I was a temporary GM on a three month contract a few years ago. I didn't directly work for blizzard, but for an outsourcing company. We were in blizzard offices tho, working beside tenured blizzard GMs. I remember one time I was investigating a report on a player, I spotted straight away he was a bot. I did some standard tests like teleporting the player character and they would just immediately zip towards the next resource node, even navigating environmental stuff without hesitation. I repeated the test several times in varying spots and it was always the same. But I was shy and new so I asked an experienced GM to approve of my judgement on the matter. and he was like hmmm well I think you don't have enough to say he's a bot just yet. He told me to move on and leave it, close the ticketet. But like, this was an OBVIOUS bot. In my mind GMs seemed to be way too lenient in letting bots continue to exist. Or at least that was my experience with the ones I worked with
Bots inflate account numbers for the shareholders, it's the exact same shit that politicians do when they claim they want to fix a problem like littering or homelessness in order to get public support. They devote the minimal amount of money into fixing things just so that it appears like you're actually doing something but pocketing the rest of the money.
haha i remeber one guy (obviously a bot) standing right in the altarac valley spot where you can Que for av, he was standing there for about 3 months, no downtime, i think he was standing there till he got r13 maybe he even got r14 idk but he didnt move at all and got mass reported by hundrets of players, just i myself prolly reported him 30-50 times. nothing ever happend to him. not even sure if it was before or after activision blizzard ? (it was classic ofc) but i remember that i quit ranking when i was realizing that even when im trying to play alot im getting beaten like crazy in the grind by literall bots that just bot for literally months and nothing happens. tldr: they didnt even do shit to OBVIOUS botters that didnt even hide it.
What kind of capabilities did you have as a GM? Were you able to say creat an item like the famous Martin Fury? I’ve also seen videos of GMs turning players into animals, Is that something that would have been within the scope of your power?
@easttowest7839 I quit retail in the first week of wrath. Returned in mop and played on and off untill 2016. Now I play classic on and off and again quite when wrath came out again. Personally I only want to play lvl 58-70. Plus MoP. I only play rogue and cata seems like the time to rejoin
I'd say Nintendo and Sony are full proof, I can't see what is happening to Blizzard ever happen to either of those two. Who ever buys one of those systems will guarantee have great old & future titles and that is a fact.
@@Kanoog You are literally proving OP right. Nintendo and Sony are not foolproof just because they have a better understanding of how to keep their customers innoculated.
I would be a WoW GM for as low as minimum wage in the US, which is 7.25 an hour and they don't even wanna pay that. These corporate places that are run like corporations don't want to pay anything anymore, they want everything automated and they only want to pay top employees.
To be fair, this is true for pretty much every MMO I have played. And I played a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I'm currently playing FF14 and I'm honestly blown away by how little effort they seem to be putting into this shit. The bots have become so confident in fact, they create whole bot guilds, cause it makes trading gil and items easier due to the Guild Chest Storage. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous. You can pretty much just look for obvious bot names/bot guild names and you could just ban the entire guilds and you could call it a day, but they don't. These bot guilds are running rampant for months, sometimes even half a year without any repercussions. By the time they finally decide to ban them said bots have already made more than enough money via RMT to just buy another copy of FF14, get another subscription and just start the cycle anew. Honestly, I think this is actually done on purpose by all Game Devs. They grant bots enough time to actually make a living, so that when they finally decide to ban them the bots will just spend some of their money to buy the game again. It's basically free money for the Game Devs and no one can blame them cause "they did something" against the bots. If you think about it, that's actually kind of smart.
@@Edge2177 Highly doubt that they are "properly" doing weekly bans. Otherwise there wouldn't be entire bot guilds and bot farms botting 3-6 months on end. Go to any EU server and play there for a couple of months, I guarantee you will see the exact same bot guilds botting for 3-6 months without getting banned.
Why would you deal with bots if they both directly make you money, and provide your actual players with services they seek? There are no downsides for Blizzard. Bots are a problem for a very small, but loud minority of players.
@ForOne814 The WoW token and bot epidemic devalue everything in the game, it impacts all players because it corrupts the gaming experience from the top down. Professions for making gold, raw gold farms and gathering basically all become pointless. People use gold to buy carries in raids, buy the gear and even pvp titles. Once people realize that most of the game can be bought with real money, they quickly stop caring about it.
What gaming companies don‘t understand is: you need loyal customers. You get loyal customers if the gamers see that you put time and effort in the games.
@@seanwilliams7655 This. It feels like people still don't understand that they're making a fuckton of money for a minimal amount of money invested in it. Wow had it's peak(s) a long time ago, now it's just about milking the cow and earning as much as possible before it's dead for real. And be assured it's working VERY well.
It's too late to fight the bots... they lost that battle in the early 2010s if not earlier due to not taking it seriously enough to begin with. That's partly why they put in the token, under the "if you can't beat them, join them" kind of idea.
As a former GM - who did far more afterwards - they don't really know that much. Not that anything here is necessarily wrong, but you could get far better information elsewhere. 😉
Back in WotLK I was the first person on my server to use a demolisher in wintergrasp and found 8-9 bugs. I never got in trouble for using them, but despite keeping everything a secret they were all fixxed in the same patch. Would I be correct in assuming a gm was keeping an eye on me so they could find the bad coding and patch it?
