Blizzard Brings Banhammer Down on 100,000 WoW Accounts

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

The part about Bliz being somehow "better" then the rest of the industry just made me shake my head. If Bliz took so much more pride in their game than money, why are there paid max lvl boosts? Is that not in the same vein as a bot? Do nothing, get rewards. And really, I see WoW as the CoD of MMOs. It changes nothing on gameplay or innovation, just releases "more of the same", but with higher lvl caps.

The paid max lvl boosts aren't mandatory, nor intrusive and not being pushed on new subscribers. They added it in to attract people who want to play the newer content but have fallen behind and don't want to grind a character to 90, which is a lot of time. Its a time-saver and the way lvl boosts work, helps you learn your class basic mechanics for new players who may not want to play at the bottom. Its not botting, its just expediting and I don't feel slighted by it as a 10 year veteran (minus months here and there between expansions and patches). I don't see it as a bot because it doesn't max-level you, it puts you at 90 and lets you play from there on, it doesn't play the game for you or give you achieves aside from the useless "you got a level" achieve. A bot doesn't teach you to play your class either, the level boost allows you to become acquainted with your class and spec if you're new, and it doesn't take long to get through the intro anyway.
There's a world of difference between Vanilla WOW and today's WOW. Some people don't like it because the game is more accessible to new players, and of course resistant to change. But there have been many innovations with WoW. Cross-realm functionality for one thing I think is innovative as well as the dungeon queues. Some would argue that its taken a lot out of the social aspect of WoW, but I've never been happier grouping with a bunch of people who may or may not talk to me during the run. Dungeon Queue has done a lot to improve the game as has the changes to PVP queuing.
Talent trees being "simplified" really was a way for WoW to get rid of a system that was already cookie-cutter anyway. Back when the talent trees were huge and either by spec or full spectrum (depending on era) there was a lot of wasted space and talent points and very few builds helped a player have an advantage except the cookie cutter builds. So they removed a time-wasting thing by allowing players a few choices, sacrificing complexity for depth.
Innovative: Now players can choose talents that compliment the way they play their character (though there are some on each tree that are either useless or over/underpowered depending on which way you look at it).
Also WoW isn't releasing a new MMO every time it makes an expansion, so "more of the same" is going to be true in some way but it is not the same game it was 10 years ago, it just resembles it somewhat. And I'm glad a lot of it has been streamlined because the extraneous crap that was done away with really didn't add depth to the game, it made it more complicated and those aren't the same thing.
There are a lot of things on the Blizz digital store that are vanity items, and then the paid level boost isn't exactly cheap either. So its not a cheap bot that plays the game for you and dominates the competition, its a decision whether your time or money is worth more to you. It also takes a lot of power away from the totally risky services offered (which is a bannable offense if used and found out) by less-than-reputable folks who will "power level" your character, provided you give them your login info and password, which is stupid but people did it anyway.
Bots however will not ever be adopted by Blizz in any fashion. They want people playing their game, and they want to make it as fair as possible.
You may not think much of them just because of a paid level 90 character option, but in the long run it is not comparable to a EULA voiding 3rd party program that plays for you. Its a one-time deal and the rest is up to you. Trying to compare the two is ridiculous.
I trust Blizzard far more than every other company. I've known people who worked there and the passion the staff has for the game is phenomenal (as well as their other products). I've talked with GMs before about the game while waiting for them to fix an issue on a character, and they're pretty decent folks. The customer service is among the best I've ever encountered.
All in all I've found that they do love what they make and do what they can to make as many people who play the game happy as possible. Its impossible to please everyone all the time, but Blizz sure does well to keep loyal customers for 10 years on the same damn game and people are willing to keep paying subs for it. That says a lot about them as a company.
And yes the dropoffs have been steeper, but it happens and will continue to happen but I don't think it will kill the game anytime soon. I'm not done with this xpac but I'm waiting for the next patch (and some budget freedom) to play again.
And if they didn't take pride in their game, you'd get shit like Slaughtering Grounds the MMO, not a game that has outperformed every other title in its genre for 10 years running, and has made more money annually than any other game in the history of gaming. If Blizzard honestly didn't have love for WOW, all your gear would be microtransacitons (skip to this raid tier now!!! only $29.99!!). They'll never do something like that, which actually makes the game pay-to-win.
That would mean they don't give a damn anymore and just want money, but the most they do is sell vanity items such as mounts or transmog gear or pets, realm transfers for folks who want to move to lower or higher pop realms depending on what you want, faction changes for people tired of being on one side or the other... all of it is cosmetic except the level boost and that is so small a thing, so innocuous its almost ridiculous to use that as a knock against the dev's love for their product. If it was like $10 a character, then I might agree with you but the pricing as it is now means that they're not really expecting people to take advantage of it as often, only if they really feel they don't want to wait and have the money.
You may not agree with me and thats fine but my personal experience with Blizz has been much better than and more personal than with any other developer out there. I've never had a conversation with a developer as a customer before I met one of Blizz's top programmers, and the guy talked about the game less like a dev and more like someone who loved to PLAY WoW.

