NOPE ,Coalition & Worldbosses... a story of breaking rules!

[keala]

Warning: If you are allergic to either salt or skittles, do not read this topic.
Warning: This post will most likely generate a large amount of replies containing the typical messages about jealousy, butthurt, salt, skittles and other amazing opinions.
Warning: With this post I do not intend on provoking the admins or GM’s of the server, but just to let the community know what the deal is and to put pressure on the guilds involved, hopefully making them completely stop breaking the rules.

Greetings everyone,

the reason of this topic is to bring to your attention an issue that has been here for way too long: the usage of bots for the purpose of scouting worldbosses. As most of us know, doing such a thing is forbidden by the Terms of Use, but it seems like someone found a way around it without having any kind of consequence.

Let's get into the details now:
Who is doing this? Really simple to answer this. The guilds NOPE and Coalition have been working together for quite some time now in order to kill every single Azuregos spawn (no, I don't care about Kazzak since it's too far while Azuregos is closeby, but I suspect something similar is happening for Kazzak too).

What are they doing precisely?
This is mostly NOPE's doing, but what it basically comes down to is them using low level characters to scout if a worldboss spawns or not. From what I’ve been told is that they are using an addon that makes scouting worldbosses possible without actually having to be there behind your computer. The addon tries to target said worldboss and once targeted will notify certain people. They most likely have a large reserve of accounts with low level characters in them, with the sole purpose of staying in Azshara (and probably Blasted Lands aswell) and checking if the worldboss has spawned.

Some of you might ask "But how do you know it's NOPE using these characters?":
Well that's really easy to say, because these low level characters are all inside their guild.
Let's give some more insight about this: I have been personally checking in Azshara and I found multiple times a level 2 rogue named Ripcaptive doing nothing there. Now there's why I said "large reserve of low level characters": Over the past 8 months, Frostpotbank, Spyerino, Captive and now Ripcaptive and most likely plenty more have all been used to scout Azuregos. The first three are confirmed to have been banned permanently for botting.

How do you know they are botting?
This was really tricky but it seems to work with their current way of botting. I think everyone knows how the game mechanics work, but I'll explain just to be sure: if you're standing still with no current target, and someone (Player or NPC) attacks you, then he/it will become your current target. Now let's say you are AFK, for any reason you will never ever lose your current target, unless they run too far, log out or hearthstone away. Here's the trick: if you almost attack them (you start to shoot an arrow at them, but then you interrupt it), he will target you. If you try to do this to some of their "scouts" or even players afking near the spawn point of Azuregos, they will not keep you in target, but instead they'll just not have a target anymore after a mere half second. Here are some videos that shows what i’m talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTzaiqhhuDA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t543LNmo6M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq9mpYXy36o

Now, I have been checking on them personally a lot, and they're not using this kind of botting 24/7. They usually stop right after I start checking on them, because they know what's the deal with me and they're pretty clever. But this doesn't mean for any reason they're innocent: I made some research and I found these ban appeals:
- Spyerino, level 1 rogue in NOPE: https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=20640. As you can see, they claim they were not botting although the GM re-confirmed that ban.
- Peach: https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=20653. The player Koru is an officer in the guild Coalition, and the reason of the ban was botting once again.

How long have they been doing this?
Hard to say, but I've been told they started using bots very early. The ban appeals of Spyerino and Peach date back to September. Captive was banned around the same time. There was a youtube video early May regarding this but the person that recorded this wanted to stay anonymous and thus didn't allow me to check it, instead he only offered me this (http://imgur.com/a/tNtFB) set of screenshots from that video. The purpose of these pictures is just to show that even back then (1st May 2015 according to the picture I provided) they were already breaking the rules. The character in question back then, called Frostpotbank, was last seen almost 8 months ago on the 1st of May 2015. I suspect this was one of their first “scouts” that got banned for botting.