So I play on Grobbulus Classic Era. It's an interesting realm because it's a role playing realm, so it's not part of the PvP Cluster with Whitemane, or PvE with Mankrik. I started there 2 months ago, back then usually 10-15 people online. All dedicated players, all one guild. In the past 2 weeks, hundreds of bots have leveled mages on there. Now Strath, Dire maul, Nodes, Lotus etc all being farmed all day non stop. I think what happened was, the players on whitemane were ganking the bots relentlessly, so now they come to Grob, hit gold cap and then do a free transfer to whitemane to sell the gold. It's insane. Our beautiful realm, is now completely overrun by bots. They dwarf the player population there.
This is really interesting thank you, its so hard to grasp how they can't get on top of the bots and has felt like they just don't want too for a while.
I was at the Blizzcon where they announced Craptivision taking over and they had Bobby Kotick's scumbag self waltz out onstage. The crowd was stunned and no one clapped, until a few random people ( I assume were planted and paid to do so) started clapping to get the crowd going. I knew right then how it would go. I'm just surprised it took so long.
The intro music gave me the mental image of Bobby K flying in on a unicorn with the Burger King crown from Shadowlands on his fat head and a golden scepter in his raised hand while a stream of cash flows from the unicorn’s ass-end.
all I've been gathering from your videos is that I should resub and bot to sell gold for some passive income irl, since clearly nothing will ever be done about it
IMO I think also the problem is when going to the spread sheets is when looking at leveling progress you have speed runners that will cover the bots level speed
On offical classic it costs 5$ for 1500 gold, on certain a private server thats been up for 5 years its costs 85$ for 1500g, and youd probably catch a ban for trying it.
*GM's before:* Doing their work making the game better, answering ingame tickets, keeping track and banned bots and more. *GM's today:* Don't care. Allowing bots roam around like a fat kid loves cake. Having these bann waves so it "looks good on paper". Doing what their bosses tells them to do regardless if bad. *Their solution:* WoW token. For both Retail AND even Classic (wrath). *Us players:* /Facepalm.
Back in 2011 i found out about perso using fishing bot in Uldum. I overhead him bragging to friends of mine on ts. I created a ticket, gave as detailed info as possible. Ticket has never been resolved,not even responce. On Wrath servers i sometimes check eternal fire farm in Storm Peaks. Last month i send maybe 30 + reports. None of them were false flags because real players always greet each other there to ensure they are not taken as bot. Not a single email from blizzard regarding those reports. And they usually do turn back amd say thank you for reports
Thanks for exposing Activision's laziness great video, but we all really know why Thighgapy got banned. 'cough' buying gold 'cough'. Players who frequently buy gold will most likely get caught.
I miss WoW. I really want to try my hand at Hardcore. But every video I watch that reminds me of Activision Blizzard's bullshit ensures I don't break my morals.
I would advise you to reconsider, many of the p2w, cheating bullshit doesn't apply to HC especially if you go for something like SSF too, and it's really really fun.
When I quit wow back in wrath, I sent a buddy 20k gold before I left for good. His account was immediately banned for gold buying. While annoying, I sent a quick email and resolved the problem. Don't tell me there is nothing that can be done. Blizzard simply demands more money for a subpar product while making excuses, if not outright blaming their players, for the problems. Its that simple. AB will never get another penny from me.
I accidently did the swim in air bug when I was jumping out of the water. It was fun! Did not hack at all. Then found out it really was a bug and it was being exploited and was not aware at the time. lol
There are STILL people contrarian to the fact that devs and gaming companies actually had passion and people who actively loved what they were making back in the 2000’s. Once the higher ups heard about MTX, it sealed their fates as well as ours. Those 2000’s devs were the nerds and geeks of the 80’s and 90’s. Of fucking course they made good games.
Look, I 100% think Vivendi would have done the same but slower, or maybe faster, it depends. But Activation was far more aggressive then them in this regard.
blizzard temp ban ur account and disbands your gbank if the gold traces to gbank, there is non of that "take out the gold and transfer it to the next gbank"
Do you really think the GMs are incapable of googling what an ID from another country looks like? The company I work at takes fraud super seriously and I bet blizzard does too
The whole thing about bots being only a negative, because they just buy WoW tokens with botted or stolen gold is kind of wrong. At some point in time someone bought a WoW token, that gets sold to the botter, doesn't matter if the botter doesn't actually pay, someone at some point did spend real money on a WoW token. This just increases the value of the WoW token since these botters can afford it, making more people likely to buy a WoW token since they can get a nice payout from botters. The more WoW tokens are sold to botters with illegitimate means of pay the more money blizzard still makes from the buyer of the WoW token. Simple econ, someones paying, and someones getting paid. Blizzard and the botter are both cashing out bigger than if Blizzard cracked down.
Holy Shit, the Dude BPKDasBaum is part of one of the most famous groups in germany, for their lord of the weed. Better let him talk about that, you will attract like most of the german internet people.
You need GMs in the worlds just like you need police officers in the streets. You can't catch everything with automated systems. They have to resort to banwaves because they don't want their systems to be predictable. But their resorting to only ban-waves makes the systems they want to fight still viable. If it costs 100$ to start an account and you can realistically make 500$ before you get banned, it's a win for the gold farmers. You need some actual people out there who are actively looking at suspicious accounts, and who ban them instantly, outside of ban waves. Do you know how police and states manage to fight most of crime? By creating a fear of getting caught. When you ban by "spreadsheets", you only ban the most suspicious of accounts ; you wanna make sure not to ban legitimate ones. It makes it so only the dumbest, or the least "up to date" get banned. If my city was Blizzard / Activision, I am pretty sure I could get drunk every night, drive home and not get caught ever. There are definitely data leaks too ; do you think Blizzard's security systems are immaculate? There is no such thing as perfectly protected systems. Likely, the better hackers are getting data directly from the source, and train their bots accordingly. You know what's hard to predict and program against? Humans. I'm sure a properly trained GM could flag and manually ban a very considerable amount of accounts per salary, and would be able to help pin-point the security systems in the right direction. With the price we pay for a single game (more than netflix), I think we deserve better service. Bots ruin the game for everyone.
