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.)

From d3cab.org:

Dear Diablo III Development Team,

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.

Signatories (in alphabetical order):
Alkaizer, Angzt, Anuiran, Bagstone, DatModz, DameVenusia, Deadset, Destitute, Empyrian, Flux, Ghostwheel, HolyKnight3000, HorstSchlemmer, Jaetch, Leviathan, Lt. Lunatic, MannerCookie, MeatHeadMikhail, Menagese, N3rdwards, Nachten, Natsuma_z, Neinball, Quin69, Thunderclaww, Wudijo, Zero(pS)

I see a lot of wrong information in this thread. A couple of things:

1) Leveling a char on HC (solo), with no HC experience (i.e., you have to play a bit more careful coming from a SC experience) can easily take up 6-8 hours. You might be able to get to 70 in 3-4, but usually that's not the case (at least 6 hours is a more realistic estimate based on what I've seen from the several people that leveled to 70 "on their own" for the season journey - please refrain from showing off if you personally are the hero that managed to do it in 3 hours, because you're simply above average then). On the other hand, getting a boost on HC takes 15-30 minutes. Depends on a few factors, but getting a boost is definitely easier if you have zero intention to play HC and delete the character right after hitting 70.

2) A HC boost differs from an SC boost as actually open maps are worse than, for example, cave maps. On a Blood Marsh map with ghosts you have to clear a significant part of the map before the low-level character can join, which means a lot of XP lost. That being said, there are a few simple rules the player being boosted should follow:

• Always stay close to the entrance; if anything dangerous appears, leave to previous map/town.
• If you don't play the character after getting to 70, take a barb (gets cheat death passive very early) or WD (cheat death passive quite early and Spirit Walk).
• WAIT until the booster tells you to teleport ("it's safe"). If you die, you have to restart and waste the booster's time, which is very annoying.
• Don't loot *anything*, no matter how many stars there are on the map, just focus on getting to 70 safely.

The booster also has to keep a few things in mind:

• Always make sure to clear the entrance of the map (if there are teleporter/chargers/ghosts you need to clear a bit more), then go back to the entrance, tell the low-level that it's safe, wait until they're there, continue clearing the map.
• If you advance to level 2+ of a map, make sure to clear the *exit* of the previous level as well - if anything happens, the low-level player can safely go back to the previous map and wait for you to clean the entrance.

3) I don't know what "losing work of weeks" means. Usually people providing a boost are powerful enough to be able to not only clear T6 quickly, but also to not die there - ever. I only played HC for a week, but my barb was good enough for T8+, so boosting someone on T6 was ridiculously easy and 100% safe for me as the booster. (No, I'm currently not playing anymore, so not doing any boosts right now.)

Just wanted to clarify those things, because I felt this thread was going in a very weird direction. Now to your more concrete issue: there are plenty of boost communities, just search for them in-game, ask in chat a few times and at some point you'll find someone. I find it funny that people say boosting in HC doesn't work - in fact, I'd guess that HC players actually have *more* experience in boosting than SC players, because you need back-up characters and restarts after you die, so while some players have only one or two characters on SC, on HC almost everyone has had a variety of characters at 70 - and obviously you don't waste hours on that leveling, but get someone (usually a friend) to do that for you. And since you're boosting one of your friends who just ripped anyways, you might as well get two more randoms in to get the bonus XP. That's why it's not too hard to find people on HC to give you a boost; just make sure to not die, as explained in point 2.

TL;DR: Search for HC boost community in-game, and you'll be done with it in no time.

Edit: You should probably add region+battle tag to your post (I could move the thread to the appropriate LFG forum then).