Blizzard announced a smart software that could render World of Warcraft bots useless. Instead of investigating player reports or monitoring logs to catch botters; Blizzard has decided to take a new approach to botting in World of Warcraft.

Over the years botting has become a serious problem for Blizzard resulting in massive support tickets and lots of subscriber cancellations. As of today the majority of their employees are now GMs or work in the support department.

The culprit?

Botters of course. Blizzard receives millions of tickets each month reporting botters in battlegrounds, raids, groups, and just randomly running around in the world farming.

Botters ruin raids and groups by causing unnecessary wipes or just plain standing there doing nothing. At least 1 in every 4 players to enter a battleground is played by a bot. The auction house and market are flooded with items from botters. It doesn’t end there.

Blizzard isn’t exactly innocent.

One of the primary goals Blizzard has adopted since World of Warcraft was released was to create more time sinks. Blizzard noticed that once characters reached a max level in the original release there was nothing left for them to do so they would stop playing and eventually cancel their account after making several alts.

To keep more people paying for a subscription, Blizzard introduced the Isle of Quel’danas in their first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The isle was a daily quest hub where players would have to login and spend 1-2 hours each day for nearly a month to max out reputation in order to receive epic items.

It didn’t stop there, the theme of the game is now rooted in daily quests, reputation farms, honor farming, and valor points farming. Everything you want to do in World of Warcraft, especially at max level, is a time sink now. A time sink that requires you to do the same unchallenging thing over and over again until your eyes bleed.

This is exactly where bots found their entrance into World of Warcraft and became extremely popular.

It’s their fault really for making people farm and waste time every day by putting in these time sinks. No new content to explore, no dynamic game play — just the same old boring crap. The same boring crap that makes you want to re-examine your life and ask yourself why upi even play at all.

Even though Blizzard is the one responsible for the boom in botting software, they have started losing customers because of botting.

The details of Blizzards new bot detection and prevention software are not solid yet but here is a brief idea of what to expect.

Maximum items/gold farmed based on level per character

That’s right, just like you can only carry so much gold with you when you transfer servers, you will only be able to farm so many of the same item/gold per character.

Blizzard will calculate approximately double the ingredients/materials required for quests/professions and set that as your character cap by level. If a profession or recipe requires a certain level, you won’t be able to obtain it.

Let’s say that you’re a 600 miner but you have no profession that uses mining ingredients. You will be capped at farming something like 100 of every ore each week or day. Once you have mined to that cap, you will no longer be able to mine anymore that day or week until reset (similar to raid and instance resets)

Let’s say that you are a 600 miner and you’re leveling Blacksmithing from 500-600 and you need about 3,000 Ghost Iron Ore to get there. Blizzard has a cap on your account for Blacksmithing and will only allow you to farm a total of 6000 Ghost Iron Ore for the lifetime of your account with higher daily caps so it can’t all be farmed at once. When you read that limit you will be placed back into the regular daily ore limit cap again.

The theme here is that if you have no need for the item you are farming because you have no profession or quest, then you will be restricted in farming those items each week. If you have a need you will be restricted by a lifetime balance factor.

Level comes into play because you need to be certain levels for certain quests and/or recipes, meaning no matter how high your mining is, unless you are eligible for a recipe you cannot farm the item to make that recipe.

This allows regular players to complete their professions and farm a bit extra for gold. It does not allow any player, legitimate or bot, to farm any excess of minerals or items. Farmers that aren’t bots are just as bad as bots, most are paid 4 cents an hour and work out of China.

Blizzard will also be doing away with auction house mules by restricting the maximum quantity any one character can have on them at one time and the lower level that character is, the lower that cap will be. This goes for gold too which will have a new cap of around 100k per character depending on level.

Veteran accounts, those accounts that have a long payment history, creation date, and are in good standing will receive bonuses to these limits allowing them to go above and beyond some of these caps but still have a cap of their own to prevent farming. This will be a reward to players that have stuck around for awhile and shown they are not bots.

Automatic player suspensions to players that repeat actions

This part of the software addresses bots that farm dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds. Blizzard went down the right path by making weekly caps, now they will go one step further.

Daily caps with a maximum repeat action of 3.

With this no player would be able to run the same raid, dungeon, or battleground more than 3 times a day. There would also be a cap each day for maximum dungeons, battlegrounds, and raids which could be something like 7 dungeons/battlegrounds, and 2 raids.

This prevents people from putting on a bot and farming to their maximum pvp and pve points in a single sitting to reach their weekly cap.

It prevents players and bots from farming many old world raids and dungeons and selling those items for gold.

If Blizzard doesn’t go with these daily caps then what it plans to implement is making every item beyond these caps no-trade or making players ineligible for rewards.

Let’s say that you are farming a low level dungeon like Scarlet Monastery for cloth and gear to sell. After 7 dungeon runs, everything you loot after would be labeled no-sell/no-drop so that you can’t sell it to a vendor or trade it to another player. This would allow players farming materials for themselves to still use the items they loot, however, it prevents them from selling these items for money.

Blizzard frowns upon both legitimate farmers and bots. Spending all day in game farming items to sell to everyone else is not what they had envisioned.

No one knows when this will be implemented because it won’t be announced in any patch notes, it will just be something that is live one day without anyone knowing.

But it is coming, and there’s nothing bots or even the team over at Stealth Botters can do about it.