Yesterday Blizzard brought the banhammer down on botters and scripters in World of Warcraft, passing out up to 18-month suspensions for players caught using a number of popular third-party programs. Watching the programs’ forums fill up with ban reports is a hell of a thing.
According to reports posted on the World of Warcraft forums, shortly before 2pm AEDT yesterday there was a spike of lag in game, a common precursor to a large ban wave. Then players affected by the ban were disconnected from the game. A member of r/WoW posted a copy of the message received shortly thereafter.
First-time offenders were issued six-month suspensions, while repeat offenders will not be able to play their accounts until April of 2019.
The main target of the ban wave seems to have been players who utilised a handful of third-party programs designed to automate game process like questing, levelling and resource gathering.
One such program, Honour Buddy, has a special “Ban Section” on its forums. It’s been pretty active since last night.
The forum for Easy WoW Tools (EWT) at hacking/exploit site OwnedCore has been receiving similar reports from users, many saying that even using some of the cheating packages more benign, passive functions resulted in bans. Banning/suspension support site Unbanster reports that FireHack, Type: Omega and Soapbox Rotations were also affected.
Players unaffected by the bans are lauding Blizzard’s efforts to keep the ageing MMO fair and balanced. Those who were effected are likely pouting, shrugging or starting up new accounts.
Comments
8 responses to “Blizzard Bans A Ton Of World Of Warcraft Botters”
I’ve just got back into WoW after a long break and while I don’t really like botting in general man I wish there was a “legal” fishing bot. So many fishing related achievements basically require hours if not days of sitting in one spot catching 1000s of fish. It’s monotonous and boring and I can fully understand why people would want to automate it.
lol agreed, it kets a bit easier later on when you get the Artefact Fishing pole. If you’re not using it already the legal add-on “Fishing Buddy” at least streamlines it a bit allowing you to just double-click cast on water, auto equip rods, baits etc
https://mods.curse.com/addons/wow/fishingbuddy
Part of the prestige of achievement is that not many people have them. Automate them and they become pointless.
Exactly, If you want mindless automation go play Runescape.
You missed the point, it is, for the most part, mind numbingly boring. While I’ll grant that it’s a little more interesting than it was in vanilla it’s still just stand in one place and fish 90% of the time, interspersed occasionally by a rare bait that summons a mob to kill.
I asked Blizzard in their forums something like 7 or 8 years ago to actually make it more of a game. With some basic control over casting, different lures that had more interesting effects and so on. Never going to happen 🙁
I didn’t got banned for using bot programs for the last 9 years.
so incomming DDoS attacks then
Not that hard to protect against Low Orbit Ion Cannon