Blizzard: Combating Botting and Exploitative Accounts in Season of Discovery Phase 2

[Scumstation]

Although not mentioned in the written blog, the Season of Discovery update preview video reveals that Blizzard is rolling out new tech in Phase 2 to help combat botting and exploitative accounts



Blizzard:

Another common question that we get, which is somewhat frustrating to answer, simply because the more we talk about it the faster bad actors can work around our efforts, is botting and exploitative accounts. Botting is a colloquial term that includes a lot of exploitative gameplay that players engage in and has a negative impact on the game. It's something we don't like, it's something we actually hate, spend a lot of time and effort trying to combat.

While we can't really talk about the specifics of what we're doing, we do want to talk about some really exciting new tech that's coming with phase 2. We've had this in limited testing on live, both in classic of its various flavors and modern for quite some time, and we've seen some very positive results from it. and so we want to set expectations where there's never really going to be a time where World of Warcraft or really any online game is going to be completely free of bad actors and malicious accounts, but we're very positive about the results we've seen from this new tech and we're really excited to see it rolled out.

Paradoxically, the more effective we are at some of these things, the more outwardly visible the bad actors can become. A lot of times following many of our ban waves, you may actually see increased bot activity, as bot farms spin up new accounts and start over. There's been a few instances of this happening, where we do a large ban wave, and I see videos posted online of streams of bots going from one part of the world to the other, but when you see that stuff and when you report it, it actually helps us clamp down on that new method as well, and it gets the bot farms into a position where they are constantly two steps forward and two steps backwards, so it is really helpful. As much as its frustrating to see, we really want to encourage you to continue to help us by reporting things and we're going to continue to do exhaustive work on our side for this issue.