Post by trog @ 08:11pm 21/04/10 | 89 Comments
We�ve recently banned over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts that were found to be violating the Battle.net Terms of Use. If this is a first offense, the CD key associated with the banned account will be suspended for 30 days, while repeat offenders will see their keys banned permanently. All account ban decisions are final.So if you're in the market for either of these games, you probably want to avoid picking up an el cheapo second hand one off eBay for a while.
We would like all players to remember that abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs is a violation of the agreement made when signing on to Battle.net, and can subject your account to disciplinary action up to and including a permanent ban of its access to the service. These types of activities can severely impact the stability of our servers, and we�ll continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating.
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Posted 08:14pm 21/4/10
Posted 08:55pm 21/4/10
Posted 08:59pm 21/4/10
WarCraft III and Diablo 2.
Pretty sure neither of those games come with Rainbow Horsies.
Posted 09:23pm 21/4/10
Posted 09:40pm 21/4/10
Posted 10:25pm 21/4/10
Posted 11:35pm 21/4/10
Posted 11:58pm 21/4/10
Posted 12:22am 22/4/10
Posted 08:52am 22/4/10
I've seen a $1000us auto it script that simulates pvp in alterac valley, complete with mounting your horse, combat (upt to 4 spells), looking around and moving with the group (if it doesnt find anyone around it just mounts and uses a set of waypoints to nagivate 'in the normal route to the AV bosses'. Then when it detects combat (name tag goes red) it then turns untill the target is in sight then starts the normal combat rotation of spells/attacks/abilities.
I saw this thing running when i asked for a quote on how much it costs and it was absolutly amazing. This dude had even configred 'defensive' rotations. So when the druid that it was playing was low on health it shifted out of form and started to heal itself. (Edit: then when the enemy/mob died, it drank/ate - he said it could level something to 80 using the set of preconfigured grinding locations in less then 4 weeks).
That blew me away. And isnt detectable since it just uses 'getpixel colour' and simulates keystrokes on a windowed 800x600 wow window btw.
last edited by gamer at 08:52:32 22/Apr/10
Posted 09:00am 22/4/10
I never thought that would be the hardest thing to do... but it's actually quite hard and required a small mod written that colour coded certain types of fish in my inventory, so auto it could pickup a red (throw out) or a green (keeper). Because you wont to only keep the expensive fish etc.
The other stuff I thought would be hard but actually went was stuff like re-applying the bobble and detecting when a fish was on etc.
Posted 09:07am 22/4/10
It's against the ToS and in a (somewhat) competitive game, it's cheating.
Posted 09:18am 22/4/10
There is nothing fun about that.
Have you ever grinded your 6th level 80 up?
Wow is one of the most fun games I've played (pve wise im referring to) however once you've done every quest in the games (literally over 10,000 quests) the eighth time, there is no fun left in it. Take my word for that (because I doubt you've even leveled two chars to 80 let alone a 6th).
That's not even mentioning the time sink required, anyone with kids and a 9-5 job doesnt have the time for. The few hours you do play per week you want to play stuff thats actually fun (not the same quest but for the 8th time). More like staying 2000+ in arena and clearing the progression content for your server for the first time.
I have about 2-3 'main chars' that my guild swaps in and out (Protection warrior, holy priest and holy paladin . Without them my guild progression would be seriously hurt.
last edited by gamer at 09:15:53 22/Apr/10
last edited by gamer at 09:18:05 22/Apr/10
Posted 09:20am 22/4/10
Dont do it.
Never played WoW, but I have played other MMO's (Playing FFXI at the moment)
If there's 'No fun left in it' I think it's time you looked at why you're still paying Blizzard $x per month to do something YOU DONT LIKE.
I have 7 lv75 Characters (cap) in FFXI and I can assure you, lv75 in FFXI takes longer then 80 in WoW. Hell, Level 50 in FFXI takes longer then lv80 in WoW and thats not even the 1/2 way point (xp wise) to 75. I had fun taking every one of them up to 75 Legit and i'm working on my 8th job now. There is also a fishing quest which requires to catch 10,000 of a specific Fish (fairly easy to catch) which took me months to fish myself. Sure I could of had a Bot do it for me in 2-3 weeks probably... but then the Bot was playing the gamp. Not me.