 

[Sarge034]

The paid max lvl boosts aren't mandatory, nor intrusive and not being pushed on new subscribers. They added it in to attract people who want to play the newer content but have fallen behind and don't want to grind a character to 90, which is a lot of time. Its a time-saver and the way lvl boosts work, helps you learn your class basic mechanics for new players who may not want to play at the bottom. Its not botting, its just expediting and I don't feel slighted by it as a 10 year veteran (minus months here and there between expansions and patches). I don't see it as a bot because it doesn't max-level you, it puts you at 90 and lets you play from there on, it doesn't play the game for you or give you achieves aside from the useless "you got a level" achieve. A bot doesn't teach you to play your class either, the level boost allows you to become acquainted with your class and spec if you're new, and it doesn't take long to get through the intro anyway.
There's a world of difference between Vanilla WOW and today's WOW. Some people don't like it because the game is more accessible to new players, and of course resistant to change. But there have been many innovations with WoW. Cross-realm functionality for one thing I think is innovative as well as the dungeon queues. Some would argue that its taken a lot out of the social aspect of WoW, but I've never been happier grouping with a bunch of people who may or may not talk to me during the run. Dungeon Queue has done a lot to improve the game as has the changes to PVP queuing.
Talent trees being "simplified" really was a way for WoW to get rid of a system that was already cookie-cutter anyway. Back when the talent trees were huge and either by spec or full spectrum (depending on era) there was a lot of wasted space and talent points and very few builds helped a player have an advantage except the cookie cutter builds. So they removed a time-wasting thing by allowing players a few choices, sacrificing complexity for depth.
Innovative: Now players can choose talents that compliment the way they play their character (though there are some on each tree that are either useless or over/underpowered depending on which way you look at it).
Also WoW isn't releasing a new MMO every time it makes an expansion, so "more of the same" is going to be true in some way but it is not the same game it was 10 years ago, it just resembles it somewhat. And I'm glad a lot of it has been streamlined because the extraneous crap that was done away with really didn't add depth to the game, it made it more complicated and those aren't the same thing.
There are a lot of things on the Blizz digital store that are vanity items, and then the paid level boost isn't exactly cheap either. So its not a cheap bot that plays the game for you and dominates the competition, its a decision whether your time or money is worth more to you. It also takes a lot of power away from the totally risky services offered (which is a bannable offense if used and found out) by less-than-reputable folks who will "power level" your character, provided you give them your login info and password, which is stupid but people did it anyway.
Bots however will not ever be adopted by Blizz in any fashion. They want people playing their game, and they want to make it as fair as possible.
You may not think much of them just because of a paid level 90 character option, but in the long run it is not comparable to a EULA voiding 3rd party program that plays for you. Its a one-time deal and the rest is up to you. Trying to compare the two is ridiculous.
I trust Blizzard far more than every other company. I've known people who worked there and the passion the staff has for the game is phenomenal (as well as their other products). I've talked with GMs before about the game while waiting for them to fix an issue on a character, and they're pretty decent folks. The customer service is among the best I've ever encountered.
All in all I've found that they do love what they make and do what they can to make as many people who play the game happy as possible. Its impossible to please everyone all the time, but Blizz sure does well to keep loyal customers for 10 years on the same damn game and people are willing to keep paying subs for it. That says a lot about them as a company.
And yes the dropoffs have been steeper, but it happens and will continue to happen but I don't think it will kill the game anytime soon. I'm not done with this xpac but I'm waiting for the next patch (and some budget freedom) to play again.
And if they didn't take pride in their game, you'd get shit like Slaughtering Grounds the MMO, not a game that has outperformed every other title in its genre for 10 years running, and has made more money annually than any other game in the history of gaming. If Blizzard honestly didn't have love for WOW, all your gear would be microtransacitons (skip to this raid tier now!!! only $29.99!!). They'll never do something like that, which actually makes the game pay-to-win.
That would mean they don't give a damn anymore and just want money, but the most they do is sell vanity items such as mounts or transmog gear or pets, realm transfers for folks who want to move to lower or higher pop realms depending on what you want, faction changes for people tired of being on one side or the other... all of it is cosmetic except the level boost and that is so small a thing, so innocuous its almost ridiculous to use that as a knock against the dev's love for their product. If it was like $10 a character, then I might agree with you but the pricing as it is now means that they're not really expecting people to take advantage of it as often, only if they really feel they don't want to wait and have the money.
You may not agree with me and thats fine but my personal experience with Blizz has been much better than and more personal than with any other developer out there. I've never had a conversation with a developer as a customer before I met one of Blizz's top programmers, and the guy talked about the game less like a dev and more like someone who loved to PLAY WoW.

