Blizzard is cracking down on bots in World of Warcraft. This time, players have no chance of coming back – they lose everything.
Bots have always been a major problem in World of Warcraft. Since the introduction of battlegrounds, there have been programs that automatically perform various tasks in the game: collecting herbs and ores, farming specific enemies, or earning honor in battlegrounds.
Particularly popular was the bot Honorbuddy, which ironically came from Bossland in Germany. There were ongoing court conflicts between Blizzard and Bossland.
Now Blizzard has dealt another hard blow to all users of the bot. Some screenshots from the Honorbuddy forums are circulating on Reddit, where customers complain that their accounts were banned after “only a few minutes of use.” For those who enjoy “feasting on tears,” this should be amusing:
Apparently, Blizzard has hidden a reliable method in the code of World of Warcraft to automatically detect the use of the bot. Accordingly, fraudsters received an email indicating that their accounts had been banned.
What is particularly interesting about this approach: Blizzard not only bans the individual WoW account of a user but all licenses on a Battle.net account! Since many bot users have multiple accounts (such as a twink account that farms resources for the “main”), this hits these fraudsters particularly hard. But that’s not all. If the account owner adds more WoW licenses to the account, these will also be immediately and permanently banned.
On Reddit, people are amused about Blizzard’s wording: “You can try to debate with our legal department regarding the closure of your account, but we cannot guarantee that you will receive a response.”
This is probably Blizzard’s way of saying: Welcome to the spam folder.
What do you think about this approach? Finally, strong and good steps from Blizzard? Or does this ultimately change nothing?