So all your cheating is for the sake of 'other' guild members. Ok, Sure.
Posted 09:26am 22/4/10
why play it if realistically, you don't like it..
Posted 09:31am 22/4/10
Posted 09:33am 22/4/10
Posted 09:43am 22/4/10
Posted 09:43am 22/4/10
Posted 09:48am 22/4/10
Posted 09:48am 22/4/10
Do you know how much 'gold' we spend per night in progression raids? (It's way better now then it used to be!) but probably close to 1-2k gold per person by 25 people. That's sometimes 25,000->50,000 gold per night.
So yes, of course we're going to automate the consumable farming. Most guilds (who have sponsors) just buy gold and launder the money or employ wow gold growers (auction whores).
Beleive it or not (shock horror suprise!) wow actually takes some pretty good organisation to even run a 25 man guild at the highest teirs of content. It was so much harder with 40 man. So much so, that we used to need to have 2 people 'on call' 24/7. Thank f*** those days are over.
Posted 09:52am 22/4/10
it's been used in this manner for years, even in games before wow existed - they know about it
unless some new reason comes along, no they won't banhammer those people as well
Posted 09:51am 22/4/10
GetPixelColour and SendKeyStroke. Those and any programs that do them will never be banned. If they are at any stage, please come back to this thread and tell me how wrong I was.
But they wont be. Because it's not possible to ban them, because they simulate a RL player playing too closely.
F*** there is even ways to run autoit or vbscript on a secondary computer to where wow is running and have it read input from the output of the first computer and simulate real keyboard keystrokes.
It'll never be banned.
Posted 10:12am 22/4/10
Posted 10:19am 22/4/10
Posted 10:25am 22/4/10
Posted 10:34am 22/4/10
Posted 10:36am 22/4/10
Posted 10:38am 22/4/10
Posted 10:46am 22/4/10
Posted 10:49am 22/4/10
Posted 10:50am 22/4/10
Posted 10:52am 22/4/10
SquareEnix (was rumored to) install (with PoL) a program that saw what other processes your computer was running the same time you were running PoL (their Launcher for Games, think Steam... but completly useless and a failed project.)
They got slammed massivly from everywhere and claimed there was no such System Scan. Apparently it's against some laws in the USA to do so, without permission, but agreeing to the ToS clould be agreeing to the system scan.
Posted 10:55am 22/4/10
If you need to do all sorts of handstands to avoid playing the stuff you need to play to play the stuff you like to play, its time to look into doing something else. Italics because I'm serious.
Its not like there's a special pleasure centre in your brain that can only be lit up by WoW raids ... is there?
And that's my opinion, so its right (more italics). If you disagree with me you're stupid and a douche and wrong.
Posted 11:49am 22/4/10
Posted 11:49am 22/4/10
Posted 11:52am 22/4/10
I started out crafting just using my own pc normally, then later on when my wife got a pc but hardly used it, and it was on the desk next to mine, I used to run daoc on her pc during the day and have the keyboard next to mine and press the button every now and then while I worked. then I thought why bother when autoit can press it for me
never got banned or warned or anything though
Posted 11:58am 22/4/10
That's a weeeee bit broad there Jimmah.
Posted 11:59am 22/4/10
I'm sure your ICC 25 man team thats 3 bosses into ICC farms all their own mats and despite what you say, doesnt enjoy a second of it.
Smart players dont allow games like wow to 'consume their life'. We log on, have everything we need at our fingertips and get straight to the fun stuff then log off. Wow is our b****, we take a game that many find hard and 'grindy' and make it into eating cake.
Most people who play wow are the lamer grindy people. I'm glad to see them come and go and never really get to experience how enjoyable wow is without the 'grindyness'. That grindyness will always be there, becaues they need you to come back at least once a month so they get their $15au per person.
That's exactly why you run a program that encodes/scrambles any bot you use both in terms of exe signature, filesize, datetime and window title.
Glider to this day is still un-detectable (last i checked) when you use it with the proper scramblers etc. Most people dont.
Warden isnt as smart as people make it out to be. Still, i only use bots i program myself. Just like trojen viruses, its the only way to make sure nothing can detect it. Then just like every hacker will tell you 'dont get greedy' and you'll be fine.
