Hey guys, today I discuss (in a Vlog format) my thoughts on botting in Diablo 3. I've been thinking about it for months, but following the correct predictions of many of its upsurge this patch, it's time to give the issue as much press as possible. I talk about its history, 2.3 task automation, clear proof against a number of high level players with no repercussions, what's going to happen if this continues, and the only feasible way for the community to reduce it. Enjoy & discuss!
To clarify (since this was asked in a comment already), a 'good start' to a solution is more frequent flagging and subsequent ban waves. Do this enough (every patch), and the botting diminishes. Unless those same players just want to keep throwing money at Blizz every 3-4 months.
Regardless of my personal view of botting (for the record I think it is lame no matter how much the apologists try to justify it). This really is on Blizzard. In my mind I have no doubts they are fully aware of the situation and likely already have very good stats relating to how many people bot.
There must surely be some quite simple solutions that Blizzard could implement to break botting software and I think it shows poor ethics on their part that they turn a blind eye to it because of the probable financial impact it would have on them if they killed botters. It seems to me that when it comes to money Blizzard appear to have a lot of moral flexibility.
ps. without leaderboards I would not see botting as an issue. But regardless of whether people regard Diablo as competritive or not, the very presence of leaderboards means it has a competitive component, and the existance of botting destroys any shred of credibility that those leaderboards have, IMHO -ps. I say all this as a console player, I have no stake in botting personally, but I would not go near PC leaderboards for this very reason.
i had lot of friends in my friend list that used bot, they still do, but are not in my friend list anymore. I totally agree with you MHM, botting it's like a disease that's ruining the whole enviroment.
Damn speaking of banwaves, why is no one talking about the hellfire exploit? Are the "top leaderboard" players every going to be punished? Frankly I've felt no reason to push Grifts this season, even though I was more excited to than ever. I'm really hoping something comes, considering it's been what, a week and a half since they said anything?
There must surely be some quite simple solutions that Blizzard could implement to break botting software and I think it shows poor ethics on their part that they turn a blind eye to it because of the probable financial impact it would have on them if they killed botters. It seems to me that when it comes to money Blizzard appear to have a lot of moral flexibility.
They will never ever be able to break all that stuff. Warden is not allowed to scan the memory or the harddrives anymore for software in some regions. So the bot developers still have a good place where to hide the software.
For me the solution is very very simple. Paragon matters to much at the moment in season and non season. Think the impact in season is even higher than it is non season. Paragonpoints should be more wortheless. I this patch was just farmign the new stuff, soing some bounties ~3 days with my mates and since then grinding the shit out of the game for ep. Nothing more nothing less.
If paragon would be more useless it would switch a bit.
Are you saying that botting is so popular because paragon farming is a huge thing right now? If so, then i have to say that you are wrong.
this post might sound like i'm encouraging botting but i'm not. I'm just sharing my experience in the subject as i have experimented with botting in different games in the past.
Botting right now will never yield anyone any amount of xp that is even starting to get close to the xp you get from speed grifting 60-70 in a 4p group. If you're good you can pull off 30b xp per hour solo botting... When done right in a group you can get over 100b quite easily and so far, there are no bots that allow the user to run multiple accounts together in the same game in a reliable manner...
Botting is too easy right now and there hasn't been a ban wave for a long time. It really makes you wonder every time whether Blizzard gives a shit or not. I'd say that they have more accurate numbers than us and they probably realize that the botters are maybe 1-5% out of the player-base (just guessing numbers here) and that their impact is indeed very minor.
@MHM: Your suggestion is ok but i don't think it will work.There might be a chance that every time blizzard puts out a ban wave, their support lines get bombarded with people crying that they got banned for no reason which in turn creates a shitload of work for their support divisions and possibly creates some sort of an internal shitstorm at Blizz HQ. I don't think it's such a simple matter of just banning all botters every x amount of time - There will always be mistakes and wrong bans... And if they go only for those who are obviously botting, then the number of bans would be so minuscule that it wouldn't matter that much. Ever since they removed trading, the effect that botting has on the nonexistent economy has become... well, nonexistent.
Botting really kills the game for most people but for some, it's a crazy boost. It's so simple to run a bot to farm t8 rifts for you over night for an example - Giving you quite a huge advantage over your friends because you'd have insane amounts of materials and rift keys if you do it right. I think the only way to make Blizzard send out another meaningless banwave is to make the public outcry bigger and bigger - With threads on forums, videos on YT and possibly even articles on places like Kotaku or whatever. And i call the banwave meaningless because that's what it truly is - players return to botting the second they get banned and the wave never catches everyone anyway... Botters are really having it easy and have been for a long time now.