As a former GM - there's a lot of incomplete / incorrect info in there. Nothing against the dude, but some of those "takes" low key sound like trying to say stuff without making Blizzard look too bad or incompetent and they come out as flat out inconsistent. Tracking large sums of gold might not be the easiest thing, but the "it's really hard to remove it from the seller or the buyer cause it's an automated system" is bullshit. Unless they've removed gm/dev commands from the game (which they haven't, even if they dismissed 90% of their GM teams) - it's a matter of executing a single command to add/remove/move gold around. Botters aren't paying anything? Last i checked you needed to buy the expansion to have a max level character in that expansion's content. Them doing it with stolen credit cards etc.was playing with semantics to make an excuse for the company - maybe they don't pay their own $, but Blizzard is still getting money off of it. They bought a wow token? - well for that token to get generated - SOMEONE had to pay $ for it and then put it for sale Good video, very informative, but take everything with a grain of salt cause the dude's clearly still holding Blizzard dear to his heart and is trying his best not to make them look like absolute incompetent fools
Watch the full 90min interview. Blizzard is long dead, Activision is a parasite commandeering its corpse. Context is king. It's hard to remove gold as a GM, because of time metrics, how tools are designed, gold being immediately spend to buy multiple items form the auction house. When talking about the automated system I was referring to the wow token system, not any gold removal system, listen to it again please. Fraudelent credit card transaction get charged back, credit card companies charge a fee for chargebacks. Expansions can also be bought with gold (gold to wow token to blizzard balance). Hackers pay 0$ for anything you can get from the online store. It's a loss for the company but not enough of a loss to fight back harder. It's taken as the price of doing business.
@@bpkdasbaum anything that is bought with gold is bought with tokens that someone has to buy with real money first. And in no world you're gonna buy anything with gold if you're a botter, it's way more profitable to sell the gold for real money and pay with real money in some currency that has regional pricing. I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. Also, literally zero botters I know use stolen credit cards. Because it's highly illegal, and because it doesn't even make sense to do so, bots pay for themselves in a day or two.
Blizz doesn't get to keep the money when the fraudulent charges are inevitably reversed. Bots are a net negative for the developers, no matter how terrible the company is.
Great video. My only gripe is that if youre attempting to do an expose then drop the cringey quips. They sully the nuetrality. IE "as outdated as a fully finished videogame"
Meta, I'd love your insight to this bit 18:45 since you say this should be put in to better protect players and account security by saying your name and other info on a video you make. couldn't this be deep faked with Ai if a hacker obtains enough pictures of you and audio clips on social media of you to create a video? I recommend watching some of the new facial and audio ai that has came out in the past few months and rapid growth for the next few years in the quality and realistic nature of ai.. Blizz isn't the only company that will be screwed by ai when it comes to bots, hackers and other issues. It's everyone pretty soon.
As someone that has been part of the world of warcraft hack scene at ground zero for well over a decade, I can tell you this video is amazingly inaccurate, and the guest sounds like he has no idea what he is even talking about. This video is exactly why nothing gets stopped.
I didn't see anyone mention posibility of Blizzard being behind bots and gold seling...It is a huge money grab potential, why should they let others do that, after all integrity and trust are long gone.
@@RobolusMaximus Yes, but there has to be an ilussion that bots are making all that money. I know that there are non blizzard activities in that department, but it's kinda hard to believe that Blizz is not involved to certain degree...we are talking about big money here. If i was Blizz and corrupt like they are, there is no way i would let anyone "eat that cake"besides me, it is just common sense. They could litteraly create money out of thin air by trading virtual gold for real money and put the blame on others.
Classic 80 / 20 at work.. 80% of the real players are out and quit. And the community is held hostage by 20% swipers who want to play WoW like a mobile game by spending real money to gain power. GDKP overlords have kept the system in a perfect choke hold and chased away normal gamers. Only the mobile game whales left paying in game currency in a bidding war of gold to get items with real life money are left. WoW mobile is finally here, noobs paying to win all day and night
You are literally free to not participate in GDKPs. You just want to get carried for free. No one wants to just raid, it's too stale, easy and boring. Adding gold to it makes it worthwhile. You are guaranteed to get something out of a raid.
I mean, the GMs today are beyond stupid and you can tell it’s people who probably have no idea what the game they are supporting is. I’d rather zero support and know they lost jobs due to being inept than bad service. AI will be taking it over but will be just as inept. That said, with inflation, devs need to be paid decent for god sake…their teams are huge plus benefits then the studio overhead costs…HR, IT, now add in customer service which could easily be larger than all the above??? Blizz GMs at WoWs peak long ago had tickets take DAYS to reply. They wanted it faster, how do you make “faster”, you hire more bodies….Hello low cost India labor!!! So they are told “just follow the script.” And they do just that, clearly they have zero knowledge but copy paste scripts. It’s like when you call a cable company and only after you do the required time waste of the basic crap and let them finish their IT script, THEN they put you to “tier 3 support” meaning America where they have a clue. Most CS are just cheap gate keepers to keep customers away from real support.
