This is a message on behalf of the portion of the community that engages in the competitive aspects (such as Leaderboards and Conquests) of this game you created - the players who love the game to the point where they dedicate large portions of their free time to playing it; who want to have at least something to show for this dedication; who want to have their names up there on the Leaderboards; and who want to see rewards for the countless hours of gameplay they spend on Diablo III.
You’re making this incredibly difficult for us.
We all know that beating the highest possible Greater Rift tiers requires a large number of attempts in addition to the time investment that is needed to get the appropriate gear. This involves a lot of grinding, be it for Keystones, crafting materials, Infernal Machines, or Ancient Legendaries. Such is the nature of the game and that is not the issue. The actual problem lies in the vast amount of people who try to get around doing this dirty work - the ones that use bots; the ones that can log into the game to hundreds of Greater Rift Keystones, Legendary crafting materials, or Infernal Machines every day, without having lifted a finger for any of those. It should be obvious that this provides these players with a huge advantage over those of us that choose not to bot, but put at least the same amount of effort into the game and advancement of our characters. This feeling is extremely disheartening. We all know that it is incredibly hard to beat the botters and even impossible if they were to step up their gameplay to a higher level of efficiency. They can get a huge lead on you every single night. This knowledge reduces the incentive and desire to participate in the Leaderboard competition until eventually the Diablo III competition becomes a farce altogether. Thus, those of us that love the game and have been dedicated players since the start become increasingly frustrated with it until we simply give up on the entire competition, or create our own, virtual “bot-free” competition by ignoring all known botters.
To prevent that, your very own End User License Agreement, which we all agreed to, states that players may not use bots such as these, even giving “the automated control of a character in a Game” as an example for such a prohibited program (Section 1.C.ii.2. of Battle.net® End User License Agreement, http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/legal/eula.html). Enforcing this agreement is your duty and yours alone. If you don’t, it will only go to show that you don’t care. It has been months since the last major action taken against botters and, consequently, Season 3 was dominated by them. Our friends lists contain more and more people who are online for more than 20 hours a day, despite them having to go to work or school. Even if detecting the actual bots running on people's machines or identifying them by their in-game behavior was impossible, their log-in times should be more than enough to warrant additional investigation. Nobody can play for 23 hours every single day.
Even if that were infeasible, at least let us report botters so that you may investigate their behavior. It has come to a point where it is quite obvious that certain high profile streamers are botting off-stream and some are even admitting so themselves in public chat rooms. These players are viewed as examples by the community, so what kind of message does that send? To us, it sends the message that not only is it apparently legal to bot, but that the game even requires it to be competitive. That is undoubtedly not how you want Diablo III to be seen, especially with how far we’ve come since the issues of the original release.
Of course, we would prefer any action against botters to happen immediately upon them being discovered. However, we are aware that this is likely infeasible. Thus, we would propose any action against botters to take place approximately two weeks before the end of a Season, coinciding with the “Season Ending” announcement, as to not give botters the time to catch up to the legitimate and fair players again. The latter would then still be able to fight for the clean Leaderboards, as they would if botters didn’t exist.
Still, with no action having been taken for so long, sending out a message to the entire community sooner rather than later would be a good idea.
Please, if you have the same love for the game that we do, do something about the botters. It cannot continue like this. We cannot continue like this.
Botting has always been a topic in Diablo 3, in fact in every Diablo game and many other games. We know that a game will never be entirely bot-free, and that the fight against botters is a rat race, making you feel like Sisyphus. Some may compare it to that of fighting a computer virus: no matter how good your anti virus software is, there'll always be a new virus that might get past your defense. However, you wouldn't just stop caring about viruses and let them spread onto your system, would you? If you see a virus openly doing its nasty work on your system, you would surely delete it.
We feel that Blizzard has recently decided to turn a blind eye on too many of those botters. We're not demanding here to ban every last botter right now - while it would be nice, it's simply not feasible. However, there are too many people openly botting, admitting it, and not even hiding, very much like the virus on your desktop. If someone has played 23 hours on average for months (!), there are only two possible conclusions: either account sharing or botting - both against the Terms of Service and punishable offenses. While these activities might have been prevalent for years, never before in Reaper of Souls did they directly translate into advantages for the players; at least not to the extent they do now. Unfortunately, this didn't come as a surprise, but we still hoped something would've been done about it.
