Blizzard unleashed its ban hammer again, this time kicking out more than 100,000 World of Warcraft players for a six-month period. Most of them are people who were cheating in various PvP battlegrounds with third-party programs, and using interrupt-scripts.
We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as “bots.” We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.
According to this chat above with one of the GMs (via r/wow), the ban affected more than 100,000 accounts. That’s a really huge number, even in a subscriber base of 7.1 million people. They have all got a temporary six-month ban, which is also surprising. Because back in the day, Blizzard didn’t mess around and permbanned botters.
Botting in WoW (or in any MMO) is nothing new, but it has become an annoying, widespread issue lately. It’s not just about the gold famers spamming the Trade Channel, but a huge number of bots farming PvP Honour Points and ruining the game for everyone else. My personal experience with this on the EU side of WoW is encountering 40-man groups of random Russian bots in Alterac Valley, running around like chicken. But if you’ve joined PvP battles lately, after a few games, it was obvious which one was the one full of bots. It’s not unplayable, but it’s very annoying.
And this ban wave isn’t just affecting hardcore PvP botters. People got lazy over the years, forgetting that this is an exploitation of game mechanics, and started casually using programs that automatically do the DPS rotations in raids or even break down collected herbs into pigments and make item crafting automatic. These players now have to wait six months to rejoin as well.
Don’t cheat
— Holinka (@holinka) May 13, 2015
Botting is defined as automation of any action, not just character movement. If a program is pressing keys for you, you’ve violated the ToU.
— Bashiok (@Bashiok) May 13, 2015
That’s a clear message from the devs.
So, I guess we can finally join Ashran without waiting in the queue for hours.
Picture: baradiel / Wowhead
Comments
7 responses to “Massive Ban Wave Hopefully Fixes World Of Warcraft PvP”
Heres a foolproof way…. set up a bunch of those drinking birds to click buttons on your keyboard! MWA HA HA HA
Only works if you wear a mumu.
So a macro is a cheat
Not the built in macros. but if you write a macro on a third-party app to emulate key presses without actually hitting a key, its a bot
I guess..
The rule is one keypress = one action. Anything that chains more than one action to a single keypress is against the TOS. That includes programmable keyboards or third party programs.
They did the same thing in the past. Massive bans is a better way of marketing, but that will not solve any issue. The time you earn by using bot-like programs and 3rd party scripts does worth it since the chance of getting caught is insignificant.
Jeez, the game’s boring enough as it is.