Saw one mage in wetlands today. Just mess up their algorythm and open a trade window after they kill a mob. They'll instantly trade their food/water which is so fun and dont forget to rep
Yeah, I always talk to the bots and try trading them gold. Easy way to find out tho to report. And yeah, they're always guildless and often have weird names like "Aghoms", I just made that one up!
it is a problem because it's like a testing ground what can be done and how evolve bots... I can't wait for time when AI bots will be farming and AI anti-bots will try to catch them.
They are not using any game breaking exploits, they dont disrupt any other players, they pay more sub, they generate material for others to buy They actually keeping classic alive Why would blizzard ban them? I am not surprise if blizzard themselves run bots at some point just to keep classic stay popular on the surface
@@maltesre9032 If you reach rank 12 by actually playing the game, you would know your character and what it does. And they are just likely better than most other players. It's not like people are talented or something, if you play the game a ton, you will be better than someone who plays it half an hour a day.
@@Blaps911 Gaining honor (ranks) requieres 0 skill, gear or game exp. Just time. So you should not judge someone of his pvp rank if it comes down to skill
On Nostalrius I loved farming mobs. It’s my jam. In Classic I literally can’t grind mobs in my usual spots because of bots. It’s seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game. Reporting them doesn’t work. They’ve been here for weeks.
The whole "bUt ThE bOtS aRe BaNnEd In WaVeS" excuse I frequently see is such bullshit - they've already wrecked farming spots, messed with the economy, and shipped their farmed items and gold off to their mains.
You don't understand how bans work in wow. They are not gonna ban the 4 bots you report. They are gonna use that data to figure out how to ban all the people using that same bot program at once.
@@Durgenheim so you'd rather they keep doing that indefinitely? Ban us onesy twosy and we just quit botting on our other accounts until we are sure the bot program isn't detected.
When my server had brakets broken 3 weeks in a row by 3 DIFFERENT bots who Xfered to our server knowing they could run it and reach our B11 slot for a 90g mount its kinda ridiculous. Especially when us pvp people reach out to them and ask wtf is going on and we get back "get good scrub a bot beat you lol"
The guy backpeddling looks like someone eating chips or something, only one free hand and is backing up so he's not likely to get attacked so he can keep eating more chips.
I've run in to bots now that run up and wave when you get near them, even priest bots buffing me. And their pathfinding is INSANE. Monkeynews did some botkiting earlier and kited a bot all the way to Arathi Highlands.
We always have winterspring bots. I usually attack them and kite them to the pit of the frost giants and leave them dying there. If you attack them once, they will indefinitely follow you as long as you stay right out of meele range. Still botting. Everyone of them. Many of them changed position and I found them in Tanaris or other places. It just gets worse. Now that TBC is pretty much confirmed, I am really worried about the bots that will raise up there. Since Honor is a currency in TBC, it can be much easier farmed. We had a one AV afk bot that has under 100 kills per week with multiple 100 thousand honor and it took literal MONTH for him to get banned. Masses of people reported him daily. No, BY THE MINUTE! And it took blizzard freaking months to ban a bot that just stands at the start of AV. Even after the announcement of a banwave, he was still ranking for many many weeks, before he wasn't logging in anymore. And we don't even know, if he just transfered or if he is actually banned. Also, he was almost rank 13 the last time I saw him. Full PvP gear, but no enchants at all. He didn't even buy the gear right away, it took him weaks for him to leave the AV battlemaster to buy it. And he never used it. Well... unless you count the one duel he had in front of IF, where he was finally on his pc for once.
Ive seen players who are a bit suspicious do a /wave when I inspected them. Had a feeling that its being automated somehow. It certainly would go some way to absolve them
90% alliance hunter bots are dwarves with boar pets. 90% of horde hunter bots are trolls with boar pets. It's a theme for some reason. I've personally ran in to around 20 dwarves botting in Duskwood in the span of 2 days AOE farming there. It's absurd.
You've hit a really good additional point as to why this is a severe situation now: Queues. With so many bots online, especially with most popping in during the early morning hours and filling slots, queues are getting more outrageous on high population servers. Blizzard is seriously dropping the ball on this and it's going to hurt them in the near future.
Christian Monsegue yeah Queues are insane right now. 104 minutes yesterday on herod. Lol and ive seen plenty of bots its just insane. Also multi boxers taking up several in game spots ive seen several of them in almost every area.
Yeah, I saw Stay Safe's video on multi-boxers, it felt like he was trying to tackle such a small portion of the problem as opposed to bots which are an order of magnitude worse. On Grobbulus-US back in October or so I created a new Horde toon and while leveling in The Barrens there were more Troll Hunter/skinner Bots than every other Class/Race combo in the entire zone. They should have started the banning then.
i had a guy join my guild last week, and he kept making up excuses as to why he was going "afk", like "taking family bike". after him saying "ill be 60 in 8 days 20 hours" i kinda thought it was sus, so i looked for him in the southern barrens and sure enough, there he was trying to loot a "rarespawn" barrens mob (kill for a hoof and turn in at taurajo) for about 45 mins. after getting him killed a few times his gear must have been 100% broken so he ran from southern barrens (past taurajo) all the way to the crossroads to repair.
Guys if you ever cancel ur wow subscription, for whatever reason PLEASE write in the reason why that it's due to excess botting. It will help all of us! :)
Had an odd one last week during AV weekend (Horde side). Some guy who was rank 11 just stayed AFK at Iceblood Graveyard (Alliance never made it past middle). When the entire team reported him AFK and he had the AFK debuff, he would start leaving the battleground and rejoining. The guy had the debuff for about 20 minutes straight just leaving and rejoining just before each base capture. By the time we got to Vaandar, he rejoined and didn't have the debuff anymore. Must be some new way to avoid being booted via the AFK debuff?
I raged about this a whole bg! Idk if was THAT guy, but on my bg the dude get the debuff and somewhat engage combat with (mob/patrol/idfk) and takes the debuff away >.
If I am the Head Director of Blizzard, I would give no hoot about fixing Classic Server's problem as long as people still pay $15/account for a game that I released 15 years ago. I might give them some maintenance some new patches with bunch of random bug fixes that people might or might not know about it as long as I show them something. Then when I see the number of players drop out, I will announce TBC then do the same for WoTLK, Cata then Panda then maybe after Panda I will reroll a Classic, and so on. Imagine how easy it is to swim in money with this easy-money method. P/S: In my opinion, Classic/TBC server is stupid for 3 reasons - 1st: I have to open a whole new server which costs money - 2nd: I have to divide my employees since we had a laid off last year and a budget cut - 3rd: This is against the law of nature, imagine you go to work then your boss decide to make your life easier by buying you a bunches of stuffs you need like a printer, new PC etc. Then you said to your boss, no I want to go back to the day where I have to work extra extra hard, with no printer then when I need to copy something I have to run to the photocopy shop and wait in line for it.
@@froztpally5148 more and more are leaving wow, they should care abt this. What I see from them looks a lot more like disconnection/incompetence rather than an easy-money lazyness mindset. They throw a lot of hours and talent at this game, they just refuse to eat the red pill ...
@@solmyr42 More and more are leaving wow but also more and more new players are joining wow too. Most of people who left WoW is Veteran/ Hardcore players because Bfa is so bad they could not handle it. But luckily Shadowland looks like a promising land and it might save WoW like Legion used to do it, sure WoW wont be a game with 12 millions players anymore but stil WoW is still the king of MMO. Second, There are so many fast pace MMO out there from Korean such as BDO where skills are flashy and the game is basically easy with p2w option for people who love to spend their money not their time. Third, this is a new era where games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Fortnite, COD: Warzone become the new king of Online Games. There are several more things that make people leave WoW, but in the end those people always come back, hardcore or casual they always come back when there is a new expansion, new patch, new things.
The bots are a symptom of the larger problem. People are buying the services offered by those who run the bots! Be it gold, leveling services or what-not.
The Stratholme and ST bots are there to farm materials and items. They go on the Auction House. How can a regular player distinguish a bot seller from a regular on AH?
@@hanne8786 He means buying them with real money from websites, not from AH. And there is no need to, just for Blizzard to use some of the millions of dollars to implement better bot detection.
