WotLK Question about bots/scammers main accounts.

[evilhao]

I've encountered a bot and i've chatted with him for a while after watching him botting for hours. I told him he's been reported and he told me that he has another 13 other accounts to replace him. I was wondering do these bots main accounts get banned ? As i've seen them transfer the botting loot to main account while doing it and main account had full BiS. The bot in question was botting thorium ore and i guess he didn't have engineering with mailbox to send stuff and instead was using main to transfer the goods. So my question is, do main accounts ever get touched or just get ignored by the warmane staff ?

[Stevy96]

Did you take video proof of his botting account character botting? Did you take at least screenshots of your chat with the main account?
Bots are rampant on Icecrown realm especially. I've been seeing the same character names for a year. It is very blatant, programmed bots. But I don't have the energy to take a video and deal with timestamping and writing an essay to explain something obvious to get a response "the player will be investigated" on these five "players" I see. I just do my daily and logout. If an actual game moderator was willing to actually spend a day in game in Icecrown zone, he would ban most of these bots. However this is extremely unlikely to happen and the economy is at the mercy of mining/herbalism farming bots. Why after almost 15 years it's still like this is the territory of conspiracy theories. Warmane relies way too much on hands off stuff like Sentinel instead of dedicated human hours.
A "crazy" solution would be to add a donation option towards a new position in staff like a Official Warmane Bot Banner. Like a player who is perma invisible and uninteractable to other players who also records the work the whole time so everyone can watch them rejuvenate the community. Streaming would be a non option because the botters could intercept and logout.

[AirConditioner]

Interesting topic... You make several, excellent points, Stevy!

I have recently reported numerous, blatantly obvious bots which herb throughout Storm Peaks. They are on 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Many have similar or auto-generated names. Most of them travel identical paths. All are 77-79 Druids with starter gear. They take 2-4 weeks to be removed.

As players, and some of us being software engineers, we know Warmane easily has the ability to identify their login times, activities and gold transfers within game. Especially after users like ourselves report these bots. "Why would Warmane not take thorough action" should be the real question here. They have the abililty to delete all accounts associated with significant gold transfers, why dont they?

There needs to be a business balance of playing quality/profitability/enforcement, which there is not at this time.

It should never be the duty of the player to spend time video recording bots - this is an absurd request by management. Reporting should be enough.

Warmane seems to have reduced pricing to compete with new, similar servers. This will not be enough for the droves of people who are currently leaving for new homes. Have you noticed the demographic of people leaving? USD$ CDN$ and Euro's are leaving.

It would be wise of Warmane to take action and clean up their community in many ways: Bots, uncontrolled chat spamming, horrible economy due to AH bots, much more. Managers, you have your work cut out for you! How about hiring live GM's?

I will no longer be donating or playing here until we see some actual work being put into the issues. I can safely state this for a group of ~15 of us who have moved elsewhere.