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Blizzard Bans 100,000 Cheaters In Massive "World of Warcraft" Ban Spree
MojoKid writes: Like many MMORPGs, World of Warcraft can be a grind. To sidestep the time commitment required to continually level up a character, gather resources, improve skills, or whatever else is desired, some gamers turn to bots, software that automates the process. The only problem is, Activision Blizzard isn't so keen on this behavior and has dropped the ban hammer hard on gamers who've been using them. Activision Blizzard didn't specify exactly how many people it booted, saying only that it was a "large number of World of Warcraft accounts." However, a screenshot of a conversation between a player, Game Master, and Activision Blizzard employee suggests that over 100,000 World of Warcraft accounts were identified and booted.
It's about fscking time. You would think they'd protect their billion dollar brand better.
I think that they are making a choice between short term profits and long term customer satisfaction
Maybe this leaves a market segment open to people who want to run games as large scale hack-a-thons, but Blizzard does not seem to want to be that company
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Why would anybody play a game where you're required to spend time playing it just for the sake of playing it? Where you're building up the skill level of your character rather than yourself?
Bots are the reason I'll never pay or play a mmorpg anymore.
6 months is plenty of time for the hardcore players to get over the addiction. this is a good moment for so many disillusioned pvpers
If Slashdot is going to be relevant, it might start by posting news that is, you know, actually new. This story hit everywhere else days ago.
I still play WoW when I'm particularly bored. It's a dead-easy game these days, and I see no reason anyone would actually use bots. Blizz has been very slow at policing but, you can go into cities now without getting trolled by half a dozen "buy gold here" sites, any more, which is progress. To be sure, the cities tend to be empty of everyone, not just the gold-sellers.
i mean fired, will be that gm and employee that gave out the, no-doubt confidential, details.
n/t
easiest way for getting rid of all cheaters and whatever on WoW is to close everyone's accounts and discontinue the game.
- -= Napalm means serious BBQ =-
Are you kidding? These same people will be back again, which means they have to buy all new copies of the game to get a fresh set of keys which is even more revenue for Blizzard. I imagine that a lot of them are accounts to farm and sell gold or other items so it's not as though they're just going to close shop and go elsewhere when there's still a demand for their services. One could argue that there's even more money to be had right now if the number of sellers has seriously decreased so there's a lot of incentive for these people to get back in the game.
I have been clean for 4-5 years and I still miss the arenas in WOW. It is not something that ever goes away....
Not playing a computer game, or watching some other people do things on reality TV?
The thought process that goes on in some people's heads must be truly baffling.
Maybe things are different on WOW but CS:GO whenever there's a ban-wave that just means cheaters buy a new account.
Good for the players who got booted, I mean. It's easy to waste large portions of your life playing that type of game. Think of the productivity gain they will experience now that they are not playing a grinding game.
Bots like TinTin++ were the only reason I played old-school MMORPGs AKA MUDs. Programming your character to be successful is a game in itself.
When people are into something and when they are into that something _deep_ it is very difficult for them to plug themselves out of that sinkhole
No matter if it's WOW or weed or even slashdot ... a bad habit is a bad habit
This is the reason why I never played any online games with blizzard.
As an adult, I can't spend the time required to see everything. I have to actually work and sleep.
I agree with them locking out people who cheat while playing online players. I disagree venomously with them locking out non online players for using all codes and hacks to play. They bought the game - if they want to be invulnerable during all phases of the game - then it should be allowed in single play.
It's unfortunate that the major game companies started focusing on metrics and statistics. If they just focused on making good games that were free from bowing to the company their profits would increase.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
That might lead a jaded person to believe that they are simply pumping revenue
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Less revenue, stronger brand. No one likes a cheater. There is such a thing as a bad customer and you want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Abnegation.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How many of those ~100,000 were false positives?
Depends. If the botters have switched over to buying WoW Tokens for their game time, then Blizzard doesn't lose a dime in revenue
It appears to be a six month ban, not permanent. Also, although it's hard to be certain, part of the motivation may have been to combat farming of honor points in PvP, which apparently has been rampant. There are cheat programs designed to help players do just that in PvP, so it could be that Blizzard found a reliable way to detect those programs running, and laid down the ban-hammer on everyone caught using it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's a lot of revenue per month Blizzard has chosen not to receive.