Just after watching this vodeo found a bot on Ashara. I was leveling one of my alts that I have not finished. I got entertained with the bot for real this really demotivates me to play the game
@@TheDeath10484 Blizzard could care less if they ban someone most of their revenue is from the shop and adds. Not the subscription fee. Classic cant ban or develop on their 15 year anti bot software because it could literally break the game if done wrong and the lack of funding... Which is why they are not banning bots and why most people bot.
@@vesical7952 No. Subscriptions, together with licensing, make up 70% of Blizzard's revenue. Source: investor.activision.com/static-files/bd70401d-236c-4499-b478-9d848b06cba1 And that was 2018, with the introduction of WoW Classic in 2019 that percentage very likely increased as well. But I do agree with you on Blizzard not caring about the potential monetary repercussions of banning bots, since the revenue loss resulting out of it would be negligible.
I discovered a few groups botting SFK doing just what you said, hearthing or summoning, all following different paths to vendor or mailbox, then all converging on the road in a long line...They did not use follow. I've enjoyed multiboxing for years, PVP and PVE, I know the difference. They even shielded and arcane exploded adds along the way. I see a lot of hunters in thousand needles as well, farming turtles or baslisks. I report them most of the time but the level of complexity that must be being used, and the sheer rampantness of the same pattern being repeated everywhere, suggest that it's an organization doing it and not individuals.
I have reported probably 20+ bots on Whitemane over the last couple months, but in a fit of irony I woke up yesterday morning to a 6mo suspension for "bot/3rd party" after fishing for 5 hours last night to get to 300 fishing... Blizz has denied my appeal stating something along the lines of, "we trust our detection software and further review shows you were in violation of ToS for botting/3rd party."
Sounds absolutely logical and a perfect example of todays Blizztivision. I was actually enjoying shit but couldnt bare to pay Activision for the work of begone PPl anymore.
in my server there are loads more bots than there are actual players -- at least outside of orgrimmar. whenever i check whichever zone with /who, the zones are just full of 100% unresponsive guildless characters with gibberish/random generated names. there are even more bot groups in dungeons than there are real players forming parties. even popular leveling zones like the barrens or stranglethorn vale boast a 3:1 bot to human ratio. furthermore, some of the top guilds in my realm are actively botting. i reported some of their alts which they are leveling with bots, and also reported their alts that are scouting world bosses 24 hours a day. of course the reports do absolutely nothing, but at least i feel like i've tried something. at this point the bots have caused irreversible harm to not only the integrity of the game, but to the economy and progression. even if all the bots are removed, their destructive effects will linger on indefinitely. if they are all banned systematically, at least the open world zones will become less disgusting and demotivating to experience, and the markets will slightly balance out -- but the money the bots made and sold can't be taken out as it has been passed on from player to player for months on end. the game is broken, the developers do not care, and our only course of action is to cancel our subscriptions in protest of their inaction. they're raking in millions of our dollars, and provide us with 0 moderation, 0 commentary and 0 effort. they're rehashing old content for money, and their behaviour is inexcusable and brutally disrespectful towards us PAYING customers. classic is an amazing game, but i will not put my money on a company that spits in my face.
dude bots are everywhere. im currently on Bigglesworth for my alliance characters and my friend and i are constantly killing horde bots in Tanaris and many other areas while we are leveling and it seems as there is no end to the bots on this server
If you find a bot that auto kills nearby mobs, they will follow the mob they are attacking until it dies. So if you take aggro of their mob, you can kite the mob and thus the bot to where ever you'd like. Get creative where you drop em off, my favorite is near the Caverns of Time drakes in Tanaris. :)
Back when classic released me and my mage buddy were in Thousand needles doing our questing thing. When we kept seeing these horde hunters walking strangly. Their pets names were in Chinese characters. This is a PVP server so me and my buddy kept watching them, we tested to see if we can mess with their pathing by sheeping them. Well they broke so we decided to fuck with them. We would kill their pets when they pulled a mob so that they would die from a mob and lose durability. apparently we piss him off the point for all the bots came after us thousand needles about five orc hunters 2 levels above us came running after us (I as a warrior and him as a mage.) We slaughtered them. By staying in their dead zone 😂
I've just levelled a rogue alt through to 60 and the number of bots i encountered on the way through was maddening. Soooo many frost mages and hunters out grinding single mobs on repeat for eternity. I really REALLY hope these videos catch blizzards attention, all of these characters need to be deleted or accounts banned. Great job on all the leg work Willie, keep em coming.
Steve Sherman I’m no expert but isn’t the point of cryptocurrency to be untraceable? They already do keep logs of all items and gold that characters interact with. That’s how they can restore the gold and items to hacked accounts.
Steve Sherman I don’t know much about cryptocurrency, nor did I claim to. Thanks for the info. Perhaps Blizzard doesn’t keep the kinds of logs I believe they do, but how else are they able to restore all the items a character has lost when hacked? Or how were they able to ensure that everybody got their gold when the classic auction house broke just after release?
I've taken it upon my self to camp opposite faction bots whenever i find them. Leveling a warlock with a friend and have come a cross at least 20 mage bots farming. Same scripts and everything, but the part I enjoy the most is when the botter notices his bot is being camped , looks at us for 5 seconds and manually holds the rez. So we run and hide behind a hill for 2-5m. He spawns and resumes his bot and we kill him 20 more times. Almost rank 4 not even 60 yet xD
I'm pretty sure I ran into a bot on Fairbanks Horde. So here's my story: I was on my way to do some farming in SM, when lowe and behold I see but a single solitary dwarf warrior, level 56, come running out of the monastery on his mount. My character is a 49 Orc rogue with 4 BoE epics and some pre-raid BiS gear, you could call my character a "twink" if you wanted. Anyway here's this dwarf who I'm obviously not going to let survive, so I entered stealth when I saw him on the path near the summoning stone and sapped him. I wanted to see if he was going to dismount and try to fight the rogue 7 levels lower than him. Much to my surprise, he just kept running on his mount. His movement seemed very suspicious to me, like a programmed path. I mounted up and gave chase to this guy. I followed him all the way from SM to the border between Silverpine and Hillsbrad where I finally managed to slay him, all without a fight. Don't you find that odd? Throughout the whole encounter, he just ran along the path like a scripted bot would. I was able to catch up to him with my carrot on a stick, which I find noteworthy that this guy didn't have any mount speed gear he could equip to escape a highly determined rogue chasing him down. It seems like this was a bot programmed to farm SM and then run by mount all the way down to Southshore and back. I don't have any evidence to back this up, it's just my own testimonial of what I experienced as a highly unusual PVP encounter. I don't see any player behaving the way this strange little dwarf did.
Bots are everywhere in classic and there are many genuine players running bots for fun or profit. Blizzard are so slack in banning the word is getting out and normal players are starting to bot. If classic becomes all about who bots the hardest I'm quitting for good.
@@cattysplat Yeah no doubt. With the AQ war effort just a few months away, Silithus just might be full of bots farming carapace fragments for would-be scarab lords.
Hey WillE, great content, as always! Regarding bots, I think it would make a lot of sense to also keep an eye on the bot 'offspring'. At lower levels it might be even a tad easier to identify them. Wetlands eastern part (Murlocs) and Duskwood northern part + cemetery seems to bristle with bots on Noggenfogger. Mostly gnome mages in Wetlands and hunters in Duskwood
Blizz needs to send you a check for doing their job. There should be teams of guys working for blizz doing this, staking out bots and shit. Would be a great job. Like a no-risk detective
The problem isn't finding bots if you manually investigate, it's automating it which is an extremely difficult problem for a bunch of different reasons
I saw 2 Edgemaster's Handguards pop up on AH at the same time, both for 256g bid with no buyout, by 2 different people. Both people where in Sunken Temple. Both Edgemasters got up to 3,3k bids before they were sold. The amount of time you'd have to spend in ST to pick up 2 Edgemaster's, and how much gold they sold for, really paints a picture of how little it's being monitored, and how much gold these bots are stacking.
Very southern tip of tanaris (slow to get to) is a beach with tons of turtles. I've seen dozens of hunters botting down there, often times attacking the same target, stacked right on top of each other, running the same paths.
