Bots

Canis Lupus

I quite liked liked farming. Weird I know but it can be relaxing. Flying my usual loop of a given area all I would see is bot after bot after bot. There's no point to farming when you then go to the AH and see the market flooded with goods that you know are primarily farmed by bots.

seven_eleven

Back in early 2010 I played WoW quite a bit. Remember those bots that used to spell out large words with their dead bodies? Well, they were happening so often, and everybody on the server was reporting them EVERY DAY so I decided to investigate a bit more.

I simply added one of the bots to my friends list to see how often they came online to spam. I cant quite remember exactly what it was but I think it was something like every hour.

I reported this particular bot for spam every single day...probably more. Including opening a ticket.

Anyway, the summer passed and I decided to shelve WoW for a while. 1 year later in summer 2011, I decided to check out WoW once again...and low and behold the bot was still in my friends list with recent activity. :rolleyes:

jabberwock

That one is a gold seller, unless I'm wrong we have been discussing people that use bots to play for personal gain.

How could you tell that it had recent activity? Friends list doesn't show activity.

Calhoun

jabberwock wrote: »

That one is a gold seller, unless I'm wrong we have been discussing people that use bots to play for personal gain.

How could you tell that it had recent activity? Friends list doesn't show activity.

I would also say it can be hard to tell pure gold sellers as well, allot of people these days from what i can tell use bot for gathering stuff. It would seem that its the only way to compete competitively with the gold sellers.

When i was on doomhammer the gold sellers had the markets cornered on most consumables you could barely make any money.

From this perspective i can clearly see why people use them, if it seems like blizzard aren't doing anything about it and looks like everyone is using them people adopt a "sure why not" attitude.

jabberwock

Take the stupidly priced bot mats and turn them into something else. Temp resetting the market and making sure that someone else doesn't get benefit from it.
I have managed to force a bot into posting at half the price that he should have by watching when they were online and posting up single items at a much lower price. Bot wades in and undercuts.
That to me is a hacked account not a player just botting the mats.
Hacked accounts will usually be the ones posting the ridiculous amounts of farmed mats.
Someone botting for mats will usually use them to make something else themselves.

At the end of the day there are 1) botters, 2) botters and 3) botters.

1) players.
2) goldsellers.
3) hacked accounts.

MurdyWurdy

I've never seen ridiculous amounts of mats on the AH on my server and I would usually sell most of the stuff I auction (using the auctioneer add-on). Prices are good too. I presume bots are much more active on certain servers. It would be interesting to see how much toe cost of an item varies between servers.

Saw this on Reddit last night
http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1794b3/well_i_guess_that_bot_really_wanted_that_herb/

And thought of this thread. Some interesting comments on bots too!

Calhoun

Ya thats another issue hacked accounts, in this day and age its hard to believe that there are still allot of hacked accounts out there because there are so many precautions to take.

Some cabbage in my guild actually used one of those account swapping sites and ended up being provided with a hacked account and not his main account is locked ect.

jabberwock

For all your AH comparison needs and a whole lot more.

https://theunderminejournal.com/
http://www.wowuction.com/


And precautions are only good if you take them.

StinkyMunkey

Was playing strand of the ancients last night, out of 15 ally, i was the onyl one not a bot:(.

Calhoun

thats good to hear , i play horde :cool:

StinkyMunkey

Calhoun wrote: »

thats good to hear , i play horde :cool:

Damn horde, its all your fault:P.

shockwave

How would you know a bot if you saw it?

I wouldnt have a clue but then again I never pvp.

Calhoun

can be hard at times as there are people as bad as bots, other times they just travel in a swarm doing the same thing. The funny times are the bots who run around all bases in a BG.

TheDoc

jabberwock wrote: »

For all your AH comparison needs and a whole lot more.

https://theunderminejournal.com/
http://www.wowuction.com/


And precautions are only good if you take them.

First rule of gold club............

Fenster

They are a huge problem on US realms too, and even with the understanding that Blizzard prefers to act in waves, the situation is a tad ridiculous.

jabberwock

I read today of a guy who just lost 40 accounts in a day to bans. He claims to have been making 14k US a month with it all.
One of the main botting programs has a special board on their forums just for people to report their suspension/ban so they can gather more info on what bliz are catching them on.
It's a lolfest of a read.

johnf26

oh oh i no the site i read them to lol some people do be nearly crying there accounts are gone..dont bot on what you cant afford to lose

UCDVet

Sadly, it's an impossible problem to solve

red_ice

UCDVet wrote: »

Sadly, it's an impossible problem to solve

its been solved. Noone plays for honor anymore, now that you get an extended conquest cap, there's no point in bothering to get honor. That coupled up with everyone having a base resilience

UCDVet

red_ice wrote: »

its been solved. Noone plays for honor anymore, now that you get an extended conquest cap, there's no point in bothering to get honor. That coupled up with everyone having a base resilience

If it were solved - nobody would use bots

I happen to know a guy who wrote a simple bot for WoW. Just one guy, he wrote it in a weekend while he was in Uni 3-4 years ago. It's not a popular bot, it's not even a well known bot. And it still works. People still use it.

I asked him if people were still using it - and this is what he sent me

78k visitors but only 53k were actual users. they have to visit the site to get a code they can enter when they start the bot so I can see how many are real users verse people looking at the site.

Any junior/senior level computer science student who was determined could through together a crappy bot in a week or two....much longer for a more sophisticated bot though. Still, that's a pretty low bar. With WoW being as popular as it is, there are lots of people who are going to be tempted to write a bot. And, on a more serious note, it can be profitable - the guy that wrote WoW Glider made MILLIONS of dollars.

There is a huge demand for bots to popular online games (even though everyone says they hate botters, lots of people want to be a botter) and because it's quazi-legal legitimate software companies aren't going to write bots. This creates a nice little niche market. From what he tells me, he's still bringing in between 30 and 50 euro per month for a little hobby project he did years ago, when he was just a student and wouldn't have been able to find a real job writing code if he tried. Per hour - it's the best paying he's ever had.

It sucks - but I don't think bots are ever going away.