An argument we often hear is "let them bot, it doesn't affect us". Is that really true? How do you know that you wouldn't all of the sudden have a shot at the top 1000 leaderboards if the thousands of botters were removed? Aren't you sometimes annoyed by people behaving oddly in public games, such as other players making sudden strange repetitive movements or even seemingly AFK'ing somewhere in your game? Even if you don't consider yourself as a competitive player, there is still an impact on you as well - and may it even be indirect, such as bots in D3V that led to lowered drop rates for everyone.
Whether you agree or not - something needs to be done about botting. Long-term, best would probably be to de-incentivize botting: close the current XP gap between Greater Rifts and Nephalem Rifts, since the latter are currently a "waste of time" for any non-botting player, but a necessary evil to acquire keys. Reduce the impact of paragon, as it incentivizes no-lifing too much and bores many competitive players to hell. While bots existed in all of Reaper of Souls, their impact was basically zero in season 1 and 2!
Short-term, what we want is not for Blizzard to acknowledge that botting is a problem. We don't want a bluepost. What we want is a sign of action. Ban at least a few of them, and don't just throw a bone at us with the Hellfire banwave that had absolutely no impact compared to the botters, yet it was punished harshly.
Blizzard, we think it's time to act.
(Disclaimer: The letter displays the opinion of the individuals signing it and does not necessarily represent their affiliation's stance. This particular post is my personal opinion and addition to the letter, independent of the other signatories or Diablofans.com.)
I can not agree more with this thread. During the first few days of S4 I've reached paragon 600+ and tried really hard to push for leaderboards, playing at a rate of 6-10 hours a day, which its not even that much, but after taking a peek at some people's profile on my friendlist, I realize I can't compete against people grinding 20+ hours a day. After that it felt so disheartening that I just couldn't keep trying to play. I've even thought of botting to be at least competitive against that people.
Zero tolerance against cheating scum like this should be obvious, some of you that play wow may know they did huge banwave on botters in wow, but only for 6 month's, videos even popped up about botters saying they got banned for the 6th time now only got 6 month ban.
Any other game dev would obviously do perm ban but greed is taking them over, not just that its just easy'r to neglect then to do something about it anyway.
People on this list allow others to play their characters and publicly talk about it on stream. Doesn't that go against terms of service. You say you are speaking for the diablo community and yet you have less than ten signatures.
Botters exploits "balance issues" lag i wonder what's next up on the list a complete boycott of diablo 3 should be happening already at least until they fix all the issues, they don't listen to constructive feedback either all they know is to ignore.
People on this list allow others to play their characters and publicly talk about it on stream. Doesn't that go against terms of service. You say you are speaking for the diablo community and yet you have less than ten signatures.
There mostly well known players that push leaderboards and stream
Everyone who does not recognize the bot problem is obviously botting himself, ofc bots and thud users should be banned and not suspended that's not even controversial, which makes this "letter" kinda redundant, i don't send letters to the police so they can punish those that cross a red light, it's just a given (as we all should know since we pressed "agree" on the terms/eula).
Exploits are a whole different beast and blizz should purge them on PTR phases, some will slip past and in that case ppl should be rolled back to the point where they started to use it.
That's what it should be like anyway, although i can't help but think that blizz does not care that much about the game anymore, they even congratulate botters publicly for their "achievements".