Well, there are two points to consider about this:
1) The ban was not permanent, but was only six months. This is a departure from their previous botting bans and will put expiration near the end of the year, which lines up with a potential patch / expansion release.
2) As others have mentioned, getting banned does not prevent you from creating a new account and buying the game again. That's an instant ~$70 for Blizzard, equivalent to a player subscribing for about 4.5 months.
3) Botting had gotten very bad in some places. A lot of customers were complaining about them turning a blind eye to it and they really needed to do something.
Finally, the primary botting software that was targeted was HonorBuddy which is mostly used for player-vs-player activities. Given how much people have complained about the current state of PvP it's not surprising they went after it in an attempt to improve things. As a bonus, the developer of HonorBuddy has said he will be discontinuing development of the software due to the ban wave.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Dear Blizzard,
If large number of people want to automate or outsource your game experience, then what you have is not a fun game but a chore.
It's more than that, and in fact in the long term this is more revenue. Games with excessive cheaters and bots end up turning actual paying customers away from it eventually as they find they're getting little to no enjoyment out of it anymore.
As you say, there's such a thing as a bad customer, and in this case they drive good customers away.
Normally I'd agree with you, but if you look at the kind of things that these bots do, it turns out that the bots are not a symptom of bad players, but of a bad game. Repetitive skill-less tasks that take forever and are required to get to the promised exciting parts of the game. No wonder that people want to bypass that. And this doesn't hurt other players at all, this is just the grind before you can even think about what competition means in a game like that. Who cares how long another player has been grinding?
Well, Blizzard does. Because for Blizzard the grind is simply an extension of the time needed to play through, which is an extension of the time the player pays for the subscription, which in turn may mean that the player still subscribes when the next expansion is finally ready, which increases the chance that the player stays p(l)aying.
But don't think this is about cheating. It isn't.
Well, if they have "players" who have a financial interest in breaking the rules, I don't see a problem with a tax on them.
I remember playing, and honestly, when it was fun, it was pretty fun. When it got to be a real grind, I quit, I didn't pay someone else even more money to keep playing a game that I didn't actually want to actually play any more. And I do suspect gold dealers do affect the game balance decisions somewhat, which means they are actually are affecting the people who don't want to pay.
Of course, there are people out there who will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to pimp out a character in WoW or some of those terrible pay to win games, so there's no way that aspect of the economy is going away, unfortunately.
Activision Blizzard likes it when Activision Blizzard talks about Activision Blizzard.
Activision Blizzard!
Nowhere has it been mentioned that any game company is locking out people from using singleplayer cheats, not to mention that TFA is talking about World of Warcraft, an entirely online-multiplayer experience.
What are you talking about
By the time they get their asses in gear to ban botters, the damage is already done. It takes months - sometimes years for Blizzard to actually take action. Even when the person botting is obvious and blatant.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Exactly. Not to mention they were recently selling max level characters for something or other. So it's ok if Blizztard sells you cheats, but not so if a Chinese entrepreneur does the same thing...? Right. At least EVE Online is honest in its own corruption.
100K is a good start - only 7 million to go. Then other mmorpgs might come out from under the shadow of the worst mmo to ever excrete itself onto a finite market.
To think, this drek keeps on going & going, whereas innovative, quality mmos like CoX go under. At least there's the likes of GW2 - B2P - buy once, play forever.
I've played WoW a bit, and I estimate that the amount of time and effort required to get a lvl 100 character with "epic" gear today, is perhaps 1/5 of what it used to take to achieve the equivalent lvl 60 back in the day.
Blizzard dumbed down, simplified, and accelerated the game, in the shear fear of losing a subscription somewhere because some kid quit when he couldn't get everything instantly, and people are still lazy enough to cheat their way to 100.
Instead of banning them, give people a settable-but-not-clearable checkbox:
- "I won't cheat", if you're caught then you're subject to a ban
- "I might/will cheat", fine, but you can't run multiplayer with others who won't
Heck, go one step simpler- no checkbox, but if you're caught cheating you can only go multiplayer with others who were caught. But the flag clears itself after 'X' amount of "time served".
