[OT] Logitech Gaming Keyboard + WoW = Ban

[RogerRamjet]

Surely its common sense though. He's capped, killing lvl25 mobs. Theres no real benefit for him.

Still, the fuckers deleted my account coz i didnt play for a few months

[a4nic8er]

well i for one know many botters who dont get caught mainly cuz apparently bliz has this really odd way of checking; that is, if ur afk-fishing (to lvl that prof skill), someone will notice and may just report u. soon thereafter, a gm char or a gm on a non-gm char will randomly just private message u; if u dunt reply then ur flagged as a botter and ur suspended while they review their logs (for patterns as in repeating clicks, movement, item usage/spell castings, etc.).

i had initialy thought this was just a joke as it was first told to me via a guildie but appparently it is real (cuz i tried it; just stook in rachet and fished for an hour without moving then some gm dm's me saying "botting is bannable" to which i replied "hah im not botting im just watching tv while i fish")

And he was unlucky enough not to be looking at his game screen when the GM DM'd him. From then on it became that GM's word against his.

[mdares]

And he was unlucky enough not to be looking at his game screen when the GM DM'd him. From then on it became that GM's word against his.

well pretty much yes. i know someoen who got a temp ban for going afk for a little while in AV cuz he had to go pay the pizza dude.

pretty wank policies if u ask me. ever since playing wow i stopped worrying about kk's policies... its a lot mroe lenient and SENSIBLE. (minus the "cant replace ur stuff - heres 100k gg no re" rule =p)

[Toxen]

*pokes nid* Shame on you.

Anyway there is a difference between macro's and store key sequences aka shortcuts, and that is the simple fact a set sequence of keys been reduced to a single key isn't a macro in the terms of the gaming community macro, its a shortcut nothing more northing less. It doesn't actively play the game for you with out you attending to it.

take for example the common requirement of games needing shift to be held down to allow you to run (we'll ignore the autowalk /autorun commands of neocron for the moment) would you say using your coffee cup to hold down the shift key while you pressed the move forward button is a macro? course not, now if you had 1 key that pressed both the shift and the forward at the same time, you'd use it wouldn't you, yes you would.

Now if someone wrote a script that would hold down shift and move forward after you started it and it didn't require you to be there that would be a macro.

[Apocalypsox]

Its a sad day when people on the neocron forums when people talk freely about WoW...

[Morganth]

Playing Devil's Advocate here (I shudder to think I'm defending the Wow guys ), why shouldn't he be banned? Macroing is macroing, whether it's done using third party software that transmits spoofed key and mouse strokes or whether it's a piece of hardware doing exactly the same thing. The fact is that he used an automated mechanism that provided him benefit without him actually being there and that's clearly against of their (and our) terms of use.

N

Did you not notice the part where he stated he was at the PC, just not watching the screen?

I've reported a fair number of botters in my time playing WoW, and the easiest way to detect them is to sit there with a stop watch and time the intervals between their cast cycles, and how often they visit the same spot. WoW bot programs have a nasty tendancy of not being like a human playing the game at all, as they have no ability to be random (as chances are, the person running the bot has figured out the combination of spells/actions required to kill a specific mob they want to farm) or to respond to other players interacting. So if I attacked a mob at the same time as a botter, the botter would continue as if the mob was his (loot goes to the person who has the mobs aggro and did the most damage roughly). If this was a real person, no doubt they'd say something, or pick another mob.

Now, had the Blizzard GMs taken this into account, they could have timed the frequency of his action cycles, and noticed that there was probably a variety of time lapses between him changing weapons to level another skill. Seeing as no program can pull data straight out of the game (mods use Blizzard made function calls, or chat channels to work), a third party program wouldn't be able to know when the skill had reached the maximum, and therefore to change. Well, now you are probably thinking that all you'd have to do is work out how long it would take to get the last 30 odd levels, add a bit more, and leave it going for that period of time. Shame leveling weapon skills is based on a random algorithm (as random as a PC can go anyway), therefore it could take you 10 mins, or an hour. Try factoring that into your program. They might have noticed that he pressed a button after a different period of time and they can easily have kicked him from the server, and questionned him as soon as he reconnected. He'd have also noticed if the mob he was grinding on had been killed, and would have found another target. If the watching GM had been smart, he could have done this, and then contacted the player when he started moving (obviously having to be at the computer in order to not be botting), hence giving him a warning instead of jumping the gun.

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[Doc Holliday]

however you cut its pretty funny that its happened. besides. blizzard has enough people in its player base. they can afford to do ban someone without a second thought. he did argue his case nicely. i read this article on clanbase with a little more info on it. plus his blog. all in all it sucks but then any kind of afk/macro/bot/thingy is pretty lame hardware or not. and you cant spin the "its advertised for wow" because i could sell aimbots on the net for q4 and everyone could think they pwn q4 till they get caught. if anyones interested in this sort of thing (the thread subject) the unreal admins forum is well worth a read. people get caught aimbotting by utan and they come up with some fantastic excuses as to why. this guy at least argued with a reasonable sense of intelligence. for that i do pity the fact he got banned.

If you wanna be 1337 you need to be too young to get a job or on the dole and alienate everyone who knows you except people who help u in games to gain more xp/cash/1337 items and lets face it everyone should know that. its the most basic principles of mmorpgs.

