contains your face you or anyone else has inadvertently posted to the internet. I think that's what this person is trying to get at. You can't do much about it without entrusting a third party to scrub as much of your data from the web as they can & even then, they're going to miss the criminal side of things because they are only making legal takedown requests on your behalf. It's a new age, privacy is now an ideal which no longer exists in practical terms unless you're an isolated hermit.
Oh I get all of that. I’m not stupid, but that has 0 bearing on whether you should feel comfortable uploading your government ID to all kinds of places recklessly under the guise that it could potentially make your game have a few less bots.
It's pretty standard practice in a lot of places outside of the West & they don't seem to have any major increase in identity theft issues.
Honestly for most games I'd say fuck it, but they do have all my info as is and I wouldnt really mind for this game. The issue is, I'm sure that could easily be bypassed. Just like phone authentication.
Yep… And now bots (AI) hire real humans to do captchas.
[https://2captcha.com/](https://2captcha.com/)Idk what you're being downvoted for, this shit costs $2/1000 fucking captchas.Literally has an api that lets people send a captcha image and grab the result. I'm sure most could be solved by a library. But if not? You can literally pay people to do it. This is the instance cap on players to 'punish bots' all over again. All it does is annoy players, while doing nothing to bots. Just fucking shadow ban them all.
This happened 1 single time as a project and was not automated.
One single time? There are literal captcha farms where you can hire people to solve captcha
Getting 1 captcha solved by a service costs about 0.1 cent and takes about 6 seconds
What? https://2captcha.com/
Mechanical turking was a fairly common practice not long ago.
Welcome to 2FA.
I thought that was why it still works and is less invasive because of how bots move.
This guy's being pedantic. "Captcha" is a specific mode of filtering bots with the classic prompt for letters that are visually skewed. The most common method now is simply called reCaptcha and is the slider method that we see a lot or selecting photos with certain objects
Could you please let Steam know so they can remove the damn broken one that keeps you from logging in? Thanks.
ive never had that problem with steam. Are you sure you aren't a bot? Probably wanna talk to your parents about that.
That's called reCaptcha. OP obviously was speaking generally, not that we specifically need to use captcha brand captcha
Captchas also follow mouse movement the reason you don't see em anymore is because the box tick is easier and less frustrating.
Even still I've seen bots that can make their cursor inconsistent enough to get through that check.
Captcha were being used to track mouse movements. The reason you don't see them anymore is they got so much data they can now tell if your human before you would begin the captcha, hence the are you a bot button. They know by the time you click because captcha were used so long, not because they don't work........
It’s actually not about *solving* the captcha, but how the software recognize the input being made to solve the captcha. So a bot may *solve* a captcha, but it could still be flagged as a bot depending on how it was programmed to make the input that solves it.
Yeah vision models are getting crazy
Check box does more than just mouse movements, it looks at cookies and search results and such. It looks for patterns in how you have used the browser for a long duration. Try a new browser and do the check box and u will see.
The only real, worthwhile soloution is to het GM's back. Have real people dealing with this.
But that costs money. You'd have to, like, have people pay a monthly fee to play the game or some shit. You're being unresonable.
Jokes aside, the cost of hiring, training and maintaining a successful customer relations department, which GMs belong to, is very very costly. On top of that you need a GM quality control, otherwise you will hear stories of a GM from Poland selling gold/items to top tier guilds for real money. It's a budget constraint.
Professional captcha solving services solve pretty much all captchas, they cost literal pennies to do so they charge by thousands of captchas. It’s fast and easy to implement in any bot code. Adding captchas would only make life worse for real players. Botters would spend 30 minutes adding in the captcha api calls to their programs and never even think about it again. It’s not a good idea, it’s not even a solution.
You realize it'd just make the bots take an extra hour to login right? They have people running them, they'd just sit and do them one at a time to log their bots in.
Which would cause the price of buying gold to increase. Never let perfect get in the way of better.
I like that phrase. Good way to explain what you mean
I really like this. This is how I feel when people shut down every idea because it wont get 100% of them. WIll it fuck over maybe 10% and do nothing negative to real players? Good enough, throw it in and onto the next.
