Hey, found this I am a former Blizzard Entertainment employee who was laid off last year. AMA you want! Questions 27, 28 talks about bots, pretty intresting. Enjoy heres the 3 question regarding the botting- Q:id you ever busted any people using bots or gold sellers? If so how you dealt with them? A:Oh yeah all the time as a GM. That was the best part, IMO. With bots you would get a report from a player, hop on the game to check it out, and get a Senior to visually confirm that it was a bot and then slam them with the ban hammer. Same thing went for gold sellers. Those were even more fun because gold sellers got their gold from compromising someone's account, taking all their shit and selling it, then taking the gold and selling it to other players. What we would do is follow the gold trail, through logs, and take back any gold, or items purchased with said gold, and recover it to restore back to the compromised player. Then we would give a nice fat action to the sellers account, which would usually result in them getting the boot.That's what I think people who buy WoW gold never understood. The gold didn't come from Chinese farmers just using bots all day to get gold. No, it came from Chinese hackers who hacked people's accounts, stripped their character clean, and then sold the gold to you online at a profit. Shitty. Q:So reports really helped, woa nice, I reported a few of them, I would wake up in the morning to farm something before the rest would start playing and watching those guys there all the time made me angry. I see how it works now, thank you for your response! Amazing AmA btw! I always liked to hear what Blizzard employes have to say. A:Oh yeah reports helped a ton because we were never really in game the majority of the time, so there was no real way of knowing who was botting or being a dick unless someone reported it to us. Believe me, banning people like that was our favorite thing to do, so we loved getting those reports lol. Q:how easy was it to detected botting A:It was pretty easy for the most part. 99% of it was visual. You could tell right away if it was a real player or a bot just by their pattern of movements. Intresting . also intresting that the fact GM most of the time not ingame.
they've also stated that player reports were heavily contributed to a ban in a blue post which is one of the reasons why I made AvoidPlayers plugin. The following Qs talk about bots; 27, 28, 34 Since they do visual checks, I strongly advise the devs that they record the movement of a normal player and attempt to replicate it as much as possible.
This would be nice but if say you had 10 hotspots in a 100 yard range and the profile currently has 50 waypoints to make it to these spots normaly. If you wanted it to look smooth you would have to Have atleast 1000 hotspots so the botted toon is feet smooth as if they were using keys to walk. It's like having a line graph... The more points the smoother the curve. This would make profiles way to large and if you used randomize hotspots it would defeat this anyway. IMO how it is now is pretty good. It isn't the bot so much the problem it's the users not knowing when not to bot and get caught
A little bit of bullshittery in there. Regular GMs don't ban a damned thing. All of those reports get escalated to specialists. He's right about not really being in game, though. You have a character logged into every server on a RAC you've been assigned to (in case anyone wonders, these are battle groups), but very rarely ever actually open the game client for anything.