I am not a sig.
Bots like TinTin++ were the only reason I played old-school MMORPGs AKA MUDs. Programming your character to be successful is a game in itself.
My feelings exactly. It turns games that are designed to have no satisfaction of winning into games that you can enjoy beating.
The smart thing would be to sort the players. But the bot-users and hackers on one set of servers, and the genuine players on another set. Get money from both camps, without them disturbing each other.
Diablo 3, Starcraft maybe? (yes, the single player portion is online as well)
How many of those ~100,000 were false positives?
Zero. Its not behavior based. Its based on physically inspecting the game's code executing in RAM and recognizing modifications to that code. Whether the player knew they were using a hacked copy of the game is debatable, that the game code was hacked is not debatable.
People proclaim their innocence all the time and the honest ones eventually return to forums saying that they did some investigation and found out that yes their brother/cousin/friend had installed a hack on the computer they played from.
They are not discontinuing development at all. They shut down the authentication servers that check your key whenever you load honorbuddy. Honorbuddy is not going anywhere for now, unless they are unable to get around the new detection scheme.
Doing it that way has lead to banning people who were running WoW on Linux previously. So yes, it can lead to false positives.
Actually, it is the other way round: There are a lot of customers Blizzard wants to keep doing business and hence has decided to get rid off about 1.5% bad apples that really piss off the other ones by breaking the rules of the game. Quite akin to banning people that post offensive content.
The only thing that may be surprising is the size of the wave. But that also makes sense because cheater-tech is usually bought by the cheaters (most cannot code themselves one bit) and if they were to bann often, cheater-tech makers could easily determine what Blizzard does to identify cheaters.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"So it's ok if Blizztard sells you cheats, but not so if a Chinese entrepreneur does the same thing."
You got it! Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Prada, Rolex etc have the same policy.
So it's ok if Blizztard sells you cheats, but not so if a Chinese entrepreneur does the same thing...?
Yes, because it's their game and in their interests they don't screw it up. A Chinese entrepreneur didn't develop the game and doesn't care. If Blizzard are screwing up, then feel free to go play somewhere else.
Also..
Blizztard
What are you? Ten years old?
WoW is dead isn't it? I mean... that game is so fucking old at this point. What kind of future can it possibly have. And really, banning people at this point? Why not so many god damn years ago? The gold farmers have been a problem in the game since always. There are literally chinese convicts playing WoW to sell gold to lazy fat kids that are so stupid they'd rather pay someone to lessen the irritation of the skinner box rather than just STOP playing a shitty game.
Sorry... I hate grindy games. I like to game but I do NOT like to grind. The only games I'll play that have grinding are Mobas and that is only because the level progression caps out after about 15 minutes in most cases. Grind COMPLETE.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
By that logic, they would earn even more if they actively helped people cheat.
Since they can't play the game they bought because it is now deliberately defective by the "owner", they get a refund, right?
You see, this would be 100% problematic if you could run your own server. But as they showed with BNetD, they are shit scared of any competition in how "their game" can be played by the people who FUCKING GAVE THEM MONEY.
I would totally demand through the courts a refund of the money for the game.
1) Each month you get a certain "allowance" and hours played deduct from that. Any unused allowance is turned into some form of in-game loot (gold or random enchants, or credit for next month). Therefore when you aren't able to play due to work or holiday for some time, you don't feel you've wasted the months' subscription. This also means you can avoid some grind and gold farming becomes less necessary to pander to: you farm gold already, or play and get much more gold by actively playing than you would when you can't.
2) Self hosting servers. Hell, if their scares about how the protocol would be hacked and their servers compromised for cheaters were relevant (See SMB and the Intel BIOS for why it's a load of crap), have two protocols, at least different interpreters, therefore compromised differently, and use one for the self-host and the other for official walled garden games. Banning accounts merely becomes a "You can't cheat on our systems, play with others who don't care".
