Avoiding Undue Attention: Steps to Prevent Bans

[Mournelithe]

Hello all!

I recently learned of this fine site from the Glider forums, so decided to take a look, and found it to be a hitherto unknown goldmine. So having registered, I feel that I should add to the community welfare before enjoying the spoils of great minds.

I do a fair amount of botting, and have been at it for a long time. While I used to do it for cash, I have reverted to the pure form of 'just for fun' with a little added 'F you Blizzard' mentality for kicks. I wrote this guide on what I have learned since I started botting about a year and a half ago, as it has served me well, and has kept me from being banned in my numerous activities. Hope it helps!

**DISCLAIMER**
This guide was written for the bot program WowGlider, but for the most part can be used with any bot program. These are not 'facts' or some sort of 'GM knowledge', but merely observations, opinions, and tactics that have kept me safe for a very long time. If you want clarification and/or have questions, you can PM me and I will reply with all possible haste. It is also something to note that I am of the 'I want to avoid getting banned without having to stop botting' school of thought, and my opinions reflect this conservative mindset

1) Guilds: On every character that I have ever glided, I have always been in a guild of one form or another. I do this because unguilded people attract attention, mainly because so many people join guilds. On all the servers I've played on, unguilded people are quite rare. They attract the attention of people looking to get more people in their guild, as well as people who know what to look for in a bot; it is almost always the first thing I notice when I see someone doing odd behavior, and it generally pans out that they are a botter. So how do you alleviate this problem?
a) If you plan on having multiple characters on the server (or even just one, but willing to put the effort in) make your own guild. Just pay a few people some silver to sign the document with the understanding that they will be removed once the guild is started. Grab some low level chars (stand outside Goldshire or something) and no one gets suspicious.
b) Join a zerg guild around your level. With anything more than 150+ players, you will never be noticed. I do this quite frequently, and just make a habit or never doing anything with the guild. Don't talk, don't chat, don't go on guild activities (DO respond to questions if asked, which almost never happened). If you glide unpopulated areas, chances are your own guildies won't ever see you anyways.

2) Names: In choosing names, avoid anything funny, offensive, cute, or altogether memorable. The point is to avoid any situation where someone would send you a tell (or for god sake, report you) because of your name. If they start laughing at your name, and send you a tell remarking on it, and you don't respond, bad things start to happen. I choose my names by going through the dictionary and finding words that would elicit no undue attention. The auto-name function is fine as well, though I've always found them rather bland.

3) Invisible Mode: Learn to use it. Go into the help file, go to index, and search 'Keyboard'. It will tell you everything you need to know. Seriously, this is the BEST thing you can do to avoid detection. It will take you 10 minutes to learn it, and then you are set for life.

4) Profiles: There are two main things to remember with profiles. First off, always choose places that are not the main focus of a quest. This will ALWAYS get you traffic, which is bad (note the title of the post). Second, do not use public profiles. I have posted a few of mine, but I would still suggest making your own. This doesn't mean that you can't use an area that has a profile, but making your own waypoints makes it much safer for you. Why? Because if someone else is on the same profile, you are goig to start looking very odd very quick. Easy fix; just make your own waypoints for the area. Problem solved.
Second, never Glide the same profile two days in a row. Someone wanders by, sees a mage killing turtles, BFD. Same someone comes back the next day going to the same places, sees the SAME mage gliding turtles, much more of a problem for you.
Also, a profile, imho, should never have less than 100 waypoints. Every profile I've made has 300+ waypoints. This is for the same reason that you don't glide the same profile for too long; someone killing spiders sees you grind by, sweet. Someone sees you grind by 6 more times, problem. Having larger profiles also gives your mobs time to respawn. Nothing looks stranger that an person running in circles through their own dead mobs.

5) Follow out timer: It should never leave 1 minute. If there is a reason for you to make it more, you may be doing something wrong. At 1 minute, it is unlikely that you will logged out by someone riding by, but if they stop to look at something, you will be removed from their prying eyes. It has always been my gliding motto '4 hours lost botting time > lost account'. Find a more remote area, or just leave off botting for one night. It's better to be a little safer than to lose your account.