Well i guess we can both agree that it's extremely profitable to bot right now.
Also, it kind of bothers me but i've learned to live with it; there are people that have botted almost 24/7 during ALL OF season 2 and 3. These guys didn't get banned or anything.
I guess the fact that if you get banned you only lose your current D3 license but your b.net account stays untouched - has to say that Blizzard either does not give a shit at all or they are actually profiting from this situation and have been profiting for a long while now but i;m not sure if that's a correct assumption; I remember back in Vanilla days when people actually made money from botting and selling shit on the rmah - When people got banned, they went back to botting really fast, every fucking time. So ever since then, untill today, every time there has been a ban wave, it caused a lot of people to re-purchase new D3 licenses and people say that this might be one of the reasons why Blizzard don't really take action. But if they would truly profit from banwaves, then we would have seen them happen more often... And they don't - so my conclusion is that this whole argument of blizz making money off botters is probably bullshit.
If it wasn't clear from my previous post or people just didn't read it because it was a bit lengthy; The main benefits of botting right now are the materials and rift keys that you gain and not the plvls because as mentioned, farming paragon in a 4p group is about 10 times more efficient. Still though, that does not mean that you won't gain some paragons while botting (allegedly around 20-50b xp ph) but that's just not the main thing.
As Hoschi mentioned, today withe the ability to cube items, having so many materials from botting basically means that you can upgrade rares into legendaries at an insane rate which allows you to perfect your gear in no time and obviously give you the option to attempt about 20-30 weapon upgrades per day which pretty much almost guarantees a perfect ancient weapon for your build in a relatively short period of time.
Botting right now will never yield anyone any amount of xp that is even starting to get close to the xp you get from speed grifting 60-70 in a 4p group. If you're good you can pull off 30b xp per hour solo botting... When done right in a group you can get over 100b quite easily and so far, there are no bots that allow the user to run multiple accounts together in the same game in a reliable manner...
I do believe there are people running multiple bots in the same game for high exp farm rates. I am not 100% what those rates are, but they are happening. Botting has always and will always give a large advantage in games like this.
With the lack of an economy however, I personally don't mind its presence. I do feel bad for those genuinely trying to push for rank 1 in whatever category, but struggle to keep up due to their competition able to play 24/7. (This is assuming some high Grift pushers bot)
Blizz has done a couple ban waves before, and I agree logistically it's probably super annoying due to (botters) calling in crying about it. However, as for the comments on what botting accomplishes, consider the following:
1) XP. Sure you can't bot 4 man G70 grifts, but you need KEYS to do grifts. Guess what bots do? That's right, grind regular rifts for keys while you sleep. Those same people doing 4 man 70's still need to farm the regular keys.
2) Wardens/Ubers. Not sure if there's an Uber bot (I wouldn't be surprised, not that hard to program), but there is most certainly at least 1 keywarden bot. So you wake up with mats for 100 HF amulets. Sound like a problem?
3) Bounty bots. Not sure about this, but most maps are static which means a screen reader can be programmed to complete it.
4) Item rerolling. This was extremely popular in D2, there were bots that gambled for you, checked item stats for you and discarded bad ones, etc. Same thing here.
Basically, short of doing high GR where a bot is likely to die due to high amount of incoming damage, almost everything else can be automated.
A user that goes by the name of Malmorcan on one of the major botting communities has made an interesting post a while ago. I think it's very relevant to this topic.
-POST TAKEN FROM MAJOR BOT COMMUNITY - POSTED BY MALMORCAN-
I've seen a lot of weird theories about bot detection and why some get banned. I thought it might be helpful to talk about these two issues, maybe clear some things up. I won't pretend to have the magic answer, but I do have some insight, since I work as a Business Analyst in the IT industry. Also, in addition to being a video game enthusiast, I also have kids, and a full time job (if it weren't for botting, I wouldn't be playing D3, because I don't have 10 hours a day to play video games period).
Bot Detection
Blizzard isn't being secretive about how they detect bots.
The ToS allows them to scan your memory, which they do to look for hooks. Unless they've decided not to look for RoS Bot in particular (which we know not to be the case by the number of bans), they likely see your botting activity. Resource hacker, or only botting in human patterns of behavior, won't hide the bot's hook from these scans.
