USER-GUIDE: SafeR Botting

I’ve drafted, in the past, a “general” guide to **safeR** botting, but I figure since the crowd has gotten larger here, I may as well type another one. 

FORWARD:

Keep in mind that botting or hacking or cheating of ANY kind is NEVER safe, my advice is to NEVER bot on a main account, or ANY account which you hold near and dear. 

I choose to bot because I just don’t have time in the day to play WoW.  I work in the trades and I am physically/mentally spent by the time I get home during the week, I also own two properties and maintain them myself which keeps me busy as well.  Ergo, I simply, as much as I wish I did, don’t have time to just mine, herb, craft, AH, etc all day long.  A lot of us don’t. 

I play the game normally when I DO play.  I raid, I do dungeons, botting allows me the ability to enjoy that aspect without having the unemployment life to do everything else mentioned above.  If it weren’t for botting, I’d be paying excessive amounts for in game gold from Chinese farmers and sites, etc, just to be able to keep up in game. 

I write my own rotations and make my own profiles, even though I do enjoy some of Onezero’s profiles from time to time when I don’t have time to forge my own. 

I type all of this because this guide will obviously benefit some more than others, I hope there are pointers in here which benefit everyone, but everyone plays and bots differently, I am only bringing to the table what I’ve learned and what has helped me over the last 14 years of my botting endeavor. 

DISCLAIMER STUFF:

We all get banned, at some point.  Botting is never 100% safe, if anyone tells you different, they’re full of shit.  We all bot because we all accept that risk.  I’ve had more accounts banned than I can count, back in the “early” days, Blizz only really slapped you on the wrist and gave a temporary ban, typically starting with a 30 day.  Obviously, these days, much different, everything they’re handing out from what I can see these days is a permaban.

What I am about to share does NOT make botting any SAFER, by any means, but it can protect what you’ve worked so hard botting FOR, if you play your cards right.  It may seem a little intense or “over-OCD”, but keep in mind; I still have multiple accounts with well over 2 million gold that I botted back in 2010/2011, for example.  They’re accounts I’ve never once touched with a bot…

Having said all of that stuff:

JUICY DEETS:

I typically create 5 accounts with Blizzard, but what I am about to lay down can be used with more, hell it can even be used with only two accounts, but I like 5, it’s a nice dungeon group in WoW.  🙂 

I set up two accounts on one Battlenet account, and 3 accounts on a completely separate Battlenet account.    I will call the account with two accounts “2” and the account with three accounts “3”, for ease of explanation going forward. 

2 is used for botting.  3 is used for playing, and never does 3 ever see a bot, it never gets injected, manual playing only.  I setup 3 on a different PC altogether, but that’s only within the last few years, since 2010 until a few years ago, all aforementioned accounts were on one PC.  For the record, I never used VM either, only recently have I started playing around with that. 

I do, however, use a VPN.  I know it doesn’t hide HWID, not going to get into that right now, but I get it, however, just sharing what I have used hither to and including now.  I use the VPN ONLY on 2, NOT on 3.  3 always sees my virgin IP address as to establish a baseline for any argument purposes with Blizz, especailly back then when there was a chance of explaining your way out of a ban. 

So, we have 2 for botting, through a VPN, and 3 which never sees a bot, and never gets loaded through VPN. 

Next, we create characters and more importantly, GUILDS.  Yes, guilds.  I currently have 8 guilds that have only my characters in them, all on one realm, and these are what are used to transfer gold and store mats. 

My botting characters ARE members of a couple of these guilds, but they are NOT guild masters, and it’s important not to make any character on any botting account the guildmaster. 

Create one guild at a time, I started with one, once the bank got a little “stuffy”, I used my accounts for some of the sigs and only had to ask in chat for maybe 5 leftover then kicked them once it was formed, real easy stuff here, but also real helpful. 

This way, if your botting acct ever does get banned, your non-botting account still has the guild GM and all of the items and gold you’ve botted, you’ve lost nothing more than a $15 sub account you’ve used for nothing more than botting. 

What I do is I setup the bot so it mails all items I’ve gathered to a character on account 3, yes, the account that never sees a bot.  So long as you’rte not mailing gold, this has never stung me, at all.  Even after the account gets banned, those items which were mailed still sit in the mailbox of the character you sent them to, so again, you’ve lost nothing more than what was in your bags for gathering. 

Auction intelligently.  Use your guild bank to store the items you’ve botted and mailed off to characters, and sell maybe 15-20 stacks of one item at a time.  If you want to be the cool person who auctions off 50+ stacks of one thing at a time, so be it, but you’re calling unnecessary attention to yourself. 

I set up 4 to 5 different AH characters, all level 1 humans that I keep in Stormwind, all members of each of the 8 guilds.  This way, one week I send all items to “Joey”, next week to “Mary”, etc etc, so people aren’t seeing the same name selling the same stuff in the auction house every day of every week.  We all know the people who make it obvious just by scanning the AH with Auctioneer, so I try to make it not obvious. 

All of the funds I make off of the AH go DIRECTLY into the guild bank AS SOON AS I collect them from the mailbox.  DO NOT keep that gold on your character for unnecessary amounts of time.  From mail, to guild bank, rinse and repeat. 