6) Glider Sounds: I like to bot when I sleep. Since I have my comp next to my bed, its no big deal. But since a single 'ping' sound isn't often enough to drag me out of a deep sleep, I changed the Glider sound with my own. This is VERY easy to do. Simply go into the glider folder, copy over your .wav file, and rename it for the sound that you are replacing (delete the old one). So whenever someone sends me a tell or is following me, a get a room full of Metallica. That'll do the trick.
NOTE: Since the gold spammers have gone on a crusade, this can be quite unpleasant. To avoid this, I use the 'anit-gold spammer' UI. Here's a link:
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/bots-p...gold-spam.html

7) Classes: Glide any class but hunters. Seriously. Any hunter immediately sends off my radar, simply because there are SO many Chinese farmers who use NE hunters with the 'Boar' pet (if you do use a hunter, for god sake, name your pet). I can imagine that other, non-botters, feel the same way.

Friends and Instances: If you really want to be safe, don't make friends. You don't want people looking for you for some reason. If someone remembers you because you healed for a WC run, they will ask you again. You don't respond, or they see you somewhere and decide to say hi....

9) Forums: While rather superfluous to say (since you are reading this) it is always a good idea to check the forums. You never know what you may find. Avoid areas where people have been banned in the recent past. GMs have a tendency to check the same area on many servers when they ban people. Also, never post a profile if you ever intend to use it again. GMs can read these forums too, and they are perfectly capable of checking out if someone is using a popular profile.
It is also wise to never post personal or ingame information on the forums; character names, where you are botting at this very moment, etc. I know for a fact that GMs check these forums; I've seen bans resulting from it. So be smart, and keep it to yourself.

10) General Knowledge: No matter how hard you try, eventually someone will see you and ask 'wtf are you doing?' It is always wise to know where you are botting, and more importantly, the quests around you. It is a much better thing to be able to say 'I'm doing ______ quest' or 'I need X amount of ______ item' than to say 'I'm grinding...'

11) AFK: Personally, I am never 100% AFK while gliding. A very large number of people are banned from player reports, and as such, having your alert timer at .5 minutes will let you know when someone is snooping around. This does you no good, however, if you are 10 miles away. If I am leaving my home, I turn off glider and logout. Referring to my moto again: '4 hours lost gliding time > lost account'. I glide while I sleep, while I do taxes or investment work, etc. But I am always within hearing range of my comp whenever I glide.

12) Other Botters: Stay away from them. Don't talk to them, don't try to share glide paths, don't try and extort them, etc. If no one knows you bot, no one can try and extort/rat on you when they go down themselves. I've seen people get banned, then buy a new account and come back to the server to get some 'starting money' by extorting the other botters they've seen. This doesn't happen, needless to say, if they don't know you exist.

13) Auctions: Be Careful! I've identified hundreds of botters on all types of servers just by the auction house. Normal players don't have 40 stacks of runecloth sitting around in the AH, nor do they own 6 epics at any given time. If you have a large influx of materials, spread it out over a couple days/weeks. Also, avoid undercutting. While this applies mainly to Chinese farmers, it's a HUGE sign saying 'I bot farm' when there are 20 stacks of some material on the AH at 25-50% the lowest/average price. Normal people don't act this way, since the margin makes a big difference for them.

14) KeyBinding: It is fairly well known that GMs will check your quickbar layouts when looking for botters; since bots require certain keys to be in certain places, using your bots 'default' key settings is dangerous. For a guide on how to fix this:
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/bots-p...cted-80-a.html

15) Play Time: While I have no difinitive information about it, it is my personal feeling that, since no sane player stays logged in for 24+ hours, it is unwise to go long periods of time without logging out. Just to be safe, I tend to log out of WoW (if only to restart Glider and change some settings) at least once every 6-8 hours.