And this is not some new technology--this type of detection has been around for years. It's also not illegal for Blizzard to scan your memory. I'm sure you've seen a forum post somewhere where someone refers to some court case in some country or something--but if you dig, you'll find that it turned out to be bogus.
So, it's neither impossible nor illegal for Blizzard to see if you have bots running. They've also asked you to sign a ToS that gives them permission to do so. I don't think, at this point, there is any mystery as to how they detect bots. But, even if they weren't allowed to scan your memory, there are other tell-tale signs of botting that are irrefutable that you cannot hide, and looking for those patterns is easy (how many human players bind mouse 3 to force move and play for 6 hours straight without taking a piss break?) The idea that Blizzard doesn't know for sure who is botting is fairly naive at this point. Sorry to break it to you.
So Who Gets Banned?
While everything else I've said in this post is straight-forward and verifiable, this next is not as straight-forward. So, let's start with these three premises:
Companies take action to make them profitable.
A large playerbase leads to more popularity and sales.
Blizzard is successful because they're not stupid.
Just as Valve, and other large video game companies, create metrics for analysis, Blizzard surely does so as well. In fact, it's almost impossible that their board of directors doesn't require it from their officers. Blizzard's been doing this a long time, and they've been able to collect data about the effects of banning accounts for botting (a lot of data first coming from WoW, along with all the data from D3).
From that data, they create rules of behavior. If they see financial trends in proximity to company action, they will begin to establish correlations. So, when they ban player accounts, they don't just look at the number of accounts they ban, they look at everything. They have a lot of information about you, and information they can deduce about you: name, age, nationality, home address, other Blizzard products you own, etc.. When they perform a banwave, a number of those banned will rebuy accounts. What factors correlate to that rebuying behavior, and what factors correlate to those who don't buy again, or don't buy Blizzard products again? The answers to those, and other questions, establish or shape rules for future action.
We can try to infer some of those rules by looking at patterns of bans. Like, maybe players botting multiple accounts 24/7 are putting a large strain on their servers, so they are considered less profitable. And we see a high percentage of ban wave reports coming from people botting multiple accounts. Recently we saw a good number of reports of multi-account botters only getting some of their accounts banned. Maybe we can infer that they've determined that people with multiple accounts, who don't lose them all, are more likely to rebuy an account. Maybe they've also determined that solo botters are less likely to rebuy--and less likely to buy other Blizzard products when they get banned. In fact, if you determine that 80% of the solo botters you ban not only never buy D3 again (not even when an expansion is released), would it be smart to ban those solo botters? What if you discover that 75% of D3 botters you banned, who also own Hearthstone accounts, stopped buying Healthstone packs? Would it be smart to ban them in the future?
Whatever the actualy rules are that they are coming up with, they are not based on a moral objection to playing the game as it was not intended to be played; they are coming up with rules that make the game more profitable. Their policy on multiboxing makes that very clear.
As far as protecting the integrity of the game to protect the existing playerbase, I think Blizzard made their intentions known when they removed the auction house and introduced BoA. Seasons also suggests Blizzard is going for a long-term community, and try to keep players playing Diablo 3 for longer periods of time.
My personal recommendations for avoiding getting banned is don't fuck with Blizzard. Don't make them pay an inordinate amount of money to keep servers alive so you can bot 24/7, or with a bunch of accounts. Don't mess with the competitive community they're trying to foster by botting in Seasons. I'm not saying you can't--there are people who bot 24/7 and get banned, and people who bot 24/7 and don't get banned; that doesn't mean Blizzard doesn't know, it just means that activity, by itself, is not banworthy. Or it means they may determine they only need to ban 35% of 24/7 botters during a particular banwave to keep server costs reasonable.
Blizzard doesn't want to ban you. They don't want to lose customers. But they will do it if your behavior costs them money directly in server costs, or indirectly by interfering with other players' enjoyment of the game. Banning is only one possible response. In a game where botting hurts other player's game by ruining their economy, or hording up farming spots (like in WoW), you can expect a stronger response. With Titanfall, when a player is detected with an aimbot, that person can only play matchmaking with other aimbotters--they aren't banned from playing the game entirely. In Diablo 3, botting does not harm other players' enjoyment of the game thanks to BoA and the removal of the auction house. The only harm it can have is on player confidence in the game and the player's sense of fairness, so don't expect bans to stop, and don't expect Blizzard to come out and say, "Yeah, we're fine with botting." What they want is for everyone to have fun so they can make more money. Yes, it's petty and childish for anyone to be mad that someone else is botting, but this is a video game, and the majority of its customers are young, so childish behavior is expected.