To be fair Blizz need the Bots to keep the lights on, they ban them slow enough they can make Real money, But not so fast they can't make a profit. Or they quit and stop buying new copies of the game.
Wait. Isn't buying a WoW token still giving Blizzard money (more momey than a monthly subscriotion)?! Or did they change that? It used to be WoW tokens were bought by players only, then sold on the AH. The argument doesn't stand, unless tokens have changed since 2018?
so i can tell you exactly why they wont fix these problems, you guys dont care. you make all these videos complaining about shit but when it comes down to it ur still gonna mindless order the next xpac, and keep paying that sub so where's the incentive for them to fix it lmao
The solution is to just make botting be a part of the game. Open world only. Not usable in pvp especially. It would even the playing field. Fuk it let people level up alts or farm their own mats while they sleep. No one can complain if everyone gets to. All people care about anyways are parses and pvp rating. Bots in the open world would hurt none of that.
AI is the future. Adapt or be mad spending hours on end leveling and farming I guess. Or we think in another direction and just remove gear from the game. Beat someone because you're better, not because you out gear them. Wouldn't that just make more sense anyways?
You should probably remove the Russel Brand bit from this video. He has not been charged with anything yet and you represent him as a convicted criminal of pedophilia based on just allegations so far. While usually it is ok to joke around about stuff like this, i don't think it's appropriate in this case considering how important that case is in regards to free speech and for content creators like yourself to be able to do what you do. I normally don't give a shit about what people do, but when it comes to us citizens possibility to Not have the ability to voice our opinions in a public space, then it DO become very important.
Lots of theories with very little to no substance here. Like saying "the scripts or warden are not working good enough". Or that Classic disconnects are tied to "old Blizzard no longer working there".Just in the last 3 month Blizzard banned over 388.000 accounts for cheating, gold selling etc.
Just a friendly heads up to anyone considering leaving a comment about this vid and that's Blizz is falsely reporting anyone expressing any anti-Blizz sentiments as spam. Corporate blackmail at its finest.
@@bpkdasbaum Except that's exactly what happened to my initial comment, striked as spam/violation of communtiy standards? Why? You tell me, because all I said was if players didn't like being thought-policed by Blizz then they should consider playing on a more hospitable private server instead. Of course if the very concept of private servers is triggering you then....
Way to deep dive Into all this .. I knew it got really lax on gamemasters .. fighting a bot with a bot really isn't that great... sad .. I miss the old days of.real game masters
I was a temporary GM on a three month contract a few years ago. I didn't directly work for blizzard, but for an outsourcing company. We were in blizzard offices tho, working beside tenured blizzard GMs. I remember one time I was investigating a report on a player, I spotted straight away he was a bot. I did some standard tests like teleporting the player character and they would just immediately zip towards the next resource node, even navigating environmental stuff without hesitation. I repeated the test several times in varying spots and it was always the same. But I was shy and new so I asked an experienced GM to approve of my judgement on the matter. and he was like hmmm well I think you don't have enough to say he's a bot just yet. He told me to move on and leave it, close the ticketet. But like, this was an OBVIOUS bot. In my mind GMs seemed to be way too lenient in letting bots continue to exist. Or at least that was my experience with the ones I worked with
Bots inflate account numbers for the shareholders, it's the exact same shit that politicians do when they claim they want to fix a problem like littering or homelessness in order to get public support. They devote the minimal amount of money into fixing things just so that it appears like you're actually doing something but pocketing the rest of the money.
kek
That was one of the GMs gold farmers. That GM paycheck wasn’t cuttin it loool
haha i remeber one guy (obviously a bot) standing right in the altarac valley spot where you can Que for av, he was standing there for about 3 months, no downtime, i think he was standing there till he got r13 maybe he even got r14 idk but he didnt move at all and got mass reported by hundrets of players, just i myself prolly reported him 30-50 times.
nothing ever happend to him. not even sure if it was before or after activision blizzard ? (it was classic ofc) but i remember that i quit ranking when i was realizing that even when im trying to play alot im getting beaten like crazy in the grind by literall bots that just bot for literally months and nothing happens. tldr: they didnt even do shit to OBVIOUS botters that didnt even hide it.
What kind of capabilities did you have as a GM? Were you able to say creat an item like the famous Martin Fury? I’ve also seen videos of GMs turning players into animals, Is that something that would have been within the scope of your power?
i think in the past 2 years iv spent more time consuming wow content than playing wow
@easttowest7839 I quit retail in the first week of wrath. Returned in mop and played on and off untill 2016.
Now I play classic on and off and again quite when wrath came out again.
Personally I only want to play lvl 58-70. Plus MoP.
I only play rogue and cata seems like the time to rejoin
Make it the last 13^^
Same, but 7 for me
Absolutely true for me. It's like moving to a new country but still keeping up with the news from your old home
You aren’t playing hardcore wow? Its a lot of fun
“You’ll be shocked at just how little effort Blizzard is putting into the war against bots.”
No Metagoblin, I think I won’t be surprised.
haha yea, id be supprised if they did even anything.
I miss GM's in game. either helping or doing random stuff/telling jokes. Made the game feel more human like and not a cash cow for other games/golf.
The lesson here is never get attached to a gaming company. What happened to Blizzard can, and possibly will, happen to every company.
Amen 🙏
Already did.
