This is BS,I can't make a living on Duskwood server anymore.You guys are are working on new content,and you can't even slow down these mining hackers?I don't think Blizz cares at all,hell it would only take 1 gm on every realm to sit in trade and ban the "susan Express" guys,but they won't.Don't tell me that would be impossible,do you know how many ppl they have working on hacked accounts? IMO they are selling the gold,it's just too easy to fix for Blizzard not to have a hand in it,sorry if I'm wrong.These mining hackers are destroying the economic side of the game,as well as the gold sellers.These are the people who hack accounts.I f we got rid of the gold sellers there would be no need for hacking accounts,or using cheats.Blizzard could spend less time getting rid of the sellers than they spend repairing hacked accounts.I have seen nothing done by Blizzard to remove gold sellers,it's so easy to do,sit in trade perma ban the gold seller advertisers,and give them no credit for their lost timecard.It would be too expensive to keep spending $15 to advertise once and lose the account.Until I see something saying different,I will believe Blizzard has a hand in the gold sellers.So to sum up,fix the old problems before you bring new content,and do something about the gold seller,and the buyers for that matter...5,000 gold for runecloth on the AH? c'mon.

Yep, caught 4 of them in less than a half hour on my hunter while mining in wg. I put in tickets, but it takes blizz a day and a half (or longer) to even respond

Fix the mining hack? Be careful what you wish for. One day you may log in to discover that all the mining nodes have been removed from Sholazar Basin.

I just keep reporting the names I see doing it and hope Blizz will ban them. It should be pretty obvious that a lvl 60 can't legitimately be mining in a lvl 78ish zone.

Yea,I open tickets,as well,but it never does any good.The hackers know they have hours to mine and dump before a GM answers a ticket,they count on it.I've had a ticket open for 4 hours while this lvl 71 priest(Opsec,Duskwood) is taking all the nodes in WG,and loggin in and out.He's sending all that ore to someone,nail them both.We know they can trace everything that's done,they do it when you get hacked.We,as players,also have to not buy gold,and let others know it's not cool.I'd love to see some links or whatever to news about anything Blizz has done to get rid of gold sellers.I actually hope I'm wrong,and somebody points me to some,I would feel better knowing they were trying to fix it,like suing the websites,whatever to put a stop to goldsellers.How about after I pay$180.00 for a year of wow they send you a free authenticator? I already paid my $6.50 :)

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Q u o t e:
This is BS,I can't make a living on...

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I'm sorry, I stopped reading here. Make a living? Give me a break.

I sent a general tell in SB about a hacker, warning other players, and had a GM send a tell to me within seconds that they were on it.

RNG I guess. But they are out there taking care of it.

It took about 4 days to get someone to look at the last ticket I put in regarding someone hacking. When the survey came to my email I began to fill it out until i realized it was asking how this particular gm handled the issue. I have a hard time believing it's this individual's fault, yet I know somehow that the poor survey responses will somehow be used against him.

I truly do find fault with Blizzard in not handling these sort of things better. No, I'm not talking about monitoring trade chat, but with identifying hackers and hacked account, tracing the accounts they send in-game mail to, and the accounts listing the items on the AH. Seriously, how hard can that possibly be?

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Q u o t e:

Game masters handle a broad range of issues. It would take more than the entire staff of the game master department to monitor trade chat on every single realm 24 hours a day. It's quite clear this is a very inefficient way of doing things. It's very costly, requires too much man power, and ultimately wouldn't help to address the range of Terms of Use violations. Instead, we have great reporting systems and a hacks team dedicated to verifying exploits in the game via automated means to not only stop those who are doing it, but to help us develop methods for preventing the same types of exploits from recurring.

Granted, you may still come across people abusing the Terms of Use, however, I caution you not to use that as evidence that we're not constantly working through ways of stopping them, much less that we're complicit in the activities.

