Blizzard bans botters/cheaters all the time. They just don't tell you about it. All because people have not been banned recently does not mean they won't in the future.
Solution: Let Blizz do its job. If there are new programs and exploits people are using to cheat, Blizzard will eventually figure out how to detect them, and take the appropriate action.
That's false information. Check out some leaderboards. There you gonna find a lot of player who have 20h+ / day each day since the beginning of the season.
All because those people have not been banned now, does not mean Blizz won't take action in the future. They ban in waves, not individually.
I never realized that this forum was so full of casual players
Then again, I come from an old school fighting game background, so I play competitively
Oooh The King of Fighters childhood, such awesomeness existed in the days where 20 ppl flocked around a single arcade machine to beat the shit outta each other. xD
Who cares about a banwave once per year? This doesn't change anything. Poeple have to be removed during the season. Otherwise it's meaningless. They will just buy a new account and bot the next season and destroy the Leaderboards again etc.. But yes, it's propably very hard to develop an algorith which can detect botters but does never ever catch unguilty player.
Didn't they roll back Gabynator or whoever during the season for some shady shinaningans? Once Blizzard finishes their investigation they learn quite a bit and bring that to warden or their servers. The more they learn the better they become and preventing botting, the faster they are at taking action.
But, that is the problem. Detecting it quickly, confirming it, and then banning or rollbacking (?) the accounts of the cheaters. I imagine bot programs are quite sophisticated in pretending to be a human player. I don't think Blizzard wants to ban accounts of people who actually play for 18 hours straight. Even though that might good for them (the players).
See, that's exactly what I don't get. This attitude is the same as in D3V - "you don't like the AH? Don't use it". If the cube goes live as is, Blizzard will need to fix it so that high-end players have to do something, because with bot-supported cache supplied they'll be done gearing after a week. And I mean pitch perfect gear with everything 650 main stat ancient rolls and so on. It DOES affect you, because after a while drop rates will be lowered, material cost for re-rolling will be increased, and so on; just like the AH, where drop rates became ridiculously low in the end such that casual players found about one item per week.
This is not the time to look the other way and say "I don't care". There's a harmful thread to the entire community.
Basically this. Let's say 2 months after the patch goes live Blizzard says, "We underestimated how effective it was for players to roll perfect quality gear with the Kanai Cube, so to address this, we've adjusted the recipe requirements appropriately. Kanai Cube recipe requirements have been increased."
This could easily be a real possibility and the reality being it's only really the botters that have said perfect gear and the reguluar Joe players are still stuck with their moderate gear except now for them to reroll an item, instead 50 Forgotten Souls they need 250 with a bunch of other inflated craftings materials. (numbers are just placeholder examples but it gets the point across).
People that say, "Botting doesn't affect me so I don't care" are just fooling themselves. Botting very much affects everyone that plays the game and the player base shouldn't passively stand by and allow it to further ruin an otherwise good game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Oh pitiful shadow lost in the darkness,
Bringing torment and pain to others.
Your damned soul wallowing in your sin.
Perhaps... it is time to die.
I did not read through all of this, but botting will be a huge part of the game and affect a lot of people negative.
This is what is going to happen (in my opinion):
- Some people (the "no lifers" that are on the top spots already and really play 12+ hours per day) will continue to compete for the top spot. To have an even bigger "advantage" than they have from just the amount of hours they (can) play, they will buy bot accounts, say 50. Since this is their hobby (or even income, not saying streamers do bot, but having high rank does help with viewer numbers for example, so it could be a reason), the price is not that high. The bots will run what they need for materials (either bounties to reroll items, rifts for shards and keys or keywardens for hellfire amulets), and the "real" account will join the games to pick up the mats/run ubers with the botted machines.
This will be a huge advantage: getting grift keys take some time, being able to "farm" 60+ per hour saves you a lot of time. All the bloodshards (I guess easy 20k per hour?) for gambling your full set, with an unlimited supply of bounty materials to reroll them in near perfect ancients and roll it with kadala into the perfect item.