Take a moment to look at how much you said to counter two points. Kindda getting a "fanboy" vibe here...

You can pay for a bot to play the game for you or you can pay to skip the game content. I don't see much difference, except for who you're paying that is.

CoD- "New" guns, "new" maps, "new/continued" story, UI improvements, fish AI, mo-cap dog
WoW- "New" gear, "new" areas, "new/continued" story, UI improvements
...
Damn, you're right. They are different. I'll start saying they're alike again when WoW gets fish AI and mo-caps a dog.

 

[Randomvirus]

100,000 is half the population of my city.

Their game, their rules, but really does botting actually hurt anything? It just lets people automate things that are time consuming. That's why we created computers in the first place.

 

[Hawki]

While I play neither, I don't think you can compare WoW to CoD. In WoW's case, it's a case of expansions being released for the same base game over time, so it's expected that the content will conform to the base game in some form or another. This has been an MMO template since at least the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In CoD, whatever differences may or may not exist between games, these are still full priced, independent games.

Anyway, I don't think WoW's going to go anywhere anytime soon, and for that, I point to the MMOs I mentioned above, both of which are still going. Even if WoW reached a point where it had, say, a few hundred thousand subscribers, that's still enough to be financially viable.

 

[NickBrahz]

Let's ban these bot users that will show them we mean business! ...but let's make it not a permanent ban, that should show them when a large chunk of the population by this point is bots especially now that you can bot to get gold to get gametime.

~1% is "a large chunk"?

I guess that would explain the "statistics" that tend to get thrown around in internet arguments.

Not that I doubt there are a fair number of people who have set up bots to play WoW for them, but their subscriber base is still, what, seven million? A few hundred thousand accounts is kind of negligible in comparison.

OT: Eh, as long as the people paying for the accounts don't get charged for the time they're banned (I'd assume not, but I've never been banned from battle.net so I wouldn't know), I find it hard to feel any sympathy for botters. They've been particularly annoying in Hearthstone lately.

%1 got banned, they didn't ban all the bots just to correct you that would of only made a tiny dent in the bot market for the game.
We can't speculate how much % really is bots and isn't all i can talk about is personal experience from when i played the game.

You also say 7 million people, yes but you have to take into account that that is 7 million over 3 different versions, and then in those versions are split into battlegroups and then into servers, so you interact with a fraction of that maybe a couple hundred thousand at most if you include all cross server stuff that that is being very generous.

When i played the game from Wrath til 2 days ago i last logged in (I play on and off large stretches i don't play admittedly).
- Every single PVP/Battleground, there is at least 1 or 2 bots per team so when you have 2-4+ bots in a 10-15 player match that is a significant chunk.
- Every time i would go to mine for some mats or something there would be a person standing in the middle of nowhere, and the millisecond a mining node would respawn it was already being mined.
- Anywhere on the map especially in cities and the zones around cities, is a lot of spam from bots trying to sell gold/mounts/etc.
- A lot of times you do a dungeon there is a bot so thats 1 person out of 5 people in that case, significant chunk.
- The above is the same for Raids, there can be 5 people maybe more botting out of 40 people, significant chunk.

