Gunkas

Yes, I've been testing to see what I could learn about how Netherwing responds to bots and reports of bots. From what I've seen so far seems to be Alliance characters need to be extra careful, while Horde side bots seem to be absolutely ignored despite all my best efforts to make this bot LOOK like a bot.

Well here is an update on my test. Been a week now and both horde bots are still running (just farming leather at level 50 non-stop without leveling). I've reported them five times each, all from unique emails. But yet they still seem perfectly fine. In this last week I have repeated this test on Alliance side and got the same results of account closure within a few hours of the report being accepted. But when I repeated it a third time, one of the Alliance characters has gone 3 days now with no problems. I just filed a third report against it and am waiting to see what happens. I'm wonder if there is a chance that the horde characters WERE spot checked, somehow passed and now are whitelisted.

So I have come to the conclusion this it really is the server. So as an experiment I made two Alliance and two Horde and ran them non-stop for 48 hours turning off ALL the security features. I reported one of the Horde and Alliance at the same time after this 48 hour non-stop session. Less than two hours after I sent the report email, the Alliance character was spot checked and account closed. The Horde character went about his business undisturbed. About 12 hours later I reported the last Horde and Alliance character. Like the first time, the Alliance character was spot checked in about 2 hours and account closed. That was 80 hours ago, and both the reported Horde characters have been going non-stop with no logging in or out. So there is definitely something weird about this server, either the GMs don't give a shit about Horde or there were other reports filed against my Alliance characters prior to my own reports. But since they both were spot checked about the same time after I sent the report, it feels unlikely.

It's weird because Horde are far more populace on this server. I've always thought it had to be the zones themselves. The Alliance zones (Elwynn, Westfall, Redridge, Duskwood) always seem a lot smaller, and their mob density is rather poor. That with the addition to (especially Westfall) all the mobs being part of collection quests with extremely low drop rates, you are in direct competition with a lot of players which I think increases your visibility a lot. I've finally had a lot of success on Alliance with this new batch of bots by simply building my own grinder profiles that stay entirely in Kalimdor instead of Eastern Kingdoms. Places like Darkshore are rather large and spread out with very few people questing there because of its shitty distribution. Compare that to Barrens which is 10-30 zone, absolutely massive and has so many mobs in it you are almost never in direct competition so you aren't pissing people off at ever turn.

Netherwing sure is an odd little server. Any bot I run on Alliance side is subject to a constant witch hunt and needs to be carefully watched most of the time. Feels like every time I turn around someone is following one of my bots and screaming about being a bot until I tell them to fuck off. Then cut over to my Horde side bot that has been running a pure grinding profile for 73hrs straight and not a single person has so much as said or whispered anything about me being a bot. Do the Horde just simply not give a fuck about bots? Or do you think its the shear size of barrens and other places that helps them avoid detection?

Tested on TBC, works perfectly.

That was pretty much my idea with the mailing thing too. Enough false flags will force them to change their protocol in determining bots. But of course it might lead to them improving their detections and making even harder to bot. But as it is a private server, unlikely. Well after getting the last batch caught I've redone my entire plan and have 2 characters in their early 50s with no troubles. I keep their screen projected within line of sight of my main PC so if anything odd happens I can immediately respond. Mixing profiles and reducing grind times to rested exp only so its less obvious, only pulling 6hrs a day. Hopefully vigilance will be key here in a server that is very active in bot hunting.

So I remembered I had my laptop taking and storing screenshots every 2 minutes. Digging into them I found that on one account I was suddenly forced into a party with two people. They said nothing according to the logs, were not visible. Next shot there was like 5 items for roll on my screen and they all timed out, but never disappeared (because they probably weren't real). This all occurred the morning I lost my accounts, so I can say for certain one at least was caught and checked. And of course I avoided ALL mail between the characters, except when I pick my brain a bit I did send one bag from the caught account to the second account two weeks ago. So that explains two of them. The last one though I never crossed any information as far as I am aware, and I was present 95% of the time because I was writing and testing the quester. So THAT one I'm still at a loss why it was closed. The only thing this tells me is I should make a grind bot and set it to mail shit to random, well known, 70s and see what happens. If you had enough bots flooding the mail boxes of random people they may stop taking that as a plausible link between bots. Of course this is a theory and not really something I want to practice, not the type of person to screw over poor randoms leveling and minding their own business. TL;DR I'm retarded.

Thanks m8! If this works I totally feel it would be worth a small cost. I think this will go a long way of making some bots not look suspect.

I was thinking if there is one thing that very human is actually buffing friendly players in range if you have buffs to give. Since I've started botting I have come to realize a pretty big tell is receiving buffs from players and then just sauntering off and ignoring them. And when players don't receive a reciprocating buff, it seems to draw their attention in a lot of cases. So I was wondering if someone far smarter than me could take this idea and turn it into a plugin or something. Unless this is something that can be done in a fightclass that I completely missed.

All three account names were super unique (FireofKaelthas, bigmantimmy, redditsucks). And all were registered on their individual machine with the VPN active. The only similarity is they all used a throwawayemail address, so that might be the link. I will try again with two different emails from two different companies and see if that helps at all. I guess other things that might prompt a handcheck is if you have 'mail' turned on. Seeing a few dozen mails full of ore with the exact same title line might seem suspect. Question to the wise though, since I have been caught once is there anything I should do besides change my VPNs? Or would it be a same time to do them on the same machines.

I just lost all 3 of my bots today. All were on their own PC, all on their own VPNs, and all running only 6 hours (2 sessions of 2-3 hours) a day set up to quick launch relogger 3-6 hours after the computers were scheduled to randomly restart once a day (at different times from each other). One bot was using Bambo's 1-70, one Andoido's 1-60 quester, and the last one was using a custom made profile in which I had been programming quests into for the last 2 weeks as it leveled running my newly programmed quests. Digging through the logs I can't find a single instance of them ever being whispered or talked to by a GM, just straight up closed. I can see maybe the two purchased questers being something Netherwing is tracking, but I rarely ran them. What got me though was my third custom profile being caught, it's exp earned was almost 80% quests and I used it 3-4 hours a day at best. PLUS it was only level 18! I'm honestly not sure what else I could have done to prevent this. It would seem Netherwing has some weird trick up their sleeve that tracks bots. Edit: I just checked an account I made and played on for an hour 3 weeks ago, never even botted on. Closed. Something tells me this is a HWID log of some sort that it is scrapping.

Somehow I completely missed this in my search, thanks!

So I have been playing around with some grinders and they have all worked well. I was wondering though does anyone have a quester for TBC that does more questing than grinding? I used Andoido's vanilla quester and it works fine, but I want to roll a Draenai. But no matter where I look there really isn't a good, competent, quester that works for a Draenai. Anyone have any recommendations, doesn't matter if it is payed or free.