I'd say Nintendo and Sony are full proof, I can't see what is happening to Blizzard ever happen to either of those two. Who ever buys one of those systems will guarantee have great old & future titles and that is a fact.
@@Kanoog You are literally proving OP right. Nintendo and Sony are not foolproof just because they have a better understanding of how to keep their customers innoculated.
@@VojtechSrb No, their are still some gems in the bunch like Arena Net and Larian Studios
I would be a WoW GM for as low as minimum wage in the US, which is 7.25 an hour and they don't even wanna pay that. These corporate places that are run like corporations don't want to pay anything anymore, they want everything automated and they only want to pay top employees.
Where in the US do they hire for 7$still?? Is it 2006? Mcdonalds hires for 18+/hr
@@isaarunarom7830$22 now in California.
Sadly Blizz/Activision is run by Shareholders now, not by a company wanting to make great games.
Can’t wait for Asmon to lose his last hairs over this
To be fair, this is true for pretty much every MMO I have played. And I played a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I'm currently playing FF14 and I'm honestly blown away by how little effort they seem to be putting into this shit. The bots have become so confident in fact, they create whole bot guilds, cause it makes trading gil and items easier due to the Guild Chest Storage. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous. You can pretty much just look for obvious bot names/bot guild names and you could just ban the entire guilds and you could call it a day, but they don't. These bot guilds are running rampant for months, sometimes even half a year without any repercussions.
By the time they finally decide to ban them said bots have already made more than enough money via RMT to just buy another copy of FF14, get another subscription and just start the cycle anew. Honestly, I think this is actually done on purpose by all Game Devs. They grant bots enough time to actually make a living, so that when they finally decide to ban them the bots will just spend some of their money to buy the game again.
It's basically free money for the Game Devs and no one can blame them cause "they did something" against the bots. If you think about it, that's actually kind of smart.
SE usually does weekly bans on Thursday, making them do more than that is just a waste of human resources.
@@Edge2177 Excuses
@@Edge2177 Highly doubt that they are "properly" doing weekly bans. Otherwise there wouldn't be entire bot guilds and bot farms botting 3-6 months on end. Go to any EU server and play there for a couple of months, I guarantee you will see the exact same bot guilds botting for 3-6 months without getting banned.
Why would you deal with bots if they both directly make you money, and provide your actual players with services they seek? There are no downsides for Blizzard. Bots are a problem for a very small, but loud minority of players.
@ForOne814 The WoW token and bot epidemic devalue everything in the game, it impacts all players because it corrupts the gaming experience from the top down. Professions for making gold, raw gold farms and gathering basically all become pointless. People use gold to buy carries in raids, buy the gear and even pvp titles. Once people realize that most of the game can be bought with real money, they quickly stop caring about it.
What gaming companies don‘t understand is: you need loyal customers. You get loyal customers if the gamers see that you put time and effort in the games.
WoW apparently still has enough loyal customers despite the bots.
@@seanwilliams7655 This. It feels like people still don't understand that they're making a fuckton of money for a minimal amount of money invested in it. Wow had it's peak(s) a long time ago, now it's just about milking the cow and earning as much as possible before it's dead for real. And be assured it's working VERY well.
That's the beauty of WoW. One-Game-Andys will defend this game to the grave. No matter how bad it is.
It's too late to fight the bots... they lost that battle in the early 2010s if not earlier due to not taking it seriously enough to begin with. That's partly why they put in the token, under the "if you can't beat them, join them" kind of idea.
Yeah i would say the battle was lost at 2003 at the development .......
Not to mention that a significant amount of the player base is so used to getting cheap gold that they'd quit without it.
As a former GM - who did far more afterwards - they don't really know that much. Not that anything here is necessarily wrong, but you could get far better information elsewhere. 😉
Back in WotLK I was the first person on my server to use a demolisher in wintergrasp and found 8-9 bugs. I never got in trouble for using them, but despite keeping everything a secret they were all fixxed in the same patch.
Would I be correct in assuming a gm was keeping an eye on me so they could find the bad coding and patch it?
no @@wilFluffball
@@wilFluffballyes
Who's they?
So I play on Grobbulus Classic Era. It's an interesting realm because it's a role playing realm, so it's not part of the PvP Cluster with Whitemane, or PvE with Mankrik. I started there 2 months ago, back then usually 10-15 people online. All dedicated players, all one guild.
In the past 2 weeks, hundreds of bots have leveled mages on there. Now Strath, Dire maul, Nodes, Lotus etc all being farmed all day non stop. I think what happened was, the players on whitemane were ganking the bots relentlessly, so now they come to Grob, hit gold cap and then do a free transfer to whitemane to sell the gold.
It's insane. Our beautiful realm, is now completely overrun by bots. They dwarf the player population there.
Worked at Blizzard myself for many years and found this video very entertaining. Even though it was lacking quite some background information.
This is really interesting thank you, its so hard to grasp how they can't get on top of the bots and has felt like they just don't want too for a while.
I was at the Blizzcon where they announced Craptivision taking over and they had Bobby Kotick's scumbag self waltz out onstage. The crowd was stunned and no one clapped, until a few random people ( I assume were planted and paid to do so) started clapping to get the crowd going. I knew right then how it would go. I'm just surprised it took so long.
What happened to the full interview vid?