3) Cut the grind. Maybe by making a single line of synergistic abilities easy. The grind would come when you need to up the other abilities to get a well rounded character that doesn't lose if they're not playing a well balanced and cohesive party. Two problems fixed here:
a) you need all archetypes playing together, and this can be hard without including people you don't know, hence cheaters get "in". Making the grind game rounding out your character means experienced players can gravitate away from forced co-op with random strangers and the demand for all usual players to organise together to play at the same time. You can do without one or two of them for sessions.
b) you can speed up the grind without unbalancing. Those who grinded already have more varied skills, so they won't have to restart.
Those people paid for it.
It's still cheating. That's the same as what they call cheating when other people do it.
Nobody does. My sister plays. She walks off while playing, the laptop still on, still dinging sounds coming as "the character" continues to level up smithing or something to a perk. So 100% not playing the game because it's the grind.
Yet still "playing" it. And, because online, paying for it.
The playable points are a long grind away. And designed that way, hence I agree with the OP that WoW is a waste of time.
Until you've spent enough to actually play the fucking game, that is. But that's the problem here: you have to play the non-game of the grind. That's what the OP is talking about. Whereas you're talking about the "post-grind" game.
Kill the first.
If you grind on a server that you don't pay for, then there would be pressure on Blizzard to make the grind less onerous and still give it purpose. As it is, they want to make the grind longer and more boring, which makes farmers of game points valuable. Depending on how much free time you have it can easily be CHEAPER to pay someone a large sum to bypass the grind. They profit too because they can put much more time into it. Only Blizzard loses, because they aren't getting the money from the gamer with a life and commitments outside the game. This is why they're against farmers: it costs them unearned revenue.
I don't know what constitutes bot use in WoW but if the bot is designed to enable automated levelling then it's a big no-no. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the gold farmers have such bots running on an almost factory-like basis.
They still have 7M subscribers. I'd hardly count that as dead.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It helps if you know what you're talking about. Starcraft you can mod all you want in single player, in fact, they effectively encourage Starcraft mods.
"Old man yells at systemd"
OR, they are just trying to make you think they are. "Let's not, and say we did," and keep the money and make the customers happy.
After the said undressing of them, the 100000 player character should have indeed jumped to their deaths from the highest peak of Azeroth, simultaneously. Banning is a spectator sport, you know.
Sort of ironic the current botters were only banned for 6 months, I was perma banned for botting in WoW circa 2006. I didn't do it for gold, in fact I probably had more gold than 99% of the players on that server at the time from cornering the AH market on many items better than most could on my server. I was quite upset at the time since I had been hoping to sell my account as a just-graduated-student at some point for $3-4K... which was an enormous amount of dough for me at the time. My account was worth a lot not just for the characters I had, but the crafting skills and rare recipes I had collected. Foolish thing about it all was I only botted because I wanted a 5th and 6th lvl 60 and no longer had time to play as much as I wanted to spend more time with my then-gf-now-wife. In hindsight, getting banned was probably the best thing that could have happened to me! Minus the loss of money of course lol
Blizzard now has a system where you can trade in-game gold for playing time. Since that was just implemented in the past couple months, I would wager that this mass ban is related to that.
Now the bots and gold farmers may have a direct impact on Blizzard's revenue.
What is the difference between buying a fully leveled character and using a bot to make one?
And I've played grindy MMOs before, when you get good at it (the grinding) your actions aren't easy to tell from a bot anyway.
Corporatism != Free Market
OP needs to play a real MMO to know what a true GRIND is. WoW was and is the easiest MMO to level up in.
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Yogi Berra
I aim to misbehave.
Actually, it's all part of their new $25 "World of WarCraft BanHammer" expansion.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Repetitive skill-less tasks that take forever and are required to get to the promised exciting parts of the game.
It's not like that. I will admit to repetitive, but skill helps tremendously. The ban was applied to accounts using a bot that automated PvP...that means one human against another. Or, rather, twenty humans against twenty others. Since humans are so ingenious, it can be quite challenging, particularly against people who are experienced. However, since it was twenty against twenty a bot could be "carried" by nineteen humans and gain honor, which is coin with which to buy armour and weapons. The armour and weapons didn't allow you to get to an exciting part of the game, it made it more difficult for other human-operated characters to kill you. The bot allowed the owner to start it and leave, coming back hours later to spend the coins that it had received.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
I like thinking in terms of countries...there are still more WoW subscribers than people in Denmark, Norway, Finland, or Singapore. But yes they have declined from their peak when WoW was bigger than Cuba, Greece, or Belgium.
blizzard banned 1 bot and 179 dedicated players.