Posted 12:01pm 22/4/10
Posted 12:02pm 22/4/10
I usually just buy the Fish Feasts for our guild. They vary in price buy say 10g each. We don't tend to go through more than 20 a night, so that's 200g.
Flasks at the moment on my server are around 15g each from the AH. At say 4 flasks a night that's 60g per player. Now sure, a while back they were more expensive, but at the same time usually a guild has Elixir specced Alchs to help make flasks. Still though, at the moment you're looking at around 60g per player for flasks.
If you're double-potting each attempt then that's 10g per attempt or say up to 200g per raid.
That's all of the consumables (poisons, reagants etc. are cheap), so say 268g per person per night.
Now sure there are then repair bills. Over 20 attempts you'll go through a bit over 2 full repairs of your gear. Now sure, I'm in cloth, but my average ilvl is 268 so it's not like I'm on the low end of gear repair costs. The most I've probably paid is maybe 80g for a full repair from red. So let's say for 20 attempts 200g in repairs per person on average.
So in total the costs per person might be around 470g for 20 attempts (and that's assuming you're buying all your consumables from the AH and you're double-potting every single fight).
Now we tend to use fewer than 20 attempts per night anyway in our 3 hour raids, but 20 is a decent enough number I guess if you're bashing your head against something.
To balance the cost, you do get some gold from each boss killed. I forget what it is for the ICC bosses but let's low-ball it at 5g each. Usually you only have a couple of bosses at most that are progression fights. The rest are on farm. In ICC most decent raiding raiding guilds would be clearing most of the instance (on either normal or hardmode) without any wipes (which will lower the repair costs). Over the space of a week you can maybe lower your daily costs by 20g or so from gold just from boss kills.
Furthermore each boss drops 2 Frost Emblems. By now most raiders would have their 4pc T10 251 at least and probably have little use for Frost Emblems except for either the odd PvP or off-spec stuff, or if they want gold to cash in for Primordial Saronite to sell. If you're cashing in Frost Emblems for Saronite then each boss gives you around 90gold. So if you're doing those 10 farm bosses each week that's 900g, which pays in full for 2 of those raiding nights. Meaning you just need to find funds to cover the other 1 or 2 nights.
So if you're raiding 3 nights a week then your average daily net cost is 155g.
If you raid 4 nights a week it's 230g a night.
It doesn't take that long to make 230g for someone interested in raiding. You'll make gold doing VoA for the badges. You'll make gold with professions. Or doing 10mans or your daily heroic or random battleground or just daily quests. You can make gold by turning in those Triumph Badges for gems etc. Or Honor points for gems.
You do NOT need to be botting to cover the costs of raiding. Now sure, someone with limited time (because they have a job) might see a use in buying gold to cover costs but botting is unnecessary.
As for those people claiming that Warden couldn't detect things like Auto-It or other tools, don't kid yourselves. Warden runs on your computer. Just like tools like Auto-It can inject keypresses and the like so to could other programs like Warden detect such things. Furthermore they can also look for certain patterns in usage on accounts. An account online for extremely long periods at a time doing the same things over and over? They might not flag it automatically for banning but that doesn't mean they might not have a GM try to talk with you to make sure you're really not AFK. Maybe your character is getting flagged over and over for being AFK in battlegrounds? A few times, sure it won't mean anything. Repeatedly? It's possible they'll flag it for a deeper look.
Posted 12:09pm 22/4/10
Posted 12:10pm 22/4/10
I only have the one account that has 6 level 80's that are active (the rest are twinks etc). I've played on and off for years.
After almost 4 years of using my own programmed bots in a smart way... i'll let you know if i ever get banned. I wouldnt hold my breathe if i was you. I think i know more about marden and how it works then anyone of this thread.
I think most of the people here saying 'youll get caught' have absolutly no idea how it actually works and the measures botters goto to advoid being flagged and finally banned. There are many websites and private forums around that have reserved engineered it and describe how it works (and the proceedures that gms follow or that increase your chances of being flagged).
