There Is A Botting Epidemic and Its Ruining The Game

Originally posted by badimojo

Does anybody spend the extra time reporting bot accounts? And following up to that, does anybody think that reporting is a worthwhile thing to do?

(I do report if I can remember to but I'm not very sure that it's worth the trouble).

Originally posted by ItsDominare

Appreciate you're not going to go into details on detection methods here, but do the in-game reports actually help? I try to remember to do one if I see an obvious bot, but you never get any feedback so it's hard to know if one is screaming into the wind or not.

Originally posted by ItsJamali

1. Can you confirm if reporting bots in game is useful?

A lot of players feel that reporting bots is a waste of time, especially when the option is buried under "cheating".

1. If it's helpful are there any plans to give players an incentive to report bots?

In some games you receive a notification if someone was banned with your help, in others there are actual rewards. For Hearthstone there's simply no feedback.

1. Are there any plans to combat the bots besides banning them more frequently? Is banning them actually reducing the number of bots over time?

People have suggested things like PvE puzzles as in game captchas, separate ques for accounts receiving many bot reports, and changes to arena to deincentives bot owners farming for runs.

Is there anything you can share with the community?

Originally posted by ItsJamali

Appreciate the response, and that there are limited resources.

The most meaningful feedback I could give you is:

1. The existence of the report feature is not communicated to players, it's something you have to figure out yourself or learn about from forums.

2. The Botting option should be top level, cheating is synonymous with hacking to a large number of players, so leaves room for confusion. People say it's buried because you don't see the Botting option until you've already selected Cheating.

Originally posted by ItsJamali

In what ways would you expect it to be communicated?

New players are far more likely to be facing bots, and far less likely to know about the report function.

I've played through the new NPE a few times, at some stage you can face other players also playing through the NPE.

After your first match against another human would seem the appropriate time to have a short pop up tutorial showing players how to add other players as friends, and also how to use the report function.

This way the focus can be on encouraging the social aspect of the game, instead of the report feature itself.

For everyone else they could be shown the same pop up tutorial on logging in like other announcements.

Any less and you're talking about social media posts which just don't reach a wide enough audience.