Every MMO wishes they were as dead as WoW. Most wouldn't have had to turn off their servers if they were one seventh as dead as WoW...
WoW is essentially the only MMO, their own genre. Everyone who makes an MMO uses so many similar things to WoW that they are essentially wowlikes. At this point, they've added more things that stuck than everquest, have added more content of more types than most games ever can, all while being around longer than anything else can, and being wildly profitable the whole time.
Also they ban people all the time. What happened here is interesting because of the scale of it.
Selling your character would also be banned.
PvP rewards you for playing it. The character progresses from weakish pvp to strongish pvp gear, and then normally has to compete in tough rated combat for the final pieces.
Many players want to skip the first part of that- they essentially want to have gear on all the character classes so they can play whatever is most powerful.
The bots are disgusting. You'll enter a battleground, and it becomes very obvious who is botting immediately. When I started playing, the bots would mostly jump in place to avoid being marked afk (afk removes them from battleground). Then they implemented features to report non contributors. A few years ago, we started seeing bots that were smart enough to acquire enemies, move toward them, and press skills uselessly- thus rendering them unable to be kicked. The last time I played, you would see those bots sometimes, and it was always shitty to load up what looked like a decent battleground only to find your team infested with them.
It looks like Blizzard figured out how to catch those cheaters, which is great.
These are cheaters, plain and simple, and I love that they get banned. They ruin the game for the actual players. They aren't "skipping a grind" by having some guy hit hogs in a field, they are actual players who want gear faster by setting a bot to run a character overnight / when they can't play because of work or school. They just want more than everyone else has, and it's bullshit when it works.
They have never sold max level characters. Not really.
A few months before the cap pushed up to 100, and after that fact was announced, they sold 90s. What is missing is, to have a decent character towards the end of an expansion requires you be both max level, and have had some time in the different tiers of content. Each expansion raises the cap, meaning that the different tiers of content at the old max level no longer are relevant.
For what it is worth, I hated that, and it's a very small part of why I don't play any more- but lets not pretend that this was some giant grind skip. The levelling game is very streamlined as it is, and the majority of the work to make a powerful character happens once you are AT max level.
I'm sure they will begin selling 100s at some point once there have been enough waves of content at 100, and when 105 or 110 or whatever is announced. But if you take them up on that offer, you'll end up with a character who still needs a decent amount of gear to matter- they are just giving you a fast intro so your friends can help you, or so you can be playing with the majority of the playerbase.
Blizzard allowing you to skip a solo pve grind is very different from a bunch of botters shitting up your battleground and ruining your team pvp experience.
Their accounts are banned. This means that they cannot log in for a fixed amount of time, possibly permanent. No one has their identity or credit card banned, ever- any one ever banned is always welcome to buy a new copy of WoW, and many do.
But a ban is a very meaningful disincentive in an MMO. Losing all your stuff is the MMO player's apocalypse. It's not about "this guy is a cheater, we blocked his IP", it's "this account cheated, so its player has lost everything".
Incorrect.
This is a pvp bot that shits up queues with dumb fucking bots while their players sleep, normally on alts. It has nothing to do with the WoW token, nor does Blizzard stand to gain anything from that. Anyone can rebuy WoW, and most banned players will have actually had an alt account ban- even botters aren't universally stupid enough to bot from their main account, by and large.
Of the people who play that I know, every single one of them bought a new copy of the game and leveled from 90 to 100 over the weekend. Some even bought gold from Blizzard (via their WoW Tokens). This was a huge cash influx for them. And in 6 months when the accounts get unbanned, they'll make all the money for people paying to merge the accounts back together to avoid paying two monthly fees.
Arena is still great, played a ton over the weekend. I've never found another game that has the same level of complexity or requires the same level of coordination between partners than WoW arena. We mostly played KFC (arms warrior / bm hunter / resto druid). Let me tell you the state of arena now vs 4-5 years ago, insanely different. The level of competition is in another league completely. For reference I was a ~2400 rated player in WotLK.