It was there yesterday but I don't see it today.
youtube only lets you see a sub trailer once so check your history
The intro music gave me the mental image of Bobby K flying in on a unicorn with the Burger King crown from Shadowlands on his fat head and a golden scepter in his raised hand while a stream of cash flows from the unicorn’s ass-end.
all I've been gathering from your videos is that I should resub and bot to sell gold for some passive income irl, since clearly nothing will ever be done about it
IMO I think also the problem is when going to the spread sheets is when looking at leveling progress you have speed runners that will cover the bots level speed
I love your investigation series!!!!! :) Keep it up Mr Goblin!! :)
On offical classic it costs 5$ for 1500 gold, on certain a private server thats been up for 5 years its costs 85$ for 1500g, and youd probably catch a ban for trying it.
*GM's before:* Doing their work making the game better, answering ingame tickets, keeping track and banned bots and more.
*GM's today:* Don't care. Allowing bots roam around like a fat kid loves cake. Having these bann waves so it "looks good on paper". Doing what their bosses tells them to do regardless if bad.
*Their solution:* WoW token. For both Retail AND even Classic (wrath).
*Us players:* /Facepalm.
is why i quit and i started from tbc
Can confirm the guild bank is a tool. I got pinched for being a bad boy but the gold that was in my bank alts guild bank was untouched.
Back in 2011 i found out about perso using fishing bot in Uldum. I overhead him bragging to friends of mine on ts. I created a ticket, gave as detailed info as possible. Ticket has never been resolved,not even responce.
On Wrath servers i sometimes check eternal fire farm in Storm Peaks. Last month i send maybe 30 + reports. None of them were false flags because real players always greet each other there to ensure they are not taken as bot.
Not a single email from blizzard regarding those reports. And they usually do turn back amd say thank you for reports
Thanks for exposing Activision's laziness great video, but we all really know why Thighgapy got banned. 'cough' buying gold 'cough'. Players who frequently buy gold will most likely get caught.
I miss WoW. I really want to try my hand at Hardcore. But every video I watch that reminds me of Activision Blizzard's bullshit ensures I don't break my morals.
You're missing out. Hardcore is still popping off and it's been nearly 2 months since release. Tons of fun
HC is amazing fun!
I would advise you to reconsider, many of the p2w, cheating bullshit doesn't apply to HC especially if you go for something like SSF too, and it's really really fun.
When I quit wow back in wrath, I sent a buddy 20k gold before I left for good. His account was immediately banned for gold buying. While annoying, I sent a quick email and resolved the problem. Don't tell me there is nothing that can be done. Blizzard simply demands more money for a subpar product while making excuses, if not outright blaming their players, for the problems. Its that simple. AB will never get another penny from me.
I accidently did the swim in air bug when I was jumping out of the water. It was fun! Did not hack at all. Then found out it really was a bug and it was being exploited and was not aware at the time. lol
There are STILL people contrarian to the fact that devs and gaming companies actually had passion and people who actively loved what they were making back in the 2000’s. Once the higher ups heard about MTX, it sealed their fates as well as ours. Those 2000’s devs were the nerds and geeks of the 80’s and 90’s. Of fucking course they made good games.
Literally watching this from Moldova lol, I agree very few people know we exist which is okay. RIP lovely french Blizzard HQ
Look, I 100% think Vivendi would have done the same but slower, or maybe faster, it depends. But Activation was far more aggressive then them in this regard.
Where’s the full interview?
Played with a top wow classic guild all of tbc and pal around with them in wrath still. They wash millions of gold though guild banks.
Excellent - keep em coming!
shocked that they dont have a hands on approach ? fuck no lol !
blizzard temp ban ur account and disbands your gbank if the gold traces to gbank, there is non of that "take out the gold and transfer it to the next gbank"
Do you have the full interview with the former GM?
Very informative!
Do you really think the GMs are incapable of googling what an ID from another country looks like? The company I work at takes fraud super seriously and I bet blizzard does too
The whole thing about bots being only a negative, because they just buy WoW tokens with botted or stolen gold is kind of wrong. At some point in time someone bought a WoW token, that gets sold to the botter, doesn't matter if the botter doesn't actually pay, someone at some point did spend real money on a WoW token. This just increases the value of the WoW token since these botters can afford it, making more people likely to buy a WoW token since they can get a nice payout from botters. The more WoW tokens are sold to botters with illegitimate means of pay the more money blizzard still makes from the buyer of the WoW token.
Simple econ, someones paying, and someones getting paid. Blizzard and the botter are both cashing out bigger than if Blizzard cracked down.
funny to see how they treat bots while im trying since 6 months to change my phone number as a real human being
Microsoft will bring in some more changes at least? Good or Bad it’s change?
Here, before bald forsaken undead reacts to this
same
Great video!!
Holy Shit, the Dude BPKDasBaum is part of one of the most famous groups in germany, for their lord of the weed. Better let him talk about that, you will attract like most of the german internet people.
You need GMs in the worlds just like you need police officers in the streets.
You can't catch everything with automated systems.
They have to resort to banwaves because they don't want their systems to be predictable.
But their resorting to only ban-waves makes the systems they want to fight still viable.
If it costs 100$ to start an account and you can realistically make 500$ before you get banned, it's a win for the gold farmers.
You need some actual people out there who are actively looking at suspicious accounts, and who ban them instantly, outside of ban waves.
Do you know how police and states manage to fight most of crime? By creating a fear of getting caught.
When you ban by "spreadsheets", you only ban the most suspicious of accounts ; you wanna make sure not to ban legitimate ones.
It makes it so only the dumbest, or the least "up to date" get banned.
