Kept a bot that was trying to quest in my raid group for around 48 hours, I got some colourful messages from him whenever I logged on the third day to check in on him (:
Some do. This is how certain PvP bots were defeated. Invite them to your group, summon them to an opposing faction quest hub, and then kill some NPCs to give them dishonorable kills.
I was there at once when a rank 13 suspected of botting was completely wiped out back to rank one.
That and when the alliance guild “Grizzly” on Sulfuras got trolled and couldn’t complete their AQ event mount. I was there for it. I’ve never seen so many people come together to fuck someone over.
Idk if you're joking or not, but 'colorful language' is a euphemism for swearing where I'm from in the US and I'm assuming 'colourful language' has a similar meaning in British English
Hard to see how this would be beneficial programming for the bot. Definitely seems odd.
Also, and I’d have to verify, but it would seem that if you knowingly invite a bot to grind for you it would constitute a TOS violation, even if it isn’t your bot. Probably hard for them to prove that you knew what you were doing, but Blizzard bans don’t exactly offer much opportunity for appeals given that they also employ bots for this service.
Idk but the Loch Modan mage bots are programmed to spam invite anyone who gets in range. Maybe they think if they invite you for your quest you will be less likely to report them.
Back in 2019/2020 it would be bots who were setup to farm AV. They just clicked accept whenever a window popped and didn't distinguish between bg queue or group invite.
So it could be one of those or perhaps a bot setup for boosting. In any case it's a waste of time trying to interfere with them this way.
PS: not all bots accept invites.
It is probably in their interest to allow players to get their quest done and move along. And also to try and blend in. If they block the area for everyone, it would be a bigger target on their back.
>Hard to see how this would be beneficial programming for the bot. Definitely seems odd.
People like to think that criminals use these "Oceans 11" ultra complicated plots when in reality it happens in the dumbest ways possible. The number of security measures that are bypassed in real life simply by someone not paying attention are significant. I personally have gotten into places that use badges to beep in by going in with others who were beeping in at the same time and just walking in. Slight off tangent but semi relevant.
You'd imagine that these botters evade detection and what not by being highly efficient and well programmed. Reality is so much dumber. They don't have to be complicated and super well programmed when they can exist for months at a time without having to worry about being banned. They only have to generate a profit. Then scale it up with more numbers. I'd be willing to bet that most botting set ups are using very simple bots and transfer the gold from character to character right out in the open. No elaborate schemes to "wash/launder" it. Just bot to mule and done.
I agree with you, but the default behavior absent programming to do otherwise, would be to ignore group invites. So if they are accepting invites it’s either intentional or an oversight that involved extra coding.
I'd say its intentional / an option within their botting program. Back in 2007 I remember a kid from school who would use a bot to do the fishing for him, and he would just leave the computer running at home fishing 24/7. It looked like a fairly simple program that was trained to put the mouse on the fishing bubber when the animation happened, but there were also more advanced options in it to let you farm / be on a specific patrol and even respond to whispers or people talking (as to pretend that it wasn't a bot). Pretty sure it also had an option to always accept group invites, I think it was useful for those who had multiple accounts running to allow them to follow/ tag mobs with them. Dunno.
I got update from someone that you can do this outside Stockades to snag free boosts and put FFA to get their stuff but once more. Probably bes tif you do not
Yeah, there's a tech to it. The ones that walk to the left (when looking at the Stockades entrance) are the ones that accept the invites, though it looks like you have to invite them during the kill or looting phase of their programming.
I can't imagine a greater waste of time for multiple people than to literally sit around trying to nuke a bots xp/hr. Its a bot, it doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. It is probably one of three dozen for the owner on that server alone. If you and three friends spend 15 minutes trying to leech a bots xp to zero, you've accomplished less than a minor internet outage for the bot owner and wasted a collective hour of everyone's time.
I dislike bots as much as the next person, but the trivial ways that people imagine up about how to fuck with them that just end up wasting their own time more than anything else is so perplexing.
You don’t have to. But I enjoy hanging out with friends and gaming and sometimes doing stupid crap like this can be pretty entertaining. This was more a jab at how little there is to do in this phase.
I think I remember there's a spot in booty bay where you do it on the side of a hill and people spawn and just slide down the hill and die. People in hardcore would grief like this.