@WillE This is absolutely a problem that needs to be solved BUT these videos are doing some damage as well. I have my moments in game where I don't really feel like grouping up with people and not in a super mood for talking. Doesnt happen often but it does happen from time to time. And I've been acused SO many time for boting simply because I'm not replying to the person saying something random. And it seems like it doesnt matter if you start replying and having an actual conversation about it. they'll STILL acuse you of boting which I find to be quite frustrating myself! This is by all mean no shot at you! Just saying boting is an issue but this also cause some problem. Love the videos, love what you do. HUGE fan. keep at it
I have seen 20+ bots this week ranging from hilsbrad foothills, shimmering flats, strangle thorn Vale, Eastern and western plague lands and deadwind pass. They are everywhere.
I found a train of like 8 hunter bots in Thousand Needles on leveling my mage on Whitemane a few weeks ago. I followed them around for a little while tagging their mobs before they could. Was fairly good exp but I decided to stop before someone thought I was one of them. Tried to get a group of alliance to kill them but they just killed me instead.
Fantastic job WillE. Was wondering, has anyone else (On Horde especially) noticed a lot of bots/afkers seem to have macros for when they get called out in chat? Usually something like "Y u mean?". It's very bizzare and kinda creepy. :P
Bot runner here. I own a farm of 120 accounts, and I can tell you that bots arent even the most damaging thing to game integrity. There are millions of gold being duplicated everyday. I personallity know a chinese guy who buys a dupe for $40-50k, uses it for a couple of days to get a ton of gold on each server, and then sells for the rest of the month. The scope of this industry is amazing.
Maybe this is besides the point, but doesn't it sound quite fun to make scripts that can avoid Blizzards banhammer? I mean, the difficulty seems quite low at the moment, but what if they got better?
Mmos are all about farming, bots farm better than any human could and they are effortless and quickly scale up. Botting kills mmos. Lets just hope blizzard wont leave us to suffer in a bot apocalypse, though some bots are just unavoidable
On Windseeker I see a lot of bots in Tanaris, all the way down south on that hard to reach beach with the the Treasure Map Quest. There's a bunch of level 50ish turtles there that I see a bunch of hunter bots farming.
Unitscan is an addon that allows u to type the name of anything and have it find and mark it for you. :) Easy way to spot specific characters, like the ST farmers.
I noticed a number of very suspicious people in Un'goro Crater the other night and started reporting all of them to blizzard. a large number of unguilded 55-60s running along the outer edge. as I made my way towards the entrance, I noticed that each followed an odd path from the Silithid cave through the raptor area, back towards the eastern wall. I only ended up reporting the ones doing a counter clockwise rotation, there were a few doing the other direction as well.
In TBC I used a bot. It would not run the exact same path each time around and would not make perfect turns and was also capable of not getting stuck easily. It would try to escape from mobs that were tagged by other players, simple replies if whispered, hearth if a player killed it more than X number of times in a short time period. I did not make it, it was commercially available. The dungeon bots are impressive though, I don't think those existed 10 years ago. There were pvp bots I knew of that could actually win in favorable matchups, especially if well geared. I think Blizzard did improve their anti-cheat detection where they could detect the more advanced bots. That was back when WoW still had a growing player base. Maybe with the shrinking player base they decided they would rather have the subs. That might be why dungeon running bots are possible now.
I'm wondering if multiplying server caps (compared to vanilla numbers) was Blizzard's way of tacitly admitting it being the only way to preserve a satisfactory degree of human-to-human socializing while permitting the gross amount of paid bot accounts that would inevitably show up and be allowed to stay for financial interests
@Tuho That's the whole idea of the game right? Grind and farm for experience and items. I dont get why people are attracted to RPG games if they hate the grind of those games.
@@NickyDekker89 No, that's not necessarily the whole idea of the game. People play for a lot of reasons. RP, guilds, collecting, raids, pvp, etc. Yes this kind of game is inherently about time sink, but there is such a thing as too grindy. And while people were okay with how old WoW was that grindy back then, most people wouldn't be now. Sadly most either forgot or just don't know how grindy old WoW is, so yes they get in over their head. Essentially, it's not that it's grindy in general, it's that it's too grindy.
The prices of orbs went down the shitter. From a normal price of 40g all the way down to 24g. It's the same with all items that these bots farm. Kinda stupid that these guys are dominating all the good farms and swimming in gold while the rest of us have to grind DM to get any respectable amount of gold.
I had a really odd moment recently playing, I went questing in wetlands late into the night, I think it was about 3-4 AM for my time but enough for the realm to also be fairly late into the night as well. I found at least 3 bots that were hunter dwarves that had unnamed pets doing the same usual patterns bots have. The next day I go questing in wetlands I see a level 40 dwarf hunter with an unnamed pet doing the same usual movements a bot might, but when I talked to him and cracked jokes in attempts to check if he was a bot he gave some pretty good legit responses. I feel like I'm stuck in a fever dream.
For me the biggest issue is its absolutely destroying to games economy on most servers, with AHs flooded with mats of all kinds and the AH bots fixing prices with all the farmed gold, you as a human cannot compete. Also Ive found that most people are way more open about just buying gold when they need it now so I know theres a market for the farmed gold also. Looked at a few gold selling sites, multiple sellers at the gold cap ready to offload to anyone willing to pay. They even have ways other than mail to get people their gold, in game trad and a method of using the AH to bypass Blizzards normal way of just seeing big gold moved through the mail.
As A mage, when I find bots in Tanaris (killing beats or ogres in the south/south west) or in The Hinterlands farming turtles at 3am- I grab a huge pack of mobs and frost nova them within mele range of the botter... They die 75% of the time... Blizzard would not only SAVE THEIR GAME... But they'd make so much money by banning the bots, removing all the gold/items they've artificially fed into the server, and forcing the botters to repurchase subscriptions...
I came across a druid bot in retail farming skins from the dogs in freehold. I proceeded to pull extra mobs towards them, and the ones with knockback knocked them so far out of position and they never went back to their spot, it was fun.
A few years back one of my brother's friends was still in university studying programming. He would do a regular "student-job" like waiter, but for extra cash bot-scripters(/programmers I guess?) would send him their bot-scripts. His job was basically to find mistakes or problems in the scripts and fix it for them. I don't remember the exact amount but he was paid a fair sum per script... and could use any of the scripts he wanted xD
There's a little group of druids camping the fish traps under the horde flight point in Desolace. You can see them swimming away, when you reach the trap. If you move away like 4-5 yards, they swim back at the trap... you can repeat this... so definitely a Bot :-D
There was one bot farming elementals at kargath FOR DAYS. He probably got reported in the end cause from asking in the world chat many ppl knew his name. I stood there for like 2 hours stealing his tags on elementals and then letting the bot finish them off just to get back in this hacker. Was really fun honestly.
This is why GMs are really good for MMOs. Even tho there would be new bots, its easy to just instantly bann these guys. Fully automated systems are not good enough, or they are implemented too late.
