wow Blizzard Takes Action Against Bot Producing Toolkits

[Starym 3,800]

 

The war against the machines continues, as Blizzard has taken a big step, seemingly taking down a couple of the main toolkits for bots. The Easy WoW Toolbox (EWT) site was taken down recently, with this message on it for a while, as spotted by jmoorefc:

Quote

After being reached by Blizzard, I decided that EWT development, support and sales must be discontinued.

Despite being an independent platform, EWT allowed the development of many other tools that infringe Blizzard's terms of use. With the immediate stop of EWT services, these tools will also stop working, at least under the EWT platform.

This is the last official announcement and no further comments will be done on this matter.

Thank you for the support

An alternative toolkit, WowMatric also seems to be down, as any links clicked on their site simply return you to the homepage, which might be a coincidence, but as this also started happening very recently, so it seems likely Blizzard have gone after these bot sources!

We don't know how many of these toolkits and bot providers Blizzard went after, as there are plenty around, but any action is better than none and hopefully they can get as many as possible! Of course this doesn't mean an immediate end to botting, in the long or even short run, but there have already been reports of lower bot activity on Classic at least (where EWT was the primary source), and even prices of the usual bot farming items rising, like Righteous Orbs and herbs/potions.

While there's still plenty of sources for bots and many of them running around, hopefully this means a more aggressive stance taken by Blizzard in these matters, and we'll see if there are significant results, even though botting can never really be completely taken away from MMOs.

Source : jmoorefc, source 2: sadhukar.

[Calysia 229]

This is good news indeed!

[ffdream6915 11]

Awesome news ! it feels good to see Blizzard actively working on reducing the bots 

[Sabejnos 10]

Sadly three additional toolkits announced Classic WoW support. LB is also still working and envolving. 

[Arcling 898]

Good they are doing something about it. Hopefully more to follow, and they still need to tackle on those advertisements in LFG (some people have learned to work around the system).

[darkgreenwax 412]

ad/spam bots are brutal for clogging up communication lines, but the real bots that personally annoyed TF out of me were the gathering bots.

 

there's nothing more annoying than working your way through a pack of mobs towards a sweet sweet rare vein only to have some bot swoop in and nab it (back when the veins would despawn right away).