WotLK Crossrealm and the growing Blackrock afk-bot dilemma.

[Susanna]

Hi,

(I'd like to preface this by noting that I play battlegrounds at a more or less daily basis.)

Ever since Blackrock was added to the crossrealm there has been a growing amount of blackrock afk bots present. Sometimes it's so bad that you get 3 afkers in WSG on your team (or the enemy team).
These cheaters use various amounts of methods to avoid getting auto-kicked, which sometimes makes it less obvious to other players that they have bots on their side.
Some for example stand and use stuff like horn of winter every time it's ready (these are the easiest to spot), others have auto follow on you and even some basic auto attack if an enemy is near them.

There's no incentive for these people not to cheat when they can simply start a new account and get a fully geared character in 5 minutes. Especially when some bots farm for a whole week without getting banned. At least on other servers you had to grind to get your character to 80 (or spend coins to buy a level 80 one), so you would lose your investment if you got caught cheating. But on Blackrock you lose nothing.

I keep seeing more and more bots from that realm appear. You never see afk bots from Icecrown any more, because even on a 7x realm you will lose investment if you get banned.

I'm curious if Warmane has some plans to combat this, because I assume they had a plan before adding that realm to the crossrealm battlegroup? Or am I mistaken?
As of now I just see more and more afk-bots, not less which starts to get to me. I could sit and report every single one but I'd have to spend a lot of my gaming time just doing that instead of playing the actual game (and trust me I've already reported tons of them).
And what does it matter in the long run if for every bot I report 3 new ones seemingly takes its place?

Anyone else has thoughts or suggestions on how Warmane should deal with this?

[Lovekeeper]

Yeah its insane, atleast 1-2 "follow bots" in every bg, ruins everything and they are 95% from Blackrock.

edit: Just remove Blackrock from Icecrown and Lordaeron battlegroup, nobody wants to play with these bots every game thanks

[ScaleRipper]

Yeah its insane, atleast 1-2 "follow bots" in every bg, ruins everything and they are 95% from Blackrock.

edit: Just remove Blackrock from Icecrown and Lordaeron battlegroup, nobody wants to play with these bots every game thanks

what a great suggestion. then remove smourne and highest lvl pve gear from blackrock aswell and we will have an actually decent pvp experience

[hunteratrix0]

For starters /follow function should be disabled in BG.
Then I guess afk/kick parameters could be changed to aggresively target afk botters. The tricky part is not to also make it catch people that are just defending legitely (think of a rogue stealthed in a base).
Something interesting is to increase the deserter duration for a player that has been reported afk (30 min to lets say 1.5 hour), problem with this is the potential for abuse on legit players.
Another idea is to improve anti-cheat and/or employing GMs to monitor the games=much faster bans and less incentive for the cheaters to cheat.

Disabling cross realm would likely cause much longer queues on all 3 of the realms, either for BG and for arenas.

[Drunkuser]

There's no incentive for these people not to cheat when they can simply start a new account and get a fully geared character in 5 minutes. Especially when some bots farm for a whole week without getting banned. At least on other servers you had to grind to get your character to 80 (or spend coins to buy a level 80 one), so you would lose your investment if you got caught cheating. But on Blackrock you lose nothing.

This is also the exact same reason why the vast majority of scripters in arena are from Blackrock.

Please remove the cross-realm.