WoW Classic with Fall Conquest and AQ War Supply Completion

While most of the news out of Blizzard lately has been focused on the now delayed Shadowlands expansion, there were still a couple of items that have come up around WoW Classic of late.

Classic is as classic does

The first has to do with the AQ war supply effort and unlock of the raids.  Any realm that has not finished the war supply event will find that it is automatically completed come Tuesday:

On Tuesday, October 6, all WoW Classic realms that have not completed their AQ War Supply turn-ins will see them autocomplete to 100%.

Immediately thereafter, the supply delivery period will begin on each realm.

We look forward to seeing you in Silithus!

Realms that were struggling to get there will now be able to advance.  Word is that there was only on US realm in that state and a couple more in the EU, so this won’t be a boost across many servers.  Still, the event unlocked back in late July, so you do have to wonder what those realms were up to.

Then there is the WoW Classic Fall Conquest event, a 15v15 Arathi Basin tournament that will be streamed by Blizzard.  The EU tournament started yesterday… sorry Euros if you’re reading about it here for the first time… but the US tournament doesn’t pick up until next weekend.  The schedule is posted if you want to watch, and if you want to compete you have until Thursday to register a team.  There is a $6,000 prize pool that will be split between the top teams in each region.

The Ahn’Qiraj War Effort set to Begin in WoW Classic

The day has arrived for the Ahn’Qiraj opening events to begin in WoW Classic.

Here come the bugs!

In order to unlock the 20 player Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj raid and the 40 player Temple of Ahn’Qiraj raid, Horde and Alliance players have to collect supplies in Orgrimmar and Ironforge to support the coming war.

Upon collecting enough supplies, a 10 hour long war event will be unlocked.  That will bring Anubisath and Qiraji warriors to Barrens and Thousand Needles, for low level players, and Silithus, Tanaris, and Feralas for higher levels.  Fighting there will gain you gold, loot, and faction with the Brood of Nozdormu.

There is also a quest line to run down that rewards a mount, so long as you finish it before the gates unlock, and a competition to become the person on your server declared the Scarab Lord.

And all of that begins today once the servers are up.  Blizzard has a post up describing the event in more detail.  And, it seems that at least one server has all the supplies they need stored up in advance, so it will be a very short event there indeed.

I also got a reminder that Holly Longdale is on the WoW Classic team on Twitter this morning.

The quests leading to opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj in WoW Classic unlock this week! They will lead to a one-time event soon. Epic to relive! Reminds me of the Sleeper in EQ. :P

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) July 28, 2020

Let’s hope it isn’t too much like the Sleeper event and the server doesn’t go down.

Meanwhile, Blizzard thinks it has a handle on the lag issues that the event may cause, but we shall see.

Ahn’Qiraj Coming This Month and More Bots Banned in WoW Classic

Time for a bit more WoW Classic news as Blizzard continues its offensive against the bot peril.

Classic is as classic does

After reportedly banning 74,000 accounts for EULA violations about two weeks back, Blizzard was back to announce another 40,000 accounts banned.

Since the launch of WoW Classic, we’ve taken action daily against accounts that were botting, hacking, and selling in-game services for real money. This continual effort has resulted in the average daily number of accounts actioned consistently increasing in the Americas, EU, Korea, and Taiwan. In May of this year, we witnessed a surge in the number of botters, and our intensification of efforts to eliminate them brought our average of actioned accounts upwards into the thousands per day.

Since our last post about this issue on June 17, we’ve continued to remove exploiters at a high pace, typically 2,000-3,000 per day, with over 4,000 accounts actioned on some days. This daily effort has resulted in actions taken against over 40,000 accounts since June 17 in the Americas, EU, Korea, and Taiwan.

We’re dedicated to driving the the exploiters away wherever we can, as we continue to make our response to this one of our highest priorities. This is a long-term effort that becomes continuously more difficult, as exploits and those who use them are driven by real money profit motives. We take action constantly, 24/7, to enforce the Blizzard End-User License Agreement 43. Any account that violates or assists others in violating license limitations on hacking, cheating, and other unauthorized use of the game is subject to suspension and removal.

As always, we greatly appreciate your reports. Player reports have been and will remain highly valuable to us, as we must evolve our detection and response methods to stay ahead of the organizations who would otherwise degrade the game for legitimate players.

The war on bots and such carries on.

Meanwhile, after having done a load test that brought the test server to its knees, presumably with more players than they expect to jump in on a live server, Blizzard has announced the start date for the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj event.

Starting July 28th, presumably after the usual maintenance window, the event will be available on US realms, and on July 29th on EU realms.  Per the posts:

At that time, players can begin the quest chain to craft a Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and players can turn in gathered resources to advance the Ahn’Qiraj war effort.

