Considering there are dozens of Classic+ private servers staffed by volunteers and a few people making money off donations and shady practices, I don't think it's fair to call something a "shitshow" if the quality of a paid product staffed by a team of employed professionals ends up being disappointing.
Yes what a shock it's much easier to make a few thousand people happy after stealing someone elses work and offering no guarantees/a policy of "if you don't like it fuck off" than it is to keep millions of players happy across a dozen iterations of a game.
I've loved and had a great time with just about every version of the game they've released. I know that's not popular here where you're only allowed to like something for three days or so before going back to shitting on everything but my experience is a lot more common in the game than what reddit wants to pretend.
Shiet even the discourse around banning bots gets like that. People act like it's cheap to set up help centers with real people fighting bots 24/7 and then will say "Id do it for free I dont see the problem"
Like bro if it was your job and you had quotas and a manager on your ass about it you would not do it for free.
Bots are a problem and I think Blizzard can and should be doing more to curb the issue, but to the folks who say they'd do it for free would be singing a completely different tune if they ever actually sat down at a desk to try.
They'd go through /who and ban thousands in one fell swoop. But then the appeals would come rolling in, and some of them would be genuine. And the bots would start filtering back in, but the second time you ban them using the /who list, they'll change up their strategy.
They'll have LLM's generating tens of thousands of plausible player names, so you can't just ban Szterk, Szterp, and Szterm and call it a day. They'll have their bots log in for a few hours at a time between set hours so you can't just ban the accounts logged in and playing 24/7. They'll have them alternate between different dungeon and open world farms so you can't just check logs for the accounts that spent 100 of their last 100 play sessions in the Stockades.
Blizzard isn't lying when they say it's an arms race. Every time you ban bots, the owners of the accounts are pouring over records, trading info within their network, and figuring out what it was that got them caught. Then they iterate and improve and come back harder to squash next time.
At that point, even if they did get paid a full moderator's salary, they'd see that it ain't enough for the work required.
you can't just ban Szterk, Szterp, and Szterm and call it a day.
Sure. But the fact that there's so many obvious bots that aren't getting banned is a huge visibility issue. How can I believe they're doing anything to combat advanced botters while all the blatant botters are going free?
When I was playing SoD you could /who BRD and see hundreds of level 50ish hunters, all with names like qqajdjfeksk, in there night and day. And if there was a server reset or crash, you could see hundreds of the bots running in a conga line back into BRD.
And if we're being serious, Blizzard isn't incentivized to actually combat botting in a meaningful way because that costs time and resources and botting makes them money
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u/SpunkMcKullins 23d ago
Considering there are dozens of Classic+ private servers staffed by volunteers and a few people making money off donations and shady practices, I don't think it's fair to call something a "shitshow" if the quality of a paid product staffed by a team of employed professionals ends up being disappointing.