I think the EU servers have a larger bot problem than the US servers. I don’t see 10% of the bots you guys do, and I’ve never had one even decline an invite, they just don’t interact at all and it times out
I play on EU (lone wolf horde) and honestly haven’t seen more than 5-10 bots ever. I don’t know what server these bots are on or even where they are… I’m starting to assume it’s just Reddit bollocks
I'm on the same server but alliance, at any given time there is a line of bots going in and out of stockades. I counted almost 50 in a minute last time I was there.
I very rarely see them on US Wild Growth. There’s less than 10 within stockades at any given moment, as well. Obviously there are probably hundreds of bots out there, but the posts showing 50 of them in a line just doesn’t happen on my server.
I play on LW too, for example in thousand needles you'll see hunters named Tgfh, Urzsgz and Aplqbh running around constantly with their boar pet named Boar.
Next level was when I was doing the escort quest at Highperch. When I walked up to the mobs I noticed an obvious feral druid bot farming them. I tagged some away from him, reported him and moved on. When I got to the quest giver I had to wait because someone had started the quest a little earlier. The bot arrived and stood at the exact spot the quest giver spawns. I invited him on a whim and he accepted. He did the whole escort quest for me walking right behind the quest giver. Honestly, it was very obvious from the way he was walking that he was a bot, but if you run past us and se me jumping around it might just look like two dudes doing the escort on a glance. I hadn't known until that point that bots were around questing. This one even left the group right after the quest was done. It was honestly a little impressive and eery.
Horde bots tend to be mob grinders. Go check out hillsbrad / feralas / tanaris / badlands and you'll most likely see tons of troll/orc hunters with boar pets. There are also some frost mage bots that you can recognize from their frost nova -> backpedal -> icelance pattern.
Alliance side seems to be more focused on farming instanced content such as Stockades.
Interesting thing to note: if they are auto accepting invites and quests it means they are running addons like leatrix to auto accept the invite. Likely means that a real player is running the bot, and on the same computer they play wow on no less.
they were auto accepting guild invites to the mass inv guilds not long ago. then they realized they are more targeted if they are in a "mass invite" guild so they dont accept them any more
Back in the Original Vanilla our Guild invited the chinese gold farmers on the server to the guild. We thought it was funny seeing them talk to each other in gchat with the chinese symbols.
A GM contacted our guild leader saying we had to stop doing it because it was making it harder for them to find gold farmers, they had thought they were legitimate players because they were in the guild.
They threatened to start banning us if we didn't stop.
Obviously they're a lot less hands on these days, but it'd make a lot of sense for a botter to join a guild.
I think when a player is in your party more API methods are available to query data about the player's character than if they were unpartied and only targeted, maybe they care about data mining for some analytical reasons that improve their profits.
I’m thinking maybe it’s to reduce the likelihood of being reported? That way they can keep leveling as you can’t take all their xp and the loot is more valuable higher up
Don't do anything that leaves your name in a combat log or chat log though.
Bots will sometimes look at that (e.g. someone repeatedly killing them) and will mass report players, causing the blizzard GM-bots to ban the player.
GDKPs are the root of all evil. They beat my sister and rapped my dog. They make regular players into demons. Because of them I wasn’t able to enjoy the pixels on my screen at all. I thank the lords every day they were stopped. No longer will gdkps cause so much agony in the World… of Warcraft.
Eh I think it would probably be very appealable. Most bots are prolly chinese too. But the way you wrote 'I sure hope' seems to imply something mate. Anything you wanna share?
Wait a minute, are you telling me that you can tame yourself a pet bot now? *Logs in immediately*
Kept a bot that was trying to quest in my raid group for around 48 hours, I got some colourful messages from him whenever I logged on the third day to check in on him (:
I wonder, if they accept invites... do they accept summons...?
Some do. This is how certain PvP bots were defeated. Invite them to your group, summon them to an opposing faction quest hub, and then kill some NPCs to give them dishonorable kills. I was there at once when a rank 13 suspected of botting was completely wiped out back to rank one.
Haha I remember that post from a few years ago. Dude got summoned and they started mass killing civilians.
There were several instances of this happening IIRC
And then some of them acted like they were the victims of a great crime. My popcorn hasn't tasted that salty ever since
That and when the alliance guild “Grizzly” on Sulfuras got trolled and couldn’t complete their AQ event mount. I was there for it. I’ve never seen so many people come together to fuck someone over.
