Anti-Bot Propaganda

I partially agree/disagree with your statement.

While all of those may not necessarily mean they were hackers, it also does not mean some of them were not reverse engineering the program, to figure out how to make bots behave better to try to fool Blizzard moderators and security measures. These days however, it seems that many people use the word "hacking" quite loosely. While back in the day, circa 1990's to mid 2000's, hacking actually meant exactly what it meant: to connect, break into and intrude into a system.

 

I understand the fundamental difference and I agree with your post. But, Blizz probably thinks this is a more effective scaring technique and aren't as concerned about the difference in definition. When it comes down to it, hackers are worse than bots.

 

You're perfectly right. Hacking is often confused with the simple cheating or cracking and this needs to stop but as far as the medias don't aknowledge themself about this topic a this would never happen.

 

Blizzard has an interest to prevent botting because it costs the company money. Botting bypasses a lot of the time aspect to grind for gold via farming and given the new conversion, there's people who will exploit in order to make gold. Farm bots and PvP bots are pretty hot sellers on a third party market mainly thanks to gold farming overall. It unbalances a server's economy and Blizzard loses out in the gold to cash market. That's one of the reasons why they came out with shop BoE mounts and pets to be sold on the AH so that players with cash can get gold in a very indirect manner vs buying from a gold seller using bots.

That being said though, I too know the difference between the two. The thing about bots is that like rogue servers that only have let's say vanilla version of WoW- relies on data that's already been given to users when they download the game. That's not hard to look into honestly and bots are built off of that with user control input for spells, movement and resource locations. So it's just a cheat that happens to latch onto the live version of the game and the data that's saved in real time gets updated to Blizzard's servers. It's no different than making a click script for an internet browser so you don't die from carpel tunnel trying to click on a button a million times.

 

You are nitpiking technical terms. Yes, very few people get ´hacked´.. but in almost all situations, end-users consider being phished the same thing. Something happens and you lose control of your account. And phishing by its very nature means the person does not realize they clicked on a bogus link. I probably read a thousand times on forums where someone says ´omg, Blizzard just banned my account that hasn´t been active for a year´.. not realizing that they just fell for a phishing attempt by responding to that email.

Blizzard could probably do themselves and the internet a favor by using the correct term ´phished´.. but most people just use the term hacked to mean the same thing... you lost control of your account to the bad guys.

So when Blizzard says that the majority of botters are coming from hacked accounts, they are just using the more generally used term for hacked, rather than the more precise term. In the end, it means the same thing.. most botters are being run on accounts that were taken from the rightful owner.

 

LOL, because I believe what they are saying.. I fell for it?

You only have to look at.. um.. basically every WOW forum everywhere and it is littered with people complaining about getting banned from WOW on inactive accounts to realize how many people fall for phising..

And seriously, you think botters are casual players?? Seriously, casual players who, you know, don´t play the game much are going to go out and find and buy bot programs?

I get it.. Blizzard is this big bad organization that lies about everything, even stuff that makes no sense to lie about. But yes yes.. my friend whose highest character is a lvl 42 druid and doesn´t even know 3rd party websites exist... she is going to spend $10 on a bot program.

Yes, most botters are probably on casual players accounts, but they aren´t being run by the casual players...

 

Yeah no, casuals aren't gonna drop money to use bots. A good, reliable bot costs a fair amount, not world shattering amount- but more than a casual would want to spend on a game. There's only a handful of reasons why anybody would pony up for a bot- Gold farming, leveling, or PvP farming. I wasn't into gold farming or pvp farming, but leveling definitely due to my raiding schedule.

Various guilds ponied up money for a leveling bot for my secondary account so that I could level up characters to do progression raids with them when I got fed up with having to transfer servers every other weekend on my main. Besides it was cheaper in the long run.

 

I agree with what Op says. However I think the best way to go about this is to just play the game the way it was meant to be played and that's that. Blizzard will say whatever they want to say, a smarter person will deafen themselves to the silly talk and just enjoy the game they paid for. Bots and hackers have no place in this game.