I hope that is useful for some of you who are constantly worried about getting banned. Don't stress the detection--they know you're botting. Just hope that when they decide to trim down on the botting community to lower server costs, you have some metrics in your favor.
TL:DR: This guy tries to explain some of the reasoning behind Blizzard banning and or not banning botters.
Imo, Blizzard should use this time between now and the end of the season to confirm botters and flag accounts internally, but dont ban them just yet! Wait. Wait to ban them a week before the season is over. Let them think they are getting away with it, and crush their dreams right before the real push for GR rankings starts. They'll have no chance of getting to a competitive state in a weeks time.
They didn't stop bots in D2, and the freakin' bots advertise they're bots in every game. No reason they'd do it here either-especially with BoA. I've seen some periodic bans, but they've never done some great purge like the've done in WoW or Hearthstone. Maybe because I'm old and couldn't compete anyway (twitch streamers basically living off playing D3), but I don't really care.
Very interesting read on the business side of it. Always laughed at the bot programs claiming their undetectable when all you'd need is 20 minutes of watching someone play to know there's nobody home. How hard would it be to detect a player ran in the exact same pattern every time they went to town, with the same delays between every action down to the millisecond.
WHEN RUNNING, A GAME MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER'S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH THE GAME. AN "UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM" AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE PROHIBITED BY SECTION 1(C)(ii) ABOVE. IN THE EVENT THAT THE GAME DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, (a) THE GAME MAY COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE; AND/OR (B) BLIZZARD MAY EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO YOU.
---
Now, i remember that there was some case in Germany that had something to do with Blizzard losing the case but i'm pretty sure that only had to do with some dude selling gold on his website. On one of the major bot websites, they say that "Botting in Diablo 3 is not against any law, except in Germany." <- not sure what they are referring to exactly here but i'd guess that it's an outcome of some lawsuit. Couldn't find anything that say that they are not allowed to scan your memory. I think that even if they are technically not allowed to, they'd still do it and you'd have to bring it to court against them if you have a problem...
There must surely be some quite simple solutions that Blizzard could implement to break botting software and I think it shows poor ethics on their part that they turn a blind eye to it because of the probable financial impact it would have on them if they killed botters. It seems to me that when it comes to money Blizzard appear to have a lot of moral flexibility.
They will never ever be able to break all that stuff. Warden is not allowed to scan the memory or the harddrives anymore for software in some regions. So the bot developers still have a good place where to hide the software.
For me the solution is very very simple. Paragon matters to much at the moment in season and non season. Think the impact in season is even higher than it is non season. Paragonpoints should be more wortheless. I this patch was just farmign the new stuff, soing some bounties ~3 days with my mates and since then grinding the shit out of the game for ep. Nothing more nothing less.
If paragon would be more useless it would switch a bit.
There are other much less invasive methods. There are many behaviours and interactions bots cannot replicate, a simple random test that may pop up every now and then (say just before entering a bounty or rift/grift) that establishes it is a human at the controls would easily break and deter botting. lets say after 3 consecutive failures of the test your account automatically goes into suspension. Similar types of tests exist on many websites to stop botters/spammers.
ps. the test could be in the form of a small mini game, suitably diablo themed, that takes less than 5 seconds to complete. eg: the image of a random Boss, his name at a random location on the screen, and a number of obviously false names elsewhere. you select the right name and you are good to go.
for god's sake, fix your stupid forum. the quoting system is the worst in the history of the internet. and it's that way for years now. i know that this will not generate an answer from anyone who is responsible for the technical back-end of this site, because they'd have to admit to being bad at their job.
oh, you all can guess what i quoted, i won't fix my post.
Agreed, but how do you even edit a post... no option for me....
EDIT: And there it popped up.
I was going to add to my earlier post, unless you're already playing D3 for 12 hours a day, pushing the ladder, I don't see how botting effects you. It's the people putting that much time in and then botting all night that screws over the legit no-lifers. You literally have to play that much in a 4 man group to get enough XP/Paragon points to compete. Between crafting the perfect Hellfire Amulet, farming mats to craft the perfect weapon, fishing rifts for hours, and farming XP you'd have to be crazy or a robot to be competitive in this game.
