Blizzard Bans WoW Botters in Massive Crackdown
MMO Glider enables its users to automatically level characters within World of Warcraft. The program sells for $25, with an optional $5 subscription available that provides additional functionality.
Blizzard sued the makers in February of 2007, and now claims that bot author Michael Donnelly has made $2.8 million from the software.
Hundreds of posts flooded the official Glider forums following the suppression, the freshly-banned cheaters sharing their frustration.
"Is there a way (E.U.) to get unused month of WOW money back? I have paid with credit card 6 months..? Is there a way to get Glider Elite money back?" read the post of one Glider user in a thread titled "I want my money Back!"
Other Glide users repented, encouraging Blizzard in its efforts to free the game from AI influence.
"Blizzard just made the game better by excluding the people who ruin it," said confessed Glider user Sundruid. "I hope people learn from this and stop botting."
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ovrlrd
replyAbout damn time this happened. I don't feel sorry at all for the people who were banned if they were botting, they should have known better. If you really have to use a bot to play a game you just shouldn't be playing it. It's hilarious that so many people seem justified in using programs like this.
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They've been banning people since launch, how is this "about damn time"?
"If you really have to use a bot to play a game you just shouldn't be playing it."
Explain? What if there are things in the game I enjoy doing that I can only do if I spend hours do something I don't enjoy? I'm not saying I personally bot, but I can easily see why people do.-
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How do they muck it up for others?
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What would that affect specifically in WoW?
It won't change the price of a mount or durability or arena fees - arguably the thing people spend the most money on since the alchemy changes.-
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1) Auction house inflation - possibly, but would probably work out to the player's favor by lower the price on goods because MORE PEOPLE are farming them. The demand stays the same in WoW, only the supply can increase by the number supplying.
2) Can't really say if those nodes would have been used by non-botting players or not.
3) So they stumbled into end game content without any idea how to play - WIPE - durability fees X 25 taken out of the economy.-
1. Not everything can be botted. Those things that can't be botted are driven up in price by by those with botted/farmed money.
2. This is irrelevant. The botters are just that much more competition for these resources. Every botted node is a node taken from live players.
3. Who does that wipe hurt less? The botter with his deep pockets of tainted gold or the user who actually used his own time to earn gold?-
Of course the wipe hurts the non-botters more - as a whole, it helps remove gold from the economy.
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PDF report on WoW Economy and Glider bot.
http://virtuallyblind.com/files/mdy/08-04-23-strumpf_report.pdf
Shack should run a story on this.
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But they muck it up for others by doing so.
QED?
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The economy in WoW is pretty good. I could even argue Blizzard has been rather poor at adjusting some of parts of the economy like the fact that large prismatic shards are so expensive and lots of enchant require a lot of them. Of course they took steps to correct this but at least on my realm they failed. It could be said their own game fucks up their own economy as much or more than bots.
They built in a lot of protection to the economy already. For example I can't sell you my old season 2 arena daggers when I get season 3, or 4 or whatever.
While the game needs protection, the people botting are not fucking up the game that much. A shitload of people bot, and blizzard let the slide or was unable to ban most of them, until now, or maybe they didn't even get most of them now, but the point is the economy is not ruined yet and this has been going on for a long long time.-
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Yeah but I actually know a lot of people with tens of thousands of gold because they run dailys, daily.
I don't know that many people who have tons and tons of gold because they bought it from botters. So I find it hard to believe the economy is totally jacked because of botters. Not to mention the economy IS NOT MESSED UP for the most part, and people have been botting for a long time. So do they really have large impact on the economy? They would eventually if the numbers of botters was very extreme. But people act like all the botters who just got banned were this huge problem.
I don't think they were. I don't have a problem with them getting banned. But I won't pretend like they were creating a lot of problems either.
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I have to admit the price of LPS has gone from about 8G 18 months ago to about 28G now on the server I play on. I don't quite know why, but people buy them, so the price will stay.
The thing I don't get is that low supply/increased demand can cause price increases, but supply is super high now. It's odd, the economy isn't really self correcting on my server. Maybe its the botters and farmers that prevent the economy from self correct? or maybe its just that with the addition of welfare T6 epics that everyone and their mother is now having to reenchant all at the same time, so LPS are in more demand?
I wonder if Blizz thought of that? If all of a sudden we give all players new gear all at the same time, they'll all need brand new enchants, all within just a few week period.
Oh well. I never witnessed a toon who appeared to be a botter, cept maybe this one guy, who had 5 identical toons following him, all with names, aaaa1, aaaa2, aaaa3, etc. All were dranei shaman, and all in follow mode, and I first saw them at level 10, and then a few weeks later at level 60 something. I didn't get it; how could one person play across 5 accounts/boxes? And keep them all leveing at the same time? Is that botting? or is that just a guy with 10 hands? And why do it? How sellable are toons with f00ked up names?
So much I don't understand-
no the guy with 5 shaman is not botting. He is using a program and some macros to pass commands through to the other accounts and plays on one of then.
So he runs an app and programs it to know that when he huts 5 on his keyboard, all 5 shaman cast lighting bolt. And when he presses F they activate a macro that targets whatever the master account/shaman is targetting. Another button might make them all cast a heal. Another might give them a stay command and another a follow command.
I used a program to do this called AutoHotKey, and as far as I know it doesn't break the EULA and Blizzard agrees.