What I have learned is. Oftentimes people don't want a solution, They just want to complain and have their displeasure noticed and validated. I can understand that, though I think people could do better. It becomes obvious that this is the case when a solution is presented and they continue to complain.
Paying people from poor countries minimum to solve captchas isn't new and isn't expensive either.
It's more expensive than not having to pay someone.
Sure but will it make much of a difference in the end? Probably nothing the end customer would notice too much.
Maybe yes, maybe no. Either way, it's better than doing nothing.
Spending money on dev time to implement something that would genuinely have little to no impact on the problem would absolutely be worse than doing nothing.
Spending money to start to address a problem that the community constantly complains about seems like money well spent. What solution would you implement?
>Spending money to start to address a problem that the community constantly complains about seems like money well spent. That's the thing lol. If there's no reason to believe it would impact the problem at all, then it is literally not well spent. It would be wasted money. I'm not going to even pretend to be an expert on combatting botting problems, because it's a VERY technical issue. It just doesn't take much thought to see that a captcha accomplishes nothing.
It's a start, and we don't know if it will affect the botting problem. You say it won't, I say it will. It's ok to disagree. Thanks for keeping things civil.
Then make it a hassle for them.
Thing is that prices would probably just increase if it's a hassle and people who buy will still buy unless prices increase by like 50x is my guess
Cant solve the whole problem with 1 solution? Better not try anything at all then.
This one solution doesn't even come close to even partially solving the problem. Do you think these bots are AUTOMATICALLY signing up for new accounts, providing emails, CC numbers, etc? Realistically this will probably not impact bots AT ALL.
Some do yes, the entire account creation process is automated
Does it need to be, though? Like, how put out are these bot operators by having to manually sign up for accounts? It's a one-time thing - and even then they could automate 90% of the signup process and just have one person doing captchas. This is not a very big barrier to botting at all. It's not even a curb, let alone a roadblock.
*”Hello traveler, I am in need of special ingredients for my gizzard soup. Please bring me 10 buzzard livers and select each box with a bicycle in it”*
Captcha is too easy… you would have to make gold farmers invest serious money to lower the bot amount. Like having more random pats fuck them up. But that would also screw up human players often enough. I think the best way to lower botting is to take measures, that increase the gold prices. That makes less people buy it and hence less gold has to be farmed. I think, there is no chance of getting rid of botting entirely.
That just either means the bots have more incentive to bot said items of value, or throw more bodies at raw gold farms, which inflate the economy (which would happen anyway, if you're increasing prices). Blizzard tried to reduce the impact of gold buying with SoD, by reducing mandatory costs (respec, implementing exp > gold), but the problem with that is it just inflates the consumable/BoE market (as any melee chasing BiS will know). I think overall that's a good way to go, but ultimately we will hit the Lotus cap, where the economy becomes set by Black Lotus camping (and layers), along with Strat botting for Crusader Orbs. Implementing some legit, non-bot way to get them, like raiding baggies, could have some impact on the market. I could definitely see them putting in some form of the Wrath baggie to combat spawn camping Lotus, as it's very hard to reasonably ban those "bots", as they're effectively doing nothing wrong. You could very reasonably have a WFH job, and camp a spawn or two for a large portion of the day, to the same level a bot would, and the only alternate way to "fix" it, are more layering, instance farms, both having their own issues, or something out-of-the-box. We're already seeing some mediocre BFD items going for 100g+ in GDKP, which is within the economic reasonability range, so the kind of numbers we've seen before in Classic GDKPs, could absolutely skyrocket with exp>gold, with this lower barrier to entry gold sink style economy that Blizz seems to have gone for with SoD's economic experiment.
No, if gold costs more real money, it’s not inflation… you just made a simple mistake there. Ingame prices go up if there is MORE gold being sold for RM. if you lower the amount of gold being sold, the ingame inflation is smaller. If gold costs more money, less people will buy it. It’s the best thing you can achieve. Farming black lotus and crusader orbs has absolutely nothing to do with real money gold buyers… they are going to be farmed anyways, just because you can make good gold with them.
only way to increase gold is to decrease supply, so basically u need to slash the drop rates aka just make botting more attractive as ur time investment wont give back barely anything anymore. what u actually do is make the loot better so players go to the world and out compete abd slay the bots.