Without more emphasis on banning botters, I agree the best thing Blizzard could do would be removing all the paragon points past 800 and keep the playing field level. Honestly, I haven't hit 800 yet, and until this season did I even learn you can keep dumping points into your primary past 800. I always thought it was just a vanity thing after 800
@Jamoose - thanks for the post, I'm also of the same opinion. Ultimately it's a business and time/action invested has to be worth the cost. If a small amount bot and it's not too public and doesn't hurt sales, there's no reason for the company to take any major action as far as time/resource investment goes. The idea is to make it more public so more action IS taken. All of this is opinion based of course, and others are free to form (and voice) their own.
Hey guys, today I discuss (in a Vlog format) my thoughts on botting in Diablo 3. I've been thinking about it for months, but following the correct predictions of many of its upsurge this patch, it's time to give the issue as much press as possible. I talk about its history, 2.3 task automation, clear proof against a number of high level players with no repercussions, what's going to happen if this continues, and the only feasible way for the community to reduce it. Enjoy & discuss!
https://youtu.be/7RxAeoCegE0
MeatHeadGaming - YouTube - Twitch - Facebook - Web
To clarify (since this was asked in a comment already), a 'good start' to a solution is more frequent flagging and subsequent ban waves. Do this enough (every patch), and the botting diminishes. Unless those same players just want to keep throwing money at Blizz every 3-4 months.
MeatHeadGaming - YouTube - Twitch - Facebook - Web
Regardless of my personal view of botting (for the record I think it is lame no matter how much the apologists try to justify it). This really is on Blizzard. In my mind I have no doubts they are fully aware of the situation and likely already have very good stats relating to how many people bot.
There must surely be some quite simple solutions that Blizzard could implement to break botting software and I think it shows poor ethics on their part that they turn a blind eye to it because of the probable financial impact it would have on them if they killed botters. It seems to me that when it comes to money Blizzard appear to have a lot of moral flexibility.
ps. without leaderboards I would not see botting as an issue. But regardless of whether people regard Diablo as competritive or not, the very presence of leaderboards means it has a competitive component, and the existance of botting destroys any shred of credibility that those leaderboards have, IMHO -ps. I say all this as a console player, I have no stake in botting personally, but I would not go near PC leaderboards for this very reason.
I got a small hope that it will come a big banwave soon...a small hope ;__;
i had lot of friends in my friend list that used bot, they still do, but are not in my friend list anymore. I totally agree with you MHM, botting it's like a disease that's ruining the whole enviroment.
Damn speaking of banwaves, why is no one talking about the hellfire exploit? Are the "top leaderboard" players every going to be punished? Frankly I've felt no reason to push Grifts this season, even though I was more excited to than ever. I'm really hoping something comes, considering it's been what, a week and a half since they said anything?
Sometimes its best to move on instead of frustrating yourself. Its a fun game, but not a game you can play competitively
Are you saying that botting is so popular because paragon farming is a huge thing right now? If so, then i have to say that you are wrong.
this post might sound like i'm encouraging botting but i'm not. I'm just sharing my experience in the subject as i have experimented with botting in different games in the past.
Botting right now will never yield anyone any amount of xp that is even starting to get close to the xp you get from speed grifting 60-70 in a 4p group. If you're good you can pull off 30b xp per hour solo botting... When done right in a group you can get over 100b quite easily and so far, there are no bots that allow the user to run multiple accounts together in the same game in a reliable manner...
Botting is too easy right now and there hasn't been a ban wave for a long time. It really makes you wonder every time whether Blizzard gives a shit or not. I'd say that they have more accurate numbers than us and they probably realize that the botters are maybe 1-5% out of the player-base (just guessing numbers here) and that their impact is indeed very minor.
@MHM: Your suggestion is ok but i don't think it will work.There might be a chance that every time blizzard puts out a ban wave, their support lines get bombarded with people crying that they got banned for no reason which in turn creates a shitload of work for their support divisions and possibly creates some sort of an internal shitstorm at Blizz HQ. I don't think it's such a simple matter of just banning all botters every x amount of time - There will always be mistakes and wrong bans... And if they go only for those who are obviously botting, then the number of bans would be so minuscule that it wouldn't matter that much. Ever since they removed trading, the effect that botting has on the nonexistent economy has become... well, nonexistent.
