The issue of botting has been around Diablo 3 for a long time, but has become much bigger in recent months as new and improved bots let players cheat the system more effectively. Unlike in the Diablo 2 days, Diablo 3 botting isn’t really done for legendary items (since those drop so fast during normal play), or even for EXP (since high level multiplayer games earn it 50x faster than solo).
We’ve talked about the botting issue quite a bit on the last couple of podcasts, and in our current vote lots of you guys vote that it’s a big issue for you. So what’s Blizzard doing about it? Not enough, in the opinion of most legit players, and with so many obvious and/or admitted botters high up on the leaderboards, fans might ask in sarcastic exasperation… “What does it take to get banned for botting? Live video evidence?”
Actually, yeah, that’ll do it. Diablo 3 Botter Banned After Streaming Botting:
The story, which you can see in the above video and hear related in amusing fashion in our latest podcast (coming shortly) is that RedX, a well-known clan leader and streamer, did his usual evening of gaming, and when he went to bed he forgot to shut down his stream before he turned on his bot. Thus his live stream showed a full evening of his Monk playing under the control of a bot. Hundreds of fans watched it live and tweeted/posted about it as time passed, enough that (apparently) even Blizzard couldn’t ignore it.
What’s this mean for botting at large? Nothing, probably. If anything, the RedX incident seems to be serving as an advertisement for botting. After all, thousands more players now know how easy and profitable it is to run an automated tool, and how blatantly a player has to fail in order to be punished for doing so.