Posted 12:23pm 22/4/10
Posted 12:30pm 22/4/10
ROFLMAO... you seriously expect people to believe that you spend 1-2K per person in a 25 man raid per night? WTF do you spend the gold on? Seriously WTF could you possibly spend that much Gold on per toon? If I spend more then 100G a night its a bad night as I make all my own consumables.
Posted 12:38pm 22/4/10
if you're a hardcore raider? yes
if you're just a regular player who raids? no
i raided for 3 years (2-3 times a week) and no way came near the cost of that. didn't see all of the content but damn well had fun playing the rest.
Posted 12:56pm 22/4/10
We're at 11/12 ICC 25man heroic. We have the Death's Demise and Grand Crusader realm firsts for our server.
I have a shockingly high amount of time /played. I'm a theorycrafter on EJ and shadowpriest.com. I've one of the main developers of SimulationCraft and the trinket Althor's Abacus was named after me.
I'd say that while I'm not in something like Adept, I'm still hardcore enough.
And yes, I know there is also gemming and enchanting and crafting items. I spent around 35k gold on crafted/BoE's near the start of ICC and I've spend thousands more on gems and the like. But on the other hand ICC has been out for 6 months or something now. People don't get loot every raid, or even sometimes every week. Uncut gems can be bought with Honor Points or with Badges or transmuted via Alchemy etc. Most guilds will have Jewelcrafters who will then cut them for you.
What sort of farming do I do? Barely any. I occasionally sell some enchants or crafted tailoring stuff. I might do the odd random heroic every so often or the Random Battleground. Every now and then I might find a BoE I can sell or I might convert some Frost Badges to Saronites to sell.
I don't bot, I've never bought gold, nor have I consistently done the full daily quests since the SWP days.
My GearScore (for what that mod is worth) is 6204 in my raiding gear.
Now it's possible you might be in a more "hardcore" guild than I am, but I think you'll find I know ample about the costs of raiding.
Posted 01:03pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:03pm 22/4/10
For the non-hardcore raider your costs can be almost nil depending upon what you do.
And even the gold mentioned frankly isn't that large. Back in the days of the pre-expansion game, yeah, it would be considered a lot of gold. But gold is inflated over time just like everything else, and in real terms raiding is probably less expensive now than it's ever been.
The game isn't just about making gold though to be able to raid which is the point I was making. You don't need to bot. You don't need to farm endlessly. You don't need to buy gold unless you really do only have time to raid and not do anything else in the game ever. If you are raiding then yes you need some gold income but it's not much really.
Posted 01:12pm 22/4/10
SNAP
Posted 01:16pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:23pm 22/4/10
Have fun boting or buying gold, I'll just continue to play with my mates and help each other.
Posted 01:27pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:32pm 22/4/10
AutoIt is a legitimate program, I've got it running on my machine with a bunch of different scripts none of which are related to WoW, Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2. If games started banning people for running legitimate software instead of targeted hacks then I'd want a refund.
If repetitive boring s*** like fishing is not interesting enough to play without automating the game with AutoIt then the game mechanics are screwed and might make sense to change them.
Posted 01:37pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:44pm 22/4/10
The other thing (and it was more relevant with single server MUDS not server-farmed MMORPGs but nonetheless still applicable) is that all these scripts/bots take CPU time and bandwidth from servers used by people ACTUALLY playing the game. But, I guess that doesnt matter either right? They can just put more servers on. Oh wait that costs money... lets charge more per month!
Posted 01:44pm 22/4/10
Yeah i've had a fair few lols from peoples reponces in this thread as well. Quite humerous with ruk on his little mission to argue about intracacies in guild cash flow. EPPEEEENNN GOOOOO!!!!!
Posted 01:48pm 22/4/10
LOL
There's no way I'd be in a guild that makes you spend that much per day. How the f*** do you make money? And don't say dailies, because that's bulls***.
Posted 01:48pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:49pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:55pm 22/4/10
Posted 01:55pm 22/4/10
You certainly don't need to be making thousands of gold a night like gamer is claiming.
Having lots of gold means that sure, you might be able to get a couple of crafted items first (though for the most part crafted items aren't as good as the rewards you get from raiding itself), and it means you don't have to worry about the small costs of raiding, but that's about it. Okay, you get to buy more vanity items like more non-combat pets or different mounts, but meh, again some of the most exclusive of those again only come from raiding, or only come from high level PvP.
