Safe Botting

[nightmist 5]

Being a veteran of the botting world here are some tips and tricks. Some are common sense but want to make this as comprehensive as possible.

Intro:
Blizzard uses big data analytics and customer reporting to catch botters. For the analytics portion they crunch numbers that flag an account. For example if your account is active 19 hours a day you will get points added to your account. Customer reports add more points. Unusually interactions methods get another. Once you accumulate enough points you are flagged for investigation. Investigations could be turning on various anti cheat processes to record whats in your memory or what processes are running. Other investigations teleport your toon or get them stuck to see how they respond. So to sum up, Blizzard crunches numbers associated to various activity to see if you are a worthy target for investigation by live people. There are automatic methods to catch botters that are in use. Usually perm bans involve a direct blizz employee investigating your toon and temp bans are generally automated systems.

Tips

1. Bot a realistic number of hours. Include actual playtime into the calculations. For example don't bot for 9 hours then play for 6.
    
2. When botting use plugins that mimic player behavior if at all possible. There are some risks with these so use them with caution. Thank you to the authors of the plugins, great job
   1. http://wrobot.eu/files/file/519-me-human/
   2. http://wrobot.eu/files/file/515-random-jumper/
   3. http://wrobot.eu/files/file/359-whisper-reply/
   4. http://wrobot.eu/files/file/303-move-during-combat/
       
3. Play your bot if at all possible. Many people have farm toons so its ok not too however playing your bot will remove analytics against it. Just queue up for some dungeons a couple of times a month or so.
   1. If you are dungeon botting (just don't, dungeon botting will get you caught so quickly) then farm with the bot or quest, do something different.
       
4. Bot in the after hours on your server. Botting during prime time causes two issues.
   1. First, you will be very inefficient with your botting since so many others are farming
   2. Second, you increase the risk of getting caught
       
5. Name your botting toon something generic and something that isn't easily remembered. If you name your toon SirButtFarmer that will get a chuckle and then reported once someone sees it a billion times running around a zone. Name it something close to a popular guild on your server, so it will blend in.
    
6. Create your own routines. For gatherer go to product settings then profile creator. Click record path, run around the zone (use a farming addon like FarmHUD) and stop recording when done, save and use it.
   1. Blizz doesn't flag toons running specific paths or locations. It isn't practical to record that much data for so many toons. They would need to store, process and analyze tremendous amounts of data points and the costs make it unjustifiable. So its ok to run shared profiles.
       
7. Use the wonderful relogger application. Seriously the thing is AWESOME. See more on that below
    
8. As said previously don't dungeon bot, I see so many bad dungeon botters, you will get reported and you will get caught.
    
9. When a new blizz update lands, hold off on botting for 24-48 hours. Sometimes updates are to catch certain things or add world bosses that can break paths. Be careful
    
10. Watch your bot on new profiles and check in on it. Once you run it for a few days with close eyes you can leave it running for long periods of time.

 

Relogger

I run relogger as my tool for farming, its amazing. For example here is what you can do:

1. Run a task such as gatherer for X amount of time.
2. Run a second task called wait to close wow and wait. This wait could be a break, such as I just played wow for 3 hours time to get up and stretch for 15 minutes. It makes you appear human
3. Run a task to log back in and run your farmer.
4. Then add another task to wait again this time to sleep for 7 hours or so.
5. Do more farming and eventually but in a final wait and list the time at 9000-9999 which will keep it closed. That gives you time to manually shut down operations or do whatever after the maximum time has been reached.

See the picture forming here. Use relogger, its a powerful tool that will maximize your botting time while keeping the analytics down against you. There are numerous excellent tutorials on the forums so just search for them.

[Sophie_ 15]

Hey, thanks for this guide :) i got a question about profiles. I had the idea to create a gatherer (mine/herb farm) but dont really have any idea to create one. So is it risky to use a public profile? Even if i use 2-3 hours per day (or less)
btw, thanks again for the plugin, didnt know these plugins existed haha 

[nightmist 5]

Its safe to use public profiles in regards to getting caught using a bot. Blizz cannot hold nor process that amount of data to track individual movements. The risk of using public profiles is the following:

1. Others may be using the exact same profile. This would look strange if you and others are running almost identical paths.
2. Public profiles are usually the same that manual runners follow. So again increases the chance of being detected.

Generally if you bot at different times and limit to 2-3 hour runs you should be just fine.

To create a path profile do the following:

1. Launch wrobot
2. Select Gatherer for the product
3. Click product settings to the right
4. Click profile creator (having dual monitor is really handy for this part)
5. Another window will pop up, its the gather profile creator
6. Now before you do the next step go to where you want to start the bot
7. Click the Record path toggle button at the bottom of the window
8. Just run a path you want to record. You can stop to gather items if you want or just run a path
9. When done click record path off
10. Save the profile to a location you can reference.
11. Once you are done run Gatherer with the profile you just saved.

I recommend creating a small path maybe in a large circle somewhere. Test it out and see how it goes. Its really easy, I use FarmHud to help me run the path I need. Don't make the end product to small or people will notice, you want a nice large path, could be a circle could be something with crazy loops. Try to start at a flight point and end near it, makes things easy.

[Sophie_ 15]

Thanks for answer, i think i'll start to create my own profiles :) 

[Svennebanan 10]

Great read, thank you.

[MoneyMaker1337 0]

Great guide mate! I have a few questions though.

Regarding nr.:

2. It doesn't look like the plugins have been updated since 2014 and 2015. Are they still safe to use? I only realized since I couldn't follow the guide to install them, since there wasn't a plugin tab anymore.

4. When is after hours and prime time? I mostly play and bot around 16-22.

6. Is it safer than using a profile already made from the forums?

And if using all the above steps, would it be stupid to use your main account for botting aswell, or would I have to buy a second account with Legion?

And for how long do you think that you would be flagged by Blizzard? 'Cause I was thinking of botting like 3-5 days a month, just to pay for the tokens.

[eeny 521]

I agree to everything i the main post.  i would also add:

If you farm mats to sell at auction: check undermine journal for your server https://theunderminejournal.com . If your bot makes an appearance as a "top seller" for the mats you are farming you need a bank bot to post auctions.  its too easy for the Legit AH flippers to look at you constantly posting massive amounts of cheap mats, along side being online multiple hours per day not responding to whispers... This is suspect, they dont like you and they will report you.  Make a lvl 1 bank that you mail the material to and post auctions from there.  that way they dont know who is farming the raw materials so they cant blast you for botting.

 

With this pic... choose the botter who you would try get banned if you could only prove they are botting...

[Zan 99]

In addition, While using a lvl1 bank toon for the AH, use them only for a few days. Then delete them and make a new lvl1 AH bank toon.

[Svennebanan 10]

Would it be beneficial to have 1x gbanker, 1x trader 1x AH char?