I hope this letter does something as it comes from a fair concern and makes valid points, but since ppl have to tell blizzard to do their job it looks like they won't as they never do what we ask of them.
while i fully support the initiative, and the sentiment of this posting/open letter, at least 4 of the "signatories" that i know of have been banned/suspended for botting/cheating in the past, isn't it extremely hypocritical to have these signing an open letter advocating against botting when they themselves were/are part of the problem to begin with, not to mention exploiting bugs/issues for personal gain, aside from that i think it needs addressing asap, and blizzard needs to make an actual statement of intent, and not just pussyfoot around the issue like they have done countless times in the past since D3 original release up to and including present day issues where they make a token gesture of banning/suspending 1 person when thousands are involved, obviously they don't publicise individual punishments as they are made on a case by case basis and are kept between blizzard and the individual, it is up to that individual if they wish to share the results of their punishment from blizzard with the community whereby leaving themselves open to major scrutiny and ridicule.
there needs to be an overhaul of the reporting procedures in game, and a way to offer information other than a quick right click>select topic>left click, in order to give context.
I say if Blizz doesn't take action after a certain period of time we all start botting. If you can't beat em join em right?
See here's the thing.. No. But I totally understand why someone would. They have made it very easy, and worse they have made it fruitful.
Anyone who knows me Darth#1885, knows I don't bot. I'm sure I've had some guildmates that wish I was a bot, clan chat would be a lot more quiet right ras?
The biggest problem isn't that Blizzard wont take action against botters, which is still questionable on how easily this could be administered but they could definitely have a report botter as if it was some concern, if not simply to say "We Do Not Approve of This." - But they don't even do that.
The problem is Blizzard makes Diablo more beneficial to use a bot than to not use a bot. First off, there's no consequence, What's that line in that new Johnny Deep movie, "If you do something and no one sees it then it didnt happen" well on this game its more like if it hasnt been triple documented stamped, and then waved infront of a blizzard employee's face it didnt happen.
The whole paragon and leveling system makes botting a HUGE advantage. High Paragon is necessary to compete on leaderboards- Blizz doing not have to be that way, The Way to get High Paragon is to do mindlessly unchallenging yet quick greater rifts on repeat, like a robot while wearing exp gear-> This is 100% Blizzard, without Experience gear the quickest way to Paragon would be the team that simply killed the most efficiently in the most challenging GR they can do in a reasonable time. I mean this game is absolute trash compared to even its form in the PTR prior to each patch release. I play HC which means I die once a week on the PTR due to DC and I still like playing on it many many times more than Live. The whole attitude on Live is "what are my teammates guild doing for me, who can I run with to make me better" there's no such thing as casually playing the game for fun. For Christs sake I mean I had a barb in my team die today, who probably wouldn't have died but they were wearing 2 items of LVL 23 gear because shared exp means we all gotta wear exp gear, we all become the leech.
So why not bot when you can do it without getting caught, ~safely in HC apparently, and it's necessary for anyone who can't play all day to compete on leaderboards.. even in HC, perhaps worse in HC.
It is better to reward for good behavior than to punish for bad behavior in almost every circumstance. Make it less rewarding to bot.
I'm just going to quickly address two points that come up quite a lot:
1) "What about TurboHUD".
TurboHUD and bots are two different issues, and they're treated differently by Blizzard. This includes about how they respond to those issues on the forums, and the history of account actions taken. Our letter and this thread is about botting. I don't think there are two different opinions about bots (unless you're a botter), something you cannot say about other issues. Therefore, please keep TurboHUD and other things out of this message, as it makes the issue more blurry and might result in a vague response. If we put the spotlight on one very specific issue and the community speaks as a whole, chances are significantly higher to get a strong response (i.e., hopefully *action* and not just *words*).
2) "Some people on the list have done X and shouldn't be allowed to sign it".
I guess those people on the list are the streamers. They're often being called out for exploiting, botting, or other violations of the ToS (I am not including TurboHUD here and refer to point 1) - keep it out of this thread). However, when they use exploits they usually do this to force Blizzard to act against it (example: blood shard exploit). On the other hand, all people on this list, especially the streamers, have a history of speaking up publicly against botting. Look at it this way: with this letter we are urging Blizzard to act. We are reminding them of their EULA and asking them to take action against those who violate the rules of the game. Why should anyone who is playing this game competitively violate those rules and then join an open letter which will eventually jeopardize their progress?
It's okay to have your own opinion and you're free to express it in this thread. But please do refrain from accusations for which you have no proof, and keep this thread on topic (the botting issue). Those are my only two requests, thanks.