Gold can be handy but it's not that hard to reach a point where you simply have nothing you feel like spending it on. That it can be done without resorting to cheating (which is what gamer does) is a good sign.
Posted 02:03pm 22/4/10
I find with my guys I seem to spend heaps on gems because none of my toons are jewelers. But when it come to enchants and food I rarely have to spend a cent on them since I've got that covered over both accounts.
It's gonna be awesome once Cata gets released. Most of the old zones will be filled with people again. Was an awesome move for Blizz not to make a whole new land splitting the world up even further.
Posted 02:11pm 22/4/10
Posted 02:19pm 22/4/10
Posted 02:25pm 22/4/10
Posted 04:06pm 22/4/10
lol! Often you hear about RL wow guild/group meetups, never been to one myself but I often shudder to think how it might all go down. No spells or chars to hide behind.
Posted 05:39pm 22/4/10
Or a $30 bot called pirox?
Posted 08:07pm 22/4/10
Posted 08:37pm 22/4/10
That sentence and everything you said around it makes no sense.
Neither does this one. It just seems like you string a bunch of technical words together and hope they make sense?
The only "smart WoW player" is one who has quit.
Posted 08:44pm 22/4/10
Yep thats what $30 buys you.
Yep pretty hard to understand your own primary language eh? Ever heard of virus signatures? Every programmed your own trojan virus? Notice how your virus signature isnt on any database, funny that hey... with me now kiddo?
I wont bother with the rest of the crap you wrote, it all require hand holding and you've already taken up too much of my time typing the above.
Posted 08:51pm 22/4/10
Posted 08:52pm 22/4/10
Posted 08:52pm 22/4/10
Before parabol jumps in and explains in excruciating technical detail why you're wrong, surely you can just admit that realistically, if Blizzard wanted to, they'd be able to figure out what homebrew script warriors are doing and stop them. They don't bother because generally you guys fly under the radar and are about 0.00000001% of the problem as the rest of the low hanging fruit.
They're not stopping you because you're the smrtest man alive - they just cannot be bothered.
Posted 08:59pm 22/4/10
Not really sure that's possible at this stage?
Posted 09:02pm 22/4/10
Posted 09:21pm 22/4/10
You are again throwing around more random terms that you seem to have no understanding of.
I'm still waiting for an explanation of:
What exactly is the link between homebrew bots and "trojen viruses"? Asking me questions about my programming background isn't an answer.
Anyway, some of the heuristic methods of virus scanners react to certain behaviour of applications. Behaviour such as mapping process memory in a strange way, fiddling with the import address table (you know what an IAT is, right? You being a Grand Master of "trojen virus" authorship and all) or headers of processes, doing dodgy things with window messages and hooks (disclaimer: these are examples, just in case you are about to froth up to hastily inform me you don't use hooks). These don't require virus signatures.
last edited by parabol at 21:21:27 22/Apr/10
Posted 09:59am 23/4/10
Incorrect. $30 doesn't buy you a ban, $30 buys you one of the most feature rich, most renowned bots the community has to offer. It currently is undetectable by warden has been since release. Pirox's bots are all auto-it based with memory reading and optional writing but no injection.
So tell me, what does this "$1000us auto-it script" have to offer over Pirox's pvptool?
Sounds like you shouldn't have been botting in the first place because the only way you can get banned is if you don't really know what you are doing. (speaking purely on pirox's behalf, not glider)
Posted 10:53am 23/4/10
Posted 10:57am 23/4/10
Posted 10:57am 23/4/10
Ahh, the Windows API?
That's if you're just looking up the process name derived from the executable. You can also get the window/class names, as well as do other things in an attempt at basic matching.
Posted 11:02am 23/4/10
Posted 11:05am 23/4/10
Posted 11:19am 23/4/10
The Windows API is fairly fundamental for most things a windows program will do. It's not a magical interface for doing admin/naughty stuff.
This.
Posted 11:30am 23/4/10
Posted 12:01pm 23/4/10
Posted 12:20pm 23/4/10
*sigh* The entire point of WINE is to provide an implementation of the Windows API :)
Posted 12:37pm 23/4/10
Posted 12:45pm 23/4/10