I don't play alliance but, at AV I noticed there's always allies hiding up the hill in icewing bunker, or behind a tree by the same bunker, and in the huts near the stonehearth gy
On the Horde side, atleast what I've noticed by playing and grinding some honor, the Horde bots hide around the choke points such as the GYs like Stormpike and Stonehearth blending in with the crowd. :c
What if the bots are run by Blizzard/Activision to pump sub numbers, keep the realms looking alive to the players not really paying attention, manipulating the economy, or (chime the conspiracy music) working on AI that could be impossible to differentiate from human players to keep the realms "alive" into the future.... Yah, you're right, probably just chinese gold farmers prepping for the eventual wow token to be introduced.
head out to shadowprey, desolace on horde side. in the coastal waters, you will find multiple lvl 4x orc rogues with diving helmets, going for those under water cages
Well, blizzard just don't want to go the real battlefield against bots, because unless it's get on the state of unplayable for players, it's profitable for blizzard. There's only 3 ways to stop botting at all, and all of them have a backfire on the normal player: 1 - Heavily agressive and intrusive anti-cheat: Like battle-eye, it scan's the memory of you pc, the processes, your storages, record patterns like skeystrokes and etc. A good examples was Tibia, probably the most botted game of all time in player-to-bot ratio. The bot were really shutdown to a point to stop devlopment of all commercial bots after its introduction. There was lot of impact on the in-game economy and even impact on the company revenue, since bots were, after all, subbed to the game. 2 - Systematic ban on inhuman pattern: that is probably not used so much those days, but i remember that runescape did it, and i've seen some bans on valve games. Things like, playin too much, for like 24 horus + non-stop, stayin for long period of time doin the same thing over and over. Some people go to the forum sayin they are doin it manually, but i doubt someone can stay 36+ hours farming the same item without loggin out. If they do, well maybe they need a ban to get their life together anyway. 3 - Systematic wide ban: I've seen it only in a very few games/servers: that is the most aggresive policy and yet, some of the most effective, ban a whole region (china), ban VPN's, ban multi-boxers. It's easy and effective, but is really hurtful for the company image and revenue. Kronos did it on their vanilla servers and were DDOS'd for like months straight. Nexon did it on the middle/late 2000's with Brazilians on their global servers. Personally i dn't see any problem with it, i'm Brazilian and was unable to play any nexon games. When i wanted to play tho, i e-mail their costumer support and after like 4 days their did something with my account that i bypassed the system with that account, so it's just a minor annoyance for legit players. Blizzard can easily wipe out bots, they even had the chance to implement a stronger anti-cheat system, since they recreated the old vanilla game engine before launching classic. They just don't want to.
Biggest giveaway of a bot is they dont jump. Especially warriors in PvP; Jumping allows you to swing while getting out of enemy swing space, bots just charge in and mash buttons and walk after someone.
I ran across group of alliance bots around lvl 33 while questing with my friend in hillsbrad on ashbringer eu. They were going probably towards SM. We attacked them and killed whole group, they didnt react at all despite being like 6-7 lvls ahead of us, also there were 30 yd gaps between every member of that group. IT was kind of strange because they could've killed us easily but they did nothing. What's more it wasnt only group that we met, there were about 3 groups like that, killed them all without any response.
If they are real people who pay the 15 dollars a month, I don't care if they spend 20 hours a day grinding gold. If they have macros to make it more efficient, than even smarter of them. I grind my gold just like the next guy and I need to work on my macros so I am more efficient. I sit in my chair at my desk for hours and hours a day. Sometimes completely mindless, listening to music or UA-cam videos on how to play WOW better. I have even thought about paying my 12 year old daughter extra allowance to fish for me :) and all of this has been increased due to social distancing. I have multiple characters I play too and not all of them are in my guild because sometimes I don't want to be bothered or distracted by anyone. Thank God you are out there policing the World (of Warcraft) keeping us safe from the tyranny of these scoundrels. I will sleep better tonight (if I was not up way too late trying to grind out 1000 gold for my 5th characters epic mount) knowing that you do what you do!! Tysm!!!
in a big fight like that, you can see some "players" use the same route, they turn at exactly the same point, which is likely due to they using the same profile for that map lol. (i used to bot for fun, and was a dev for some bots).
Bot for fun? That's the lamest excuse I have ever heard. At least just come out and be honest about it, no need to cover it up with words like 'I used a bot because it was fun'.
@@tjerk9023 I've done programming myself so I know the fun in developing and testing stuff you made yourself. However, if making a WoW Bot is your definition of having fun as a programmer, you must be a really bad one :D I can think of a hundred things more interesting and worth your time as a programmer. And those things will actually push your knowledge of programming and will make you a better programmer in the end. The only thing you will get is free gold for your WoW char lol
on grobbulus horde me and this dude found a dwarf hunter bot and kept killing his pet over and over, hoping it would run away eventually. his movement was so strange, it was so easy to tell after a minute of interacting with this "player" that it was a bot
Yeah my bot test is to straight up ask them, warn them I will report them if they don't let me know whether or not they're a bot, then I steal tags from them for an uncomfortable amount of time and if they don't get angry then it's settled.
The beach in Azshara is teeming with bots, hunters, mages and druids all in the same boe's. Burning Steppes is the same way. I report them every time I see them but I doubt anything will be done about it.
Someone accused me of botting while I was leveling.
I'm just a ret paladin :/
He's just standing there...... AUTOATTACKING!
top comment :D
Lol Paladin. Retagoths are just a meme
@@KenjiAsakura09 nice reference xD
hahaha i know how it feels they whisper me all the time XD i even stopped answering that i can't kill differently hahaha
Saw one mage in wetlands today. Just mess up their algorythm and open a trade window after they kill a mob. They'll instantly trade their food/water which is so fun and dont forget to rep
lool, ill remember this u smartie
LMFAO I approve of this message.
Yeah, I always talk to the bots and try trading them gold. Easy way to find out tho to report. And yeah, they're always guildless and often have weird names like "Aghoms", I just made that one up!
@@meatsauceification why you need have a Guild?I play solo so what
Me: I dont play WoW
Also Me: botting in wow is problem indeed
I don't play wow either. I just like to watch billy videos
it is a problem because it's like a testing ground what can be done and how evolve bots... I can't wait for time when AI bots will be farming and AI anti-bots will try to catch them.
They are not using any game breaking exploits,
they dont disrupt any other players,
they pay more sub,
they generate material for others to buy
They actually keeping classic alive
Why would blizzard ban them?
I am not surprise if blizzard themselves run bots at some point just to keep classic stay popular on the surface
@@Tomoyo0827 if left unchecked they can ruin the market for normal players.
@@Tomoyo0827 Either you are a troll or blind
Rank 12 Rogue opening from STEALTH with a bow shot :'D
I mean its classic. Rank dosent mean = skill.
i spam bow as well to clothest target if there are too many ranged
Sneak attack!
@@maltesre9032 If you reach rank 12 by actually playing the game, you would know your character and what it does. And they are just likely better than most other players. It's not like people are talented or something, if you play the game a ton, you will be better than someone who plays it half an hour a day.
@@Blaps911 Gaining honor (ranks) requieres 0 skill, gear or game exp. Just time.
So you should not judge someone of his pvp rank if it comes down to skill
On Nostalrius I loved farming mobs. It’s my jam. In Classic I literally can’t grind mobs in my usual spots because of bots. It’s seriously affecting my enjoyment of the game. Reporting them doesn’t work. They’ve been here for weeks.
REEE
The whole "bUt ThE bOtS aRe BaNnEd In WaVeS" excuse I frequently see is such bullshit - they've already wrecked farming spots, messed with the economy, and shipped their farmed items and gold off to their mains.
What server you on?
You don't understand how bans work in wow. They are not gonna ban the 4 bots you report. They are gonna use that data to figure out how to ban all the people using that same bot program at once.
@@Durgenheim so you'd rather they keep doing that indefinitely? Ban us onesy twosy and we just quit botting on our other accounts until we are sure the bot program isn't detected.
Blizzard really needs to focus more on banning botters in Classic, it's a real problem for everyone at this point...
Sad part is they dont have the resources to stop it. Nor do they care. Why would they say no to money ?
When my server had brakets broken 3 weeks in a row by 3 DIFFERENT bots who Xfered to our server knowing they could run it and reach our B11 slot for a 90g mount its kinda ridiculous. Especially when us pvp people reach out to them and ask wtf is going on and we get back "get good scrub a bot beat you lol"
World of Botcraft
World of Pay to Win
@@kentwatanabe9456 because actual humans and players quit the game as a result
@@kentwatanabe9456 Yea because they are a small indy company, lmao what are you talking about
The guy backpeddling looks like someone eating chips or something, only one free hand and is backing up so he's not likely to get attacked so he can keep eating more chips.
Sounds like you're speaking from experience 🤔😂
Gamer move
People use the keyboard to move with one hand?
Eating, smoking, drinking a beer with my mouse hand.. all reason for why i regularly keyboard turn and back pedal.
It's more likely your typical classic player aka a total moron and casual xD
Thank you for directing attention towards this issue, Wille. It does need to be dealt with, urgently. Slim chance it will be, but here's hoping.
I've run in to bots now that run up and wave when you get near them, even priest bots buffing me. And their pathfinding is INSANE. Monkeynews did some botkiting earlier and kited a bot all the way to Arathi Highlands.