- This will result in the leaderboard being completely impossible for the more casual player. If he cared to start anyway, it will have an impact.
- Maybe worse: this will impact droprates (in later seasons) "because it is too easy to get items", and increase the cost to reroll items, making the game more and more a grind for the more casual player.
I know these points are probably already mentioned, still wanted to line them up and repeat.
Now the worst part: banning bots is not going to help the situation (a lot)! As I explained, the "real" account jumps into the bot account games to collect rewards. (To be 100% sure, bots are running on other computers on another IP, not physically linked to the main account). Blizzard can (try to) detect bots and ban them. But on what ground are they going to ban the main account? Because it gets a lot of invites and doesn't do any work?
You would just reply something like "People in my clan are trying to super boost me to see how far we can go", "I added those people from *whatever site* that I had a secret trick to get #1 and they wanted to be my friend and help", "People from my stream keep inviting me to grab a cache", ... As long as the main account is clean, I bet it will be very hard for find a legit reason to ban you. (I know the TOS says they can ban you for whatever reason, but I know from experience that the invites do happen *a lot* on stream, banning a legit streamer for that might backfire big time.)
So, they would have to start limiting when/how you get things. But how?
-Idle to long -> what if you're playing with friends and the baby starts crying, they'll understand and continue, you don't get a reward (while you did put some effort in there). Or any other reason ofcourse, personally I sometimes go make food while friends are farming caches in the game (would not do it in public games), or go out to have a smoke, or ...
- If you didn't take part 51% of the run -> Bounties you have to do bonus act, splitfarming with 4 will give nobody a reward since everyone took part in only 2/5 bounties?; What is taking part? Good luck you poor WD to hit 51% of the mobs in a rift when there are 3 WW barbs running in front, no key or shards for you! And no more splitfarming, making runs longer again for legit players. No more optimizing/rerolling gear while your friends start already, ...
Basically ANY idea can be shot down to keep it as it is.
The only effective "fix" would be to make drops solo player only, cheaters will have to bot their real account (and hopefully get detected and banned, in a perfect world), will have less advantage, and even less people would care since the game will turn into a solo player game and loose a huge part of the player base
For now, I predict a nice upcoming "sale" on diablo, with a lot of copies sold, a huge increase in player base (botting will give some real advantage again, for the first time since ROS). Happy farming for everyone, or should I say "happy gambling", since a lot of items wont come from farming anymore
PS: Since the banwaves seem to happen between seasons, many people don't even care if their account get banned. Next season you have to start over anyway, doesn't matter if it's on your old account or a new one (that you can pick up for 30 euro, not bad for 3-4months of game time :p).
however they shut down the AH for several reasons, one being that players played the auction house and not the actual game.
Sorry, I had to respond (and troll a bit) on this
In vanilla, people complained about the droprates being bad and stuff, but I can't remember posts for new game modes (apart from "we want PVP, you promised!"). Seems story mode, ubers and economy simulator (AH) was enough to entertain people
Now we have story mode, bounties, rifts, grifts, kadala+mystic+cube (coming), still have ubers (even 1 more), vault, "not the cow level" (coming) and people still come up with different things they want because "they get bored".
So it seems there is a big demand that got filled by the AH in vanilla, but can't be filled by "epic loot runs (rifts)", "exploring and getting rewards (bounties)" and "compete against yourself, friends and the world (grifts)"?
This, like several other of the things you (bagstone specifically but it kindof applies to anyone who is in agreement with him) consider to be extremely important does not affect my way of play in the slightest. I feel I need to mention that because you are taking one segment of the community and elevating their importance above all others (by suggesting that this issue, which is primarily an issue in the competitive circle is so important to the game as a whole). Once again, that grouping is the segment that plays the game competitively. If you do not play this game competitively then it doesn't matter what anyone else is doing really. There is no economy for the bots to ruin, and they don't jump into my game and mess it up so what exactly does this do to me? I play entirely solo and just do my own thing. At the moment YOU are more of a threat to me than a million botters because you are proposing changes that limit what I can do in the game because botting affects a portion of the game I don't deal with. This has not been taken into consideration in regards to this issue, nor has it been considered in your campaign against paragon levels. I urge you and anyone else who plays competitive to seek solutions that do not potentially damage aspects of the game outside of competition.