I support this letter actually. I dont think high leaderboard people can possibly complete unattainable grift level with that kind of system
I'd actually consider rolling back the leaderboards on a weekly basis, Thats when the botters start dwindling down and we as fair competitors dominate this ugly cheating method.
Botting has such as small impact in competitive GR right now. It comes way more to the ability of nolifing your way to paragon 1400+ which bots can't do. All it really does is farm you some mats which all the no lifers already have plenty of. So basically you'll never make to the top20 of the SC ladder if you are a normal folk with a job, a family or school doesn't matter if you bot or not.
It had already been clarified but I guess it bears mentioning again - flaming and breaking the forum rules will not be tolerated.
Everyone is free to say absolutely anything you want about the matter at hand: agree or disagree with the letter contents, that streamers are not representative of the community, whether the competitive aspect of Diablo 3 is legit or not - but the rules are for everyone and we won't allow anyone to break them. No matter how right or wrong one may be, without the rules we simply cannot have a civil discussion.
If blizzard can't even control botting in WoW, what makes you think they will in D3, a game they have obviously shown they don't care at all about.... I quit WoW for two things.. botting being one and also the continuation of debuffing and making stupid changes to classes that shouldn't be touched. But I play d3 quite often, well my brother and I do. And I honestly don't care anymore, yeah it makes me mad that people bot and get that advantage over me but there is no point in courting advice to blizzard as they don't care for D3... so everyone will have to get use to people botting D3, it took over D2, and now its just going to continue.
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From d3cab.org:
Botting has always been a topic in Diablo 3, in fact in every Diablo game and many other games. We know that a game will never be entirely bot-free, and that the fight against botters is a rat race, making you feel like Sisyphus. Some may compare it to that of fighting a computer virus: no matter how good your anti virus software is, there'll always be a new virus that might get past your defense. However, you wouldn't just stop caring about viruses and let them spread onto your system, would you? If you see a virus openly doing its nasty work on your system, you would surely delete it.
We feel that Blizzard has recently decided to turn a blind eye on too many of those botters. We're not demanding here to ban every last botter right now - while it would be nice, it's simply not feasible. However, there are too many people openly botting, admitting it, and not even hiding, very much like the virus on your desktop. If someone has played 23 hours on average for months (!), there are only two possible conclusions: either account sharing or botting - both against the Terms of Service and punishable offenses. While these activities might have been prevalent for years, never before in Reaper of Souls did they directly translate into advantages for the players; at least not to the extent they do now. Unfortunately, this didn't come as a surprise, but we still hoped something would've been done about it.
An argument we often hear is "let them bot, it doesn't affect us". Is that really true? How do you know that you wouldn't all of the sudden have a shot at the top 1000 leaderboards if the thousands of botters were removed? Aren't you sometimes annoyed by people behaving oddly in public games, such as other players making sudden strange repetitive movements or even seemingly AFK'ing somewhere in your game? Even if you don't consider yourself as a competitive player, there is still an impact on you as well - and may it even be indirect, such as bots in D3V that led to lowered drop rates for everyone.
Whether you agree or not - something needs to be done about botting. Long-term, best would probably be to de-incentivize botting: close the current XP gap between Greater Rifts and Nephalem Rifts, since the latter are currently a "waste of time" for any non-botting player, but a necessary evil to acquire keys. Reduce the impact of paragon, as it incentivizes no-lifing too much and bores many competitive players to hell. While bots existed in all of Reaper of Souls, their impact was basically zero in season 1 and 2!
Short-term, what we want is not for Blizzard to acknowledge that botting is a problem. We don't want a bluepost. What we want is a sign of action. Ban at least a few of them, and don't just throw a bone at us with the Hellfire banwave that had absolutely no impact compared to the botters, yet it was punished harshly.
Blizzard, we think it's time to act.
(Disclaimer: The letter displays the opinion of the individuals signing it and does not necessarily represent their affiliation's stance. This particular post is my personal opinion and addition to the letter, independent of the other signatories or Diablofans.com.)