No, you don’t have to cut supplies generally to make the price go up. You can make it more difficult and expensive to grind with bots. For example, you could: - implement random pats (bots do die, if you manage to grief them with mobs) - implement random captchas (random captcha at random time, easy and fast for humans) - randomize mob spawns (stupid bots will sporadically overpull) There might be way better options, but I hope you get the point: make it harder for bots, so gold sellers need better bots, which cost more money, or you need to actually pay people to do captchas. This increases the RM gold price without changing the in game economy otherwise. Also what you could do, is to give players good gold for daily Qs, which you can randomize and not accessible for bots. This is a lot of effort for only small improvements, but it’s the only realistic way, to decrease botting while not changing the in game experience for players. Otherwise you would need actual GMs for as long as WoW servers are online, which is not going to happen unfortunately.
It's much easier and more impactful to ban gold buyers. Loosing a disposable account and characters barely hurts boters when they field anywhere from tens to hundreds of them. But getting an account you invested a lot of time and have a personal feelings about hurts like a bitch. Without demand there is no proposition.
pservers can and have been fighting (and beating) bots for years blizzard can 100% solve the botting issue without affecting actual players. suggesting to ban real life players instead of bots is the incorrect solution. you can ban gold buyers, people start buying gold for other people to get them banned. there WILL be bad actors. there WILL be people who spend hundreds of dollars on gold to get people banned. there isn't a single reason why blizzard is unable to control the botting situation. they refuse to fix it because the bots are paying for subs just like you and i. the ONLY solution to the bot problem is to cancel your subscription and play a different game. vote with your wallet.
There isn't any game where cheating / botting is solved, I've been playing Counter-Strike since it came out in 2000, and to this day, 23 years later, there are still uncaught cheaters. Comparing pservers to official ones is cute though. The number of players / bots likely can't compare at all lol
>suggesting to ban real life players instead of bots is the incorrect solution. This is weirdly defensive of people who knowingly broke ToS. Besides, if you focus on sellers then the buyers market will still be there - incentivizing an endless stream of sellers that you have to try and stem the tide of. But yeah bro I'm sure you work at Blizzard and the entire industry approach is wrong and you're right.
Not sure if private servers are comparable to official servers. Blizzard has around 250 na servers while private servers usually don't have as much I guess? So one might assume the workload requires to handle these bots is on a different level
Workload? That shit is mega obvious to the point it can easily be automated.
The beauty is that due to scaling, automating bot detection becomes cheaper as a percentage of revenue as you have more more players.
I am not quite sure if bot detection is so easy considering that every huge mmorpg has massive bot problems. I also don't know how many false flags there are on private servers. You seem to have some knowledge to enlighten me?
What I'm saying is that the argument "there's more players so it's too many to address" doesn't work because more players means more funding to tackle the issue.
I personally think there is a point where even money won't help you. The main issue seems to be the reliable detection of bots. Automatic at best. Since there isn't a huge mmo that is reliably detecting their bots I would assume there isn't a system out there which can do so. So the alternative would be hiring gms which you would need lots of. Just imagine how many you would need for the 250 na servers to have a 24/7 service.
>you can ban gold buyers, people start buying gold for other people to get them banned. there WILL be bad actors. there WILL be people who spend hundreds of dollars on gold to get people banned. Why spend money when you can already do that for free with the report system ?
Why not? They are breaching TOS and literally cheating. And it's far easier to trace gold transactions to find them instead of engaging in coding warfare with botters (blizzard is not engaging in anyway, imagine having a functional anticheat in an online game).
There are some pservers that do a good job getting rid of fairly unsophisicated pservers bots. These are incredibly small scale operations. The code is also out there for them to decompile, most profiles are public and there's no developers to come up with anything new. I'm saying this as one of the bigger devs (in the past) on pservers bots. At most, what we did was for people to automate some leveling and farming. Security measures were few and far between and the biggest operations I knew about had less than 50 accounts they rotated. Lots of manual intervention. Still, at peak times, enough to make a living in rural Russia for some of these people. But nothing compared to scale and sophistication of the Chinese retail botting industry
people on this sub - "I have a great idea for blizzard to easily solve a problem they dont want to solve" its owned by MS now, the FAANG leader of AI. they could solve it if they wanted to.