We always have winterspring bots. I usually attack them and kite them to the pit of the frost giants and leave them dying there. If you attack them once, they will indefinitely follow you as long as you stay right out of meele range. Still botting. Everyone of them. Many of them changed position and I found them in Tanaris or other places. It just gets worse.
Now that TBC is pretty much confirmed, I am really worried about the bots that will raise up there. Since Honor is a currency in TBC, it can be much easier farmed.
We had a one AV afk bot that has under 100 kills per week with multiple 100 thousand honor and it took literal MONTH for him to get banned. Masses of people reported him daily. No, BY THE MINUTE! And it took blizzard freaking months to ban a bot that just stands at the start of AV. Even after the announcement of a banwave, he was still ranking for many many weeks, before he wasn't logging in anymore. And we don't even know, if he just transfered or if he is actually banned.
Also, he was almost rank 13 the last time I saw him. Full PvP gear, but no enchants at all. He didn't even buy the gear right away, it took him weaks for him to leave the AV battlemaster to buy it. And he never used it. Well... unless you count the one duel he had in front of IF, where he was finally on his pc for once.
@@Blubbii88 I commented on the last video about WS bots actually. I kited 3 of them to Timbermaw Hold :D
Ive seen players who are a bit suspicious do a /wave when I inspected them. Had a feeling that its being automated somehow. It certainly would go some way to absolve them
What if it was a real player and you are a bot?
@@huehue6252
What if they are both real players?
90% alliance hunter bots are dwarves with boar pets. 90% of horde hunter bots are trolls with boar pets. It's a theme for some reason. I've personally ran in to around 20 dwarves botting in Duskwood in the span of 2 days AOE farming there. It's absurd.
I also noticed the hunter bots are almost all dwarves. And with boar pets. Not sure why though.
@@asdfghjkl900321bow racial for trolls and gun racial for dwarves makes them passively more efficient
@@asdfghjkl900321 And boars are among the best starter pets due to their charge ability. Plus they eat everything.
Tarron freaking boars man
The botting pisses me off so much. Outside of BGs, badlands is the place were ive seen most bots. Makes me angry just thinking about it.
I quested through Badlands yesterday. Multiple level 60 bots farming the elementals.
Lmao u maddddddddddU MAAAADDDDDD
Reroll a hunter with improved aspect and 3/3 improved range. Make the boys afk rofl
@@foottothefloormotorsports8384 NOW THIS GUY GETS IT
@@foottothefloormotorsports8384 What do you think ive been doing during these corona times my friend. Rage is a pretty good motivator;)
Me: Pretty excited to hit my 2nd level 60
Willie: I have several and some I forgot I even had.
Powering leveling does not mean you know what you're doing.
Im still working on my first :)
@@juanrodriguez-ub6xx same. After 1 year I'm still only lvl 50. I guess since I don't play everyday
You've hit a really good additional point as to why this is a severe situation now: Queues.
With so many bots online, especially with most popping in during the early morning hours and filling slots, queues are getting more outrageous on high population servers. Blizzard is seriously dropping the ball on this and it's going to hurt them in the near future.
Christian Monsegue yeah Queues are insane right now. 104 minutes yesterday on herod. Lol and ive seen plenty of bots its just insane. Also multi boxers taking up several in game spots ive seen several of them in almost every area.
I had a 310 minute que at 6pm Server time on Arugal Oceanic. Havn’t seen it that high since launch
Yeah, I saw Stay Safe's video on multi-boxers, it felt like he was trying to tackle such a small portion of the problem as opposed to bots which are an order of magnitude worse. On Grobbulus-US back in October or so I created a new Horde toon and while leveling in The Barrens there were more Troll Hunter/skinner Bots than every other Class/Race combo in the entire zone. They should have started the banning then.
i had a guy join my guild last week, and he kept making up excuses as to why he was going "afk", like "taking family bike". after him saying "ill be 60 in 8 days 20 hours" i kinda thought it was sus, so i looked for him in the southern barrens and sure enough, there he was trying to loot a "rarespawn" barrens mob (kill for a hoof and turn in at taurajo) for about 45 mins. after getting him killed a few times his gear must have been 100% broken so he ran from southern barrens (past taurajo) all the way to the crossroads to repair.
who the fuck has a family bike? L o L
@@wuhr2790 I think he meant "taking the family out biking".
Horde AV queues being so long I was able to almost double my honor per hour by corpse camping bots on this exact route to Stratholme :)
Could you imagine not leveling your own toon in classic, as if there's so much to do at end game...
ZeroAspartame you grind honor for items and gear and you farm gold for raids and pvp
@@haki4066 and its INSANELY boring, its as basic as it gets in an MMO.
@@Eldenbruh True, but i dont grind for fun, i do it to feel accomplished and rewarded.
@O K lol man....wow. have a good day.
Guys if you ever cancel ur wow subscription, for whatever reason PLEASE write in the reason why that it's due to excess botting. It will help all of us! :)
Had an odd one last week during AV weekend (Horde side). Some guy who was rank 11 just stayed AFK at Iceblood Graveyard (Alliance never made it past middle). When the entire team reported him AFK and he had the AFK debuff, he would start leaving the battleground and rejoining. The guy had the debuff for about 20 minutes straight just leaving and rejoining just before each base capture. By the time we got to Vaandar, he rejoined and didn't have the debuff anymore. Must be some new way to avoid being booted via the AFK debuff?
I feel like I was in that AV because I remember some dude pointing that out. That would be funny if that was you!
I raged about this a whole bg! Idk if was THAT guy, but on my bg the dude get the debuff and somewhat engage combat with (mob/patrol/idfk) and takes the debuff away >.
you attack a mob and the debuff is gone?
@@areoblast1 Of course.
Really glad you're doing this WillE! We need to bring as much attention to World of Botcraft / Botcraft Classic as possible.
If I am the Head Director of Blizzard, I would give no hoot about fixing Classic Server's problem as long as people still pay $15/account for a game that I released 15 years ago. I might give them some maintenance some new patches with bunch of random bug fixes that people might or might not know about it as long as I show them something. Then when I see the number of players drop out, I will announce TBC then do the same for WoTLK, Cata then Panda then maybe after Panda I will reroll a Classic, and so on. Imagine how easy it is to swim in money with this easy-money method.
P/S: In my opinion, Classic/TBC server is stupid for 3 reasons - 1st: I have to open a whole new server which costs money - 2nd: I have to divide my employees since we had a laid off last year and a budget cut - 3rd: This is against the law of nature, imagine you go to work then your boss decide to make your life easier by buying you a bunches of stuffs you need like a printer, new PC etc. Then you said to your boss, no I want to go back to the day where I have to work extra extra hard, with no printer then when I need to copy something I have to run to the photocopy shop and wait in line for it.
@@froztpally5148 more and more are leaving wow, they should care abt this. What I see from them looks a lot more like disconnection/incompetence rather than an easy-money lazyness mindset. They throw a lot of hours and talent at this game, they just refuse to eat the red pill ...
@@solmyr42 More and more are leaving wow but also more and more new players are joining wow too. Most of people who left WoW is Veteran/ Hardcore players because Bfa is so bad they could not handle it. But luckily Shadowland looks like a promising land and it might save WoW like Legion used to do it, sure WoW wont be a game with 12 millions players anymore but stil WoW is still the king of MMO. Second, There are so many fast pace MMO out there from Korean such as BDO where skills are flashy and the game is basically easy with p2w option for people who love to spend their money not their time. Third, this is a new era where games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Fortnite, COD: Warzone become the new king of Online Games. There are several more things that make people leave WoW, but in the end those people always come back, hardcore or casual they always come back when there is a new expansion, new patch, new things.
The bots are a symptom of the larger problem. People are buying the services offered by those who run the bots! Be it gold, leveling services or what-not.
And? It's far, far more difficult for blizzard to stop the gold selling websites or to stop the buyers than it is to simply continuously ban the bots.
The Stratholme and ST bots are there to farm materials and items. They go on the Auction House. How can a regular player distinguish a bot seller from a regular on AH?
