Thousands of World of Warcraft accounts have been shut down by Blizzard as it moves to stop people using "bots" to play the game
Blizzard announced it had banned a "large number" of accounts in a message posted to the game's online forums.
The accounts had been discovered using programs, called "bots", that automate gameplay, said Blizzard.
This violated the game's terms of use and gave bot users an unfair advantage, it added.
"Cheating of any form will not be tolerated," said the message.
Blizzard did not reveal how many accounts had been shut down. However, a widely-shared screengrab of a conversation between a player and a customer service rep suggested that about 100,000 accounts had been closed.
The ban will be in force for six months, said Blizzard.
The action is likely to hit many people who play World of Warcraft simply to get in-game gold that they can later sell to other players. These players often use bots to automate the repetitive steps needed to complete quests or other actions that generate gold.
However, gaming news site Kotaku said the large number of banned accounts was likely to have caught more casual players who use third-party programs to automate the work characters in the game must do to refine raw materials or produce desirable crafted items.

Full story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32757289Heard about this the other day and its good to some extent to keep cheats out, however I know the pain of having to get specific mats for a piece of gear, the auction house extremely overpriced even if you have gold to buy the mats vs farm/gather them in game, and I have used automation in the past to grind some thorium nodes in un'goro crater etc in which you could simply have your character a sneaky rogue with invisibility to avoid dinosaur aggro running around the crater and by the time you make a full loop the spawn time of the nodes was perfect for an automated script to just run and gather so that I wasnt wasting hours of my life gathering mats when I could be getting other things done and enjoy the fun part of the game vs the grind part of the game.

I stopped doing this years ago though during the BC days ( Burning Crusade ) around 2008 when I was playing around with a memory tool on my system and saw that Blizzard in addition to running the game was actively scanning memory addresses as an anti-cheat / anti-SQL value injection method.

At this time I didnt get caught running a custom macro I created with JitBit, but stopped when I saw the sneaky behind the scenes memory scanner that is a traffic cop for specific memory addresses that its guarding injection of which was coded into their game client. I was thinking that as long as my characters actions were not on a repetitive cycle that I wouldnt get caught and so I wouldnt have my character grinding for hours and hours which would bring attention to my characters actions of only playing hours and hours to grind metal ore nodes, but was sporadic in letting it run for maybe an hour or 2 every few days to be not as cyclic and appear to be a human player grinding for 1 or 2 hours.

I stopped and havent used a bot with any blizzard game ever since finding out about this since I didnt want to be banned from my account that had so much time and effort placed into my characters.

Later it was pointed out to me that their lengthy multiple agreement EULA even stated about these memory scanners being resident and it was written as such that if you do not agree to these that you should uninstall the game and stop playing pretty much.

Here is more info on the memory scanning that they perform: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/13987330036


As well as an application gathering API they run to look for bots / cheatware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_%28software%29

Bots though were getting out of hand for the last 2 years of gaming with World of Warcraft. I up until the recent Resto Druid nerf was a healer for groups and I would get into a RANDOM group of "people" and you would have a tank that is unresponsive, charging ahead, not keeping up with the pace of the game, and being a royal pain. It got to a point that people were asking the tank "Are you a Bot?" and no response since it was a bot. Someone was using a bot program to level their characters to max level without actually playing. To make matters worse, Blizzard has the instances coded as such that you can not kick someone from the group while in combat, so here we are a group of real people trying to get rid of a bot player and the only opportunity to do so is when combat has ended, but with a tank bot that doesnt take a BREAK, the only option is to leave group in which now real players get a lock out from entering another instance because there is a time penalty for leaving instances during the fighting. So you queue up for another instance when that time penalty wears off and hope not to get mixed up with that bot or any other bot. Once I left group, paid the time penalty waiting for it to wear off and WENT back in and got grouped with the same darn bot. That was very frustrating that there was such a lack of tanks playing that I got mixed up with the same tank again.

More info on time penalty "Deserter Debuff" here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1549668906

I totally agree with this statement from this link: Quote

Why penalize someone for being unlucky to be grouped with several horrible useless players?

Even if say you didn't ...which Kellogs product did you use ? ?...There's a bunch of them...