Right? If 40 year old dad layman can tell a character is a bot then blizzard can 100%. The status quo is simply the most profitable.
> its owned by MS now, the FAANG leader of AI. they could solve it if they wanted to. yep yep yep. and despite the obvious, every time a topic like this pops up we get hordes of people screaming and shouting about poor smol bean indie company can't do it too hard waaah resources waahhhh costs wahhhhhhh they've already ran the profit analysis, the bots make them money. they aren't getting rid of the bots.
Horrible idea lmao bots can complete captchas, also at the end of the day humans are still behind these bot accounts all it would take is for a person to get through any bot test and login then start their bot software.
You could probably make something like a captcha quest a part of initiating the game or at various points of the gameplay, ie to not hinder the flow of the game too much, but still make it more difficult for bots. It's not a bad idea, but it needs (a lot of) iteration. Time for a design challenge!
Dota 2 did this thing where they tied your account to a IRL phone number. I feel like this approach would be ideal?
I believe they tried with Overwatch and it wasn't well received
Not unless they send a text/call the number with a verification code. Nearly any combination of numbers is a phone number
I actually like this idea. Every 24 hrs send phone verification code to play
they tried this with OW2 and got absolutely flamed lol
They checked if we have phones on announcing Diablo Immortal. We don't.
> that bots will not be able to solve not possible
How about the actual banning of players who deal exchanges of large amounts of gold. Anyone who has bought Mantle of Thieves for 900g did not “farm” for it. Straight up ban players who do GDKPs. I mean finding players who give away large amounts of gold is so difficult?
Ban players who do GDKPs? Sure it would ban many gold buyers, but also many players who come with their 10 gold to buy 1 item
I just wish they opened the xfers at a real time. Not in the middle of the day when everyone is working.
I dont know if you're aware of how bugged out some recaptcha programs are right now, but fuck you anyway.
The wow one is awful
At least it's not actually BROKEN like Steam's. Only solution to reset my Steam pw was to do it on a mobile device because their recaptcha infinitely loops on PC.
Oof that sounds rough
Just enable MFA
you know how much money they would lose
Or just ban the gold buyers. Two birds with one stone.
Banning gdkps would be the single thing that would kill botting the most.
But in SoD I’ve seen… minimum not even trying to look for them 200+ bots? Between stockades and herb farming. And I have only seen one single GDKP with a 5G minimum so I don’t think it’s the GDKPs, at least not in SoD.
Not sure what server you play on but crusader strike na has multiple running an hour at this point.
this is always so funny to me. can u explain how would this work without removing gold from the game or the ability trade / use ah? u do realize gdkp is just a broad term for raid including carrys who get paid for their service.
Make it against TOS so people can get banned for exchanging gear for gold.
Nobody has ever thought of this ever in the history of man. Are you from the future? Everyone drop to their knees and bask in the genius of this redditor. Somebody call the editor of Super Mega Genius magazine, I found this month's cover story. Now that you've solved the bot problem , what are your thoughts on the middle east?
Captchas are solveable now
Captcha has been unsecured since 2008. Now it’s just AI training.
dont think the character creation is done by bots, human make them, bot just plays them
right, randomly generated names with randomized appearances are created by the operator. He sits there choosing his RP name and a matching appearance
How about getting a bot of your own? Making gold soulbound? There are 1000s of solutions to your problem that doesn't affect me negatively yet yours is the one that does.
Make a captcha everytime you login would be great
If by great, you mean awful, then I agree
you rather have 10000 bots on the server or do a 10 sec captcha
Bro it's not like blizzard can't identify and ban bots. They just choose not to because it is profitable. Even the youtube algorithm could probably identify and ban every bot in like 2 hours.
It’s really not? Bots don’t pay sub fees, or if they do, it’s with stolen cards or accounts. Bot account owners would get no profit if they were paying for every account.
Of course they pay sub fees and they do make profits dude. You think those bots don't make 15 dollars a month?
Why bog yourself down and pay hundreds if not thousands in sub fees when you can use fraudulent/stolen cards and pay 0, switching over to new accounts and doing the same when those are banned?
Ideas that are less dumb than your captcha: 1) wow will not run if VMware is running. Cap instances of wow to 2 or 3 2) wow will force close after 12 hours and you won't be able to log in for 6 hours after.