[Odin]

But then, Nid, consider what he also said; that there is nothing in the TOS that disallows the use of keyboards of that type, and the one he has was advertised as being compatible with WoW.

Blizzard went for the neck too quickly, IMO.

Logitech advertises it falsely as such. Blizzard has come out multiple times on their forums stating they will not support the G-15 and keyboards of it's ilk. That's why I avoided using the keys on my G-15 for such. Was only a matter of time before they started banning. Unfortunately, I cannot take this guy at his word as is my take I've seen too many people state 'their' story as something completely different then what actually happened.

[Paper Dragon]

Logitech advertises it falsely as such. Blizzard has come out multiple times on their forums stating they will not support the G-15 and keyboards of it's ilk. That's why I avoided using the keys on my G-15 for such. Was only a matter of time before they started banning.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that, heh. Thanks for pointing it out.

Unfortunately, I cannot take this guy at his word as is my take I've seen too many people state 'their' story as something completely different then what actually happened.

On this we'll have to agree to disagree; what I've seen and experience of Blizzard's CS in the past has been nothing short of disgusting. For a company of that size to ignore and pawn off its customers with mere "looking at it" when repeated harassment petitions are sent, well....

Thankfully I've never had this issue with Neocron.

[Bugs Gunny]

Hmm, i wonder how many of the GM's and KK's employees actualy play more than 6 hours of wow a week.....

[Odin]

Hmm, i wonder how many of the GM's and KK's employees actualy play more than 6 hours of wow a week.....

I have a 60 priest, 56 rogue and 54 pally on there before I cancelled my account a month or 2 back.

[Sylow]

Not that I condone macroing and all that, but from a company standpoint, as long as the guy is paying his monthly fee why should they care? Why deny your company money based on something that is relatively harmless, and equivalent to him sitting in front of the keyboard doing the same procedure himself. Just my 2 bits...

Simply: a small number of bot-users manage to gain a massive advantage. A huge number of players notice that the small number gained the advantage, feels that they can't compete, are frustrated and leave.

Now you have lost a large portion of your playerbase, instead of a small one.

Additionally, bot-using (as well as exploiting and abusing) gets people ahead very fast, making them loose out much content and leaving them with a "finished" game in very little time. Since the bot also didn't make friends, what is there to keep them in the game? Probably not much, so they will move on to another game. (Even faster if they realize that there are other bot-users who did the same and theiy whole great "achievement" is nothing special...)

Thus, throwing those out also makes sense from a pure business point of view and even more sense from a honest players or gameleaders point of view. You loose a few months of subscription of a small part of your playerbase while the players who could be pissed off by the abuse is much larger and is likely to also still stay for much longer.

I have a 60 priest, 56 rogue and 54 pally on there before I cancelled my account a month or 2 back.

And it even makes good sense. Would the KK employees _not_ take a look at other MMORPGs around, i would consider them ignorant and / or incompetent.

And to the topic again, it is incredibly easy to detect such stuff. As already mentioned, there are among others:
- not reacting to tells (i would dare to assume, he got and missed more than one.)
- not reacting in a "sentient" way to happenings in his surroundings. (Removing or stealing his monster and still seeing him issue the attack commands, spawning an absolutely terrible monster and see his reaction, etc... If he reacts and curses, you appologize for the mistake, resurrect him, give him a few gold coins and he's happy again.)
- absolutely fixed timing of commands. (And i even dare to assume, the guy had the weapon switch on a timer, too... let the char train one weapon for 15 minutes, switch to the next. After an hour, take a look on how skills are, adjust the bot/keyboard accordingly to train for the next hour...)

Might sound harsh, i don't have any love for WoW (left of boredom and disappointment of massive design flaws after two months) but i think that Blizzard is doing the right thing by directly punishing any exploiter and not giving in to begging and nagging. [Though, if i was them, i would get rid of their macro-system. At least while i played, it was a direct and open invitation to abuse and exploit without using any tools outside of the game.]

[Rage]

All said and done. they lost a good gammer + money. Yeah they mighta gained ah lil negative feedback from all this or that but i get what Nidhogg is saying. It's really to many ppl to pay that much attention. Still sad it happened over a Programable Keyboard.

And yeah, but still... a lil warning woulda been helpful. keep in mind that is still a loyal and also paying customer.

NC has been alot closer to its gammers though.. but Bliz is a bigger company (I guess) ...NC always impress me though. So far its been real nice

But a quick fact, tha bigger a company is the less it cares about its customers. Money, time and effort seems to be the biggest factors. Although Geico Ins. as been pretty nice to me ( no plug intended ) but they base they company off good P.R.

P.R. stands for Public Relations ( jus for those thats like P.R. ? )

And dealing with businesses and having my own... you not gone keep good customers. Now this longrun ...ppl that stay with you for a long time. You might keep picking up new ppl that stay w/ you for a year or less but thats not positive.

All said..they coulda handled that lil bit better

[Skusty]

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[unreal]

heh, Yeah. I have the Logitech G7 (was thinking of getting the G5 but thought meh, the G7 looks a touch nicer, and the whole fast rechargable battery pack thing). Haven't really used those buttons that much lately to be honest, if i'm Para'd I usually end up taking concentrated antishock drugs as the only character I PvP at the moment if my Pistol Spy; with crap runspeed a Spy would be dead pretty fast.