16) Professions: While more than a few of my char's are enchanter/tailors, I always start my characters as skinners. The reason is that, when botting, you will be leaving a long trail of dead bodies behing you, and can act quite like a huge arrow pointing right to you. I like to avoid that kind of attention, especially since my logout timer is set so low. Skinning solves that problem, and as such, I generally bot skinnable mobs. While not a necessity (and it will slow your exp/hr some) it helps remove the traces of your passing, not to mention brining in a little extra cash.
What to do with all this leather? Well, following my AH rule, I tend not to sell leather on the AH; botting just creates too much of it. So, instead, I make leather items out of it, and then DE it with an alt (I use mail, since the alt is generally on the same account, and made specifically for that purpose). Enchanting mats are much less likely to draw suspicion on the AH, and for the most part, I just keep them for leveling enchanting later, selling off the excess.

In the end, staying safe means blending in. It is a common mistake that safe gliding means being removed from the WoW community. This isn't true. Think of yourself as a spy; you're job is to know the area, people, and to blend in with them perfectly. As long as you shield yourself from player reports, the chances of you getting caught go down to near 0. If you have a question, ask yourself 'What would I do if I was a normal player, and all this time I spent getting to X level matters to me?'


That's it on my end. If something else comes to me in my dreams, I'll update this. Hope everyone stays safe.

~Mournelithe

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[issacobra]

nice +rep. I use all these but too lazy to write this all.

[Flying Piggy]

Awesome guide , we use a lot of the same basic rules to avoid detection . Although you forgot the Keybindings change and the custom classes , still a great guide though .

[Mournelithe]

True, though I was more shooting for the 'player actions ingame' side of the house, with a focus on how to act. I'll add another section though, since I agree with you completely

[wickermanz]

Nice Guide.. i like the idea of changing the Glider sound to a custom sound like an alarm or somethin .. would of saved one of my accounts. my charactor broke a few of these rules had a very attractive name was in a active guild and it got banned because of someone that was trying to get me to do scholo or something and then reported me i could post the SS if i could find it its pretty funny.

[Flying Piggy]

Oh and almost forgot , +rep

[Subterfuge]

great guide. i would use gliders on my account but since my cousin is paying for it i dont want to screw him over. once i get outa college ill buy some accounts n start gliding.

[Mournelithe]

...it got banned because of someone that was trying to get me to do scholo or something and then reported me ...

Yeah I almost had the same problem; guy kept sending me tells, saying stuff like 'Ima gonna report you if you don't respond; me thinks u botter'. Took 6 tells to wake me up (long night) so I decided to remedy the situation. It has saved my account a few times, since, imho, Player tells are more important to hear than GM tells (if a GM /w you, you're basically screwed anyways); being able to stave off a player report by running to the comp and responding quick saves bots :P

NOTE: Updated the guide to include my more recent fix to the gold seller problem ruining my REM cycle. Thanks to Flying Piggy for the guide.

[TehGoggles]

Another tip, this may go with the friend's tip thingy but here it goes

Do not try to make e-drama around yourself (EX: Going on the offical WoW forums, then getting all the alliance side pissed at you on your server, so your on a few alliance guilds KoS (Kill on sight for you newbies).) Or, getting your own faction pissed out you so they bugg you nonstop ingame.

[Mournelithe]

Another tip, this may go with the friend's tip thingy but here it goes

Do not try to make e-drama around yourself (EX: Going on the offical WoW forums, then getting all the alliance side pissed at you on your server, so your on a few alliance guilds KoS (Kill on sight for you newbies).) Or, getting your own faction pissed out you so they bugg you nonstop ingame.

Yep, completely agree, although it almost goes without saying that anyone trying to avoid detection should avoid the WoW official forums like the plague lol.

[Cheezeit117]

+rep for the awesome guide! Please write more, I love it

[lag]

This is a fantastic guide, thank you so much for sharing

++rep

[Shattered]

Wow, this is a fantastic guide. Thank you for sharing. +rep.

[xxsilentxx]

Really good I want to learn how to do this now. Thanks for the tips!

[Nugma]

Fantastic! Write more! Lovely! I'd read it again.