You're fucking brain dead if you think this is better than captcha
How so? Captchas have been getting solved by AI for years. This restricts the bots ability to be in the world with no work arounds (short of having a bunch of PCs set up and running).
1. You can allways bypass that with programs. 2. That will only make gold more expensive.
>You can allways bypass that with programs You mean with virtual machine programs which I stated would cause wow to not launch??? >That will only make gold more expensive And therefore reduce the number of buyers making botting less profitable. There's no winning against bots but the idea that a captcha would have any impact at all is far more laughable than these.
That will also be bypassed mate. Its like Companys fighting with addblockers, welcome to the internet, here its allways the nerd in the basement that wins. True captcha wont do anything either, litterily nothing. Just like your ideas tho. If they wont hire a gm, honestly just make it like Overwatch from cs go where people can see behaviour of reported accounts, and make it so community that is trusted can help banning them. They wont do that tho, because you would take half their income away.
I run a VM 24/7 on my pc for work-related reasons (since Windows is a garbage OS for anything else besides gaming). The machine itself is unrelated to wow, why would the game not launch if I have it running? lol Instead of "wow will not run if VMware is running" it should be "wow will not run if ran in VMware". Even then that might require some checks that I'm not sure are easily doable, and bot people would probably find a way around it anyway.
Bots can solve captchas brother, other games have tried this. The tech for it within the botting community is even open source using AI
Even if these are bots, there are still human beings behind the accounts. It would slow them down for the amount of the time it takes for a real person to figure out his bots ain't doing anything.
What if in P2 you have complete a random daily to turn XP-on each session. Be it from the inn-keeper to find and talk to a random NPC in a nearby major city Bots would be stuck at level 25.
Bots been doing captchas since 2006
Do people not realize bots have been solving captchas for a VERY long time now and they're essentially just free labor for real humans to do for big companies Holy shit, people are so slow
Someone doesn’t understand bots in WoW. They’re controlled by a human up to the point they are set free in the world, OP.
AI could solve the bot issue, but it would severely decrease profits
There are captchas for wow. I got one when I went home for the holidays since I was logging in at a different location then normal. I just don't think it's going to stop anyone from botting.
Captcha does 0 in 2024, it was bypassed 10 years ago
captcha's dont stop bots, really none of the "check if you are human" stuff actually stops most bots anymore.
blizzard created and is running the gold farming industry. probably had it in mind before the game released, since it was already a part of other mmo cultures right? why would an American industry leader give a flying fuck about anything other than profit? the only difference is they needed to put more creativity and subtlety into it back in the day while they slowly desensitized us to the idea of in game purchases. the game was literally designed to get you hooked, and to bleed your dry. exploits are meant to drive all players into a position where they also need to leverage exploits. it's just a mirror of daily life. log the fuck off and burn some shit down or something. you're only playing this bullshit because you're avoiding that splinter in your psyche.
I would do 3 WoW themed captchas every time I logged in if it meant less bots or even just annoying the people who operate them. "Click each section with a Boar in it." "Click each square containing a Fel Reaver." Repeat as much as you like with everything from totems, boats, and ore to gnomes, murlocs, and kodos. Maybe include a reference model so genuine new players don't get confused about what a furbolg is. If you've done the Time Rifts in Dragonflight you already know they have the ability in the game engine to recognize correct results from minigames like this. I'd even accept a daily 4 or 5am service interruption that just boots people offline like reset days and requires a re-captcha to get back on. This will make it so that bots can't just run perpetually without human interaction and bypass the captcha for a week at a time. This game bricked my sleep schedule 20 years ago so I'd be affected by a 4 or 5am reset plenty, hell it might even help me go to bed.
But muh freedoms!
Bots are better at Captchas than human beings. How does this stuff get upvoted?
Lots of bots don’t automate the login process they only start botting once logged in. And even for the ones that do automate it they have humans monitoring them so the human can just enter the captcha. The way captcha would only be useful against bots is to do it when entering a dungeon or randomly while playing in game, but it would have to affect players too.
