1. Day 3 of THIS season, there are over 1,000 players in NA Legends.
2. Day 3 of LAST season, there were only 75 or so players in NA Legends.
Unless Hearthstone's community has grown 13 fold, the reasonable explanation for such a high number of legends players has to be bots. Why bots? Because the ability to play 24/7 logs a larger number of games played (in 72 hours, at an average of 7 games per hour, 504 games), combined with a positive win rate allows bots to "grind" to legends.
So, now that it's undeniable that bots exist, how many are there?
Let's set some base assumptions:
- 7 games per hour, 72 hours of gameplay have allotted 900 bots (900 of the 1000 legends players) to reach legends
- Assuming at most a 55% win rate, a random generator can assume on average, 800 or so games to reach legends.
So, the 900 or so bots already at legends are a bit luckier than the average bot. I would consider them to cover roughly 5% of confidence interval, meaning the population of bots being run is nearly 18,000 bots. With over 10 million ipad downloads and on average, 4-5k legends player at the end of season, we can assume the grand population of active NA server players to be 500k+. If we expect 20% to be online at a time, that's 100k players vs. 18k bots. The average player will face a bot 1 out of every 6 games. At the moment, I certainly feel that I encounter a bot at least 1 out of 6 games.
Should we be worried?
I believe the answer is yes, we should be worried, deeply. Currently, it impacts the casual player very little, but it will have a huge impact on the grind to legends:
- Your performance won't be reflected as well, as a new legends now may be rewarded a starting rank in the mid 100s, whereas they should deserve a spot in the top 100.
- Your grind to legends is going to be much harder, as these bots have shown the capability to achieve legends, and won't be making any human error. I would assume whoever is multi-botting stops when they hit legend, and starts botting on a new account. That means bots won't leave the ladder later in the season.
- The casual players are discouraged from trying to achieve a higher rank, as these bots can easily defeat a casual player at lower ranks.
- The experience of the game has been ruined to some degree, ranked play where you queue into a bot 1 out of every 6 games or so can be annoying to some, and enraging to others.
If you've come this far, you clearly care about this issue, and I encourage you to reply to this thread, voice your opinion here and to Blizzard. If Blizzard won't fix it, it's important for the community to bring action.
Not sure about the numbers you posted but I definitely feel like 1 out of 6 seems reasonable. At certain times/ranks I feel like it's more like 1 out of 3.
Agree if blizz doesn't get in front of this it could become a serious problem. I'm not legend yet but I'm curious how many people who are in legend are facing bots. Do they stop playing after they get legend and switch to another account? What's the end game here? Is it a bunch of small guys or a few big dogs running tons of accounts with the goal of selling accounts that have all the cards?? There has been a SIGNIFICANT increase in the last week in the number of bots I'm seeing. I hardly noticed them before the start of the season.
Even if we suspect that a player is actually a bot, what could possibly be done? I don't think there's really any great way to prove it or to stop it from occurring. Ultimately, I think it's a fad of sorts, that will pop up for as long as it takes lazy players to get all the cards. It does discourage any sort of economy, though, and that does sadden me.
Not sure about the numbers you posted but I definitely feel like 1 out of 6 seems reasonable. At certain times/ranks I feel like it's more like 1 out of 3.
Agree if blizz doesn't get in front of this it could become a serious problem. I'm not legend yet but I'm curious how many people who are in legend are facing bots. Do they stop playing after they get legend and switch to another account? What's the end game here? Is it a bunch of small guys or a few big dogs running tons of accounts with the goal of selling accounts that have all the cards?? There has been a SIGNIFICANT increase in the last week in the number of bots I'm seeing. I hardly noticed them before the start of the season.
Clearly there's a mix of intentions here. Whoever has been designing these bots is obviously smart enough to get to legends themselves, therefore their incentive is monetary gain. Selling an account with legends on it already is probably worth $100+, in terms of cards on the account and the status that they've "achieved."
With the bots easily found now through a Google search, lazy or discouraged players have turned to botting to reach legends.How the bot got leaked is harder to trace, but we can assume people wanted to profit off of selling the bot client as well, which never works well. The accessibility of bot clients to the public has definitely increased the number of bots online the past few days.