So Blizzard banning what seems to be a tiny fraction of botters once in a blue moon, not even permanently is nothing, and the reason they rarely ban bots is because its to much effort and they lose money is they ban botters which pay them money though buying the game, subscribing etc.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Take a moment to look at how much you said to counter two points. Kindda getting a "fanboy" vibe here...

You can pay for a bot to play the game for you or you can pay to skip the game content. I don't see much difference, except for who you're paying that is.

CoD- "New" guns, "new" maps, "new/continued" story, UI improvements, fish AI, mo-cap dog
WoW- "New" gear, "new" areas, "new/continued" story, UI improvements
...
Damn, you're right. They are different. I'll start saying they're alike again when WoW gets fish AI and mo-caps a dog.

I'm also getting a "vibe" from your post. It is not conductive to anything but fostering resentment and anger. I'd like to keep the discussion respectful, which I have up to this point where I honestly feel you've disrespected me.
Sure I'm a fan of WoW. I won't hide that. I will however say that the way you used the word "fanboy" was dismissive of anything I said. This is a forum, not twitter and if I feel passionate about something, I may write a few paragraphs worth. Dismissing my post because of its length is ignorant too because I wasn't just countering points, I was offering my thoughts.
If you feel my thoughts have no worth, fine. But have some integrity to say it straight out. My feeling right now is that you don't care much for discussion, but are unwilling to walk away, so you take a parting shot at me. I'm not pissed off, but I am a bit annoyed. Its not so much that I care what you think of me rather that I won't let someone disrespect me and not say something about it. So I'll say what I have to say in response to your baiting: Leave the sarcasm and juvenile dismissals out next time if you want to be taken seriously or if you've something to say that has nothing to do with the discussion, and something to do with the person posting, say it. Or if you've nothing to add to the discussion, and just feel like attempting to be subtly rude, then drop the failed subtlety and say what you really mean. Like I'll come right out and say I think you're disrespectful, rude, and don't even have the gumption to say what you mean outright and your attempt at sarcastic responses comes off as juvenile.

Now to the discussion, which I'll continue whether I feel you want to or not because you've raised points I feel are incorrect in a factual way not philosophical. You've compared CoD to WoW in ways that are not comparable, and here's why they aren't:

WoW has improved their graphics but most of it has been reskinning and not using a whole new engine or rebuilding the game from the ground up, and some of the underlying mechanics but the core game is still the same as it was during Vanilla. Maps have changed but they needed to change and some parts were taken out. But I still play WoW the same and the way it works at the core is the same. Basically WoW is Warcraft 3's engine with a LOT of patches and updates, but at the core its still WC3.

WoW feels the same to me as it did the first day I played, with some streamlining, cutting away the things I rarely used anyway.
Warlods of Draenor is not "World of Warcraft part 5", its still the same game with an exception that the original vanilla questlines have been done away with and the original map has changed due to the introduction of the flight mechanic to the core world, thanks to Cataclysm.

CoD hasn't just reskinned their games and released them under a new title with new content, they're all different in core mechanics. I can say safely that playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare is not the same mechanically as playing Advanced Warfare. You don't get CoD 1-4, MW2, Blops 1 and 2, MW3, and Ghosts when you buy Advanced Warfare. And they don't all use the same core engine. They rebuild the engine to work for the newer game for the most part and the underpinning mechanics feel at least a bit different with each iteration. They may have a lot of the same features, but they don't play the same as previous entries and some of them have made me feel like I needed to relearn the game from scratch. I don't play Advanced Warfare the same why I play MW2, because they don't function the same way.

I still play WoW pretty much the same, there's more going on with the UI but I still move the same, jump the same, fly the same and I feel like I'm playing the same game I started with.

I will say that WoW has innovated by adding in phased areas, where the map changes dependent on what quests you've finished, but you're still technically on the same map as someone else on the same realm who may have completed more of the quests or none at all in comparison to your character.

I get it, you don't like WoW or CoD, but they're not comparable in any way except in that they're two of the top played games in the world, and you seem to not like either of them. One is the same game that came out in 2004 with patched additions and expansions and the other is a series.

Yes I wrote another lengthy post to counter your points. If you feel that is somehow the wrong way to go about it, go use twitter where there's a character limit since you seem to be unable to handle someone putting some thought into their responses and dismissing them as "fanboys" because they feel you're wrong or at the least not comprehending why you are wrong.