We had five people in our guild banned for botting with Honorbuddy. Every single one of them bought a new copy of the game and started leveling again. Most purchased a new copy on Thursday/Friday and I know of at least one that is already back to level 100 (took him 15 hours of /played). Blizzard is going to make so much fucking money off this ban. Not to mention people had to buy WoW tokens (gold) to buy their heirlooms and they will have to pay to merge the accounts together in 6 months.
Blizzard has never sold max level characters. They sell level 90 character boosts for $60. You still have to level from 90 to 100 to reach max level.
First let's specify what bot we're all talking about: Honorbuddy.
BGs was only one part of it. High end guilds were raiding using the combat routines. A number of progression guilds broke up entirely because 90% of their roster is banned. It was also being used in arenas (look up "Gladiator Suite" on the honorbuddy forums). People were playing literally in gladiator range (2700+ arena rating) using the bot. It had perfect DPS rotations, CC'd, used cooldowns correctly and could perfectly kick any cast. It was also being used to farm professions (herb, mining, etc) and pretty much any other aspect of the game. Personally, I leveled one of every class to 100, including multiples of some classes (for arena purposes, so I could play with less skilled friends without affecting my rating).
Here's some context:
WoW has a bunch of things you can do.
Level: You have to level to participate in most content. Bots that automate this are often ignored, because they aren't that much better at it. This is not about one of those bots at all.
Raiding, an organized pve (player versus environment, in other games pvm for player versus monster)- an experience at max level versus challenging encounters. If you fail on one "boss", he "resets", and you have to try that boss again from the start. Each boss encounter is 3-10 minutes, and raiding guilds normally meet at specified times when everyone can be available, and clear multiple bosses (ideally all of them) in one or more difficulty levels. The hardest levels are almost unbeatable except for the top few thousand players out of millions, and it normally takes some time for even the professional players to get down the hardest bosses on the hardest difficulties whenever a new raid is released. When you do beat a boss, he drops random loot- potential upgrades, hopefully, to make you and your friends more powerful. The gear dropped from the toughest bosses is the best currently in the game for pve.
No bot can raid. A few bots can automate certain tasks, but these are rarely employed- the tasks needed for automation are so dynamic, and the risks so great, that it's almost unheard of.
Ranked PvP- At max level, you can join a premade group for arena (2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 death match) or rated batteground (objective based 10v10 play). These modes are very difficult to win at the higher level. Participation grants access to the best pvp gear in the game.
No bot does these things. A few players use bots to automate certain tasks- for instance, one really hard task is to "kick" an opponent when they are casting. Since there is a lot of latency and ability to fail (the opponent will often start a cast, then stop, hoping that you will "kick" when he is not casting, thus wasting your cooldown, and allowing him to cast again, this time without fear of interruption), kickbots are a thing- but they are much harder to get away with. All ranked pvp is very hard to cheat at, because you will generate a series of complaints from your opponents, and get banned permanently for it.
This is not what's being discussed, and a kickbot or other arena program is ultimately trying to provide your character with one or more superhuman responses. These are rare and actioned severely.
Casual PvP- generating the gear needed to play in ranked, this involves being thrown in with mostly random people in an objective based pvp environment. Very popular among those who don't want to coordinate in Skype, or people who just want to play some.
*This is what the bot in question does:* It automates this casual pvp. This allows the players to have alternate accounts that are getting gear on multiple characters. This means that they can play pvp with different classes easier than those who do not cheat. A few fools even botted from their main accounts, which the bot authors always tell you not to do. These bots shit up the game- you'll queue up and notice some of the players are bots, and if your team has too many, you'll lose. If the enemy team has too many, your win will not be fun, because bots are stupid.
I don't play WoW right now, but I'm very glad to see them banning these clowns.
WoW has 7.1 million subscribers this quarter (Q1 '15).
Q4 '14 (When the Warlords of Draenor expansion hit) WoW had 10 Million subscribers.
Q3 '14 there were 7.4 million.
Q2 '14 There were 6.8 million
It is pretty obvious that new content is not helping retain players for more than a month or teo.