Most people dont care about bots as long as it doesnt effect them. Leaders boards dont concern most players also. Removing cool new features will piss off everyone.
botters dont effect leaderboards in any way. every good player in the leaderboard is like 10 times more efficient than a bot can ever be.
botters dont take away anything away from u as u only grinding for ur own sake. and no, i dont bot at all.
I disagree with this point. While I am sleeping, they are botting so even if I am more efficient then the BOTS they still have a leg up. Not to mention, now they can bot for mats all night long, logon and start creating gear. The issue I have with botting is the effect it has on the game for normal people. The more traps they put into place to prevent botting does nothing but rune the game for normal people.
This is why people should care about botting, it does impact each and every player, even if you do not care about leaderboards.
All because those people have not been banned now, does not mean Blizz won't take action in the future. They ban in waves, not individually.
Oooh The King of Fighters childhood, such awesomeness existed in the days where 20 ppl flocked around a single arcade machine to beat the shit outta each other. xD
Those Who Do Not Know True Pain Cannot Possibly Understand True Peace...
Didn't they roll back Gabynator or whoever during the season for some shady shinaningans? Once Blizzard finishes their investigation they learn quite a bit and bring that to warden or their servers. The more they learn the better they become and preventing botting, the faster they are at taking action.
But, that is the problem. Detecting it quickly, confirming it, and then banning or rollbacking (?) the accounts of the cheaters. I imagine bot programs are quite sophisticated in pretending to be a human player. I don't think Blizzard wants to ban accounts of people who actually play for 18 hours straight. Even though that might good for them (the players).
Basically this. Let's say 2 months after the patch goes live Blizzard says, "We underestimated how effective it was for players to roll perfect quality gear with the Kanai Cube, so to address this, we've adjusted the recipe requirements appropriately. Kanai Cube recipe requirements have been increased."
This could easily be a real possibility and the reality being it's only really the botters that have said perfect gear and the reguluar Joe players are still stuck with their moderate gear except now for them to reroll an item, instead 50 Forgotten Souls they need 250 with a bunch of other inflated craftings materials. (numbers are just placeholder examples but it gets the point across).
People that say, "Botting doesn't affect me so I don't care" are just fooling themselves. Botting very much affects everyone that plays the game and the player base shouldn't passively stand by and allow it to further ruin an otherwise good game.
Bringing torment and pain to others.
Your damned soul wallowing in your sin.
Perhaps...
it is time to die.
I did not read through all of this, but botting will be a huge part of the game and affect a lot of people negative.
This is what is going to happen (in my opinion):
- Some people (the "no lifers" that are on the top spots already and really play 12+ hours per day) will continue to compete for the top spot. To have an even bigger "advantage" than they have from just the amount of hours they (can) play, they will buy bot accounts, say 50. Since this is their hobby (or even income, not saying streamers do bot, but having high rank does help with viewer numbers for example, so it could be a reason), the price is not that high. The bots will run what they need for materials (either bounties to reroll items, rifts for shards and keys or keywardens for hellfire amulets), and the "real" account will join the games to pick up the mats/run ubers with the botted machines.
This will be a huge advantage: getting grift keys take some time, being able to "farm" 60+ per hour saves you a lot of time. All the bloodshards (I guess easy 20k per hour?) for gambling your full set, with an unlimited supply of bounty materials to reroll them in near perfect ancients and roll it with kadala into the perfect item.
- This will result in the leaderboard being completely impossible for the more casual player. If he cared to start anyway, it will have an impact.
- Maybe worse: this will impact droprates (in later seasons) "because it is too easy to get items", and increase the cost to reroll items, making the game more and more a grind for the more casual player.
I know these points are probably already mentioned, still wanted to line them up and repeat.
