I keep seeing this suggestion made. Blizzard is NOT going to do that for Diablo III.
As I mentioned before, it seems like a simple no-brainer on the surface where a simple query can be performed showing the top most played hours per Season, and then investigating those accounts.
That is where the problem lies. This game isn’t setup to be handled that way. Their support articles speak volumes about the limited amount of backend support for dealing with in-game issues (which itself translates to not having the same level of support infrastructure that World of Warcraft has for comparisons sake).
It’s a conscious decision; limited resource allocation and tools with regards to personnel who would need to investigate thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of potential violations. And as mentioned, it’s a time consuming process because their stance is one to err on the side of caution where multiple people will review the evidence. It would make sense for the game to have this level of support IF this game was truly competitive (going to go off on a related tangent).
But as I mentioned before, the leaderboards in this game aren’t taken as serious competition by Blizzard. If so, this game would have an actual ranking system as well as a level playing field. Loot based games with RNG plus the fact that we have unlimited Paragon with main stats that can grow indefinitely (causing an even wider power variance gap), is not a level playing field.
Heroes of the Storm has XP and gold but those are metered mainly for hero levels that do not impact the overall strength of any class. The only purpose for that is to offer rewards (like unlocks in that or other Blizzard games, gold that ultimately can be used in-game). That is why they are going to be able to implement competitive leagues with actual ranked leaderboards. That is how rewards in D3 would need to be totally re-worked in order to even begin the process of making the leaderboards in this game anywhere near a level playing field.
And that itself is not going to happen because much of this is intended design to “make online matter”. Multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts, additional multiplayer XP bonuses that further magnifies the amount of shared XP and thus Paragon leveling, one can achieve playing Greater Rifts in co-op, solo leaderboards that aren’t really solo because they want players to group up to gain that gem leveling advantage for pushing Greater Rifts solo after the fact. Even split bounties (in terms of the bounty cache) is left untouched. All of this is INTENDED DESIGN decisions to drive more players to feel like they have to play co-op (and thus making online matter). <- can’t repeat this enough
Furthermore, even if they did do this (monitoring for 24/7 types of activity), then guess what? The botters are just going to pull back on the time spent botting. Basically, Blizzard would need to put in all of these processes, procedures, back end tools, and it would be all for nothing because the botters will just adapt and put in maximum time limits. The hacks and security team know this already. It’s the D3 design team (or the leads who are making these boneheaded decisions) that has caused this mess. And they are the ones that need to directly address the root cause issues.
The root cause issues are noted here. That is why players are botting this game. Whichever way you look at it, this is all a self-inflicted wound due to a combination of intended design with little regard for the actual consequences down the road. This isn’t surprising because this design team hasn’t been stellar with their decisions for this franchise. They’ve resorted to bandaid fix after bandaid fix. This same team came to the conclusion of not including a Paragon leaderboard because they thought this would be an uninteresting sort of end game activity (grinding for XP to race to the top of a leaderboard).
And it’s so funny that this is one of the core reasons players are botting the game not to get the top Paragon, but to get a main stat advantage (which indirectly equates to trying to get the highest Paragon level). There are many folks who don’t believe how efficient ROS BOT is either solo or in groups. As a side consequence, it can farm materials and keys fairly well on any well geared character (better if using a class that is adept at farming to begin with). And as I noted before, the way it is designed makes it less detectable to Warden. Basically, the more sophisticated programmers have figured out how Warden works, and they design their apps in ways where it is almost indistinguishable from a human player.
At the root, their Paragon design is shallow with the lack of choice and the artificial round-robin system up until P800. Furthermore, all of this XP acceleration has made what was supposed to be a far slower journey to P800 and beyond, trivial in group Greater Rifting. And now that many more players are P2000+, we are about to see just how broken the game is going to turn into unless they re-balance the Paragon XP soon. Once Season 4 rolls over, non-seasonal will become officially broken in this game. You cannot make this stuff up.
This design team is absolutely clueless (and by extension, incompetent) on ARPG/hack-n-slash/dungeon crawlers/rogue like type of games in terms of those nuances of character building and progression. They are decent at making an action combat ARCADE game which is exactly what Diablo III is. The game that exists is Diablo in name and story only. The majority of the ARPG elements died once they made most of the games core systems (like the skills system) “on rails”.
Great for arcade style action/combat and nothing really more (so if you look at the game that way like I do, it’s somewhat fun to play it whichever way that you the player, have the most fun with). Hell, we have such a limited amount of character slots because of this “free load out” ability with skills (just without an actual UI to have a bunch of presets as them doing that, would show how arcade the game is) where character permanence isn’t an issue. Yet with each season, players will eventually find they will need to delete an existing character (and when designing this mode, they didn’t even have some way for the player to at least archive some of the data associated with these prior characters ala hardcore modes “graveyard”). It’s this continual display of half-assed design and implementation that is telling about “team 3”.
Bringing this all back to the subject matter though, using 24/7 style activity for this game (with its illusion of challenges, difficulty, and competition) as a means to potentially identify botting activity, is not going to be worth making all of the administrative and personnel changes. Furthermore, it’s an administrative headache because of one exception to their account sharing rules (guardianships when it comes to minors). Basically, it’s something that legal wouldn’t advise.
Finally (and I will repeat what I’ve always said), the way you address the problems (in this case, botting) is addressing the root cause issues. Remove most %XP gear, remove the ridiculous multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts, redesign the entire Paragon system where there are more meaningful choices for those Paragon points (and get rid of the round robin system). When I say meaningful, what I mean is a design where some selections will represent an actual opportunity cost to what can go towards main stat.
Example using movement speed via Paragon points. Using only strictly Paragon points (not additive to gear), you can exceed the 25% maximum (but this reduces the amount of main stat one can achieve via Paragon points). Additionally, synergies can be created so using this example, for every 10% of movement speed from Paragon points, you also increase the pickup radius (which would become a Utility option like it originally was in an early PTR) effect per point of Paragon thus requiring less Paragon points to achieve a certain amount of PUR. The main point is to add more granular choices in each category and at least a little bit of depth and choice with how those Paragon points are used.
This entire system would need to be designed out to at least Paragon 10,000 at minimum where there is a calculated opportunity cost for putting all of ones Paragon points into main stat/vitality. The key objective is to remove the incentive for players to grind XP where their damage only goes up as a result of main stat inflation.
Honestly speaking though, something like this will never really happen because this team has a history of bandaid fixes (as opposed to addressing the root cause).