@@hanne8786 He means buying them with real money from websites, not from AH. And there is no need to, just for Blizzard to use some of the millions of dollars to implement better bot detection.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR BRINGING THIS ISSUE TO LIGHT!. Blizzard is completely ignoring it, please help the community get blizzard to end these issues!
when WoW dies only bots will roam the empty worlds
Idk if wow will ever die
pretty much like swtor i was considered extremely rich back when it was popular now my credits are worth less than a dollar lol
I watched a bot in badlands continually die after rezzing and taking the same exact path. His gear must've all been broken or something lol.
Or maybe it was a bot set up to die and die forever
That was me... I'm not a bot I'm just bad...
Just after watching this vodeo found a bot on Ashara. I was leveling one of my alts that I have not finished. I got entertained with the bot for real this really demotivates me to play the game
I see same bots everyday, been there for months. Ironic that private servers have better bot control than blizz
The reason why this is the case, is that blizzard still get paid with a monthly subscription fee, for all those bots. Private servers don't.
@@aidanzammit9810 Already debunked blizz makes a small fraction of its revenue from subs... Their 15 dollars means nothing to them.
@@vesical7952 what.
@@TheDeath10484 Blizzard could care less if they ban someone most of their revenue is from the shop and adds. Not the subscription fee. Classic cant ban or develop on their 15 year anti bot software because it could literally break the game if done wrong and the lack of funding... Which is why they are not banning bots and why most people bot.
@@vesical7952 No. Subscriptions, together with licensing, make up 70% of Blizzard's revenue. Source: investor.activision.com/static-files/bd70401d-236c-4499-b478-9d848b06cba1
And that was 2018, with the introduction of WoW Classic in 2019 that percentage very likely increased as well.
But I do agree with you on Blizzard not caring about the potential monetary repercussions of banning bots, since the revenue loss resulting out of it would be negligible.
I discovered a few groups botting SFK doing just what you said, hearthing or summoning, all following different paths to vendor or mailbox, then all converging on the road in a long line...They did not use follow. I've enjoyed multiboxing for years, PVP and PVE, I know the difference. They even shielded and arcane exploded adds along the way. I see a lot of hunters in thousand needles as well, farming turtles or baslisks. I report them most of the time but the level of complexity that must be being used, and the sheer rampantness of the same pattern being repeated everywhere, suggest that it's an organization doing it and not individuals.
Hurts my soul to see those sub analytics, love your content and you certainly deserve the subs!
I have reported probably 20+ bots on Whitemane over the last couple months, but in a fit of irony I woke up yesterday morning to a 6mo suspension for "bot/3rd party" after fishing for 5 hours last night to get to 300 fishing...
Blizz has denied my appeal stating something along the lines of, "we trust our detection software and further review shows you were in violation of ToS for botting/3rd party."
Sounds absolutely logical and a perfect example of todays Blizztivision. I was actually enjoying shit but couldnt bare to pay Activision for the work of begone PPl anymore.
in my server there are loads more bots than there are actual players -- at least outside of orgrimmar.
whenever i check whichever zone with /who, the zones are just full of 100% unresponsive guildless characters with gibberish/random generated names. there are even more bot groups in dungeons than there are real players forming parties. even popular leveling zones like the barrens or stranglethorn vale boast a 3:1 bot to human ratio.
furthermore, some of the top guilds in my realm are actively botting. i reported some of their alts which they are leveling with bots, and also reported their alts that are scouting world bosses 24 hours a day. of course the reports do absolutely nothing, but at least i feel like i've tried something.
at this point the bots have caused irreversible harm to not only the integrity of the game, but to the economy and progression. even if all the bots are removed, their destructive effects will linger on indefinitely. if they are all banned systematically, at least the open world zones will become less disgusting and demotivating to experience, and the markets will slightly balance out -- but the money the bots made and sold can't be taken out as it has been passed on from player to player for months on end.
the game is broken, the developers do not care, and our only course of action is to cancel our subscriptions in protest of their inaction. they're raking in millions of our dollars, and provide us with 0 moderation, 0 commentary and 0 effort. they're rehashing old content for money, and their behaviour is inexcusable and brutally disrespectful towards us PAYING customers.
classic is an amazing game, but i will not put my money on a company that spits in my face.
dude bots are everywhere. im currently on Bigglesworth for my alliance characters and my friend and i are constantly killing horde bots in Tanaris and many other areas while we are leveling and it seems as there is no end to the bots on this server
If you find a bot that auto kills nearby mobs, they will follow the mob they are attacking until it dies. So if you take aggro of their mob, you can kite the mob and thus the bot to where ever you'd like. Get creative where you drop em off, my favorite is near the Caverns of Time drakes in Tanaris. :)
Back when classic released me and my mage buddy were in Thousand needles doing our questing thing. When we kept seeing these horde hunters walking strangly. Their pets names were in Chinese characters. This is a PVP server so me and my buddy kept watching them, we tested to see if we can mess with their pathing by sheeping them. Well they broke so we decided to fuck with them. We would kill their pets when they pulled a mob so that they would die from a mob and lose durability. apparently we piss him off the point for all the bots came after us thousand needles about five orc hunters 2 levels above us came running after us (I as a warrior and him as a mage.) We slaughtered them. By staying in their dead zone 😂
I've just levelled a rogue alt through to 60 and the number of bots i encountered on the way through was maddening. Soooo many frost mages and hunters out grinding single mobs on repeat for eternity. I really REALLY hope these videos catch blizzards attention, all of these characters need to be deleted or accounts banned. Great job on all the leg work Willie, keep em coming.
Steve Sherman I’m no expert but isn’t the point of cryptocurrency to be untraceable?
They already do keep logs of all items and gold that characters interact with. That’s how they can restore the gold and items to hacked accounts.
Steve Sherman I don’t know much about cryptocurrency, nor did I claim to. Thanks for the info.
Perhaps Blizzard doesn’t keep the kinds of logs I believe they do, but how else are they able to restore all the items a character has lost when hacked? Or how were they able to ensure that everybody got their gold when the classic auction house broke just after release?
Imagine if wow would CAPTCHA all instances, BG and raids
thats actually a great idea
@Fuck Google Punish? it's a fucking captcha
@@faylure9985 He's probobly either a botter or a multi-boxer. I could def. see that being annoying as fuck for multi-boxers.
@@domiasmoth sounds like a win win really
I've taken it upon my self to camp opposite faction bots whenever i find them. Leveling a warlock with a friend and have come a cross at least 20 mage bots farming. Same scripts and everything, but the part I enjoy the most is when the botter notices his bot is being camped , looks at us for 5 seconds and manually holds the rez. So we run and hide behind a hill for 2-5m. He spawns and resumes his bot and we kill him 20 more times. Almost rank 4 not even 60 yet xD
I'm pretty sure I ran into a bot on Fairbanks Horde. So here's my story: I was on my way to do some farming in SM, when lowe and behold I see but a single solitary dwarf warrior, level 56, come running out of the monastery on his mount. My character is a 49 Orc rogue with 4 BoE epics and some pre-raid BiS gear, you could call my character a "twink" if you wanted. Anyway here's this dwarf who I'm obviously not going to let survive, so I entered stealth when I saw him on the path near the summoning stone and sapped him. I wanted to see if he was going to dismount and try to fight the rogue 7 levels lower than him. Much to my surprise, he just kept running on his mount. His movement seemed very suspicious to me, like a programmed path. I mounted up and gave chase to this guy. I followed him all the way from SM to the border between Silverpine and Hillsbrad where I finally managed to slay him, all without a fight. Don't you find that odd? Throughout the whole encounter, he just ran along the path like a scripted bot would. I was able to catch up to him with my carrot on a stick, which I find noteworthy that this guy didn't have any mount speed gear he could equip to escape a highly determined rogue chasing him down. It seems like this was a bot programmed to farm SM and then run by mount all the way down to Southshore and back. I don't have any evidence to back this up, it's just my own testimonial of what I experienced as a highly unusual PVP encounter. I don't see any player behaving the way this strange little dwarf did.
Bots are everywhere in classic and there are many genuine players running bots for fun or profit. Blizzard are so slack in banning the word is getting out and normal players are starting to bot. If classic becomes all about who bots the hardest I'm quitting for good.