I can not agree more with this thread. During the first few days of S4 I've reached paragon 600+ and tried really hard to push for leaderboards, playing at a rate of 6-10 hours a day, which its not even that much, but after taking a peek at some people's profile on my friendlist, I realize I can't compete against people grinding 20+ hours a day. After that it felt so disheartening that I just couldn't keep trying to play. I've even thought of botting to be at least competitive against that people.
Cracking down on bots is fine, but I can't help but laugh at this letter when so many on that list allow others to play their toons for them.
Amen!!!!!
Zero tolerance against cheating scum like this should be obvious, some of you that play wow may know they did huge banwave on botters in wow, but only for 6 month's, videos even popped up about botters saying they got banned for the 6th time now only got 6 month ban.
Any other game dev would obviously do perm ban but greed is taking them over, not just that its just easy'r to neglect then to do something about it anyway.
I say if Blizz doesn't take action after a certain period of time we all start botting. If you can't beat em join em right?
People on this list allow others to play their characters and publicly talk about it on stream. Doesn't that go against terms of service. You say you are speaking for the diablo community and yet you have less than ten signatures.
Funny half of them have been banned for cheating in the past lol. Botting bad cheating okay i guess huh
Botters exploits "balance issues" lag i wonder what's next up on the list a complete boycott of diablo 3 should be happening already at least until they fix all the issues, they don't listen to constructive feedback either all they know is to ignore.
There mostly well known players that push leaderboards and stream
Also i agree bagstone , didnt they have a report for botting back in vanilla but then they just patched it out im pretty sure they did..?
One mind cannot contain all wisdom...
Everyone who does not recognize the bot problem is obviously botting himself, ofc bots and thud users should be banned and not suspended that's not even controversial, which makes this "letter" kinda redundant, i don't send letters to the police so they can punish those that cross a red light, it's just a given (as we all should know since we pressed "agree" on the terms/eula).
Exploits are a whole different beast and blizz should purge them on PTR phases, some will slip past and in that case ppl should be rolled back to the point where they started to use it.
That's what it should be like anyway, although i can't help but think that blizz does not care that much about the game anymore, they even congratulate botters publicly for their "achievements".
I hope this letter does something as it comes from a fair concern and makes valid points, but since ppl have to tell blizzard to do their job it looks like they won't as they never do what we ask of them.
Those Who Do Not Know True Pain Cannot Possibly Understand True Peace...
while i fully support the initiative, and the sentiment of this posting/open letter, at least 4 of the "signatories" that i know of have been banned/suspended for botting/cheating in the past, isn't it extremely hypocritical to have these signing an open letter advocating against botting when they themselves were/are part of the problem to begin with, not to mention exploiting bugs/issues for personal gain, aside from that i think it needs addressing asap, and blizzard needs to make an actual statement of intent, and not just pussyfoot around the issue like they have done countless times in the past since D3 original release up to and including present day issues where they make a token gesture of banning/suspending 1 person when thousands are involved, obviously they don't publicise individual punishments as they are made on a case by case basis and are kept between blizzard and the individual, it is up to that individual if they wish to share the results of their punishment from blizzard with the community whereby leaving themselves open to major scrutiny and ridicule.
there needs to be an overhaul of the reporting procedures in game, and a way to offer information other than a quick right click>select topic>left click, in order to give context.
Anyone who knows me Darth#1885, knows I don't bot. I'm sure I've had some guildmates that wish I was a bot, clan chat would be a lot more quiet right ras?
The biggest problem isn't that Blizzard wont take action against botters, which is still questionable on how easily this could be administered but they could definitely have a report botter as if it was some concern, if not simply to say "We Do Not Approve of This." - But they don't even do that.
The problem is Blizzard makes Diablo more beneficial to use a bot than to not use a bot. First off, there's no consequence, What's that line in that new Johnny Deep movie, "If you do something and no one sees it then it didnt happen" well on this game its more like if it hasnt been triple documented stamped, and then waved infront of a blizzard employee's face it didnt happen.