If you choose to continue discussion, again I'm going to ask you drop the condescension, failed subtle sarcasm, and actually discuss something instead of acting like a myopic juvenile. I'm perfectly willing to discuss things rationally, but if you aren't then don't bother replying.

 

[SecondPrize]

I remember how much it sucks to grind honor for your first pvp set when you hit level cap. I also remember how much it sucks when you start the match destined to lose because you've a bunch of selfish cunts on your team afk'ing or botting. Fuck em, should have been done long ago.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Temp 6 month ban. You might as well forget those accounts Blizzard. That's twice as long as it takes for someone to break your skinner-box mind conditioning. Once they're out... they don't want to get back in it.

Suggestion... maybe, maybe just maybe design your game with enough open-ness in game play to make using bots well.. not an issue. Anyone who's played wow kknows it's basically about jjust skill rotations. Make your mechanics a bit more challenging and maybe you won't have to worry about bots. I mean I remember around the time I quit I was doing DUngeons practically on Auto pilot. Had to keep playing tank role just to keep it interesting enough . Playing Healer literally made me fall asleep. DPS not much better.

Blizzard, you made your game so linear that it's practically a straight line now. Heck at least in the old days you could do something crazy like switch up your talent, See if you could find a way to make a dual wielding Tank work. Effecient no... but challenging and different enough to keep someone thinking and interested for a month or so.

 

[NickBrahz]

I remember how much it sucks to grind honor for your first pvp set when you hit level cap. I also remember how much it sucks when you start the match destined to lose because you've a bunch of selfish cunts on your team afk'ing or botting. Fuck em, should have been done long ago.

I loved back when you could buy gear if you had the currency even if you couldn't wear it, i only played Alliance back then and the Call to Arms weekends was just added, nothing was better then being level say 50 doing a weekend of AV on the CTA and walking away with a full set of basic pvp gear waiting for you at level 80 and gaining 5-10 levels.

 

[shrekfan246]

Snip

You apparently had incredibly bad luck, because aside from gold spammers, over my own five and a half years of playing the game I rarely saw bots in the actual game world. Certainly never running dungeons or raids, though I can't say the same for PvP. EDIT: And I played on servers that were frequently listed as being "High" population (one of them occasionally even had a queue to log in).

Or, in other words, anecdotal evidence isn't really enough to start making huge generalizations like that. Like you said, the average player interacts with a mere fraction of the overall population actually playing WoW. Some people are going to run into a higher number of bots than others. Sorry you have apparently seen so many over your time.

(Also, 40-man raids stopped being a thing after Vanilla. Raids in BC and up wouldn't let more than 10/25 people in, and it wasn't until, what, the end of Mists that they finally put in the flexible raid system? And in 40-man raids, a good ten of those people tended to be useless and just there as warm bodies to throw at a boss anyway.)

EDIT: I will grant that I can't speak for how it's gone in the past year and a half or so. Maybe nowadays LFR is full of bots. But it wasn't back when I used it.

 

[Fiad]

Got an email saying I was banned. Dont even play WoW.

 

[Merlark]

Bottom line is they will find you? it seems they have been running this bot program since 2010...I think 5 years is a pretty good run.

Cheat your butts off I say, by the time they detect it you will probably not be playing the game anyways of if so my lord how much DO you need to bot in that game? lol.

MMO's are pretty helpless when it comes to these things, bravo for shutting one down but its far from eliminating the bulk that probably exist i'm sure. this short of thing is more for public scare then anything, the admins are always at a disadvantage when it comes to not only detecting but stopping them.

 

[Aeshi]

Suggestion... maybe, maybe just maybe design your game with enough open-ness in game play to make using bots well.. not an issue. Anyone who's played wow kknows it's basically about jjust skill rotations. Make your mechanics a bit more challenging and maybe you won't have to worry about bots. I mean I remember around the time I quit I was doing DUngeons practically on Auto pilot. Had to keep playing tank role just to keep it interesting enough . Playing Healer literally made me fall asleep. DPS not much better.

Blizzard, you made your game so linear that it's practically a straight line now. Heck at least in the old days you could do something crazy like switch up your talent, See if you could find a way to make a dual wielding Tank work. Effecient no... but challenging and different enough to keep someone thinking and interested for a month or so.