Have I ever contacted GMs and reported them?
Yes, I surely did, and more than just a few times. Most of the times they would just say “Thanks for your report, we will further investigate”, while nothing actually happened. Even after I gave these videos of Ripcaptive clearly botting, they were still using that character weeks later. But even then, here lies the real problem. Even if we imagine the case where Ripcaptive is banned, it doesn’t solve anything. Why? because as I already said, they can just bring a new level 1 character there, with full disrespect towards the staff as if they don’t care at all about the rules. It seems that despite the fact that the official Terms of Use forbid botting, the enforcement of this rule is lacking and therefore allows players to continuously bot on alts and face no consequences on their mains, while reaping huge advantages for their mains and their guilds.

And now, this is the most interesting part of the topic. I talked with many players in different guilds, and some of them even showed me some sad screenshots. I apologize to the person that gave me this, but I have to share it with the public. It simply can’t go unpunished. After reading these 2 screenshots you’ll get chills down your spine (http://imgur.com/a/32ajs). Shatari, how about you man up and admit the fact that you as a former officer of NOPE have not only allowed but also accommodated the use of bots, in order to gain an unfair advantage over other guilds? This goes for the rest of leadership of both NOPE and Coalition as well.

This has gone so far, that absolutely nobody in NOPE or Coalition’s leadership can deny the fact that these “scouts” are botting, and are used to gain an unfair advantage. Sadly, the people responsible will never come forth, as it will mean they face a permanent ban. They will keep hiding, but let it be known: NOPE and Coalition have been botting, and will continue to do so, as long as they are capable of getting away with it. Both guilds have reaped the benefits and gathered a large amount of very good items from not only Azuregos, but from Kazzak as well.

Would they have gathered the same amount of items if they weren’t botting? NOPE and Coalition are strong guilds, and they certainly would have gotten a lot of kills, but that doesn’t take away the fact that they have gained an unfair advantage by using bots to scout for them. Lately the chinese have been making it slightly more difficult for NOPE and Coalition to get easy kills. With Emerald Dragons on the horizon we might see a change in the worldboss environment, but it’s only a matter of time before NOPE and Coalition will start botting on those as well. The fact remains that NOPE and Coalition will do everything to gain an unfair advantage on these worldbosses, including as I showed you in this forum post: botting.

Thanks for reading this immense Wall of Text, I hope you enjoyed.

[Baalls]

I'd like to see the hammer come down for this.

[Charizard]

tl;dr

[Theloras]

of course those f@gs are botting

[Aslan]

Much news many wow, every guild from peenix had these addons and did it early when the worldbosses were implemented, after several heated discussions with GM's, making them bringing it up at 2 of their own meetings, they decided to not allow said scripts and many guilds left the world boss business.

Tldr: If they kept that up despite the stated rules for 8+ months, the only thing I can say is /clap GM's .
But lets see the salt, jealousy and skittles flow for now.

Edit: If you wanna have fun, go to Azshara and spawn a hunter pet called Azuregos... Just a test of how good the addon (if it includes classification) is if there is one .

[Eyrin]

[varth]

Damn that's a lot of evidence actually.

[Beéfcake]

Lets wait and c boys and gurls.

[Lorilay]

FWIW you can use the game API to perform non-action commands after a pause (supermacro has this functionality with the "/in" command, which draws on the Blizzard API). Blizzard removed the ability to use this for character actions partway through vanilla (I used a macro to automatically rebuff myself with thorns when leveling on retail). Also, there is another API command to recognize if you target a mob exactly by name, which you can use to conditionally send an "Azuregos is up" chat message, for example.

Because "/target" and chat commands aren't considered character actions, you can still use "/in" to repeatedly target a mob and send a conditional chat message with the 1.12 API (remember those annoying countdown "pulling" macros from vanilla retail?). That said, your character will still go AFK eventually if you don't move around a bit.

I guess my point here is that targeting a mob and sending a chat message don't require player input under the Warcraft API, and there's no evidence that these players are AFK botting instead of just moving once every 15 min. That said, I'm not convinced the GM staff on here actually understand what can be accomplished with in-game macros (as opposed to external programs or hardware), so it's possible they'll get banned anyways.

[Grim]

Imagine when this starts happening on Emerald Dragons, something very crucial for server-wide competition and smooth AQ progress.. With such rubbish around, there won't be any point continuing playing on Nostalrius, sadly.

Oh well...