In a blog post that went up late Wednesday, Blizzard Community Manager Kaivax announced that Blizzard has either closed or suspended over 74,000 World of Warcraft Classic accounts across the Americas, Oceania, and Europe regions. The accounts were found to be in violation of the End-User License Agreement and that most were, in fact, bots.
Automation tools in World of Warcraft (or just MMOs in general) are nothing new. In fact, although they blatantly violate the rules, it’s a very hot market. People want to play online RPGs, but they don’t necessarily want to endure the grind that comes with them. World of Warcraft Classic, in particular, is one heck of a grind. That doesn’t mean you should cheat it, though.
Kaivax admits that this is an ongoing problem that won’t be going away any time. As mentioned above, automation tools are wildly popular and there are always very smart individuals creating new tools that circumvent almost any security measures that Blizzard throws up. It’s a never-ending battle. And, as Kaivax points out, the folks at Blizzard are at a disadvantage.
Identifying and removing bots is simply once aspect of maintaining the World of Warcraft experience. And while it’s a high priority for Blizzard, it’s still one of many, many tasks that the developer is working on all the time. For the people creating these automation tools, however, this is their singular focus. In short, there’s a lot more effort going into creating these tools than there is detecting and eliminating them and there’s just no way around that.
On top of that, the actual process of determining whether or not someone is in fact “botting” can be very time consuming.
We use powerful systems to determine if the suspected player is using an identifiable cheat, and our heuristics (which we do not outline publicly) are constantly improving and evolving. But when we examine a suspect and these measurements aren’t out of line, we have to manually gather evidence against the accused player, which can be very time consuming and complex. It’s worthwhile though, because we never want to take action against a legitimate player.
According to the post, they’re implementing ideas that may make it easier to detect and eliminate cheaters in a much more efficient way in the future, so we’ll have to stay tuned to see exactly what those ideas are and if they work. As always, Blizzard isn’t going to go into too many details, because that’s just going to give the botters another leg up.