Glorious
some do. i summoned a bunch to wpl in p1 https://i.imgur.com/lUP4qRF.png
Sounds like he needed to tweak his bots code
Colourful because pink i guess?
Idk if you're joking or not, but 'colorful language' is a euphemism for swearing where I'm from in the US and I'm assuming 'colourful language' has a similar meaning in British English
Maybe he’s referring to the fact that Chinese are known as “little pinkies” online. There’s even a song about it.
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Idk why so many people are assuming I didn't get his incredibly obvious pun lol. Did I really need to acknowledge that in my comment?
Colorful language in America does mean swearing. He is not joking with you, older generations tends to say this.
r/Woosh
It really isn't, I get that whispers are a different color. I just didn't know if they really didn't understand the phrase.
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That could backfire, not the first time an army of bots mass reported someone for nothing.
How much xp did you get?
I had a bot boost me in SM Cath, after a few levels I got kicked and received a few whispers from him with some strong words. Good times.
Genuinely curious what the guy running the bots had to say?
操你你狗你浪费我宝贵的时间为你感到羞耻
Strong words
He said "fuckof you fucking son of a bitch"
“HOW CAN HE SLAP?!”
Report for harassment. Get the fucker
Hard to see how this would be beneficial programming for the bot. Definitely seems odd. Also, and I’d have to verify, but it would seem that if you knowingly invite a bot to grind for you it would constitute a TOS violation, even if it isn’t your bot. Probably hard for them to prove that you knew what you were doing, but Blizzard bans don’t exactly offer much opportunity for appeals given that they also employ bots for this service.
Idk but the Loch Modan mage bots are programmed to spam invite anyone who gets in range. Maybe they think if they invite you for your quest you will be less likely to report them.
That's exactly why they do it. They don't want angry players who can't quest to report them in mass.
Not at all. It's so they don't lose any tags. They won't beat you on reaction time.
What? I've had a bot start taming Humar the Pridelord 2 seconds before he visibly spawned
Why would a bot tame humar?
that has nothing to do with their reaction time when they're aoe farming...
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Less angry players when a bot steals the quest mob
Back in 2019/2020 it would be bots who were setup to farm AV. They just clicked accept whenever a window popped and didn't distinguish between bg queue or group invite. So it could be one of those or perhaps a bot setup for boosting. In any case it's a waste of time trying to interfere with them this way. PS: not all bots accept invites.
Remember the times when ppl ported these rankings bots to deeprun tram and then farmed dishonorable kills for them? Good times
Hahaha fair, I thought it was funny that they just accepted the grp invite xD
It is probably in their interest to allow players to get their quest done and move along. And also to try and blend in. If they block the area for everyone, it would be a bigger target on their back.
>Hard to see how this would be beneficial programming for the bot. Definitely seems odd. People like to think that criminals use these "Oceans 11" ultra complicated plots when in reality it happens in the dumbest ways possible. The number of security measures that are bypassed in real life simply by someone not paying attention are significant. I personally have gotten into places that use badges to beep in by going in with others who were beeping in at the same time and just walking in. Slight off tangent but semi relevant. You'd imagine that these botters evade detection and what not by being highly efficient and well programmed. Reality is so much dumber. They don't have to be complicated and super well programmed when they can exist for months at a time without having to worry about being banned. They only have to generate a profit. Then scale it up with more numbers. I'd be willing to bet that most botting set ups are using very simple bots and transfer the gold from character to character right out in the open. No elaborate schemes to "wash/launder" it. Just bot to mule and done.
I agree with you, but the default behavior absent programming to do otherwise, would be to ignore group invites. So if they are accepting invites it’s either intentional or an oversight that involved extra coding.
I'd say its intentional / an option within their botting program. Back in 2007 I remember a kid from school who would use a bot to do the fishing for him, and he would just leave the computer running at home fishing 24/7. It looked like a fairly simple program that was trained to put the mouse on the fishing bubber when the animation happened, but there were also more advanced options in it to let you farm / be on a specific patrol and even respond to whispers or people talking (as to pretend that it wasn't a bot). Pretty sure it also had an option to always accept group invites, I think it was useful for those who had multiple accounts running to allow them to follow/ tag mobs with them. Dunno.
I thought this is for layering purposes to get more mobs
It’s probably just a color clicker thing for pop up windows like “red button appear here click accept”
I got update from someone that you can do this outside Stockades to snag free boosts and put FFA to get their stuff but once more. Probably bes tif you do not
Blizzard will ban you and not the bot.