If it feels like 1 out of 3 now, it will probably only get worse for the next few weeks. And honestly, I don't know what to tell you, we can only raise the issue at this point and hope Blizzard finds a reasonable, and timely solution.
Even if we suspect that a player is actually a bot, what could possibly be done? I don't think there's really any great way to prove it or to stop it from occurring. Ultimately, I think it's a fad of sorts, that will pop up for as long as it takes lazy players to get all the cards. It does discourage any sort of economy, though, and that does sadden me.
Well, that all depends on how Blizzard receives requests and how easily these bots can be detected. I don't know much about the platform, Unity, that Hearthstone was developed on, but I would expect that Blizzard can still log all user inputs. That includes mouse clicks, x and y position, etc. So if Blizzard chooses to log that data, which can seriously slow their server down, it could be used to determine who's botting.
As for the incentive behind these bots, it seems like there is some monetary gain involved. An account with a legendary card back is worth money. If you're surprised by this notion, just do a quick search for League of Legends skins and you'll be shocked what a few in-game features can be worth to the right audience.
in world of warcraft gm's simply try to contact you if you're appearing to be a bot - if you don't answer to them in a way that appears to be human - they tend to investigate further and issue bans
however - world of warcraft is a game with a much(!) higher income and it would be impossible to hire people for this job unless blizz starts to get more money out of hearthsone or redistributes their resources across games (which they won't do, since this would mean that hearthstone would stop being profitable to them)
so - my guess is they're going to try to make using bots harder (although clever hackers will eventually find ways around everything) and maybe even some sort of "human confirmation" test, that would pop up if you seem to be a bot (no captchas please ...)
Well, Blizzard's incentive to fix this issue should be quite large:
- Hearthstone is projected to take in $200M in in-game sales within its first year
- The botting reduces the value of the in-game cards, which reduces their overall sale
- The botting issue is easily solved by issuing bans, as everything of value is already in-game! Anyone buying an account will be hesitant to purchase for fear of being banned the next wave, and people botting for their own benefit are less inclined to take that risk with their sunken costs in place.
I totally agree and can confirm that we face similar issues on the EU server. I'm currently rank 3 and face a bot approximately every 5th game I play. While they make a few very questionable plays, one can still lose to them due to the randomness that is inherent to Hearthstone. Botting to reach legend/accumulating gold is pathetic and directly contradicts the purpose of this game (playing other people). Blizzard should be alarmed and react immediately: a report function should be added to the game and accounts in question should be banned permanently if bots were used at any point of time.
still in wow there is a high number of bots specially in pvp, the bot problem would remain. the better solution in hearstone for the comunity is to promote more tourneys . So far we are at less than 10 each week with 10 000 000 acounts compared to the more than 20 dailies in MTGO with less than 300 000 players and a max of 4000 playing at the same time.
you all know <redacted>- is not bad. And it has been spotted by a lot of streams already - I just want to announce we are working on card hovering feature. Let us be more like a human
and...
<header>
zilea just lost live vs <redacted>
</header>
he just lost to <redacted> zoo bot
just a matter of time when blizzard will ban this bot no red arrow, no card hovering so obvious
you all know <redacted>- is not bad. And it has been spotted by a lot of streams already - I just want to announce we are working on card hovering feature. Let us be more like a human
and...
<header>
zilea just lost live vs <redacted>
</header>
he just lost to <redacted> zoo bot
just a matter of time when blizzard will ban this bot no red arrow, no card hovering so obvious
</header>
Oh wow,
If ZIlea can't beat it, we're doomed! ( Kappa )
But on a serious note, I fear as the bots become more and more complex, it'll be impossible for Blizzard to stop the botters. I mean, card hovering, randomized action movements, occasional random mouse-clicks, etc. Unless there's some kind of scanner that Blizz adds to the next hearthstone patch, there's going to be little ability for blizzard to identify botters server-side.
Should be an easy fix, just keep altering the game protocol and it will break existing bot versions and discourage the casual user and raise the time investment for the bot makers. They did this back on Diablo 1, every time a patch would come out the trainer would break and Raymond would have to reverse-engineer the protocol all over and issue a patch. The trainer updates took longer and longer and the quality of the updates diminished. That was when a patch was a huge deal. Now patches take seconds to apply to a user.