If my city was Blizzard / Activision, I am pretty sure I could get drunk every night, drive home and not get caught ever.
There are definitely data leaks too ; do you think Blizzard's security systems are immaculate? There is no such thing as perfectly protected systems.
Likely, the better hackers are getting data directly from the source, and train their bots accordingly.
You know what's hard to predict and program against? Humans.
I'm sure a properly trained GM could flag and manually ban a very considerable amount of accounts per salary, and would be able to help pin-point the security systems in the right direction.
With the price we pay for a single game (more than netflix), I think we deserve better service.
Bots ruin the game for everyone.
The use of Russel Brand's image when referring sexual assault of under age minors is defamatory.
As a former GM - there's a lot of incomplete / incorrect info in there. Nothing against the dude, but some of those "takes" low key sound like trying to say stuff without making Blizzard look too bad or incompetent and they come out as flat out inconsistent.
Tracking large sums of gold might not be the easiest thing, but the "it's really hard to remove it from the seller or the buyer cause it's an automated system" is bullshit. Unless they've removed gm/dev commands from the game (which they haven't, even if they dismissed 90% of their GM teams) - it's a matter of executing a single command to add/remove/move gold around.
Botters aren't paying anything? Last i checked you needed to buy the expansion to have a max level character in that expansion's content. Them doing it with stolen credit cards etc.was playing with semantics to make an excuse for the company - maybe they don't pay their own $, but Blizzard is still getting money off of it. They bought a wow token? - well for that token to get generated - SOMEONE had to pay $ for it and then put it for sale
Good video, very informative, but take everything with a grain of salt cause the dude's clearly still holding Blizzard dear to his heart and is trying his best not to make them look like absolute incompetent fools
Watch the full 90min interview.
Blizzard is long dead, Activision is a parasite commandeering its corpse.
Context is king. It's hard to remove gold as a GM, because of time metrics, how tools are designed, gold being immediately spend to buy multiple items form the auction house. When talking about the automated system I was referring to the wow token system, not any gold removal system, listen to it again please.
Fraudelent credit card transaction get charged back, credit card companies charge a fee for chargebacks. Expansions can also be bought with gold (gold to wow token to blizzard balance). Hackers pay 0$ for anything you can get from the online store. It's a loss for the company but not enough of a loss to fight back harder. It's taken as the price of doing business.
@@bpkdasbaum anything that is bought with gold is bought with tokens that someone has to buy with real money first. And in no world you're gonna buy anything with gold if you're a botter, it's way more profitable to sell the gold for real money and pay with real money in some currency that has regional pricing. I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.
Also, literally zero botters I know use stolen credit cards. Because it's highly illegal, and because it doesn't even make sense to do so, bots pay for themselves in a day or two.
Blizz doesn't get to keep the money when the fraudulent charges are inevitably reversed. Bots are a net negative for the developers, no matter how terrible the company is.
@@Trashalchemy there are plenty of botters that just pay Blizzard money.
This is exactly why I choose not to subscribe to retail wow anymore, private servers are way better quality these days anyways
Great video. My only gripe is that if youre attempting to do an expose then drop the cringey quips. They sully the nuetrality. IE "as outdated as a fully finished videogame"
Meta, I'd love your insight to this bit 18:45 since you say this should be put in to better protect players and account security by saying your name and other info on a video you make. couldn't this be deep faked with Ai if a hacker obtains enough pictures of you and audio clips on social media of you to create a video?
I recommend watching some of the new facial and audio ai that has came out in the past few months and rapid growth for the next few years in the quality and realistic nature of ai..
Blizz isn't the only company that will be screwed by ai when it comes to bots, hackers and other issues. It's everyone pretty soon.
Try Guild Wars 2 no bots there idk why maybe its a niche mmo.
As someone that has been part of the world of warcraft hack scene at ground zero for well over a decade, I can tell you this video is amazingly inaccurate, and the guest sounds like he has no idea what he is even talking about. This video is exactly why nothing gets stopped.
Blizzard has consistently have a lazy attitude when it come to bots.
Great video mate
bro, please link the actual song tracks! what the song that starts at 6:18?
thanks :)
I didn't see anyone mention posibility of Blizzard being behind bots and gold seling...It is a huge money grab potential, why should they let others do that, after all integrity and trust are long gone.
You know if blizz want to sell gold ... they dont need bots
@@RobolusMaximus Yes, but there has to be an ilussion that bots are making all that money. I know that there are non blizzard activities in that department, but it's kinda hard to believe that Blizz is not involved to certain degree...we are talking about big money here. If i was Blizz and corrupt like they are, there is no way i would let anyone "eat that cake"besides me, it is just common sense. They could litteraly create money out of thin air by trading virtual gold for real money and put the blame on others.
cant wait to finish the vid what an intro tho bro !!!
Classic 80 / 20 at work.. 80% of the real players are out and quit. And the community is held hostage by 20% swipers who want to play WoW like a mobile game by spending real money to gain power. GDKP overlords have kept the system in a perfect choke hold and chased away normal gamers. Only the mobile game whales left paying in game currency in a bidding war of gold to get items with real life money are left. WoW mobile is finally here, noobs paying to win all day and night
You are literally free to not participate in GDKPs. You just want to get carried for free. No one wants to just raid, it's too stale, easy and boring. Adding gold to it makes it worthwhile. You are guaranteed to get something out of a raid.
