Update from June 24:
As right and important as the bans that Blizzard has issued for over 74,000 WoW Classic accounts in recent weeks were, it is now important that the developers stay on the ball and swing the next ban hammer in a timely manner. On the one hand because the last wave did not catch all cheaters by far according to the reports of various players, on the other hand the bot users seem to have already adjusted to the situation in view of the Black Lotus hotfix and to position characters with Herbalism skill 300 in the Lotus areas.

Black Lotus after the changes ;) from r/classicwow Look at these eager fellas farming 5min after serverrestart! from r/classicwow

How does it look like on your server? Are there also more bots around again? Did the ban wave bring any improvement at all? Tell us in the comments.

Original news from June 19:
Only yesterday, we criticized Blizzard in a column regarding their handling of bot users: The ban system works too unreliably, bots that have been reported multiple times can wreak havoc in Azeroth for months, and with the freshly introduced instance limit, the developers are also punishing many WoW fans who have never used unauthorized programs in WoW

.

And although all of these points of criticism remain valid (for now?!), we must now praise Blizzard. Because the developers have once again added. According to a post by community manager Kaivax in the official WoW forum, a wave of bans flushed numerous bot users out of the fantasy world of Azeroth last night. Specifically, over 74,000 accounts across all regions are said to have been completely closed or banned for violations of WoW's End User License Agreement (buy now €14.99 ) in the past month. Most account owners are said to have used unauthorized programs to automatically collect resources or kill enemies. And indeed, the ban wave is having an effect. Last night, there were significantly fewer characters in the WoW Classic dungeons than usual:

Stratholme, Whitemane Horde. 4PM. from r/classicwow

Kaivax continues to reveal that while there are large ban waves like the one last night, the team at Blizzard is actually working around the clock to fight bots. Many account closures have taken place in the middle of the night or on weekends in recent months. Kaivax explains that they definitely don't want to punish accounts of players who haven't done anything wrong. The only way to do that is through an appropriate control process, where someone manually collects evidence of a reported character's infraction.

And yes, there have been cases where characters have been reported, but they haven't used a bot at all

.

Likewise, there have been accounts that have been closed for exploiting a bot, and then the banned character has a new account and uses the same exploit under the same character name. Such examples can be frustrating to players who have made the reports, of course, because they feel that no action is being taken against reported bots.

The

challenge for Blizzard is also great for another reason, Kaivax said. The for-profit bot companies have only one goal: to bypass the game's security measures and get as much profit out of their business as possible. When accounts are banned, it falls on them as a budgeted cost of doing business. Blizzard is therefore continuing to work on improving the measures in order to take faster action against the cheaters. In the future, there should be more updates on the actions taken.

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