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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.
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
Where you're building up the skill level of your character rather than yourself?
Why do some people smoke weed rather than building up themselves? Because it's easier and they're unmotivated. *shrug*
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You must be new here. /. has been like this for nearly 8-9 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
*looks at userids*
Yeah. He's new here. /pre-emptive UID-off.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Letting cheaters continue to cheat if they decide to pay a fee would piss off the legit players way more than just deleting the accounts. Not that the cheaters would be cool with having to pay extra either.
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.
Most people who are in to sports don't actually play them. They watch other people play them. At which point your just learning how to commentate on a game and I doubt the fact that other people are exerting themselves really makes it better then then playing a video game.
Momento Mori
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.
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.
It's a time-sink. There's a market for it, and Blizzard (and others) merely capitalize on this. It's really not up to anyone to question what someone else chooses to do with their time. Would you rather he be getting drunk every night at a bar and then driving home? Or hitting on your wife? People need their little things, it's what makes them feel that their life belongs to them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
People like different parts of the game. Who are you to judge?
Learn to love Alaska
Define "bad" please? Do come up with the one definition that we can all agree on. Or how about you butt out of people's lives? What difference will your opinion make in 5000 years? If people want to waste their time then more power to them. It's their time to waste, after all. Life is more than slaving away to make someone else rich or staring at a sunset or a flower. What we choose to do (or not do) with our time is what defines us as individuals.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The truth is none of it makes any difference at all. In the long run, we are all dead.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Am I doing it right?
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.
Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.
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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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.
That depends on what your actual goals are.
If you said, "I want to play WoW and have recreation time, and fuck everything else." then that could be true.
On the other hand, if you had goals for yourself that were impaired by the time or money spent on the game, and now you're wondering why you can't achieve those same goals, then you wasted your time.
You can play WoW in moderation and be fine. No question about it. And I am given to understand, it is much easier to be casual these days to boot.
However, if you look up many disorders, pathological behavior consists of actions done to such an extent or in such a manner as to interfere with the ability of someone to function normally in life, such as making a living, or even eating and sleeping properly. You certainly can play WoW too much, and you certainly can spend too much money on it, via paying for gold outside of the game.
If you're not measuring up to your own yardstick, you're wasting time, and not because someone else told you its wrong, but because you're objectively hurting yourself or preventing yourself from achieving your goals.
I used to be a guild and raid leader on endgame content. I remember more than one teen or college age student that was having problems and spent far too much time playing the game. Of course, I doubt the problem was solely the game, but they certainly used the time to do that, rather than addressing issues that they had.
As you'd expect, I used to play quite a bit myself, but eventually I realized that I simply didn't have enough time to play the game and still do what I wanted to do. It was time to quit. And looking back, I remember having a lot of fun. So, I don't regret it, but I also don't regret putting it down either.
People cheat at every game, because there are always people who want more reward for less effort. WoW was actually a lot less grind-y than other MMOs when it came out, and it's driven the competition to be more friendly to casual players. It's been some time since I played, but from what I hear they're still making efforts to make things easier for casual players, and if you're not obsessed with minmaxing and getting rare stuff you could certainly explore and play for years without ever grinding content. With upwards of 10,000 quests and continents bigger than many games' worlds, it absolutely puts the 'massive' in MMO.
If you *are* grinding, I'm sorry, but Blizzard isn't forcing you to aim for piles of gold, rare mounts, or heroic gear sets. *You* want to be a top tier player with better stuff than everyone else, but then you complain about having to work harder than other players to get it. It is hard because you want it to be hard, it is a chore to keep the 'riff-raff' out, so you can show off what a special snowflake you are. If the stuff was easy to get...you'd want other stuff.
Now I won't argue that Blizzard is guilty of exploiting players' OCD; there's always something you really want tantalizingly within reach. It's very much a 'one more quest...one more battle...one more level' addictive sort of experience. It's well balanced, in that lots of things seem to be *just* worth the effort to aquire them, and once you do, there's more...and more...and more. Addictiveness is of course not a bad quality in entertainment, like a novel you can't put down, but if you can't keep in control and balance it with your life, or have to resort to exploits that make the game worse for everyone, then it's simply not for you. Sorry!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
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.
Thank goodness that you are here to straighten out the developers of a game that after nearly ten years consistently has over 7 million subscription paying players. :-)
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?
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.
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"
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Yogi Berra
I aim to misbehave.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.