And because WoW is so simple and easy you will, naturally, have no problem whatsoever posting a link to your main character's armory page so we can see that you've completed all the hardest content in the game, right?

Well, unless you're yet another Hypocrite who whines about the game being "too easy/casual" yet has never done anything beyond LFR, that is.

Also:

Temp 6 month ban. You might as well forget those accounts Blizzard. That's twice as long as it takes for someone to break your skinner-box mind conditioning. Once they're out... they don't want to get back in it.

Feel free to explain how WoW's "eeeeeevil mind control" gameplay of "do the same task multiple times for a reward that isn't 100% guaranteed" is different to any other Video Game's gameplay of "do the same task multiple times for a reward that isn't 100% guaranteed", by the way.

Because I've asked that question to just about every "SKINNER BOX SKINNER BOX HURRRR" spouter, and none of them have been able to answer that, possibly because "Skinner Box" is a thing so loosely defined that it could feasibly be applied to any activity that has ever existed, ever, that they just heard the term from Extra Credits and are now slapping the term on any game that's cool to hate on at the moment.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Temp 6 month ban. You might as well forget those accounts Blizzard. That's twice as long as it takes for someone to break your skinner-box mind conditioning. Once they're out... they don't want to get back in it.

Suggestion... maybe, maybe just maybe design your game with enough open-ness in game play to make using bots well.. not an issue. Anyone who's played wow kknows it's basically about jjust skill rotations. Make your mechanics a bit more challenging and maybe you won't have to worry about bots. I mean I remember around the time I quit I was doing DUngeons practically on Auto pilot. Had to keep playing tank role just to keep it interesting enough . Playing Healer literally made me fall asleep. DPS not much better.

Blizzard, you made your game so linear that it's practically a straight line now. Heck at least in the old days you could do something crazy like switch up your talent, See if you could find a way to make a dual wielding Tank work. Effecient no... but challenging and different enough to keep someone thinking and interested for a month or so.

And because WoW is so simple and easy you will, naturally, have no problem whatsoever posting a link to your main character's armory page so we can see that you've completed all the hardest content in the game such as the Mythics right?

Well, unless you're yet another Hypocrite who whines about the game being "too easy/casual" yet has never done anything beyond LFR, that is.

Considering I haven't played WoW since just before MOP came out... I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that. My last impression of the game was just... boredom. It was like a deskjob at the office. Something that's 80% rote.

 

[Aeshi]

Considering I haven't played WoW since just before MOP came out... I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that. My last impression of the game was just... boredom. It was like a deskjob at the office. Something that's 80% rote.

How awfully convenient for you.

But my point still stands: Did you actually try/do any of the hardest content Cataclysm had to offer?

Or were you (again), yet another Hypocrite who whined about the game being "too easy/casual" yet never bothered doing anything beyond basic questing/instances?

 

[MonsterCrit]

Considering I haven't played WoW since just before MOP came out... I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that. My last impression of the game was just... boredom. It was like a deskjob at the office. Something that's 80% rote.

How awfully convenient for you.

But my point still stands: Did you actually try/do any of the hardest content Cataclysm had to offer?

Or were you (again), yet another Hypocrite who whined about the game being "too easy/casual" yet never bothered doing anything beyond basic questing/instances?

What do you think? I mean the fact that you believe anyone who does not share your love and enthrallment must not know what thy're talking about says a lot about your own standpoint.

As for convenient. In a way it was. What took me out of WoW was a hurricane screwing up the internet in my region for about a month. So I couldn't play wow and in that Month I came to realize that I was playing not out of challenge, exploration, excitement or enjoyment, but habit. A month off was enough to break the routines tI'd gotten into and even when the internet came back to proper DSL speeds... I realized I didn't want to get back into that sort of habit again.

Around the same time I started experiementing with Steam and GoG.. the rest as they say is history. I found was to spend $10 a month that provided actual enjoyment and excitement for that month maybe even longer. I haven't been back to WoW since. and given the way Blizzard's numbers have been leaking... so are more and more players. I

 

[Aeshi]

What do you think? I mean the fact that you believe anyone who does not share your love and enthrallment must not know what thy're talking about says a lot about your own standpoint.