Botting really kills the game for most people but for some, it's a crazy boost. It's so simple to run a bot to farm t8 rifts for you over night for an example - Giving you quite a huge advantage over your friends because you'd have insane amounts of materials and rift keys if you do it right. I think the only way to make Blizzard send out another meaningless banwave is to make the public outcry bigger and bigger - With threads on forums, videos on YT and possibly even articles on places like Kotaku or whatever. And i call the banwave meaningless because that's what it truly is - players return to botting the second they get banned and the wave never catches everyone anyway... Botters are really having it easy and have been for a long time now.
Well i guess we can both agree that it's extremely profitable to bot right now.
Also, it kind of bothers me but i've learned to live with it; there are people that have botted almost 24/7 during ALL OF season 2 and 3. These guys didn't get banned or anything.
I guess the fact that if you get banned you only lose your current D3 license but your b.net account stays untouched - has to say that Blizzard either does not give a shit at all or they are actually profiting from this situation and have been profiting for a long while now but i;m not sure if that's a correct assumption; I remember back in Vanilla days when people actually made money from botting and selling shit on the rmah - When people got banned, they went back to botting really fast, every fucking time. So ever since then, untill today, every time there has been a ban wave, it caused a lot of people to re-purchase new D3 licenses and people say that this might be one of the reasons why Blizzard don't really take action. But if they would truly profit from banwaves, then we would have seen them happen more often... And they don't - so my conclusion is that this whole argument of blizz making money off botters is probably bullshit.
If it wasn't clear from my previous post or people just didn't read it because it was a bit lengthy; The main benefits of botting right now are the materials and rift keys that you gain and not the plvls because as mentioned, farming paragon in a 4p group is about 10 times more efficient. Still though, that does not mean that you won't gain some paragons while botting (allegedly around 20-50b xp ph) but that's just not the main thing.
As Hoschi mentioned, today withe the ability to cube items, having so many materials from botting basically means that you can upgrade rares into legendaries at an insane rate which allows you to perfect your gear in no time and obviously give you the option to attempt about 20-30 weapon upgrades per day which pretty much almost guarantees a perfect ancient weapon for your build in a relatively short period of time.
I do believe there are people running multiple bots in the same game for high exp farm rates. I am not 100% what those rates are, but they are happening. Botting has always and will always give a large advantage in games like this.
With the lack of an economy however, I personally don't mind its presence. I do feel bad for those genuinely trying to push for rank 1 in whatever category, but struggle to keep up due to their competition able to play 24/7. (This is assuming some high Grift pushers bot)
Blizz has done a couple ban waves before, and I agree logistically it's probably super annoying due to (botters) calling in crying about it. However, as for the comments on what botting accomplishes, consider the following:
1) XP. Sure you can't bot 4 man G70 grifts, but you need KEYS to do grifts. Guess what bots do? That's right, grind regular rifts for keys while you sleep. Those same people doing 4 man 70's still need to farm the regular keys.
2) Wardens/Ubers. Not sure if there's an Uber bot (I wouldn't be surprised, not that hard to program), but there is most certainly at least 1 keywarden bot. So you wake up with mats for 100 HF amulets. Sound like a problem?
3) Bounty bots. Not sure about this, but most maps are static which means a screen reader can be programmed to complete it.
4) Item rerolling. This was extremely popular in D2, there were bots that gambled for you, checked item stats for you and discarded bad ones, etc. Same thing here.
Basically, short of doing high GR where a bot is likely to die due to high amount of incoming damage, almost everything else can be automated.
MeatHeadGaming - YouTube - Twitch - Facebook - Web
A user that goes by the name of Malmorcan on one of the major botting communities has made an interesting post a while ago. I think it's very relevant to this topic.
-POST TAKEN FROM MAJOR BOT COMMUNITY - POSTED BY MALMORCAN-
I've seen a lot of weird theories about bot detection and why some get banned. I thought it might be helpful to talk about these two issues, maybe clear some things up. I won't pretend to have the magic answer, but I do have some insight, since I work as a Business Analyst in the IT industry. Also, in addition to being a video game enthusiast, I also have kids, and a full time job (if it weren't for botting, I wouldn't be playing D3, because I don't have 10 hours a day to play video games period).
Bot Detection
Blizzard isn't being secretive about how they detect bots.
The ToS allows them to scan your memory, which they do to look for hooks. Unless they've decided not to look for RoS Bot in particular (which we know not to be the case by the number of bans), they likely see your botting activity. Resource hacker, or only botting in human patterns of behavior, won't hide the bot's hook from these scans.
