DiabloFans

What's really great about this banwave is timing. It's impeccable, absolutely perfect; just a few weeks before the end of the season. It will hopefully give some of the legit players who quit because of botters an incentive to come back (though I believe it's too late for many, it seems like Quin is going to stay with PoE for good this time). They should've done this in S3/S4 as well, as everyone was waiting for it, and we would've never even arrived at this state - but at least this time they got the timing right. I think everyone saw in the example of Gabynator's first ban in September 2015 that an early ban does nothing - he came back and still got rank #1s, just botting on his new account.

The most important point of this banwave though is the message: Blizzard finally stood up to it's ToS and showed initiative. For the first time in over a year this was a major banwave against botters. If you listen to the background Teamspeak discussion on any of the SoS guys' videos from yesterday (Gaby, Chainer) you can hear them say "I played legit for so many seasons but they never did anything, so I started botting because everyone did it". That's why they should've done this earlier - many top players either quit or started botting, and that's because there was no action in Season 3 and Season 4. Let's hope this improves the situation in Season 6 (more legit players coming back and more botters stopping to bot). Let's be clear about it: banning at the beginning of the season does nothing. All those guys have multiple accounts (don't ask me why, but they were all admitting they do on said Teamspeak discussion), and if you're a top player you don't care about a new game license for a few bucks anyways. But knowing that if you bot from the beginning of Season 6 might get you banned towards the end - including a wipe of all your records - will make at least some people think twice about botting in Season 6. What's most powerful in stopping people from botting is not even the ban itself, but the fear of being banned just before you can reap your rewards.

That being said, not everything's perfectly good now. It was a first step, but they didn't catch all of them - not nearly. Again, aforementioned TS discussion was so interesting to listen to, as in the background you can hear people say "I botted like crazy and didn't get banned". Also, in the hours after the banwave they went through clan and communities rosters and friends lists and were wondering why certain people were online (as opposed to being banned). This holds also true for my personal experience; I talked to a lot of people yesterday who were happy about the ban wave, but everyone knew a lot of people (both casuals and high-profile players) who are botters, yet didn't get banned. It seems as if Blizzard manually confirmed every case before executing the bans, or is maybe banning in waves, or maybe is online banning a selection of botters, by whichever criterion.

A last point that was already discussed on Reddit is the fact that we have a lot of fragmented teams on the leaderboards now, and some people argue that the entire group record should be wiped if one of the people in the group was banned for botting. There was quite a lot of pushback; however, I think this should be the case. It's like in relay races at the Olympics: If any of the participants gets banned for doping, the entire team loses its medals. Note the difference: the other team members do not get banned, but they need to re-earn their 2 player/3 player/4 player record, because their existing record was achieved by the help of "cheaters". The argument against this is that it would punish those people who might not have known about their team mates being cheaters. I personally argue that this is very unlikely. Most groups on the leaderboards, and I would suspect 100% of the groups in the top 100, know each other - they are either clan mates or have each other on the friends list. In that case, you know if someone is botting or not. If you spent hours and days of flipping rifts you will eventually have to farm TX for keys, and if one of your team members never participates in the TX key farming - well, it's at least highly suspicious. People at the top of the leaderboard aren't dumb, they know what's happening.

Well, let's see where we go from here. It's a good start, a sign of life from Blizzard. The ship has sailed for many players, but at least they're not done with the competition entirely and seem to care about their game. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in Season 6: how the community reacts, if the amount of botters will go down, and if they repeat this ban wave to catch more bad guys (as plenty of them are still out there).

Edit: I made a thread on the official forums about the fragmented leaderboards issue, as I think it's something we need to discuss next - http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/20743035839