This video is an eye opener. Keep it up 😊
why would blizzard do anything about bot accounts when, they have to pay a sub and they contribute to there monthly interactions.
watch the video you sausage
Blizzard got corrupted by Old Gods of Greed
M'ney
I mean, the GMs today are beyond stupid and you can tell it’s people who probably have no idea what the game they are supporting is.
I’d rather zero support and know they lost jobs due to being inept than bad service. AI will be taking it over but will be just as inept.
That said, with inflation, devs need to be paid decent for god sake…their teams are huge plus benefits then the studio overhead costs…HR, IT, now add in customer service which could easily be larger than all the above??? Blizz GMs at WoWs peak long ago had tickets take DAYS to reply. They wanted it faster, how do you make “faster”, you hire more bodies….Hello low cost India labor!!! So they are told “just follow the script.” And they do just that, clearly they have zero knowledge but copy paste scripts.
It’s like when you call a cable company and only after you do the required time waste of the basic crap and let them finish their IT script, THEN they put you to “tier 3 support” meaning America where they have a clue. Most CS are just cheap gate keepers to keep customers away from real support.
38 gold buyers have watched this video
A wild asmongold appears! Let’s see how he reacts!
Very Good Video
Blizzard Versailles ❤
the good old times
Mc LOVIN is a real person 😆🤣
Commenting for algo
BPK war gamemaster? Dolle Karte
Hier legen wir die erstmal weg, hierhin so. Jetzt erstmal ordentlich einen durchziehen.
@@bpkdasbaum Weltkulturerbe
I bought roughly 300k Gold. Minimum 40k up to 100k per order. Never happend anything to my Account.
It's deliberate $
great video keep it up dude
To be fair Blizz need the Bots to keep the lights on, they ban them slow enough they can make Real money, But not so fast they can't make a profit. Or they quit and stop buying new copies of the game.
so you didn't watch the whole video
GGs
PPC
Wait. Isn't buying a WoW token still giving Blizzard money (more momey than a monthly subscriotion)?! Or did they change that? It used to be WoW tokens were bought by players only, then sold on the AH. The argument doesn't stand, unless tokens have changed since 2018?
Not if the wow token is also bought by a stolen credit card 😂
@@MetaGoblin Ah! Yes, how I didn't catch that, I'm not sure. Thanks for the clarification!
nice vid
so i can tell you exactly why they wont fix these problems, you guys dont care. you make all these videos complaining about shit but when it comes down to it ur still gonna mindless order the next xpac, and keep paying that sub so where's the incentive for them to fix it lmao
The solution is to just make botting be a part of the game.
Open world only. Not usable in pvp especially.
It would even the playing field.
Fuk it let people level up alts or farm their own mats while they sleep.
No one can complain if everyone gets to.
All people care about anyways are parses and pvp rating.
Bots in the open world would hurt none of that.
AI is the future. Adapt or be mad spending hours on end leveling and farming I guess.
Or we think in another direction and just remove gear from the game.
Beat someone because you're better, not because you out gear them.
Wouldn't that just make more sense anyways?
You should probably remove the Russel Brand bit from this video.
He has not been charged with anything yet and you represent him as a convicted criminal of pedophilia based on just allegations so far.
While usually it is ok to joke around about stuff like this, i don't think it's appropriate in this case considering how important that case is in regards to free speech and for content creators like yourself to be able to do what you do.
I normally don't give a shit about what people do, but when it comes to us citizens possibility to Not have the ability to voice our opinions in a public space, then it DO become very important.
It's a joke you sausage. And anyway the guy was totally off the rails in his prime.
Lots of theories with very little to no substance here. Like saying "the scripts or warden are not working good enough". Or that Classic disconnects are tied to "old Blizzard no longer working there".Just in the last 3 month Blizzard banned over 388.000 accounts for cheating, gold selling etc.
Just do the math.
100,000 × 16$ a month equals 1,600,000 dollars a month in sales.
Getting rid of All the bots would be like cutting your own throat.
So you didnt watch the whole video
@@Trashalchemy the guy is delusional and doesn't know what he's talking about. His information is straight up incorrect.
So I should trust rando@@ForOne814 over the guy who actually worked for the company. Sure thing. Lemme go get my tinfoil hat real quick.
@@Trashalchemy yeah, you should totally trust some rando in the video and not the person whose entire income is from WoW RMT, lol.
It would not surprise me one bi if the company itself is behind the gold selling websites.
nice
nice vid
Just a friendly heads up to anyone considering leaving a comment about this vid and that's Blizz is falsely reporting anyone expressing any anti-Blizz sentiments as spam.
Corporate blackmail at its finest.
ain't nobody got time for that, and anyone that would have the time for that, have been fired.
*puts tinfoil hat on anyway just in case*
@@bpkdasbaum Except that's exactly what happened to my initial comment, striked as spam/violation of communtiy standards? Why? You tell me, because all I said was if players didn't like being thought-policed by Blizz then they should consider playing on a more hospitable private server instead.
Of course if the very concept of private servers is triggering you then....
Way to deep dive Into all this .. I knew it got really lax on gamemasters .. fighting a bot with a bot really isn't that great... sad .. I miss the old days of.real game masters
None of this is surprising what so ever. They make far too much money from those subs.
you spent too much time on this video
no such thing
if you're shocked by this you need to ask yourself some deeper questions about life tbh - time to go outside, read some Nietzsche or some shit.
k m8
L for falling for the russel brand accusations
Russell Brand is innocent of that shit bro get a grip
I was there when they cared. It was better times..
You have great taste in beer