Hello,
My previous comment had douchy vibe, sorry about that. I'm just a "bit" frustrated about the amount of bots I encounter in the game today, and about Blizzard's attitude towards this subject.
I also happen to be working in IT security, focusing on reverse engineering. In my spare time I like to dissect wow, I understand some things about how they implemented their anti-cheat system and how it works.
Please enlighten me how "detecting these bots would be easy from a technical perspective".
Sure thing, just let me say a few things before:
I would define 2 groups of botters for clarity's sake:
If somebody from group 1 decides not to release the bot developed to the public, the chance for detection is very close to 0, since blizzard doesn't know that the bot even exists. Private bot developers are simply out of scope, because you won't be able to detect them, as they know what they are doing and how to avoid checks from blizzard, but I think this group is about 0.1% of all botters.
However if they release the bot to the public, blizzard will inevitably know about the bot and hopefully start doing something against it. So bot users in group 2 are the annoying fuckers who destroy your gaming experience in battlegrounds.
So Blizzard uses Warden to scan for known various things on the client side, including checks for known byte patterns and values in memory (something like this, just an example, this is what most private servers warderns are checking for) that indicates that the player is cheating (btw some interesting facts on warden can be found here, it's written by one of most experienced guy in wow hacks :)), and the player is then flagged for ban in the next weave. They tend to go after a specific bot/cheat method, depending on which is the most used at the time. After they implement a detection method, they silently wait, even several months, so they can detect and ban more cheaters in the next ban weave.
HOWEVER, in the case of honorbuddy, which is undoubtedly the most pressing issue in the game today, they failed to do that, as the bot trains are still running wildly around in BGs for at least 6 months by now (if not more), which is unacceptable IMO.
You see, we have entire teams dedicated to this and believe it or not
I am sure they have a department for this, I'm just not sure it's big enough. There was a time where they did not update warden for a whole year.
I'm curious exactly what solution you are thinking of
The current system anti cheat is doomed as it can and will be circumvented by people in group 1. If honorbuddy dies there will be another to replace it.
Finally I arrived at the part that you originally asked, what would I do? Nothing magical, these are trivial things to do:
I would move focus on detecting bot users on server side. I would make use of the hardware that is available today, and develop an analytics system (big data and shit) that would constantly scan player data to detect certain behaviors that indicates a bot. The system would keep track of player events such as login, logout, send mail, movements, spells casted, whatever you need for the next steps:
Having all this data ready to query, the system could check for known red flag behaviors, like being online 24/7h, are you doing things for an abnormally long time, are you going between A and B point on the map the exact same way as other 123124 characters (see bot trains)? How much gold you make on avg / hr?
http://iseclab.org/papers/botdetection-article.pdf
You know what I mean. basically using heuristics, you could assemble your own triggers, and then correlating this data with other player accounts would create a pattern that could be used for caching botters. Obviously the banning should not be automated, only in 100% certain cases (like all patterns matched + warden confirm), but this could help game masters to catch an ongoing bot train.
Because I know that they are NOT doing it this way now.
Again, this is nothing new, and Blizzard HAVE the resources to implement this or any similar system, yet they fucking let it going on.