And this is not some new technology--this type of detection has been around for years. It's also not illegal for Blizzard to scan your memory. I'm sure you've seen a forum post somewhere where someone refers to some court case in some country or something--but if you dig, you'll find that it turned out to be bogus.
So, it's neither impossible nor illegal for Blizzard to see if you have bots running. They've also asked you to sign a ToS that gives them permission to do so. I don't think, at this point, there is any mystery as to how they detect bots. But, even if they weren't allowed to scan your memory, there are other tell-tale signs of botting that are irrefutable that you cannot hide, and looking for those patterns is easy (how many human players bind mouse 3 to force move and play for 6 hours straight without taking a piss break?) The idea that Blizzard doesn't know for sure who is botting is fairly naive at this point. Sorry to break it to you.
So Who Gets Banned?
While everything else I've said in this post is straight-forward and verifiable, this next is not as straight-forward. So, let's start with these three premises:
Just as Valve, and other large video game companies, create metrics for analysis, Blizzard surely does so as well. In fact, it's almost impossible that their board of directors doesn't require it from their officers. Blizzard's been doing this a long time, and they've been able to collect data about the effects of banning accounts for botting (a lot of data first coming from WoW, along with all the data from D3).
From that data, they create rules of behavior. If they see financial trends in proximity to company action, they will begin to establish correlations. So, when they ban player accounts, they don't just look at the number of accounts they ban, they look at everything. They have a lot of information about you, and information they can deduce about you: name, age, nationality, home address, other Blizzard products you own, etc.. When they perform a banwave, a number of those banned will rebuy accounts. What factors correlate to that rebuying behavior, and what factors correlate to those who don't buy again, or don't buy Blizzard products again? The answers to those, and other questions, establish or shape rules for future action.
We can try to infer some of those rules by looking at patterns of bans. Like, maybe players botting multiple accounts 24/7 are putting a large strain on their servers, so they are considered less profitable. And we see a high percentage of ban wave reports coming from people botting multiple accounts. Recently we saw a good number of reports of multi-account botters only getting some of their accounts banned. Maybe we can infer that they've determined that people with multiple accounts, who don't lose them all, are more likely to rebuy an account. Maybe they've also determined that solo botters are less likely to rebuy--and less likely to buy other Blizzard products when they get banned. In fact, if you determine that 80% of the solo botters you ban not only never buy D3 again (not even when an expansion is released), would it be smart to ban those solo botters? What if you discover that 75% of D3 botters you banned, who also own Hearthstone accounts, stopped buying Healthstone packs? Would it be smart to ban them in the future?
Whatever the actualy rules are that they are coming up with, they are not based on a moral objection to playing the game as it was not intended to be played; they are coming up with rules that make the game more profitable. Their policy on multiboxing makes that very clear.
As far as protecting the integrity of the game to protect the existing playerbase, I think Blizzard made their intentions known when they removed the auction house and introduced BoA. Seasons also suggests Blizzard is going for a long-term community, and try to keep players playing Diablo 3 for longer periods of time.
My personal recommendations for avoiding getting banned is don't fuck with Blizzard. Don't make them pay an inordinate amount of money to keep servers alive so you can bot 24/7, or with a bunch of accounts. Don't mess with the competitive community they're trying to foster by botting in Seasons. I'm not saying you can't--there are people who bot 24/7 and get banned, and people who bot 24/7 and don't get banned; that doesn't mean Blizzard doesn't know, it just means that activity, by itself, is not banworthy. Or it means they may determine they only need to ban 35% of 24/7 botters during a particular banwave to keep server costs reasonable.
Blizzard doesn't want to ban you. They don't want to lose customers. But they will do it if your behavior costs them money directly in server costs, or indirectly by interfering with other players' enjoyment of the game. Banning is only one possible response. In a game where botting hurts other player's game by ruining their economy, or hording up farming spots (like in WoW), you can expect a stronger response. With Titanfall, when a player is detected with an aimbot, that person can only play matchmaking with other aimbotters--they aren't banned from playing the game entirely. In Diablo 3, botting does not harm other players' enjoyment of the game thanks to BoA and the removal of the auction house. The only harm it can have is on player confidence in the game and the player's sense of fairness, so don't expect bans to stop, and don't expect Blizzard to come out and say, "Yeah, we're fine with botting." What they want is for everyone to have fun so they can make more money. Yes, it's petty and childish for anyone to be mad that someone else is botting, but this is a video game, and the majority of its customers are young, so childish behavior is expected.