It's all downhill from here, unless some miracle happens.
The smart thing would be to sort the players. But the bot-users and hackers on one set of servers, and the genuine players on another set. Get money from both camps, without them disturbing each other.
Not sure if this idea would really work. If cheaters have been using bot/hack, why would they be spending more money into the game? Thus, is it really worth keeping them on a separated server that the company has to maintain (spend money)? Got rid of them would be a better choice, I think.
Why not fight bots with bots? Players caught using bots get a "special" servers, where the bots cheat, and constantly pummel the players.
After a few days of getting pummeled, getting their inventory reduced to nothing, the problem will take care of itself, and they will either stop using bots, cancel their subscriptions and start a new one, or just quit altogether.
Selling your character would also be banned.
It's true that Blizzard doesn't want you selling your characters, but it happens nonetheless. This was especially true around the time he's talking about, before Battle.net accounts were a thing and it was fairly simple to merge WoW accounts, but it's still possible today. I have a friend who started playing in 2004 and he sold his account for about $4,000 right before starting college in mid-2006.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
So people pay to play this game...... then they pay other people so they don't have to......... odd
Arenas are the reason I could never get into PvP in WoW.
"Sorry, you picked the wrong class, you have to either find friends of these exact two other classes/specs to play your preferred spec, or reroll healer". FOR EVERY ARENA SEASON EVER TBC-Current
Yes, I'm a bitter enhancement shaman.
I play League of Legends for my PvP fix. I play WoW for it's group dungeon content, the one thing they actually do well.
Except for, ya know, Eve Online. Which is nothing like WoW.
Yeah it makes it a lot harder to play with friends. But most people played at least a couple classes. And since honorbuddy got popular I have (i think) 14 level 100s. I'd have to count to be sure, I have one of every class plus 3 druids and 2 shaman. And it's so easy to gear up a class now that you can really play anything you want. They've also instituted a system that makes it easy to find arena groups and I've had some good sessions playing with random people I've found that way.
Because they'd still have to pay their monthly fees.
Exactly. Not to mention they were recently selling max level characters for something or other. So it's ok if Blizztard sells you cheats, but not so if a Chinese entrepreneur does the same thing...? Right. At least EVE Online is honest in its own corruption.
100K is a good start - only 7 million to go. Then other mmorpgs might come out from under the shadow of the worst mmo to ever excrete itself onto a finite market. To think, this drek keeps on going & going, whereas innovative, quality mmos like CoX go under. At least there's the likes of GW2 - B2P - buy once, play forever.
IF GW2 had half the story writing team of WoW, I might have made it more than 2 hours before going, Gee, this grind is way too boring. I really don't care what is going on right now.
So it's ok if Blizztard sells you cheats, but not so if a Chinese entrepreneur does the same thing...?
What about the real customer experience? Why have you skipped over that concept?
I don't mind playing a fair game and losing. I hate playing a fair game just to get swindled by cheaters. I tend to avoid games with easy exploits because of this. I don't know what the WoW cheats really do (I speak from an old EQ1 perspective) but you better bet that Sony wouldn't have seen much of my money if I were camping a rare spawn and had to contend with known cheaters to just try to get a shot at my target. Not to say there weren't cheats and bots in EQ but I was never at a place where it was utterly obvious that I was playing against cheaters.
Either that, or the in-game capital has an exchange value to real-life currency, and they want more of that for some reason.
move to a real game that is fun enough that you dont want to bot! check out Archeage
And that's fine, as long as everyone else agrees that is a valid venture. I'm sure it's a challenge to develop a competent WoW bot... but a majority of players don't want that in the game world, which is a reasonable sentiment for that game.
oh, wait, no, those were just account stealing gold pirates and people using bots.
God those are so annoying.
Way to go, Blizz!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
>We had five people in our guild banned for botting with Honorbuddy. Every single one of them bought a new copy of the game and started leveling again. Most purchased a new copy on Thursday/Friday and I know of at least one that is already back to level 100 (took him 15 hours of /played).
Yes, but the question is are they botting again? I would assume only if they were stupid, or liked hitting their heads with walls. The point was to stop botting and hopefully it was successful.