@@cattysplat Yeah no doubt. With the AQ war effort just a few months away, Silithus just might be full of bots farming carapace fragments for would-be scarab lords.
As a rogue i thank you for the camp spots.
@@Deadlychuck84 for the lolz
Glad to see some change since your last video. Keep up the good wok
Hey WillE, great content, as always!
Regarding bots, I think it would make a lot of sense to also keep an eye on the bot 'offspring'. At lower levels it might be even a tad easier to identify them.
Wetlands eastern part (Murlocs) and Duskwood northern part + cemetery seems to bristle with bots on Noggenfogger. Mostly gnome mages in Wetlands and hunters in Duskwood
Blizz needs to send you a check for doing their job. There should be teams of guys working for blizz doing this, staking out bots and shit. Would be a great job. Like a no-risk detective
The problem isn't finding bots if you manually investigate, it's automating it which is an extremely difficult problem for a bunch of different reasons
Bots gotta sub too
I saw 2 Edgemaster's Handguards pop up on AH at the same time, both for 256g bid with no buyout, by 2 different people. Both people where in Sunken Temple. Both Edgemasters got up to 3,3k bids before they were sold. The amount of time you'd have to spend in ST to pick up 2 Edgemaster's, and how much gold they sold for, really paints a picture of how little it's being monitored, and how much gold these bots are stacking.
Very southern tip of tanaris (slow to get to) is a beach with tons of turtles. I've seen dozens of hunters botting down there, often times attacking the same target, stacked right on top of each other, running the same paths.
@WillE This is absolutely a problem that needs to be solved BUT these videos are doing some damage as well. I have my moments in game where I don't really feel like grouping up with people and not in a super mood for talking. Doesnt happen often but it does happen from time to time. And I've been acused SO many time for boting simply because I'm not replying to the person saying something random. And it seems like it doesnt matter if you start replying and having an actual conversation about it. they'll STILL acuse you of boting which I find to be quite frustrating myself!
This is by all mean no shot at you! Just saying boting is an issue but this also cause some problem. Love the videos, love what you do. HUGE fan. keep at it
1:37 not a bot, he was re-living the true vanilla pvp experience where backpeddling was considered a smart move
WillE these videos are fantastic. So much hard work put in. Keep it up man!
I have seen 20+ bots this week ranging from hilsbrad foothills, shimmering flats, strangle thorn Vale, Eastern and western plague lands and deadwind pass. They are everywhere.
I found a train of like 8 hunter bots in Thousand Needles on leveling my mage on Whitemane a few weeks ago. I followed them around for a little while tagging their mobs before they could. Was fairly good exp but I decided to stop before someone thought I was one of them. Tried to get a group of alliance to kill them but they just killed me instead.
I can't stand botting.
Also I think I'm in the minority that thinks multiboxing should be bannable as well.
blizzard would never, thats a whole 75 dollars a month they would lose for each multiboxer
you arent in the minority, blizz just wont ban them
@@jacque3427 Of course they wouldn't. And that's the problem. Corporate greed > their own ToS
You are indeed in the minority, multiboxing takes a lot of effort and skill, I have no problem with them.
Samuel Pearlman it takes a lot of effort. Skill is a tad subjective.
Fantastic job WillE.
Was wondering, has anyone else (On Horde especially) noticed a lot of bots/afkers seem to have macros for when they get called out in chat? Usually something like "Y u mean?".
It's very bizzare and kinda creepy. :P
Bot runner here. I own a farm of 120 accounts, and I can tell you that bots arent even the most damaging thing to game integrity. There are millions of gold being duplicated everyday. I personallity know a chinese guy who buys a dupe for $40-50k, uses it for a couple of days to get a ton of gold on each server, and then sells for the rest of the month. The scope of this industry is amazing.
Maybe this is besides the point, but doesn't it sound quite fun to make scripts that can avoid Blizzards banhammer? I mean, the difficulty seems quite low at the moment, but what if they got better?
Mmos are all about farming, bots farm better than any human could and they are effortless and quickly scale up. Botting kills mmos. Lets just hope blizzard wont leave us to suffer in a bot apocalypse, though some bots are just unavoidable
On Windseeker I see a lot of bots in Tanaris, all the way down south on that hard to reach beach with the the Treasure Map Quest. There's a bunch of level 50ish turtles there that I see a bunch of hunter bots farming.
There are bots lining up at the Goblin Merchant selling Runecloth Bag Patterns in Everlook.
You're doing a great thing for the community, mate.
hunter bots are literally everywhere
I dont play anymore but your channel really helped me back when classic came out so heres my sub.
Unitscan is an addon that allows u to type the name of anything and have it find and mark it for you. :)
Easy way to spot specific characters, like the ST farmers.
Really good work/ research!
The horde diving to search through the cages in Desolace for the Big Iron Fishing Pole.
I noticed a number of very suspicious people in Un'goro Crater the other night and started reporting all of them to blizzard. a large number of unguilded 55-60s running along the outer edge. as I made my way towards the entrance, I noticed that each followed an odd path from the Silithid cave through the raptor area, back towards the eastern wall. I only ended up reporting the ones doing a counter clockwise rotation, there were a few doing the other direction as well.
10:13 Pause video.
Open another tab.
Benny hill theme tune.
Resume.
It's almost like all these botters are just seeing how much they can get away with. Evidently, they are getting away with pretty much everything lol.
Great detective work!
In TBC I used a bot. It would not run the exact same path each time around and would not make perfect turns and was also capable of not getting stuck easily. It would try to escape from mobs that were tagged by other players, simple replies if whispered, hearth if a player killed it more than X number of times in a short time period. I did not make it, it was commercially available. The dungeon bots are impressive though, I don't think those existed 10 years ago. There were pvp bots I knew of that could actually win in favorable matchups, especially if well geared.
I think Blizzard did improve their anti-cheat detection where they could detect the more advanced bots. That was back when WoW still had a growing player base. Maybe with the shrinking player base they decided they would rather have the subs. That might be why dungeon running bots are possible now.
I'm wondering if multiplying server caps (compared to vanilla numbers) was Blizzard's way of tacitly admitting it being the only way to preserve a satisfactory degree of human-to-human socializing while permitting the gross amount of paid bot accounts that would inevitably show up and be allowed to stay for financial interests
Players stop buying gold and the demand for professional grade pve bots dies overnight.
@Tuho That's the whole idea of the game right? Grind and farm for experience and items. I dont get why people are attracted to RPG games if they hate the grind of those games.
@@NickyDekker89 No, that's not necessarily the whole idea of the game. People play for a lot of reasons. RP, guilds, collecting, raids, pvp, etc. Yes this kind of game is inherently about time sink, but there is such a thing as too grindy. And while people were okay with how old WoW was that grindy back then, most people wouldn't be now. Sadly most either forgot or just don't know how grindy old WoW is, so yes they get in over their head.
Essentially, it's not that it's grindy in general, it's that it's too grindy.
You can find bots near the camp in Desolace. Alwats druids in aquatic form, where they open shells as soon as they spawn :-)
Same in Retail .Blizz don't care... They need the MONEY. I have reported bots and sent them the video many times but they are still there farming 24/7
The prices of orbs went down the shitter. From a normal price of 40g all the way down to 24g. It's the same with all items that these bots farm. Kinda stupid that these guys are dominating all the good farms and swimming in gold while the rest of us have to grind DM to get any respectable amount of gold.
Im also on Pyrewood, noticed a lot of people botting just in Winterspring months ago as i was leveling to 60, they all seemed to be hunters too.
I had a really odd moment recently playing, I went questing in wetlands late into the night, I think it was about 3-4 AM for my time but enough for the realm to also be fairly late into the night as well. I found at least 3 bots that were hunter dwarves that had unnamed pets doing the same usual patterns bots have.
The next day I go questing in wetlands I see a level 40 dwarf hunter with an unnamed pet doing the same usual movements a bot might, but when I talked to him and cracked jokes in attempts to check if he was a bot he gave some pretty good legit responses.
I feel like I'm stuck in a fever dream.