Saying someone probably shouldn't be complaining about a game being "too easy" when they (seemingly) haven't actually bothered to try any of the harder content in said game: Now a sign of "enthrallment" apparently.

 

[MonsterCrit]

What do you think? I mean the fact that you believe anyone who does not share your love and enthrallment must not know what thy're talking about says a lot about your own standpoint.

Saying someone probably shouldn't be complaining about a game being "too easy" when they (seemingly) haven't actually bothered to try any of the harder content in said game: Now a sign of "enthrallment" apparently.

Again you're making assumptions and showing your enthrallment. The fact that I can say I found the game to be linear, boring and unchallenging seems to be the issue you're focusing on. Your experience may have been different but my own experience is still valid.

 

[Lightknight]

Interesting. I wonder if that equates to millions in lost revenue for Blizzard? 100,000 at $15/account? Maybe this is intentionally timed with their release of a method to convert gold into game time?

I've never understood the point of using a bot in a subscription-based MMO...you're literally paying to not play a game. >.>

If you find it so much of a chore to play that you would use a bot...why even play?

I do find it pretty humorous that the maker of the bot basically said "Yeah, this is a minor set-back. We'll work on the issue and get back to letting you use a bot as soon as we can."

A lot of the gameplay is just grinding or a chore to maintain your character. With something automating that, you can instead spend your real life time doing the things you really want to do like raiding instances instead of mining a certain type of ORE for hours on end. You still have to mine and collect other resources, so they basically figured out a way not to do the chores that MMOs create.

 

[Sarge034]

Spoiler: Wall of text

I'm also getting a "vibe" from your post. It is not conductive to anything but fostering resentment and anger. I'd like to keep the discussion respectful, which I have up to this point where I honestly feel you've disrespected me.
Sure I'm a fan of WoW. I won't hide that. I will however say that the way you used the word "fanboy" was dismissive of anything I said. This is a forum, not twitter and if I feel passionate about something, I may write a few paragraphs worth. Dismissing my post because of its length is ignorant too because I wasn't just countering points, I was offering my thoughts.
If you feel my thoughts have no worth, fine. But have some integrity to say it straight out. My feeling right now is that you don't care much for discussion, but are unwilling to walk away, so you take a parting shot at me. I'm not pissed off, but I am a bit annoyed. Its not so much that I care what you think of me rather that I won't let someone disrespect me and not say something about it. So I'll say what I have to say in response to your baiting: Leave the sarcasm and juvenile dismissals out next time if you want to be taken seriously or if you've something to say that has nothing to do with the discussion, and something to do with the person posting, say it. Or if you've nothing to add to the discussion, and just feel like attempting to be subtly rude, then drop the failed subtlety and say what you really mean. Like I'll come right out and say I think you're disrespectful, rude, and don't even have the gumption to say what you mean outright and your attempt at sarcastic responses comes off as juvenile.

You had some good talking points, but also a lot of fluff. In my experience, with Nintendo and Valve "fanboys" (note- I define "fanboy" as someone driven to defend their favorite thing to the exclusion of all counter points. IE, open minded intelligent discussion.) mostly, I find that if someone offers a huge counter argument to a few points they're trying to obfuscate the discussion and, in general, don't actually respond to the points being made. Like you failed to address this one... "You can pay for a bot to play the game for you or you can pay to skip the game content. I don't see much difference, except for who you're paying that is." If that's not the case and you're willing to discuss things with an open mind as opposed to carrying the WoW banner till you die, then I'm game. But I would ask you start spoiler boxing your posts, this shit's gonna get looooooong.

Now to the discussion, which I'll continue whether I feel you want to or not because you've raised points I feel are incorrect in a factual way not philosophical. You've compared CoD to WoW in ways that are not comparable, and here's why they aren't:

WoW has improved their graphics but most of it has been reskinning and not using a whole new engine or rebuilding the game from the ground up, and some of the underlying mechanics but the core game is still the same as it was during Vanilla. Maps have changed but they needed to change and some parts were taken out. But I still play WoW the same and the way it works at the core is the same. Basically WoW is Warcraft 3's engine with a LOT of patches and updates, but at the core its still WC3.

WoW feels the same to me as it did the first day I played, with some streamlining, cutting away the things I rarely used anyway.
Warlods of Draenor is not "World of Warcraft part 5", its still the same game with an exception that the original vanilla questlines have been done away with and the original map has changed due to the introduction of the flight mechanic to the core world, thanks to Cataclysm.