The difference between this and a bot is none of the shaman automatically do anything other players can't automatically do, like follow. The guy running the accounts has to hit buttons and provide input. He just does it all at once instead of 5 separate times. But he must input an action into the game. A bot you just set up some waypoints so it knows how to navigate the area, and then it just takes care of itself, killing, looting, etc with zero player input for hours on end.-
using a program that passes on commands from one account/character to another are actually breaking the ToS/EULA and they've stated so many times in "dual-boxing complaint" threads. If you get 2 accounts and managed to control them "as intended", that's ok - using software to just control one and make other characters do the same thing, not ok. It's still botting, only you control one and bot the others, people running glider usually don't even bother to control one (but technically they could, and have chars on other accounts mimic them - same thing, equally wrong)
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Blizzard has certain rules you must play by, one of those is "no bots" therefore if you must use a bot, you shouldn't be playing the game and Blizzard has every right to ban you
i don't know why anyone would have a problem with this, bots quickly turn the game to crap, as does gold farming for profit
the last time i played i got solicited constantly by bots and gold farmers and it ruined the experience for me
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most people bot to level up or pvp rep/honor gain.
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doesn't justify anything
I'd love to have more classes to play at level 70, and personally I don't understand why Blizzard themselves don't provide a shortcut for people who already did 1-70 once (or even worse: a couple times) before as the lowbie game is only fun so many times and most of it is deserted nowadays
still, the game is based on levels, and as long as the intended way to level is to start every alt at 1 and go through the whole treadmill until 70 where the fun would start, I just don't bother levelling alts.
but I don't go and try to make shortcuts myself - if it's too much to bear, if you're not having fun "as intended" then don't justify taking unintended shortcuts with the 1% fun you'd have after you circumvented the rest of the game, quit and look for something that offers you that fun without having to lame out and bot or buy gold or w/e
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There will always be bots, and you will always be at a disadvantage if you don't use them. Also a lot of the botters made thousands of dollars off selling their bots. I take it you failed to get your free money. What a sucker.
Also you statement "If you really have to use a bot to play a game you just shouldn't be playing it." is very ignorant.
Consider that there are parts of an MMO that people do want to play and parts of an MMO they don't want to play. If they can use a tool/cheat/hack/call-it-what-you-want to cut out the parts of the game they don't like and focus on what they think is fun why wouldn't they do that? Why would they stop playing the game entirely when they could continue to play the parts they do like. It would be stupid to stop playing if you had an opportunity to just do what you want.
Think of it like only playing the maps in counter-strike that you like and avoiding the ones you don't like. Of course this doesn't involve cheating but if the people using bots cared that bots are cheating they wouldn't use them, they do so we can assume that is not a factor. Wouldn't it be stupid to continue to play the maps in CS you hate when you could just change servers to one that is playing the one you like? More stuff you like less stuff you don't like.
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"Consider that there are parts of an MMO that people do want to play and parts of an MMO they don't want to play"
Most MMO's have enough content that if you don't want to do something, you don't have to. You can move on and do something else. You don't need a bot to bypass this stuff.-
um. How am I supposed to get level 70 warlock if I don't have one. It is much easier to bot it up to 70 instead of having to level another character up. I don't want to level anymore, I have done it before.
My choice is to quit. This fails to get me a warlock.
I could buy one, but that costs me money. Also I risk the original owner stealing it back.
I could borrow a friends, if they let me use it, but this is against the rules in theory.
Or I could bot my own, which also costs money, but probably less, but is more work than buying, but its MINE. It could be banned.-
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and to further comment on this - the people running WoW have no incentive to make it easier for people to get this level 70 warlock if the answer to this problem is "I keep playing and paying the monthly fee, and additionally pay some lame-ass idiot money for a bot, and when you ban me I will probably do it again because I'm obviously addicted enough"
now, if enough people were like "game at 70 was fun with class X, but now I wanna do it with class Y but levelling 1-70 is lame, I quit, cu Blizzard", they might get the clue that maybe, maybe their players don't want to level 1-70 nine times...
botting might solve the problem for the people who want class X at level cap badly but CBA to put in the effort to level them according to the game's rules (which itself doesn't take long, it's just boring as hell after two times), but in general they don't do anything but cause grief for (even a few) legit players and fill the pockets of whoever wrote the bot. -
Fool. You do NOT define my options. I DO.
I have not used a bot or bought any characters ever. But I have played other peoples characters which gets me the same thing, a high level character of a class I want to try. I have considered why I play the game. Without wall of texting you every answer involved level capped characters. Blizzard even made a realm for this for the new tournament where you can make three level 70s so people didn't have to BUY or BOT new characters just to PvP on their team.
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so by your logic, this is perfectly reasonable:
i don't like to get killed in CS, but i love killing other players, therefore i should be allowed to use a cheat so i take no damage, that way i can avoid the part of the game i don't like (getting killed) and only play the part of the game i do like (killing)-
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you said that if people using bots cared that they were cheating, they wouldn't use them, but it doesn't matter whether the people using the bots care about cheating, it matters what the community as a whole and the owners of the servers care about cheating, and blizzard obviously cares
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Pretty much.
Then again if 50% of the players you meet are bots it would ruin the world. On the other hand the world in WoW is kind of instance based now anyway. There are degrees.
I normally don't see bots unless I am looking. So they generally do not affect me. If we are competing for monster spawns I will get 90% of them because a bot can't compete with me. If there were 20 bots in the area though it would be different. So it is a question of degrees.-
the problem is if they use a laissez-faire policy against bots "because they don't really hurt the legit players, right? RIGHT?", you end up in a game like Lineage 2 where a vast majority of monster spawns are camped by bot teams and by far most of the farmed resources come from bots
of course one bot per server won't hurt the game in any meaningful way - but where do you draw the line?
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Have you done battlegrounds recently in Warcraft? In Alterac you see upwards of 10 people afking, while warsong, eots, and arathi usually see 3-4 afkers per game. AFK people almost always result in a loss, and this affects my gaming experience.
IMO, wrong is wrong, whether it affects me directly or not.
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