wow Blue Posts Round-up: Jan 11

[Stan 5,240]

The latest blue posts talk about botters, the Travel Form speed bug and bad communication on 7.1.5 and the latest patch notes.

Dealing With Botters

The first blue post deals with botters as it accuses Blizzard of simply ignoring them, which is of course not true. Rather than banning botters one at a time, they rather ban them in so-called "banwaves" when they suspend several thousands of accounts at once. The post also talks about reverse engineering a bot and building anti-cheating mechanisms around it.

Glaxigrav

Customer Support checking in - we definitely can and do continue to action bots. However, there might not always be landmark sweeps where thousands of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. These actions happen on a couple levels. 

Some are as simple as a Game Master investigating individual reports and we don't need more information on that particular system: we can close them down immediately. Other cases, we observe, monitor, and then detect/break the bot without needing player reports. Mass actions also occur, but those who barter and trade in illicit programs don't usually come to the WoW Forums to discuss it. 

There's a combined effort of normal checks/sweeps that our Hacks team do, the reports that are sent to Game Masters via right-click reporting, and other research on how these programs interact with our games where we attempt to break those methods outright. However, much like real life, the game of "Good Guys vs. Bad Guys" is an ongoing game. We build a mousetrap, they build a better mouse, we improve the mousetrap, etc. We aren't resting on our laurels, and continue to iterate and build new systems and pull new data to help us find and remove cheaters. 

If you see people exploiting bots/cheats in-game, let us know. You can also email us tips at [email protected]. In-game reports are best as it includes important information that players can't traditionally see (account details, play behavior information, etc), but where it's not possible the email is sufficient for us to kick off some research!

Blizz doesn't need to "collect info" they have the info for the last 10 years. They could spend what...ten or twenty bucks to buy a bot account and get all that info in minutes. Its a cop out.

This assumption is that bots haven't evolved in the 11 years we've been investigating/breaking them. There are a few botting companies who would strongly disagree with that assessment. Also, reverse-engineering a tool doesn't happen in minutes, whether you make the purchase or not. Debugging and reverse-engineering takes time, and then building reporting/detection around that also takes additional time. I can certainly understand your frustration, but I want to make sure it's tempered with realistic expectations. 

Bots and cheat programs will continue to exist in any game for as long as there's a market for it: unfortunately, players who buy gold or other RMT services encourage botting and compromised accounts whether they realize it or not. People bot for a variety of reasons, from small-scale boredom to organizations who run gold selling services. As long as those exist, we'll continue to keep weeding out and removing them from the community.

(Source)

Travel Form Nerf?

Travel Form speed has been decreased to 80% mount speed, which is an unintentional bug and should be fixed soon.

Ornyx

Hey all,

This is a bug and we currently have a hotfix in the works to resolve it. I'll update this thread if I hear anything more.

Thanks for the heads up, and we appreciate your patience on this.

(Source)

7.1.5 Patch Notes Issue

Not only were the patch notes terribly written there was also lack of communication between the community and the developer team. The initial 7.1.5 Patch Notes were written without details and after that Blizzard edited in some more details. Instead of giving us numbers, they just stated vague information like: "...the damage of XX abilities has been slightly / greatly increased." Changes like that should be communicated precisely and we need numbers! Hopefully, this will get solved in the next patch. Here are the blue tweets by Lore a.k.a. Josh Allen explaining more.

Placeholder for tweet 818586691510276097

Placeholder for tweet 81869257712160358

[PatrickHenry 293]

Josh Allen ?? @devolore

We generally don't make promises but I can 100% promise this will not happen again.

 

 

 - ;)

[hDszzT 103]

That promise is so gonna backfire on them sooner or later lol.

[Calysia 229]

6 hours ago, Ammako said:

That promise is so gonna backfire on them sooner or later lol.

I give it until the end of the week :)

[Valks 2,375]

17 hours ago, Ammako said:

That promise is so gonna backfire on them sooner or later lol.

It's a bold move :D