You don't have to be jaded to believe that Blizzard chases revenue.
The smart thing would be to sort the players. But the bot-users and hackers on one set of servers, and the genuine players on another set. Get money from both camps, without them disturbing each other.
Wouldnt work.
CRZ and rated battlegrounds. Unless you separated them at that level you may as well not bother.
Did they drop any good loot?
should be allowed to drink alcohol.
Some people are drug addicts, so no one should be allowed to use drugs.
Some people are addicted to World of Warcrack, so no one should be allowed to play WoW.
The baby can't digest meat, so all of us have to drink milk....
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
The smart thing would be to sort the players. But the bot-users and hackers on one set of servers, and the genuine players on another set. Get money from both camps, without them disturbing each other.
it's all about having an advantage. bots exists to gain an advantage. if everyone is a bot, it defeats the point.
not to mention, bots put excessive load on their servers beyond what would be possible with a human player.
Because they'd still have to pay their monthly fees.
what costs do those monthly fees go toward, pre-profit? bandwidth. electricity. maintenance. etc. all of those costs get multiplied by bots. humans don't play for weeks straight. a bot is a net loss for the company.
people seem to forget that just because it's digital doesn't mean it's without operating costs.
if you look at the kind of things that these bots do, it turns out that the bots are not a symptom of bad players, but of a bad game
yes, it's so bad that people pay their monthly fees and spend thousands of hours leveling their characters. just a terrible game indeed.
And this doesn't hurt other players at all
wrong. MMOs are all about your place respective to other players. how do you think it makes the non-cheating customers feel if they spend 5000 hours leveling their character but someone else does it in 10 hours of screen time with a bot? you think it makes the vast majority of paying customers feel good about the game? like they want to keep devoting their precious time and money?
this is nothing more than keeping the vast majority of the paying customer base happy. and yeah, it's a money grab because as soon as the average person feels the game is overrun with bots, they stop paying.
Great, can you guys get on the Starcraft cheaters now? Those cheaters only cheat to beat other individuals and they really ruin the game for everyone.
http://ezserveronline.com/forums/index.php
WoW reported 10 megasubs a few months ago. It's likely lower, probably down to 8 or something.
Eve posted an all time high of 500 kilosubs a few years ago, and seems to be well behind that these days.
Is it even the same genre?
Shamans are healers, you had plenty of time to shine. No, not every side spec is supported in all seasons, but shamans have had decent numbers over the years.
Great move by Blizzard. Now we need to go after the clowns that hack Starcraft 2. I really don't understand the mindset of cheaters/hackers... it's like they so utterly fail as human beings that they can't even have fun playing a video game without cheating. If you really hate "grinding" at WoW (and the article and comments suggest that this type of grinding isn't at all necessary to enjoy the game) then don't play it. Starcraft 2 hacking (generally maphacking to gain vision of your opponent's base and army) is even more counterproductive: the matchmaking/MMR system gives you opponents judged to be at exactly your skill level, with an expectation of 50% win/loss. By hacking you artificially inflate your perceived skill... leading to harder opponents, who can and will beat you DESPITE the cheating. Losing even when cheating must be a special kind of awful.
The only time I've ever botted in a game was SWG. I wanted to level up some crafting professions. The only way to earn the relevant xp was to craft thousands of items, which had little to no value to anyone in the scheme of things. The crafting system involved a series of windows with recipes to be selected, materials to select, various options and finally finish the crafting resulting in a finished item. I figured out that you could actually use the ingame macro system to perform all of the actions in a perpetual loop, except the selecting of materials, which required some double mouse clicks. So I spent some time doing nothing but selecting crafting materials with the mouse while the running in game macro did everything else as rapidly as it could. But I realized I was looking at doing that and nothing else for something like 5 or 6 hours straight. So I found a mouse macro utility that would interface with the OS mouse drivers and feed it the appropriate mouse actions to move the cursor back and forth double clicking at the appropriate times. Then I sat down and read a book while it did the grind for me.
It was honestly a very silly system, the only significant barrier to maxing out those professions was the speed at which the interface reacted and your ability to double click rapidly in the same spot(s) for a very long time.