I hope that is useful for some of you who are constantly worried about getting banned. Don't stress the detection--they know you're botting. Just hope that when they decide to trim down on the botting community to lower server costs, you have some metrics in your favor.
TL:DR: This guy tries to explain some of the reasoning behind Blizzard banning and or not banning botters.
Imo, Blizzard should use this time between now and the end of the season to confirm botters and flag accounts internally, but dont ban them just yet! Wait. Wait to ban them a week before the season is over. Let them think they are getting away with it, and crush their dreams right before the real push for GR rankings starts. They'll have no chance of getting to a competitive state in a weeks time.
They didn't stop bots in D2, and the freakin' bots advertise they're bots in every game. No reason they'd do it here either-especially with BoA. I've seen some periodic bans, but they've never done some great purge like the've done in WoW or Hearthstone. Maybe because I'm old and couldn't compete anyway (twitch streamers basically living off playing D3), but I don't really care.
Very interesting read on the business side of it. Always laughed at the bot programs claiming their undetectable when all you'd need is 20 minutes of watching someone play to know there's nobody home. How hard would it be to detect a player ran in the exact same pattern every time they went to town, with the same delays between every action down to the millisecond.
If you go over to the battle.net eula: http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/legal/eula.html
There's this section:
Consent to Monitor.
WHEN RUNNING, A GAME MAY MONITOR YOUR COMPUTER'S RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (RAM) FOR UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAMS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY WITH THE GAME. AN "UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM" AS USED HEREIN SHALL BE DEFINED AS ANY THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE PROHIBITED BY SECTION 1(C)(ii) ABOVE. IN THE EVENT THAT THE GAME DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, (a) THE GAME MAY COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION YOUR ACCOUNT NAME, DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED, AND THE TIME AND DATE; AND/OR (B) BLIZZARD MAY EXERCISE ANY OR ALL OF ITS RIGHTS UNDER THIS AGREEMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE TO YOU.
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Now, i remember that there was some case in Germany that had something to do with Blizzard losing the case but i'm pretty sure that only had to do with some dude selling gold on his website. On one of the major bot websites, they say that "Botting in Diablo 3 is not against any law, except in Germany." <- not sure what they are referring to exactly here but i'd guess that it's an outcome of some lawsuit. Couldn't find anything that say that they are not allowed to scan your memory. I think that even if they are technically not allowed to, they'd still do it and you'd have to bring it to court against them if you have a problem...
There are other much less invasive methods. There are many behaviours and interactions bots cannot replicate, a simple random test that may pop up every now and then (say just before entering a bounty or rift/grift) that establishes it is a human at the controls would easily break and deter botting. lets say after 3 consecutive failures of the test your account automatically goes into suspension. Similar types of tests exist on many websites to stop botters/spammers.
ps. the test could be in the form of a small mini game, suitably diablo themed, that takes less than 5 seconds to complete. eg: the image of a random Boss, his name at a random location on the screen, and a number of obviously false names elsewhere. you select the right name and you are good to go.
Agreed, but how do you even edit a post... no option for me....
EDIT: And there it popped up.
I was going to add to my earlier post, unless you're already playing D3 for 12 hours a day, pushing the ladder, I don't see how botting effects you. It's the people putting that much time in and then botting all night that screws over the legit no-lifers. You literally have to play that much in a 4 man group to get enough XP/Paragon points to compete. Between crafting the perfect Hellfire Amulet, farming mats to craft the perfect weapon, fishing rifts for hours, and farming XP you'd have to be crazy or a robot to be competitive in this game.
Without more emphasis on banning botters, I agree the best thing Blizzard could do would be removing all the paragon points past 800 and keep the playing field level. Honestly, I haven't hit 800 yet, and until this season did I even learn you can keep dumping points into your primary past 800. I always thought it was just a vanity thing after 800
@Jamoose - thanks for the post, I'm also of the same opinion. Ultimately it's a business and time/action invested has to be worth the cost. If a small amount bot and it's not too public and doesn't hurt sales, there's no reason for the company to take any major action as far as time/resource investment goes. The idea is to make it more public so more action IS taken. All of this is opinion based of course, and others are free to form (and voice) their own.
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