CoD hasn't just reskinned their games and released them under a new title with new content, they're all different in core mechanics. I can say safely that playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare is not the same mechanically as playing Advanced Warfare. You don't get CoD 1-4, MW2, Blops 1 and 2, MW3, and Ghosts when you buy Advanced Warfare. And they don't all use the same core engine. They rebuild the engine to work for the newer game for the most part and the underpinning mechanics feel at least a bit different with each iteration. They may have a lot of the same features, but they don't play the same as previous entries and some of them have made me feel like I needed to relearn the game from scratch. I don't play Advanced Warfare the same why I play MW2, because they don't function the same way.

I still play WoW pretty much the same, there's more going on with the UI but I still move the same, jump the same, fly the same and I feel like I'm playing the same game I started with.

I will say that WoW has innovated by adding in phased areas, where the map changes dependent on what quests you've finished, but you're still technically on the same map as someone else on the same realm who may have completed more of the quests or none at all in comparison to your character.

And I would ask how is that different from CoD? Sure CoD has a new engine every once in a while, they're new games in an industry where pixels > gameplay quality and WoW is the same game being updated. But here's the thing, I could take "WoW" out of almost everything you said and replace it with "CoD". CoD iterations are little more than expansions when you think about it. The graphics get a bump, the game mechanics get a tweak here and there, new areas, new skills added to the old ones, short story addition, ect, but in terms of core gameplay they're the same. The reason I compare the two is simply because I feel that WoW is dying a slow CoD death. There will always be those people who buy them, but eventually people tire of the same thing rehashed over and over again. Factually speaking, the numbers prove that. New content brings people back, they play it, and leave when it's boring again. Same thing's happening with CoD, and Titenfall, and Destiny, and any other thing that's super hype but low content/replay value.

I get it, you don't like WoW or CoD, but they're not comparable in any way except in that they're two of the top played games in the world, and you seem to not like either of them. One is the same game that came out in 2004 with patched additions and expansions and the other is a series.

First, see above. Second, I enjoyed my time on WoW when I was playing with friends, but we all look for different things in games. I hate the solo MMO grind, it's boring to me. That's why I dropped WoW, that's why I didn't buy Final Fantasy after my friend got me to play the trial, and why I enjoy the hell outta SWTOR. WoW doesn't cater to me and that's fine, but I see it as just rehashing content and ideas, milking the user base for all it's worth (I absolutely hate subs, btw.) until the pot runs dry. As for CoD, I absolutely love CoD4. That's my baby. It feels like a tight arena shooter and I really like that. Every iteration since then has, in my opinion, served to kill the fast paced nature of the game. More intricate levels means more corner campers. Stronger perks (IE nuke, moab, et all) serve to promote camping and kill farming. Homogenized weapon characteristics (IE SMGs with similar dmg and range to ARs, all weapons having low recoil, higher fire rate, ect) serve to take a level tactical intuition out of the game. It evolved from something I enjoyed to something I didn't and yes, I'm a little bitter about that.

Yes I wrote another lengthy post to counter your points. If you feel that is somehow the wrong way to go about it, go use twitter where there's a character limit since you seem to be unable to handle someone putting some thought into their responses and dismissing them as "fanboys" because they feel you're wrong or at the least not comprehending why you are wrong.

As long as you actually counter my point, write away. Again... "You can pay for a bot to play the game for you or you can pay to skip the game content. I don't see much difference, except for who you're paying that is."

If you choose to continue discussion, again I'm going to ask you drop the condescension, failed subtle sarcasm, and actually discuss something instead of acting like a myopic juvenile. I'm perfectly willing to discuss things rationally, but if you aren't then don't bother replying.

Be careful with the descriptors there buddy. I'll give you that I was condescending, but I wasn't being sarcastic nor juvenile. I've just beat my head against the wall enough with diehard fans to be weary when it looks like one wants to discuss things. But regardless, in all my posts I laid down my points based in and backed up by facts.

But just look at your rational in post 21 as to why I mighta thought you were a "fanboy". Your only retort to the lvl bost was it wasn't mandatory and some folks just didn't want to fall behind. A bot isn't mandatory and people use it to advance their character. If you can't see that particular connection I worry I'm starting to bruise my head again.