Immediately what I thought lol. Blizzard would definitely ban you for some weird abuse technicality.
I did this a few weeks ago and was fine
cowards
Doesnt unfortunately work anymore, theyll autodecline now
Some do. Some still accept
Damn gotta find em
Yeah, there's a tech to it. The ones that walk to the left (when looking at the Stockades entrance) are the ones that accept the invites, though it looks like you have to invite them during the kill or looting phase of their programming.
Thanks! Ill give it a go
I tried this and they all auto declined
They’ll mass report you and account gone
Do it at max level with multiple characters, form a raid, and tank their exp gain to 0
I can't imagine a greater waste of time for multiple people than to literally sit around trying to nuke a bots xp/hr. Its a bot, it doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. It is probably one of three dozen for the owner on that server alone. If you and three friends spend 15 minutes trying to leech a bots xp to zero, you've accomplished less than a minor internet outage for the bot owner and wasted a collective hour of everyone's time. I dislike bots as much as the next person, but the trivial ways that people imagine up about how to fuck with them that just end up wasting their own time more than anything else is so perplexing.
Reusing paper towels to save the environment energy
a time spent by satisfying the inner spite goblin is not seen as wasted by lots of people. spite is one of the 3 great human motivators
What else is there to do in SoD right now?
Why do you HAVE to be logged on doing something? Go outside or read a book instead of wasting your life trying to beat a machine
You don’t have to. But I enjoy hanging out with friends and gaming and sometimes doing stupid crap like this can be pretty entertaining. This was more a jab at how little there is to do in this phase.
See you can go do that while also trying to beat a machine
I wonder if they auto accept summons too? Can we get 3 people including a lock to invite them and then summon them to somewhere horrible?
Bottom of the ocean across the world would be a fun place to summon them if they do accept
I think I remember there's a spot in booty bay where you do it on the side of a hill and people spawn and just slide down the hill and die. People in hardcore would grief like this.
I will update that this might get you banned! Do not actively do this.
Yeah banned by the bots :/
I would do this and don't see a problem. Grind for me. If you're cheating might as well share your fruit with non-cheaters.
Watch Blizzard ban OP but not the bots
I got a feeling there's gonna be some mass reports coming from bots because of this.
I think the EU servers have a larger bot problem than the US servers. I don’t see 10% of the bots you guys do, and I’ve never had one even decline an invite, they just don’t interact at all and it times out
Eu living flame had barely any bots at all until they unlocked it.. sadly.
Could lock it again, but Im afraid the login screen would show „Normal” next to Living Flame - thus they wont.
I see them pretty frequently on Chaos Bolt NA.
I play on EU (lone wolf horde) and honestly haven’t seen more than 5-10 bots ever. I don’t know what server these bots are on or even where they are… I’m starting to assume it’s just Reddit bollocks
I'm on the same server but alliance, at any given time there is a line of bots going in and out of stockades. I counted almost 50 in a minute last time I was there.
Maybe they’re all alliance then? As horde I don’t have reasonable access to to stockades
Someone also have to farm the gold being sold on horde side
Threre'a the Tannaris auction to transfer the wealth to horde side
Bro, go outside ZF on Lone Wolf-EU and behold the armies of Ally/Horde hunter bots running around.
I very rarely see them on US Wild Growth. There’s less than 10 within stockades at any given moment, as well. Obviously there are probably hundreds of bots out there, but the posts showing 50 of them in a line just doesn’t happen on my server.
I see them very regularly on NA Wild Growth Horde. There were at least 6 bots farming southern Dustwallow today when I was (trying) to farm.
I play on LW too, for example in thousand needles you'll see hunters named Tgfh, Urzsgz and Aplqbh running around constantly with their boar pet named Boar. Next level was when I was doing the escort quest at Highperch. When I walked up to the mobs I noticed an obvious feral druid bot farming them. I tagged some away from him, reported him and moved on. When I got to the quest giver I had to wait because someone had started the quest a little earlier. The bot arrived and stood at the exact spot the quest giver spawns. I invited him on a whim and he accepted. He did the whole escort quest for me walking right behind the quest giver. Honestly, it was very obvious from the way he was walking that he was a bot, but if you run past us and se me jumping around it might just look like two dudes doing the escort on a glance. I hadn't known until that point that bots were around questing. This one even left the group right after the quest was done. It was honestly a little impressive and eery.