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Just a question..have you ever guys acknowledged that those mining bots and gold spammers aren't just a "person who is abusing the ToU", but shady companies, that employ real people to do their dirty gold? Identifying a hacking account won't do much help, if you don't realize that this account is not just of a bored person who wants to afk AV for marks, or mine saronite for their own use. You have to find a way to hit the problem to the core, eradicate the third party market that has evolved inside your game, not say "it's players who abuse the ToU"

I know it's not easy to do of course, and I admit I have 0 experience. You can't lawsuit a company in China or wherever they are. And when I get goldspammed, it's the exact same message, with 3 different URL's over the month, so their "services" are constantly getting their sites shut down, only to reappear under a different name.
i'm afraid that recruiting more GM's to do LIVE searches for bots and scammers would be much more effective, an in-game solution that you can control, instead of trying to go over courts and external ways of disabling those "services".

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Q u o t e:
it's so easy to do,sit in trade perma ban the gold seller advertisers,and give them no credit for their lost timecard.It would be too expensive to keep spending $15 to advertise once and lose the account.Until I see something saying different,I will believe Blizzard has a hand in the gold sellers.So to sum up,fix the old problems before you bring new content,and do something about the gold seller,and the buyers for that matter...5,000 gold for runecloth on the AH? c'mon.

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1. You're an idiot.

2. Most of those gold sellers are using stolen accounts taken from people who have been keylogged or tricked into releasing their information. Perma-Ban isn't a viable option.

The problem will only be resolved when people stop buying gold.

When I mine Ive reported four of these a day, bots going under the terrain using teleport or some sport of speed hack to jump from node to node. Eat some Blackened Worg Steak if you dont have track humanoids or check your combat log when you see nodes disappear in front of you.

However, Reporting these bots is not a solution and does not address the problem. These bots have been operating with impunity for a long time and tickets take forever to get addressed (even then sometimes the active bots have to be reported two or three times). Apparently you cant detect when someone is in one place then 2000 meters half a second later.

I would like to see something done about it, but untl it is I'll just continue to buy saronite and titanium and greatly reduced prices from these very miners because I cannot compete with them in resource gathering.

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Q u o t e:
This is BS,I can't make a living on Duskwood server anymore.You guys are are working on new content,and you can't even slow down these mining hackers?I don't think Blizz cares at all,hell it would only take 1 gm on every realm to sit in trade and ban the "susan Express" guys,but they won't.Don't tell me that would be impossible,do you know how many ppl they have working on hacked accounts? IMO they are selling the gold,it's just too easy to fix for Blizzard not to have a hand in it,sorry if I'm wrong.These mining hackers are destroying the economic side of the game,as well as the gold sellers.These are the people who hack accounts.I f we got rid of the gold sellers there would be no need for hacking accounts,or using cheats.Blizzard could spend less time getting rid of the sellers than they spend repairing hacked accounts.I have seen nothing done by Blizzard to remove gold sellers,it's so easy to do,sit in trade perma ban the gold seller advertisers,and give them no credit for their lost timecard.It would be too expensive to keep spending $15 to advertise once and lose the account.Until I see something saying different,I will believe Blizzard has a hand in the gold sellers.So to sum up,fix the old problems before you bring new content,and do something about the gold seller,and the buyers for that matter...5,000 gold for runecloth on the AH? c'mon.

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You understand that with the volume of business these guys get, a $30 vanilla WoW CD key for several hours of nonstop targeted advertisement to a population of millions is the cheapest ad space in the world, right? These guys spend tens of thousands on sponsored Google links and affiliate banners. Banning them achieves nothing in terms of cutting into their bottom line.

That said, I agree with you that a company raking in as much $$ as Blizzard could afford to put some better real-time human controls into the game, even if that is just one intern per realm monitoring trade channel and whispers. I'm guessing the task isn't so complex that one person couldn't handle the monitoring of 5-10 realms at once with some software to help red flag things for investigation based on keywords.

Blizz, want me to write the software for you? Wanna hire me? I'm not cheap, but I'll do a good job!

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Q u o t e:

Game masters handle a broad range of issues. It would take more than the entire staff of the game master department to monitor trade chat on every single realm 24 hours a day. It's quite clear this is a very inefficient way of doing things. It's very costly, requires too much man power, and ultimately wouldn't help to address the range of Terms of Use violations. Instead, we have great reporting systems and a hacks team dedicated to verifying exploits in the game via automated means to not only stop those who are doing it, but to help us develop methods for preventing the same types of exploits from recurring.

Granted, you may still come across people abusing the Terms of Use, however, I caution you not to use that as evidence that we're not constantly working through ways of stopping them, much less that we're complicit in the activities.

