A bit of information from a gm About botters

[chingchawng]

found this, its a response from a gm about botters a little different then the canned responses i am used to seeing thought it was a bit informitive.

" Thanks for taking the time to report this to us. A lot of times these bot programs are running on compromised account and the original owner is not yet aware of the issue. Getting these reports helps us get the bots out of the game as quickly as possible and the account back in the hands of the rightful owner.

However in the event that the bot is not a compromised account but a player themselves botting we take a completely different course of action. In the case that the bot is not exploitive (eg a gold seller on a compromised account), we report these to our Hacks team. They take each report and begin monitoring the players every movement to learn as much as they can about each program. If they just immediately removed them, nothing would be learned to improve the system. For instance while you may see 1 player botting, there could be hundreds other players using the exact same or very similar programs. Once we learn how a program works, we can use that information to detect potentially hundreds of other bots that haven’t been reported yet.

Unfortunately, because of the investigation process, you are sometimes likely to see a bot in game for a particular amount of time until our investigation is complete.

Thank you again for taking the time to report this to us and I hope this answered any question you may have about the process we use to handle bots. "

[Vyre]

This is what they write all the time in the ticket, if you're not there to talk with them in a conversation. Also i think everyone knows that they don't ban you instantly when you bot, that they wait no matter what. It makes sense, and they would be extremely stupid if they didn't do this.

[[Z]em]

I feel this is common sense really because it obviously helps them to try and catch other botters. Although there are still a handful of public bots that arnt being detected to i guess blizz need to up thier game!

[Anonie]

it usually takes a week or two for a botter to be banned, unless hes flying without a mount or traveling underground

[kickasskid54]

it usually takes a week or two for a botter to be banned, unless hes flying without a mount or traveling underground

Please link where it says botters take one week to get banned, because AFAIK they pretty much don't ban you unless you exploit the economy, or prove that there is a third party program running on your computer.

[Anonie]

I've added people who've botted to my friends list, and with the help of a certain addon, notice when these names disappear (get banned or faction/race change, I'm 100% certain that a rename keeps them on my friends list). Usually the names of people who are always on in uldum/twilight highland disappear within 1-2 weeks. Some take longer (months) and others don't disappear. I've never seen a bot who's been reported instantly banned.

There's been a few ban reports where the banned say they've never sold things on ah (make flasks for guild i guess) or sold it via mail. So it seems that a person who's been reported will be monitored for a while for bot like behavior.