Now the worst part: banning bots is not going to help the situation (a lot)! As I explained, the "real" account jumps into the bot account games to collect rewards. (To be 100% sure, bots are running on other computers on another IP, not physically linked to the main account). Blizzard can (try to) detect bots and ban them. But on what ground are they going to ban the main account? Because it gets a lot of invites and doesn't do any work?
You would just reply something like "People in my clan are trying to super boost me to see how far we can go", "I added those people from *whatever site* that I had a secret trick to get #1 and they wanted to be my friend and help", "People from my stream keep inviting me to grab a cache", ... As long as the main account is clean, I bet it will be very hard for find a legit reason to ban you. (I know the TOS says they can ban you for whatever reason, but I know from experience that the invites do happen *a lot* on stream, banning a legit streamer for that might backfire big time.)
So, they would have to start limiting when/how you get things. But how?
-Idle to long -> what if you're playing with friends and the baby starts crying, they'll understand and continue, you don't get a reward (while you did put some effort in there). Or any other reason ofcourse, personally I sometimes go make food while friends are farming caches in the game (would not do it in public games), or go out to have a smoke, or ...
- If you didn't take part 51% of the run -> Bounties you have to do bonus act, splitfarming with 4 will give nobody a reward since everyone took part in only 2/5 bounties?; What is taking part? Good luck you poor WD to hit 51% of the mobs in a rift when there are 3 WW barbs running in front, no key or shards for you! And no more splitfarming, making runs longer again for legit players. No more optimizing/rerolling gear while your friends start already, ...
Basically ANY idea can be shot down to keep it as it is.
The only effective "fix" would be to make drops solo player only, cheaters will have to bot their real account (and hopefully get detected and banned, in a perfect world), will have less advantage, and even less people would care since the game will turn into a solo player game and loose a huge part of the player base
For now, I predict a nice upcoming "sale" on diablo, with a lot of copies sold, a huge increase in player base (botting will give some real advantage again, for the first time since ROS). Happy farming for everyone, or should I say "happy gambling", since a lot of items wont come from farming anymore
PS: Since the banwaves seem to happen between seasons, many people don't even care if their account get banned. Next season you have to start over anyway, doesn't matter if it's on your old account or a new one (that you can pick up for 30 euro, not bad for 3-4months of game time :p).
Sorry, I had to respond (and troll a bit) on this
In vanilla, people complained about the droprates being bad and stuff, but I can't remember posts for new game modes (apart from "we want PVP, you promised!"). Seems story mode, ubers and economy simulator (AH) was enough to entertain people
Now we have story mode, bounties, rifts, grifts, kadala+mystic+cube (coming), still have ubers (even 1 more), vault, "not the cow level" (coming) and people still come up with different things they want because "they get bored".
So it seems there is a big demand that got filled by the AH in vanilla, but can't be filled by "epic loot runs (rifts)", "exploring and getting rewards (bounties)" and "compete against yourself, friends and the world (grifts)"?
This, like several other of the things you (bagstone specifically but it kindof applies to anyone who is in agreement with him) consider to be extremely important does not affect my way of play in the slightest. I feel I need to mention that because you are taking one segment of the community and elevating their importance above all others (by suggesting that this issue, which is primarily an issue in the competitive circle is so important to the game as a whole). Once again, that grouping is the segment that plays the game competitively. If you do not play this game competitively then it doesn't matter what anyone else is doing really. There is no economy for the bots to ruin, and they don't jump into my game and mess it up so what exactly does this do to me? I play entirely solo and just do my own thing. At the moment YOU are more of a threat to me than a million botters because you are proposing changes that limit what I can do in the game because botting affects a portion of the game I don't deal with. This has not been taken into consideration in regards to this issue, nor has it been considered in your campaign against paragon levels. I urge you and anyone else who plays competitive to seek solutions that do not potentially damage aspects of the game outside of competition.
Most people dont care about bots as long as it doesnt effect them. Leaders boards dont concern most players also. Removing cool new features will piss off everyone.
This is why people should care about botting, it does impact each and every player, even if you do not care about leaderboards.
What a great advertisement of botting software.