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I usually do not get involved in reporting people, but for a week I noticed this one character farming the fire elementals in one area. Night, Day, Early, Late, he was always there. I also noticed his patterns as being unnatural to a real player. I was there farming myself on an alt, but after I noticed him I went back a few times at odd times to check on him.

I was absolutely positive it was a bot, so I then reported him.

I checked back 24 hours later and he was gone. Have not seen him since.

I am no fan boy by any stretch, but I think they do a good job and try as to this from what I have seen.

While I'm sure Blizz is, at the very least, rolling around ideas on how to stop it, I'm getting pretty sick of it too.

I fly around WG looking for nodes, and they seem to be pretty scarce. Now, that could be chalked up to other players mining as well, but in one night I had three nodes stolen from me by some putz that was under the ground. Couldn't hit him with Frost Fever and Death Grip just gave an immune message.

I'm sure its a bit tricky to both figure out how to stop them in a way that won't affect actual players, but please Blizzard. Hurry and do something.

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Q u o t e:
These are the people who hack accounts.I f we got rid of the gold sellers there would be no need for hacking accounts,

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No, they would need to hack more accounts because there other account were banned, add to that it's not just gold sellers trying to hack accounts and break the game other people do it just to do it any one older than five should know this... Sometimes people find fun in just raising hell.

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Q u o t e:
Blizzard could spend less time getting rid of the sellers than they spend repairing hacked accounts.

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What the hell does this even mean? They have to repair accounts and deal with gold spammers among other things why do you happen to think they only ever do one thing at a time? Like they can jut wave their hands and all sellers heads will explode.

What kinds of things should a player be looking for for hacked accounts.

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Q u o t e:
Until I see something saying different,I will believe Blizzard has a hand in the gold sellers

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I'm sure this was just said in the heat of the emotion, but I've heard this theory a number of times, so I'll add my 2 cents. Just stop and think about it for 2 seconds. Why would blizzard take the time to hack someone's account, send away all their gold, then restore the gold/items to that person all so they could obtain a few thousand gold to sell? Wouldn't it be easier to just skip to the end and restore millions of gold to some dummy account and sell it directly from there?

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Q u o t e:



I'm sure this was just said in the heat of the emotion, but I've heard this theory a number of times, so I'll add my 2 cents. Just stop and think about it for 2 seconds. Why would blizzard take the time to hack someone's account, send away all their gold, then restore the gold/items to that person all so they could obtain a few thousand gold to sell? Wouldn't it be easier to just skip to the end and restore millions of gold to some dummy account and sell it directly from there?

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I absolutely do not think Blizzard has anything to do with hacking people's accounts.
I do think it is in some way, directly or indirectly, involved in the selling of gold.

That is why it makes things cost so much instead of requiring completion of quests.

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Q u o t e:

Game masters handle a broad range of issues. It would take more than the entire staff of the game master department to monitor trade chat on every single realm 24 hours a day. It's quite clear this is a very inefficient way of doing things. It's very costly, requires too much man power, and ultimately wouldn't help to address the range of Terms of Use violations. Instead, we have great reporting systems and a hacks team dedicated to verifying exploits in the game via automated means to not only stop those who are doing it, but to help us develop methods for preventing the same types of exploits from recurring.

Granted, you may still come across people abusing the Terms of Use, however, I caution you not to use that as evidence that we're not constantly working through ways of stopping them, much less that we're complicit in the activities.

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Its extremely tedious to report these issues(spamming) repeatedly when within 5 minutes they are back using a different account.
The problem I see, is that the spammers are using trial accounts to abuse the players with spam. You guys really need to end the free trial accounts in their current form. You need to use your sponsoring system (recruit a friend) to link a trial account with a full account. In addition, you should consider preventing users from having names like avsbdvbui, or vnymbv on account creation.

As for the mining hackers, I did report one, and they were gone within a day.

Unfortunatly, I don't think there is a way to stop these things.

Whenever Blizz develops a way to detect these hacks, a new one comes out within the next hours.

Blocking IP from china will result in the use of proxies or wathever.

Permabanning account will do nothing since its stolen account to start of.


And ouf course, people will never stop buying gold, sadly (you cant stop lazyness).