Once both of those activities are completed on a given realm, the gates of Ahn’Qiraj will be available to be opened.

I have been, somewhat unintentionally, hoarding cloth in my bank.  I had a mind toward getting first aid up on all my characters.  But when this starts I suppose I can clear some bank slots by donating to the cause.  We are now getting into things I actually remember happening back in the day when I first started playing WoW.

Also, a clarification about nature resist gear that is currently not available in WoW Classic was posted, though only in the EU forums, listing out the gear that was not yet in the game and that Blizzard was looking into when to release it into the game.

Blizzard Goes After WoW Classic Bots and Warms up for AQ

This week saw some WoW Classic news related to bots and cheating as well as a stress test on the public test realm.

Classic is as classic does

The big announcement was that Blizzard had banned 74K accounts for EULA violations.

We’ve recently completed a round of actions against players who were found to be cheating in World of Warcraft.

We rarely communicate publicly about this, because we’ve found that describing our sources and methods can make it easier for malicious actors to work around them, but we feel that it’s worthwhile to expand on the subject today, as many players have recently asked us for more details.

Including today’s actions, over the last month in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe regions, we’ve closed or suspended over 74,000 WoW accounts that were found to be in violation of our End-User License Agreement 68. The majority of these were found to be using gameplay automation tools, typically to farm resources or kill enemies much more efficiently than legitimate players can.

While today’s suspensions were applied in a batch (often referred to as a “banwave”), it is a top priority for us to identify accounts that are botting and remove them. Our team works around the clock, every day of the week, and many of the suspensions and account closures over the last few months have gone out in the middle of the night, or on weekends.

Like you, we play World of Warcraft. We understand what it’s like to spot a player in-game who appears to be botting. We always want to eliminate the botting player, if it can be proved that they are indeed cheating. And that raises a big difficulty in addressing this issue – we have to prove to ourselves that the accused player is not a person who’s actually controlling a character with their hands on a keyboard.

We use powerful systems to determine if the suspected player is using an identifiable cheat, and our heuristics (which we do not outline publicly) are constantly improving and evolving. But when we examine a suspect and these measurements aren’t out of line, we have to manually gather evidence against the accused player, which can be very time consuming and complex. It’s worthwhile though, because we never want to take action against a legitimate player.

Yes, there have been cases where a legitimate player appeared (to another player) to be botting. In those cases, where a legitimate player is reported and then cleared of wrongdoing, it can be very frustrating to the reporting player to again see what they think is a bot. We’ve also seen examples where the reported player was caught exploiting the game, and was removed from the game, and then quickly returned to doing the same thing on a new account with the same character name. That’s an infuriating sight for the players who initially reported it. We greatly appreciate your reports, and we understand how you feel about this.

We’re ultimately working to unravel a challenging circumstance. Real money trading drives third parties to put an enormous amount of effort into circumventing our detection systems. As much as this is a very high priority for us, it is the only priority for profit-driven botting organizations. The bans we issue are simply a cost of doing business for them.

We’re working on further improvements to every part of the game that might address cheating issues more swiftly and completely, and we’ll continue to let you know as those next steps are taken.

Thank you very much for your feedback on these issues, and thank you for your reports!

Ars Technica even did a story about the “bot mafias” that were present in WoW Classic. and how they have messed with the economy, all no doubt in furtherance of illicit gold sales.

I know I have seen a bunch of gold seller spam email messages showing up on my characters lately.

I have multiple screen shots of similar messages

I have been using the “Report Player” button to respond to these, so hopefully I helped target a few bad actors.

In addition, Blizzard made a change to the number of instances a player can access during a single day.

As part of our ongoing efforts to eliminate exploitative and automated gameplay, with scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’re implementing the following change to our settings on all WoW Classic realms:

• You may now enter a maximum of 30 unique instances (dungeon and raid) per day, per realm.

This restriction complements the current limit of 5 instances per hour. Now, when a player enters a dungeon or a raid, the game checks to see if they have entered 5 instances in the last hour or 30 instances in the last 24 hours, and if they have, they cannot enter the instance until enough time has elapsed. This check is across all of your characters on your realm.

These limits only apply to dungeon and raid instances, and do not apply to PvP battlegrounds.

I had run into the old “five instances per hour” limit while trying to get the Hydrocane to drop in Gnomeregan, but the overall cap will now close that out a bit more thoroughly I suppose.  (I didn’t need nearly that many instances to get the drop on multiple characters.)

And then, in a note about things to come, Blizzard also did a stress test on the PTR on Thursday to test Silithus and the Ahn’Qiraj (AQ) opening event.  They have already posted a summary of how that went.  We shall see if they do anything with the information they collected.

Finally, layering, which Blizzard had to turn on again for a few realms recently due to queues, has been worked on to make sure that it will function correctly when these events hit the live servers.