I posted in an earlier bot thread that an extraordinary claim like "bots are hitting legend" demands extraordinary evidence, so I'd like to thank you for compiling some pretty damning evidence. A thousand Legends in three days, compared to 75 last month, is far too massive a difference to be waved away, there has to be something happening behind it.
- I would assume whoever is multi-botting stops when they hit legend, and starts botting on a new account. That means bots won't leave the ladder later in the season.
I'm not so sure about that, though. Do you think there's a market for creating accounts, getting them their Legend rank and card back, and then selling them? If so this could happen. But I wouldn't have thought the average botter would just grind up another account for the lulz, given that even a cheap deck like Zoolock is going to require some investment of effort to put together on a new account, and given that there's no real value in grinding multiple Legend accounts is there?
1. Day 3 of THIS season, there are over 1,000 players in NA Legends.
2. Day 3 of LAST season, there were only 75 or so players in NA Legends.
Hey, just curious: Can I see where you found this information?
I think you'd also have to consider a growing player base. Hearthstone is gaining popularity so a huge increase in player base might actually be plausible.
1. Day 3 of THIS season, there are over 1,000 players in NA Legends.
2. Day 3 of LAST season, there were only 75 or so players in NA Legends.
Hey, just curious: Can I see where you found this information?4
I think you'd also have to consider a growing player base. Hearthstone is gaining popularity so a huge increase in player base might actually be plausible.
I myself faced a legendary player ranked 890 yesterday, I've seen 1000+ ranked players on streams since day 3. As for the past seasons, I've obtained legend the first week for the past few seasons, and there hasn't been more than 100 legends in the first week for the past 3 seasons.
Even if the player base is growing, we still have to consider the time it takes to grind to legends. If you're an extremely skilled player, 3 days is do-able, we see xixo's performance indicates at least 20+ hours even for the best player. To have 1000 at legends would mean the hearthstone community has not only grown extraordinarily, but the skill of these players and their time spent playing has increased extraordinarily as well. Instead, the more reasonable conclusion is the prevalence of bots. 72 hours with a decent win rate can get a few of the luckier bots into legends. If we consider these 900 to be the lucky bots, you arrive at my conclusion: there's tens of thousands of bots being run on hearthstone right now.
1. Day 3 of THIS season, there are over 1,000 players in NA Legends.
2. Day 3 of LAST season, there were only 75 or so players in NA Legends.
Hey, just curious: Can I see where you found this information?4
I think you'd also have to consider a growing player base. Hearthstone is gaining popularity so a huge increase in player base might actually be plausible.
I myself faced a legendary player ranked 890 yesterday, I've seen 1000+ ranked players on streams since day 3. As for the past seasons, I've obtained legend the first week for the past few seasons, and there hasn't been more than 100 legends in the first week for the past 3 seasons.
Even if the player base is growing, we still have to consider the time it takes to grind to legends. If you're an extremely skilled player, 3 days is do-able, we see xixo's performance indicates at least 20+ hours even for the best player. To have 1000 at legends would mean the hearthstone community has not only grown extraordinarily, but the skill of these players and their time spent playing has increased extraordinarily as well. Instead, the more reasonable conclusion is the prevalence of bots. 72 hours with a decent win rate can get a few of the luckier bots into legends. If we consider these 900 to be the lucky bots, you arrive at my conclusion: there's tens of thousands of bots being run on hearthstone right now.
I believe there aren't 1000 legend players yet. When xixo reached Legend he was rank ~100+, not because 100 other guys were faster than him but because some people with a higher legend MMR hadn't logged in yet. It's probably the same in this case.
If Blizz will handle this like they handled botting in D3 then we are doomed.
And yeah, maybe there are more skillful players. 1000 vs 75 sure thing. Suddenly everyone got enlightened,
how did they handle it in d3? i haven't played that game
on the bots... for those who haven't got their legendary cardback this could be the easiest season to do so as the meta gets really easy to read if bots use zoo/shaman only on higher ranks. on the other hand how satisfying is it to get legendary against a pool of ai's. and then one could simply bot themselves...
also i think mass bans will help nothing as this game is free to play, bot users will simply start a new account. maybe it will catch some retards who use bots on their fully equiped accounts to get golden heroes or something but for the mass of bot users they have to find a better solution.
