https://www.topiama.com/r/1332/i-am-a-former-blizzard-entertainment-employee-who#r53 I've cued it to the botting related question but the whole thread is pretty interesting. CP
Very interesting read, overall. Seems like getting banned using a bot is 99% dependent on being reported by a player.
Tell me how the fuck you hack an account nowadays. You'd need SQA and password to mail. I for one believe that 99% of the gold sold comes from farming. There just isnt enough gold in stripping accounts and even bothering with that shit. One account out of 10 maybe hold 30k, easily farmed in a day with a good bot. Huge hassle to get gold by hacking imo.
He was a GM from 2006 to 2012 so it was probably the number one method of gold sellers in his early days. Nowadays account "hacking" is virtually non existent.
My daughter fell for one and gave them everything but the keys to my house. It wasn't hard to get back but when I logged in I was mounted flying with a bag full of ore and herbs.
I'm guessing a lot of the hacked accounts are probably from people visiting questionable gold seller websites that have key logging malware. Your reputable gold sellers that have been around for a while aren't doing this, probably, but fly by night places with super cheap gold almost certainly do it. I'm a guild (free company) leader in FFXIV and I've had a few members that got their accounts hacked. Almost all of them confided that they bought gil at some point recently. At least Blizzard has good customer service and can restore hacked accounts pretty quickly in most cases. Square Enix is terrible when it comes to restoring hacked accounts.
I think it's funny when I read about blizzard saying gold for sale comes from hacked accounts lol. We all know it's easier to bot it and how many people do bot it to sell. That's just blizzards way of making the naive and less informed people believe botting isn't being done as much as it really is.
I'm curious to know as well. From what I can tell, most botters have multiple accounts, myself included. I have like 5 wod accounts and 3 battlechest accounts.
So it seems from this that where afk botters are being spotted is in movement. A lot of this is probably due to click-to-move (just watch a bot flying - those pauses in particular) though the stutter-stepping around bad in dungeon buddy and the bot trains in battlegrounds are also exceedingly obvious. We need strafing. We need smooth turns. We need alternate and fuzzy paths. We need the ability to run through bad rather than have it as an absolute no-go area. And whatever happened to the keyboard turning plugin that Highvoltz once gave us? That looked a lot more human from an outside perspective.
Multiple player reports = suspension and if they continue I assume it's perm Makes sense... However the latest ban wave was definitely a detection.
The good old days where gm's actually manually banned bots. Even testing them if they weren't sure by teleporting etc.. had some funny encounters like that.