The whole paragon and leveling system makes botting a HUGE advantage. High Paragon is necessary to compete on leaderboards- Blizz doing not have to be that way, The Way to get High Paragon is to do mindlessly unchallenging yet quick greater rifts on repeat, like a robot while wearing exp gear-> This is 100% Blizzard, without Experience gear the quickest way to Paragon would be the team that simply killed the most efficiently in the most challenging GR they can do in a reasonable time. I mean this game is absolute trash compared to even its form in the PTR prior to each patch release. I play HC which means I die once a week on the PTR due to DC and I still like playing on it many many times more than Live. The whole attitude on Live is "what are my teammates guild doing for me, who can I run with to make me better" there's no such thing as casually playing the game for fun. For Christs sake I mean I had a barb in my team die today, who probably wouldn't have died but they were wearing 2 items of LVL 23 gear because shared exp means we all gotta wear exp gear, we all become the leech.
So why not bot when you can do it without getting caught, ~safely in HC apparently, and it's necessary for anyone who can't play all day to compete on leaderboards.. even in HC, perhaps worse in HC.
It is better to reward for good behavior than to punish for bad behavior in almost every circumstance. Make it less rewarding to bot.
I'm just going to quickly address two points that come up quite a lot:
1) "What about TurboHUD".
TurboHUD and bots are two different issues, and they're treated differently by Blizzard. This includes about how they respond to those issues on the forums, and the history of account actions taken. Our letter and this thread is about botting. I don't think there are two different opinions about bots (unless you're a botter), something you cannot say about other issues. Therefore, please keep TurboHUD and other things out of this message, as it makes the issue more blurry and might result in a vague response. If we put the spotlight on one very specific issue and the community speaks as a whole, chances are significantly higher to get a strong response (i.e., hopefully *action* and not just *words*).
2) "Some people on the list have done X and shouldn't be allowed to sign it".
I guess those people on the list are the streamers. They're often being called out for exploiting, botting, or other violations of the ToS (I am not including TurboHUD here and refer to point 1) - keep it out of this thread). However, when they use exploits they usually do this to force Blizzard to act against it (example: blood shard exploit). On the other hand, all people on this list, especially the streamers, have a history of speaking up publicly against botting. Look at it this way: with this letter we are urging Blizzard to act. We are reminding them of their EULA and asking them to take action against those who violate the rules of the game. Why should anyone who is playing this game competitively violate those rules and then join an open letter which will eventually jeopardize their progress?
It's okay to have your own opinion and you're free to express it in this thread. But please do refrain from accusations for which you have no proof, and keep this thread on topic (the botting issue). Those are my only two requests, thanks.
this should include the use of programs to aid gameplay... which is already against the tos
I support this letter actually. I dont think high leaderboard people can possibly complete unattainable grift level with that kind of system
I'd actually consider rolling back the leaderboards on a weekly basis, Thats when the botters start dwindling down and we as fair competitors dominate this ugly cheating method.
Botting has such as small impact in competitive GR right now. It comes way more to the ability of nolifing your way to paragon 1400+ which bots can't do. All it really does is farm you some mats which all the no lifers already have plenty of. So basically you'll never make to the top20 of the SC ladder if you are a normal folk with a job, a family or school doesn't matter if you bot or not.
It had already been clarified but I guess it bears mentioning again - flaming and breaking the forum rules will not be tolerated.
Everyone is free to say absolutely anything you want about the matter at hand: agree or disagree with the letter contents, that streamers are not representative of the community, whether the competitive aspect of Diablo 3 is legit or not - but the rules are for everyone and we won't allow anyone to break them. No matter how right or wrong one may be, without the rules we simply cannot have a civil discussion.
Please, keep that in mind going forward.
If blizzard can't even control botting in WoW, what makes you think they will in D3, a game they have obviously shown they don't care at all about.... I quit WoW for two things.. botting being one and also the continuation of debuffing and making stupid changes to classes that shouldn't be touched. But I play d3 quite often, well my brother and I do. And I honestly don't care anymore, yeah it makes me mad that people bot and get that advantage over me but there is no point in courting advice to blizzard as they don't care for D3... so everyone will have to get use to people botting D3, it took over D2, and now its just going to continue.