For me the biggest issue is its absolutely destroying to games economy on most servers, with AHs flooded with mats of all kinds and the AH bots fixing prices with all the farmed gold, you as a human cannot compete. Also Ive found that most people are way more open about just buying gold when they need it now so I know theres a market for the farmed gold also. Looked at a few gold selling sites, multiple sellers at the gold cap ready to offload to anyone willing to pay. They even have ways other than mail to get people their gold, in game trad and a method of using the AH to bypass Blizzards normal way of just seeing big gold moved through the mail.
As A mage, when I find bots in Tanaris (killing beats or ogres in the south/south west) or in The Hinterlands farming turtles at 3am- I grab a huge pack of mobs and frost nova them within mele range of the botter...
They die 75% of the time...
Blizzard would not only SAVE THEIR GAME... But they'd make so much money by banning the bots, removing all the gold/items they've artificially fed into the server, and forcing the botters to repurchase subscriptions...
I came across a druid bot in retail farming skins from the dogs in freehold.
I proceeded to pull extra mobs towards them, and the ones with knockback knocked them so far out of position and they never went back to their spot, it was fun.
A few years back one of my brother's friends was still in university studying programming. He would do a regular "student-job" like waiter, but for extra cash bot-scripters(/programmers I guess?) would send him their bot-scripts. His job was basically to find mistakes or problems in the scripts and fix it for them.
I don't remember the exact amount but he was paid a fair sum per script... and could use any of the scripts he wanted xD
The true classic experience is to have the bots everywhere. Hell, bring back the speed boost hackers as well.
There's a little group of druids camping the fish traps under the horde flight point in Desolace. You can see them swimming away, when you reach the trap. If you move away like 4-5 yards, they swim back at the trap... you can repeat this... so definitely a Bot :-D
There was one bot farming elementals at kargath FOR DAYS. He probably got reported in the end cause from asking in the world chat many ppl knew his name. I stood there for like 2 hours stealing his tags on elementals and then letting the bot finish them off just to get back in this hacker. Was really fun honestly.
This is why GMs are really good for MMOs. Even tho there would be new bots, its easy to just instantly bann these guys. Fully automated systems are not good enough, or they are implemented too late.
I don't play alliance but, at AV I noticed there's always allies hiding up the hill in icewing bunker, or behind a tree by the same bunker, and in the huts near the stonehearth gy
This almost like watching a nature show, only instead of Sir Richard Attenborough telling me about ants, WillE is telling me about robots.
On the Horde side, atleast what I've noticed by playing and grinding some honor, the Horde bots hide around the choke points such as the GYs like Stormpike and Stonehearth blending in with the crowd. :c
What if the bots are run by Blizzard/Activision to pump sub numbers, keep the realms looking alive to the players not really paying attention, manipulating the economy, or (chime the conspiracy music) working on AI that could be impossible to differentiate from human players to keep the realms "alive" into the future....
Yah, you're right, probably just chinese gold farmers prepping for the eventual wow token to be introduced.
head out to shadowprey, desolace on horde side. in the coastal waters, you will find multiple lvl 4x orc rogues with diving helmets, going for those under water cages
Well, blizzard just don't want to go the real battlefield against bots, because unless it's get on the state of unplayable for players, it's profitable for blizzard.
There's only 3 ways to stop botting at all, and all of them have a backfire on the normal player:
1 - Heavily agressive and intrusive anti-cheat: Like battle-eye, it scan's the memory of you pc, the processes, your storages, record patterns like skeystrokes and etc. A good examples was Tibia, probably the most botted game of all time in player-to-bot ratio. The bot were really shutdown to a point to stop devlopment of all commercial bots after its introduction. There was lot of impact on the in-game economy and even impact on the company revenue, since bots were, after all, subbed to the game.
2 - Systematic ban on inhuman pattern: that is probably not used so much those days, but i remember that runescape did it, and i've seen some bans on valve games. Things like, playin too much, for like 24 horus + non-stop, stayin for long period of time doin the same thing over and over. Some people go to the forum sayin they are doin it manually, but i doubt someone can stay 36+ hours farming the same item without loggin out. If they do, well maybe they need a ban to get their life together anyway.
3 - Systematic wide ban: I've seen it only in a very few games/servers: that is the most aggresive policy and yet, some of the most effective, ban a whole region (china), ban VPN's, ban multi-boxers. It's easy and effective, but is really hurtful for the company image and revenue. Kronos did it on their vanilla servers and were DDOS'd for like months straight. Nexon did it on the middle/late 2000's with Brazilians on their global servers. Personally i dn't see any problem with it, i'm Brazilian and was unable to play any nexon games. When i wanted to play tho, i e-mail their costumer support and after like 4 days their did something with my account that i bypassed the system with that account, so it's just a minor annoyance for legit players.
Blizzard can easily wipe out bots, they even had the chance to implement a stronger anti-cheat system, since they recreated the old vanilla game engine before launching classic. They just don't want to.
great video glad you made a part 2
I sometimes pretend to be a bot just for the lols. howboutdat
Biggest giveaway of a bot is they dont jump. Especially warriors in PvP; Jumping allows you to swing while getting out of enemy swing space, bots just charge in and mash buttons and walk after someone.
Bots jump just fine depending on what's in their script.
Botting is getting more popular in Retail as well. For example: The Serpent's Maw in Vol'dun
I ran across group of alliance bots around lvl 33 while questing with my friend in hillsbrad on ashbringer eu. They were going probably towards SM. We attacked them and killed whole group, they didnt react at all despite being like 6-7 lvls ahead of us, also there were 30 yd gaps between every member of that group. IT was kind of strange because they could've killed us easily but they did nothing. What's more it wasnt only group that we met, there were about 3 groups like that, killed them all without any response.
If they are real people who pay the 15 dollars a month, I don't care if they spend 20 hours a day grinding gold. If they have macros to make it more efficient, than even smarter of them. I grind my gold just like the next guy and I need to work on my macros so I am more efficient. I sit in my chair at my desk for hours and hours a day. Sometimes completely mindless, listening to music or UA-cam videos on how to play WOW better. I have even thought about paying my 12 year old daughter extra allowance to fish for me :) and all of this has been increased due to social distancing. I have multiple characters I play too and not all of them are in my guild because sometimes I don't want to be bothered or distracted by anyone.
Thank God you are out there policing the World (of Warcraft) keeping us safe from the tyranny of these scoundrels. I will sleep better tonight (if I was not up way too late trying to grind out 1000 gold for my 5th characters epic mount) knowing that you do what you do!! Tysm!!!
in a big fight like that, you can see some "players" use the same route, they turn at exactly the same point, which is likely due to they using the same profile for that map lol.
(i used to bot for fun, and was a dev for some bots).
Bot for fun? That's the lamest excuse I have ever heard. At least just come out and be honest about it, no need to cover it up with words like 'I used a bot because it was fun'.
" I used to bot for fun, and was a dev for some bots". This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Just sad.
@@NickyDekker89 How hard is to imagine people like to program bots and test it out themself? I can because I'm a programmer myself.
@@tjerk9023 I've done programming myself so I know the fun in developing and testing stuff you made yourself. However, if making a WoW Bot is your definition of having fun as a programmer, you must be a really bad one :D
I can think of a hundred things more interesting and worth your time as a programmer. And those things will actually push your knowledge of programming and will make you a better programmer in the end.
The only thing you will get is free gold for your WoW char lol
on grobbulus horde me and this dude found a dwarf hunter bot and kept killing his pet over and over, hoping it would run away eventually. his movement was so strange, it was so easy to tell after a minute of interacting with this "player" that it was a bot
You have to check out Arathi Highlands Circle of Inner Binding. I've seen 4 botters there farming Elemental Earth over the last 3 weeks.
Infesting detective work 🤔
There is an island in STV where i saw 6 mages looping around taking the same path and killing elementals on a rail.
Yeah my bot test is to straight up ask them, warn them I will report them if they don't let me know whether or not they're a bot, then I steal tags from them for an uncomfortable amount of time and if they don't get angry then it's settled.
you're doing a great service,sir
The beach in Azshara is teeming with bots, hunters, mages and druids all in the same boe's. Burning Steppes is the same way. I report them every time I see them but I doubt anything will be done about it.