Ex-GM Answering Questions on Reddit

[Cypher]

Doubt he'll know anything related to Warden or server side bot detection mechanisms etc (or if he'd even reveal anything if he did), but probably still interesting to people here.

IAMA ex-World of Warcraft Game Master - AMA : IAmA

[oprime]

made my day
especially the RP server part

edit: this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi9Oi9XjyUQ (ninjad from that thread)

[EmilyStrange]

Are people so hungry for triviality that they will sit around and listen to a CSR, an entry-level position, of a company talk about his job?

[Jens]

Quite an entertaining read!
Never really gave it much thought that everything uttered might be logged, but i guess it is just like everything else these days.

Are people so hungry for triviality that they will sit around and listen to a CSR, an entry-level position, of a company talk about his job?

yes.

[EmilyStrange]

Quite an entertaining read!
Never really gave it much thought that everything uttered might be logged, but i guess it is just like everything else these days.

Everything, and I do mean *everything*, is logged. The only thing that isn't logged is client-side only stuff such as certain animations that do not change the game state on the server-side and no message is transmitted for.

Chat logs are kept "forever" and are readily accessible, most other types of data have varying retention policies though I don't know of any data that isn't kept for several months. As a developer with access to duplicates of a realm's character database you can pretty much look at anything that character ever did, including just re-organising and shuffling the character's inventory around. Statistics can be run on how quickly a dungeon was run, or when you picked up a quest, completed it, and turned it in (hello! fly hack abuser, we see you did that kill quest from one end of the zone to other in just eight seconds!), how fast you gather farming nodes, and how far apart each one is, and computing your moving speed is all readily done, but company policy dictates that even a detection means it needs to be investigated by a human, so financially it often isn't worth doing to just punish one person who bots for a few hours a week. Blizzard treads very carefully not to just arbitrarily ban accounts due to the public outcry it would cause. Also, the staying of the ban hammer isn't about the loss of revenue it would cause, but the cost of dealing with someone who has been banned. Every time a player contacts a CSR, it costs the company money. Every time that something is working outside of the environs of the automated systems and a human gets involved, it costs money. It is why players have the "unstuck character" function and the "report player for spam" function.

CSRs have access to chat, notes other CSRs have made, account history, suspensions, complaints other people have made against the account if it was ever investigated by a CSR and they felt the need to make a note of it, other accounts tied to the same credit card (though not the credit card number) or billing address, IP address history, email address history, (hello! [email protected] who is now using [email protected], obvious account sale!). Higher level CSRs know when you made the switch from XP to Vista to 7, when you went from 32-bit to 64-bit OS, and when you put new memory in your computer and upgraded the graphics card.

Not all CSRs are in-game GMs. Just like character classes and roles, there are different roles of CSR with different powers and tools at their disposal.

[123jokesonme]

Wow made me think for awhile looks like all those people saying oh this is undetectable are a bit naive as to what undetectable means.Might have to figure out some ways to tread a bit more carefully in the future.Interesting stuff for sure!

[Xelper]

Most things are detectable, just everyone says "undetectable" and means "undetected." While trying to appeal a ban some time ago they were able to pull full location and chat data on my characters from more than 6 months prior. I was contesting some speed hacking ban (on my alt account, I never risk my main account ) a while ago and they basically said "You were in the Darnassus at 23:34:10, entered Ashenvale at 23:34:25, entered The Barrens at 23:34:3 and so on... leaving no room for playing dumb. I was actually caught by a GM who whispered me saying "FREEZE!"... he must have found it entertaining.

Now... analyzing this stuff reliably is a lot of work, and they probably hadn't gotten to that point yet.

An example of Blizzard analyzing logs for bans would be the Archaeology banwave that hit Pirox bots a few months ago. Because the developer was too lazy to figure out a way to read digsite locations from the client directly, he decided to use something he already had in place to save himself some time (inbound chat reading). pvpTool used a script command that would output the coordinates of your current digsites to a chat channel:

/join asdmsadsadsada
/4 Digsite 1:
/4 Digsite 2:
etc...

Blizzard then went through their chat logs between February 20th and March 14th searching for the obvious pattern that pvpTool used when sending these coordinates, and retroactively banned everyone based on log evidence alone.