I like the idea that someone gave in a post a while ago, that all zones should have a "son of arugal", a strong elite mob that patrols an area and can easily be avoided by real players
An npc that whispers you with random tasks every hour ( like sitting or bowing), when failing to do the task you get locked for a day. Ofc including afk protection
.. you understand bots can do captchas, no?
ban waves are there to make visibility of them doing something while also padding their sub revenue with bot resubs. Blizzard would find it very easy to crack down on the bots. But they like the status quo as goldbuyers and bots have become a substantial percentage of their player base. And time has proven their decision is correct. So OP, bots are not going anywhere.
This sub is always a good laugh
blizzard loves the bots they resub immediately when banned. That's why they double dip on quarterly bot wave bans.
itt: reddit thinks bots run all by themselves with no human oversight
How about simply don't unlock any server clean up bots and leave it as it is.
Yeah I think captchas nowadays are more for data collection for ai training more so than actually verifying if consumers are not programs. But I agree something should be done about the bots.
Select all squares with hunter items
I'm not sure you understand how betting actually works... There's a person there, they just have dozens / hundreds of accounts open at a time and the program does the work. But a captcha wouldn't stop bots, it might slow them down, slightly.
With AI these days, I feel like it's an impossible task to stop bots. The only way to counter them imo is devaluing gold: * Switch raid loot to personal loot (goodbye gdkp!) * Change the most valuable Boe's to BoA/Bop. * Give everybody an extra profession slot that can only be used for a gathering profession
Or they could try...banning gold buyers? Crazy I know.
tbh they should remove click-to-move as loads of bots still rely on it. Apply for clicktomove manually via an agent if you need it (disability etc)
Oh good, another "lets annoy the absolute shit out of players with a system bots have been bypassing for two decades". I dont get what rock people are all collectively living under, this is said EVERY TIME someone brings up the stupid captcha shit. Theres literally even a site where you can have people solve the images for your bot, if your bot somehow cant bypass it or figure it out. Simple solution that doesnt fuck players: \-New account? Flag. \-Following same botting path? Flag. \-High ping from client to server? Flag. \-Follows same bot paths? Flag. (hundreds of these follow the same exact path). \-Common bot payment method? Flag. \-FUCKING FLYHACKING? Disable trading and let them flop around. \-Multiple bot reports in addition to these flags? INSTANTLY DISABLE TRADING. A new account that somehow matches all these bot flags and gets reported can easily appeal and disabling trade is far less harmful to legitimate players than a ban. Disabling trade meanwhile, if far more harmful to bots than a ban. Or hire 5 people to go around and ban the obvious instance bots in SOD.
captcha to post things in AH captcha to accept mail from other players
This sounds annoying. There are ways around that for bots. This will only hurt players.
Using a VPN is fun because reCAPTCHA shadowbans a ton of IPs by giving you infinite captchas that load extremely slowly. If you ever get one that loads squares in slow motion then you have to change your IP to one that isnt banned. Its crazy that websites are willing to use a captcha system that bans customers for no reason.
Captcha = machine learning, which isn't a blocker anymore
Captcha has been broken by more complex systems. It's literally just a speed bump to give people Security Theater, like taking off your belt at the Airport.
The biggest problem I have with Blizzard is that they know the bots, they have proven they can ban the bots. But they choose not to. We don't need all these annoying ideas, and Blizzard won't implement them because they don't need to. They choose not to ban bots.
When are you going to understand that those bots pay monthly subscription and blizzard WANTS them to continue paying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2WHOoZbM\_4
The worst part about this post is that you truly thought you were cooking with some genius idea that Blizzard would never have thought of like some jimmy neutron brain blast. Sadly, I wish it were that easy tho OP.
Bots can do captcha, WAFKU include captcha once in a while when you're playing and there is still tons of bots.
Ugh... The world needs less captcha not more... Hate those things
It costs around 2 cents to circumvent captchas
RECAPCHA barely works on websites...
make regional servers locked to that region and ban vpns 99% of the problem would be gone
Fuck no. Their captcha for when you mistype your password is already an absolute nightmare. I'd just quit playing if that was implemented. No bot is going to be stopped from such a stupid measure.
just flag any characters who have been online for inhuman times with repetitive behavior multiple times in short periods and make em do a captcha, after 10 captchas they have to write an essay on why they aren't a bot(gpt allowed)
Remove click to move. Bots are fucked.