Instead of accusing 90% of legendary ranks of botting (and intentionally or unintentionally advertising bots by claiming they can get to legendary "easily"), have you considered that maybe now good players are reaching legendary faster because their winrate is slightly inflated by bots they get to play against on the way?
If there are that many bots that 1000 players who previously could not hit legend, that's just as bad. Not as bad for people who can get to legend now, but at most that's 1000 players. The 100,000 players around rank 15-20 will have a far worse game experience, not least from having to play essentially the same match over and over and over again (same class, same deck, same "mind", same game... again).
Well they didnt. This is one of the reasons Diablo3 was such a bestseller. People bought new copies of the game to create bot accounts and Blizz was fine with it because the money flowed. I dont know if the botters are buying packs to craft the rares needed for the decks, but if they do so, Blizz wont move a finger. Its all about money.
EDIT AFAIK they sold 14 million D3 copies (before it was available on playstation) and people are estimating that about 4-7 million of the accounts were bots.
the thing with hearthstone is it is free to play, so you can simply buy a bot and grind a collection. even those who want to have a deck from scratch to bot with will in the end limit their purchases to that one deck and grind the rest with a bot. also right now you can chose to pay a low fee for a bot and let it farm arena 24/7 for a month or shell out approximatly 200 on packs to get the same. as i see it right now only idiots or uninformed people would choose to crack packs. the only reason im not boting is because i have a full collection and all the card backs so i have way too much to lose. if i had started this game not long ago i would be boting for sure right now. my conclusion is that blizzard has a strong incentive to fix this asap as the bots are rivaling their sales.
EDIT AFAIK they sold 14 million D3 copies (before it was available on playstation) and people are estimating that about 4-7 million of the accounts were bots.
I'm pretty sure there's not enough crack in the world that you could think 4-7 million D3 copies were sold to botters, even if you smoked all of it.
Instead of accusing 90% of legendary ranks of botting (and intentionally or unintentionally advertising bots by claiming they can get to legendary "easily"), have you considered that maybe now good players are reaching legendary faster because their winrate is slightly inflated by bots they get to play against on the way?
This. Inflating the number of total stars earned by introducing bots catapults average/above-average players into higher ranks than they previously were. This is especially true because the criteria for achieving legend is a fixed number of stars, rather than a percentage of the top end MMR.
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I'd like to assure everyone that bots are real.
Consider these two simple facts:
1. Day 3 of THIS season, there are over 1,000 players in NA Legends.
2. Day 3 of LAST season, there were only 75 or so players in NA Legends.
Unless Hearthstone's community has grown 13 fold, the reasonable explanation for such a high number of legends players has to be bots. Why bots? Because the ability to play 24/7 logs a larger number of games played (in 72 hours, at an average of 7 games per hour, 504 games), combined with a positive win rate allows bots to "grind" to legends.
So, now that it's undeniable that bots exist, how many are there?
Let's set some base assumptions:
- 7 games per hour, 72 hours of gameplay have allotted 900 bots (900 of the 1000 legends players) to reach legends
- Assuming at most a 55% win rate, a random generator can assume on average, 800 or so games to reach legends.
So, the 900 or so bots already at legends are a bit luckier than the average bot. I would consider them to cover roughly 5% of confidence interval, meaning the population of bots being run is nearly 18,000 bots. With over 10 million ipad downloads and on average, 4-5k legends player at the end of season, we can assume the grand population of active NA server players to be 500k+. If we expect 20% to be online at a time, that's 100k players vs. 18k bots. The average player will face a bot 1 out of every 6 games. At the moment, I certainly feel that I encounter a bot at least 1 out of 6 games.
Should we be worried?
I believe the answer is yes, we should be worried, deeply. Currently, it impacts the casual player very little, but it will have a huge impact on the grind to legends:
- Your performance won't be reflected as well, as a new legends now may be rewarded a starting rank in the mid 100s, whereas they should deserve a spot in the top 100.
- Your grind to legends is going to be much harder, as these bots have shown the capability to achieve legends, and won't be making any human error. I would assume whoever is multi-botting stops when they hit legend, and starts botting on a new account. That means bots won't leave the ladder later in the season.
- The casual players are discouraged from trying to achieve a higher rank, as these bots can easily defeat a casual player at lower ranks.