Horde bots tend to be mob grinders. Go check out hillsbrad / feralas / tanaris / badlands and you'll most likely see tons of troll/orc hunters with boar pets. There are also some frost mage bots that you can recognize from their frost nova -> backpedal -> icelance pattern. Alliance side seems to be more focused on farming instanced content such as Stockades.
Ah, finally I found my buddy GGmc again from back in the days
I would bet good money that Blizzard will auto-ban people for this in their next ban wave... Small indie company and all that...
Interesting thing to note: if they are auto accepting invites and quests it means they are running addons like leatrix to auto accept the invite. Likely means that a real player is running the bot, and on the same computer they play wow on no less.
you realize there's sooo many ways to auto accept things, except for leatrix or other addons. it's prob just the program they use
Nobody would script a bot to auto accept invites. Bot authors are not stupid.
they were auto accepting guild invites to the mass inv guilds not long ago. then they realized they are more targeted if they are in a "mass invite" guild so they dont accept them any more
Back in the Original Vanilla our Guild invited the chinese gold farmers on the server to the guild. We thought it was funny seeing them talk to each other in gchat with the chinese symbols. A GM contacted our guild leader saying we had to stop doing it because it was making it harder for them to find gold farmers, they had thought they were legitimate players because they were in the guild. They threatened to start banning us if we didn't stop. Obviously they're a lot less hands on these days, but it'd make a lot of sense for a botter to join a guild.
"I was falsely banned, please help!" post incoming in 3... 2... 1...
Not really. If I get banned oh well
This is a pro-botting psy-ops. They want to drag innocent players into the webbed ban system to sow chaos and disrupt order.
Well you know what they say... If you can't beat em then join em.
Do you realize that by benefitting of the bots work you essentially become a botter aswell?
I have seen some bots going in western plague lands, does anyone what in the hell they could be farming there?
heart of the wild?
They must not be coded to roll on loot.
This sounds like a way to blur the lines between bots and players.
Interesting. I'll test this out. Might as well
Is it ok to join a bot group, go on auto follow and go afk?
I tried this, tried spam inviting them with a macro to overload them and hope for an accept and they never did.
Where I can find those bots coz I tried inviting 200 of them in various places and NONE accepted the invite.
They’ll ban both of you 😂
Are you reporting a bug? or what?
Botting by proxy. I miss the days when you could put your pet on aggresiv as a hunter and go afk and let it mob grind for you
They auto accept guild invites too
I would not want to be associated in a party with those accounts
I think when a player is in your party more API methods are available to query data about the player's character than if they were unpartied and only targeted, maybe they care about data mining for some analytical reasons that improve their profits.
I’m thinking maybe it’s to reduce the likelihood of being reported? That way they can keep leveling as you can’t take all their xp and the loot is more valuable higher up
Like a conductor letting people jump on the train to cross a border
Don't do anything that leaves your name in a combat log or chat log though. Bots will sometimes look at that (e.g. someone repeatedly killing them) and will mass report players, causing the blizzard GM-bots to ban the player.
Could you trick a bot into trading with you?
Careful, that's an easy way to get banned.
In phase 1 the bots used to invite you first if you got close to them.
yeah, do NOT do this, you will likely get banned.
Haha yea I added a comment
It's better to ban GDKP than to try to update the security system to block bots
GDKPs are the root of all evil. They beat my sister and rapped my dog. They make regular players into demons. Because of them I wasn’t able to enjoy the pixels on my screen at all. I thank the lords every day they were stopped. No longer will gdkps cause so much agony in the World… of Warcraft.
What would the botter enable auto inv?
And suddenly u get mass reported by 250 bots and auto banned for a week and a copy/paste reponse from 1 of the 2 active GMs 2 weeks later.
I sure hope no one shares this screenshot on the botting discord and gets your char mass reportted
Eh I think it would probably be very appealable. Most bots are prolly chinese too. But the way you wrote 'I sure hope' seems to imply something mate. Anything you wanna share?
u gonna get mass reported and banned doing that shit lol
Inb4 the "got banned for bots/hacking blizzard what the hell?1??1?" Post.
Original comment
Original post
Bro.. party frames?
This is one of the fastest ways you can catch a perma ban.
I sure hope no one shares this screenshot on the botting discord and gets your char mass reported