Run different profiles.  Create your own profiles.  I am not going to get into the details of LCP, but it’s a detection method used by Blizzard and it invloves pathing, specifically using the same waypoints over and over and over.  As it can be argued that any specific set of coordinates used more than once can contribute to the LCP method, it still helps to have multiple profiles that you rotate through once every few days or so.  With my limited time, I typciallky set aside two to three hours on the weekend just to record profile paths.  Trust me, it is worth it.  They don’t have to be “radically” different from each other, they just can’t use the exact same “x,y,z” coordinates as the profile before or after it. 

Group up.  I’m not saying to run bots in groups, not everyoen can afford multiple botting licenses, etc, but group up with another one of your characters and then log them out.  This helps with people seeing you and trying to invite you to a group for whatever reason, now they’ll get the message that you’re already in one.  It’s another tool I have used in the past to thwart any sort of player-based reporting. 

Don’t bot 24/7.  I used to think this advice was hot garbage, dished out by the over-paranoid, until I started noticing patterns circa 2011-2012.  I used to help with a dev team back then with some smaller, well built bots.  In exchange for this, I got unlimited everything, including licenses.  I would run 5-6 bots at a time, whatever my CPU and video cards at the time could handle.  I noticed that my accounts that I had scheduled to shut down after 8-9 hours of botting were “clearing the radar”, while the accounts I had running 24/7 were getting axed.  After the 30 day ban(s) lifted, I swapped accounts, meaning I would run the once 24/7 accounts only 8-9 hours and the once 8-9 hour accounts I would run 24/7.  Within the next 30 days, the accounts NOW running 24/7 got axed, and the accts that had gotten banned before which were now running 8-9 hours were clear.  If this does happen to be absolutely coincidental, then I should have played the lottery those days, because my luck with that experiment was on point.

There used to be a wonderful addon named “ShutUp”.  It was a whisper replier, and you could set your own message as to what to reply with.  It was nice because I would set up a message saying I had headphones on listening to tunes while farming and turned off all chats, and if you need me, send an in game mail.  I thought it was a clever message, still leaving an avenue of communication if need be, but telling them to piss off at the same time.  🙂  If the bot you’re using has a setting for a custom use auto whisper reply that you can tailor to your own message, I would suggest using it as I did with that old addon.

As far as “AI” replies that bots these days come equipped with, I don’t use them.  What I do now is set the bot to shut down if I recieve more than 3 whispers, and I also have the bot log whispers so I can check said log if I ever come back to WoW being closed unexpectedly.  Three whispers is all anyone needs, anything beyond that with no reply is going to look sketchy.  I’ve seen people in the past whisper a random question, then whisper a second time asking if I got the first, then a third time asking if I was a bot.  Anything after that would only provce to them I was.  If, however, WoW is closed after the third whsiper, obviously they’ll see you’re no longer online.  When I check the logs, I determine whether or not to ever message them back claiming I was having network issues and apologizing, then once the convo is done, /ignore them, OR just /ignore them off rip.

As far as death count, if your bot (like Baneto) has an option for “PVP-only deaths” I would utilize that.  I can’t tell you how many times on older bots, on PVP servers, a player would my toon botting, be in full gladiator gear, mess with my toon, then get his fellow unemployed gladiator buddies to join him, and my account was banned within a week due to them, just becasue the bot kept rezzing over and over and doing the same thing, we all know a human player wouldn’t be so stupid as to keep rezzing, and then waiting for the rez timer after 5, 10 minutes, and get killed by them again, it is sooooo obvious in a PVP environment when someone is botting.  Therefore, if you’re not in a BG or Arena, keep the setting for PVP related deaths at 3, if you die 3 times to someone with no life to speak of in the real world, let the bot shut down, don’t get your account in trouble over a nuisance of a person. 

DON’T NINJA!!!!  Most all bots, including Baneto, have an option to NOT ninja gather.  USE IT!!!  I know some people here won’t care, and might say “Fuck em”, but that’s what generates player reports.  You’re botting, just because you miss one node or two nodes or twenty nodes isn’t the end of the world.  I keep that option on, I don’t ninja, and I still wake up every day to 15 to 16 emails of items farmed in the 6 to 7 hours I was sleeping. 

Regarding PVP, I don’t.  This might be one of those areas where my playstyle and botting style greatly differs with everyone else, and that’s ok, but I don’t PVP with bots, never have, probably never will.  When I join BGs on my main acct, it is soooooooo more than obvious who the bots are, and everyone in those BGs is typing about how they’re reporting them.  I’m not saying Baneto makes it look obvious, because I don’t know, I’ve literally never botted with any bot in PVP.

Same with dungeons.  I don’t bot in dungeons, ever, not even rotation-only.  Again, I only use the bot as a gathering, crafting, and selling tool, so I know that this may not be useful info for those who DO use it in dungeons.  I do what I do with the bot so that the limited time I DO have to play can be spent enjoying the raiding, dungeons, and PVP. 

That’s about the extent of what I can come up with off the top of my head.  I am always down for any suggestions or other tips and tricks of trade that I’ve yet to hear, as we’re always ever-learning in both this hobby and this life.   -Waldo Odlaw