- The experience of the game has been ruined to some degree, ranked play where you queue into a bot 1 out of every 6 games or so can be annoying to some, and enraging to others.
If you've come this far, you clearly care about this issue, and I encourage you to reply to this thread, voice your opinion here and to Blizzard. If Blizzard won't fix it, it's important for the community to bring action.
Signing out,
Justsaiyan
Not sure about the numbers you posted but I definitely feel like 1 out of 6 seems reasonable. At certain times/ranks I feel like it's more like 1 out of 3.
Agree if blizz doesn't get in front of this it could become a serious problem. I'm not legend yet but I'm curious how many people who are in legend are facing bots. Do they stop playing after they get legend and switch to another account? What's the end game here? Is it a bunch of small guys or a few big dogs running tons of accounts with the goal of selling accounts that have all the cards?? There has been a SIGNIFICANT increase in the last week in the number of bots I'm seeing. I hardly noticed them before the start of the season.
Even if we suspect that a player is actually a bot, what could possibly be done? I don't think there's really any great way to prove it or to stop it from occurring. Ultimately, I think it's a fad of sorts, that will pop up for as long as it takes lazy players to get all the cards. It does discourage any sort of economy, though, and that does sadden me.
Clearly there's a mix of intentions here. Whoever has been designing these bots is obviously smart enough to get to legends themselves, therefore their incentive is monetary gain. Selling an account with legends on it already is probably worth $100+, in terms of cards on the account and the status that they've "achieved."
With the bots easily found now through a Google search, lazy or discouraged players have turned to botting to reach legends.How the bot got leaked is harder to trace, but we can assume people wanted to profit off of selling the bot client as well, which never works well. The accessibility of bot clients to the public has definitely increased the number of bots online the past few days.
If it feels like 1 out of 3 now, it will probably only get worse for the next few weeks. And honestly, I don't know what to tell you, we can only raise the issue at this point and hope Blizzard finds a reasonable, and timely solution.
Well, that all depends on how Blizzard receives requests and how easily these bots can be detected. I don't know much about the platform, Unity, that Hearthstone was developed on, but I would expect that Blizzard can still log all user inputs. That includes mouse clicks, x and y position, etc. So if Blizzard chooses to log that data, which can seriously slow their server down, it could be used to determine who's botting.
As for the incentive behind these bots, it seems like there is some monetary gain involved. An account with a legendary card back is worth money. If you're surprised by this notion, just do a quick search for League of Legends skins and you'll be shocked what a few in-game features can be worth to the right audience.
Well, Blizzard's incentive to fix this issue should be quite large:
- Hearthstone is projected to take in $200M in in-game sales within its first year
- The botting reduces the value of the in-game cards, which reduces their overall sale
- The botting issue is easily solved by issuing bans, as everything of value is already in-game! Anyone buying an account will be hesitant to purchase for fear of being banned the next wave, and people botting for their own benefit are less inclined to take that risk with their sunken costs in place.
I totally agree and can confirm that we face similar issues on the EU server. I'm currently rank 3 and face a bot approximately every 5th game I play. While they make a few very questionable plays, one can still lose to them due to the randomness that is inherent to Hearthstone. Botting to reach legend/accumulating gold is pathetic and directly contradicts the purpose of this game (playing other people). Blizzard should be alarmed and react immediately: a report function should be added to the game and accounts in question should be banned permanently if bots were used at any point of time.
still in wow there is a high number of bots specially in pvp, the bot problem would remain. the better solution in hearstone for the comunity is to promote more tourneys . So far we are at less than 10 each week with 10 000 000 acounts compared to the more than 20 dailies in MTGO with less than 300 000 players and a max of 4000 playing at the same time.
From unnamed bot source
So guys and girls,
you all know <redacted>- is not bad. And it has been spotted by a lot of streams already - I just want to announce we are working on card hovering feature. Let us be more like a human
and...
<header>zilea just lost live vs <redacted>
he just lost to <redacted> zoo bot
just a matter of time when blizzard will ban this bot
no red arrow, no card hovering so obvious
Oh wow,
If ZIlea can't beat it, we're doomed! ( Kappa )
But on a serious note, I fear as the bots become more and more complex, it'll be impossible for Blizzard to stop the botters. I mean, card hovering, randomized action movements, occasional random mouse-clicks, etc. Unless there's some kind of scanner that Blizz adds to the next hearthstone patch, there's going to be little ability for blizzard to identify botters server-side.
