This isn't the first round of such actions from Blizzard. Doing massive bans like this servers several purposes. It makes it much harder to react to when botters have been getting detected for months and the net usually catches more people that way. If the bot programmers don't know what is tipping off blizzard, because it could be a number of things over the past several months that makes it harder to program around. It also sends out a very public message that Blizzard is willing to ban a sizable portion of people and doesn't go soft on cheating. It is about the message being sent and not how effective they are.
Companies need to change up their tactics just as often as the cheaters do. Now if Blizzard would just start handing out bans for people BUYING gold, then maybe people would be to afraid to do so. Even temporary 7 day bans would get the message out.
Apparently there was a huge ban wave overnight. The Glider forums are inaccessible. There isn’t much news yet but so far it seems like If you used glider in the past few months, you’re banned.
It's very easy to tell if a character, upon reaching the level cap of 70, has been gliding/ botting its way through levels; all you have to do is look at the characters reputation. No reputation/ faction means that they glided there way to 70.
I know this first hand; a friend of mine used Glider to raise 4 toons to 70 in about six weeks. Then he proceeded to throw those same toons into to AV the get the S1 arena epic gear. About a week and a half ago, he tried to log on and found it he was banned. Needless to say I laughed my ass off, but then again it kind of sucks; I've leveled 4 toons to 70 and workign on a 5th... It would be nice to fast-forward through some of the tedious parts of leveling.
But the joke is on me now; he's started another toon (warlock) last week. He was level 1 and is now level 42... in less than a week's time. So what if the account gets banned, Blizzard STILL gets paid. My friend went out and bought a game card with a few months time, created an account and logged on, that money goes to Blizzard. So in the end, Blizzard wins either way. The banning is just something symbolic to help the players who level w/o third party programs feel better.
Comments
This isn't the first round of such actions from Blizzard. Doing massive bans like this servers several purposes. It makes it much harder to react to when botters have been getting detected for months and the net usually catches more people that way. If the bot programmers don't know what is tipping off blizzard, because it could be a number of things over the past several months that makes it harder to program around. It also sends out a very public message that Blizzard is willing to ban a sizable portion of people and doesn't go soft on cheating. It is about the message being sent and not how effective they are.
Companies need to change up their tactics just as often as the cheaters do. Now if Blizzard would just start handing out bans for people BUYING gold, then maybe people would be to afraid to do so. Even temporary 7 day bans would get the message out.
It's very easy to tell if a character, upon reaching the level cap of 70, has been gliding/ botting its way through levels; all you have to do is look at the characters reputation. No reputation/ faction means that they glided there way to 70.
I know this first hand; a friend of mine used Glider to raise 4 toons to 70 in about six weeks. Then he proceeded to throw those same toons into to AV the get the S1 arena epic gear. About a week and a half ago, he tried to log on and found it he was banned. Needless to say I laughed my ass off, but then again it kind of sucks; I've leveled 4 toons to 70 and workign on a 5th... It would be nice to fast-forward through some of the tedious parts of leveling.
But the joke is on me now; he's started another toon (warlock) last week. He was level 1 and is now level 42... in less than a week's time. So what if the account gets banned, Blizzard STILL gets paid. My friend went out and bought a game card with a few months time, created an account and logged on, that money goes to Blizzard. So in the end, Blizzard wins either way. The banning is just something symbolic to help the players who level w/o third party programs feel better.
Yeah I know Blizz doesn't take the full measure of stopping botters, but then... business is business.
Always change your signature.
Its hard to say what is worse... Pay and play countless days of BG's for nothing or pay and use a bot to play countless days of BG's for nothing.
Both are pointless to me. Everybody will need to do this again in 6 months anyway.