Should be an easy fix, just keep altering the game protocol and it will break existing bot versions and discourage the casual user and raise the time investment for the bot makers. They did this back on Diablo 1, every time a patch would come out the trainer would break and Raymond would have to reverse-engineer the protocol all over and issue a patch. The trainer updates took longer and longer and the quality of the updates diminished. That was when a patch was a huge deal. Now patches take seconds to apply to a user.
Free to try and find a game, dealing cards for sorrow, cards for pain.
I posted in an earlier bot thread that an extraordinary claim like "bots are hitting legend" demands extraordinary evidence, so I'd like to thank you for compiling some pretty damning evidence. A thousand Legends in three days, compared to 75 last month, is far too massive a difference to be waved away, there has to be something happening behind it.
I'm not so sure about that, though. Do you think there's a market for creating accounts, getting them their Legend rank and card back, and then selling them? If so this could happen. But I wouldn't have thought the average botter would just grind up another account for the lulz, given that even a cheap deck like Zoolock is going to require some investment of effort to put together on a new account, and given that there's no real value in grinding multiple Legend accounts is there?
Hey, just curious: Can I see where you found this information?
I think you'd also have to consider a growing player base. Hearthstone is gaining popularity so a huge increase in player base might actually be plausible.
I myself faced a legendary player ranked 890 yesterday, I've seen 1000+ ranked players on streams since day 3. As for the past seasons, I've obtained legend the first week for the past few seasons, and there hasn't been more than 100 legends in the first week for the past 3 seasons.
Even if the player base is growing, we still have to consider the time it takes to grind to legends. If you're an extremely skilled player, 3 days is do-able, we see xixo's performance indicates at least 20+ hours even for the best player. To have 1000 at legends would mean the hearthstone community has not only grown extraordinarily, but the skill of these players and their time spent playing has increased extraordinarily as well. Instead, the more reasonable conclusion is the prevalence of bots. 72 hours with a decent win rate can get a few of the luckier bots into legends. If we consider these 900 to be the lucky bots, you arrive at my conclusion: there's tens of thousands of bots being run on hearthstone right now.
I believe there aren't 1000 legend players yet. When xixo reached Legend he was rank ~100+, not because 100 other guys were faster than him but because some people with a higher legend MMR hadn't logged in yet. It's probably the same in this case.
how did they handle it in d3? i haven't played that game
on the bots... for those who haven't got their legendary cardback this could be the easiest season to do so as the meta gets really easy to read if bots use zoo/shaman only on higher ranks. on the other hand how satisfying is it to get legendary against a pool of ai's. and then one could simply bot themselves...
also i think mass bans will help nothing as this game is free to play, bot users will simply start a new account. maybe it will catch some retards who use bots on their fully equiped accounts to get golden heroes or something but for the mass of bot users they have to find a better solution.
If there are that many bots that 1000 players who previously could not hit legend, that's just as bad. Not as bad for people who can get to legend now, but at most that's 1000 players. The 100,000 players around rank 15-20 will have a far worse game experience, not least from having to play essentially the same match over and over and over again (same class, same deck, same "mind", same game... again).
the thing with hearthstone is it is free to play, so you can simply buy a bot and grind a collection. even those who want to have a deck from scratch to bot with will in the end limit their purchases to that one deck and grind the rest with a bot. also right now you can chose to pay a low fee for a bot and let it farm arena 24/7 for a month or shell out approximatly 200 on packs to get the same. as i see it right now only idiots or uninformed people would choose to crack packs. the only reason im not boting is because i have a full collection and all the card backs so i have way too much to lose. if i had started this game not long ago i would be boting for sure right now. my conclusion is that blizzard has a strong incentive to fix this asap as the bots are rivaling their sales.
I'm pretty sure there's not enough crack in the world that you could think 4-7 million D3 copies were sold to botters, even if you smoked all of it.
This. Inflating the number of total stars earned by introducing bots catapults average/above-average players into higher ranks than they previously were. This is especially true because the criteria for achieving legend is a fixed number of stars, rather than a percentage of the top end MMR.