This is written by someone without even the vaguest since of how World of Warcraft works, or gaming at all?

1 real worldified: "The should pass a law saying every car could only be driven 20 hours a month. That will reduce the amount of time people spend travelling."
-> See the problems with this? They all apply to WoW. Alternate transportation, owning five cars, etc. All apply. Solves nothing, shits on everyone.

2 real worldified: "Instead of the google, we can all search with our own search engines that we run locally, on our smartphones"
-> All the scaling problems apply.

3 real worldified: "Instead of making everyone get a phd in physics, math, stats, philosophy, journalism, and computer science, maybe we could offer individual degrees. I will propose this as a solution to the problem of everyone in the whole world needing to get all of those things, because that entirely represents reality as it is now"

1)- You can't regulate hours played. If you did this, it would mean that the only people with alts were ones who could buy multiple accounts. It would also completely destroy the play experience, which involves a great deal of relaxing and talking. If you had to watch a clock super hard... just awful.

2)- You have no conception of the value provided by the servers. There are people who (against the ToS and in some cases copyright law) host world of warcraft (and other games) servers. These are known as "private servers", and you can google them. While a real server can have thousands (and interact seamlessly with OTHER servers with also thousands), these servers struggle mightily with tens, and implement almost none of the actual server side scripting that takes up so very much computational power.

3)- The game already offers a great deal of this, and importantly, the bots were almost all alt characters to begin with. This means that they were grinding to get access to more play styles. This is also monumentally stupid because the entire concept of "the grind" is not really being understood as something to even complain about properly.

Let me say this: in every game I have played, there are cheaters. What non-mmo games normally have is, is a pool of non-gamers who understand that cheaters are the problem. The solution isn't "there outta be a law" (to limit play time, to prevent you from accessing your client RAM, to ensure that the giant data centers are somehow freely available to you), the solution isn't "reduce the grind" because the "cheaters are justified because I don't even play so I totally get this". It's to ban cheaters, and keep banning.

Ban cheaters.

Keep banning cheaters.

That's the answer. In all the games. You just. Fucking. Ban. Cheaters.

Here's some context:

WoW has a bunch of things you can do.

Level: You have to level to participate in most content. Bots that automate this are often ignored, because they aren't that much better at it. This is not about one of those bots at all.

Raiding, an organized pve (player versus environment, in other games pvm for player versus monster)- an experience at max level versus challenging encounters. If you fail on one "boss", he "resets", and you have to try that boss again from the start. Each boss encounter is 3-10 minutes, and raiding guilds normally meet at specified times when everyone can be available, and clear multiple bosses (ideally all of them) in one or more difficulty levels. The hardest levels are almost unbeatable except for the top few thousand players out of millions, and it normally takes some time for even the professional players to get down the hardest bosses on the hardest difficulties whenever a new raid is released. When you do beat a boss, he drops random loot- potential upgrades, hopefully, to make you and your friends more powerful. The gear dropped from the toughest bosses is the best currently in the game for pve.
No bot can raid. A few bots can automate certain tasks, but these are rarely employed- the tasks needed for automation are so dynamic, and the risks so great, that it's almost unheard of.

Ranked PvP- At max level, you can join a premade group for arena (2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 death match) or rated batteground (objective based 10v10 play). These modes are very difficult to win at the higher level. Participation grants access to the best pvp gear in the game.
No bot does these things. A few players use bots to automate certain tasks- for instance, one really hard task is to "kick" an opponent when they are casting. Since there is a lot of latency and ability to fail (the opponent will often start a cast, then stop, hoping that you will "kick" when he is not casting, thus wasting your cooldown, and allowing him to cast again, this time without fear of interruption), kickbots are a thing- but they are much harder to get away with. All ranked pvp is very hard to cheat at, because you will generate a series of complaints from your opponents, and get banned permanently for it.
This is not what's being discussed, and a kickbot or other arena program is ultimately trying to provide your character with one or more superhuman responses. These are rare and actioned severely.

Casual PvP- generating the gear needed to play in ranked, this involves being thrown in with mostly random people in an objective based pvp environment. Very popular among those who don't want to coordinate in Skype, or people who just want to play some.

*This is what the bot in question does:* It automates this casual pvp. This allows the players to have alternate accounts that are getting gear on multiple characters. This means that they can play pvp with different classes easier than those who do not cheat. A few fools even botted from their main accounts, which the bot authors always tell you not to do. These bots shit up the game- you'll queue up and notice some of the players are bots, and if your team has too many, you'll lose. If the enemy team has too many, your win will not be fun, because bots are stupid.

I don't play WoW right now, but I'm very glad to see them banning these clowns.

Botters mostly were botting on alt accounts.

What server has empty Stormwind or Org? NONE of them.

WoW is, despite my own personal drop being taken out of the bucket, at 7-10 megasubs. You could fit almost all the lesser MMOs inside there and still have room.

These are pvp botters that shit up the random queue battlegrounds while their owners are asleep. I don't play right now, but I'm very glad they got the boot. Those guys are awful.

Incorrect.

This is a pvp bot that shits up queues with dumb fucking bots while their players sleep, normally on alts. It has nothing to do with the WoW token, nor does Blizzard stand to gain anything from that. Anyone can rebuy WoW, and most banned players will have actually had an alt account ban- even botters aren't universally stupid enough to bot from their main account, by and large.

Their accounts are banned. This means that they cannot log in for a fixed amount of time, possibly permanent. No one has their identity or credit card banned, ever- any one ever banned is always welcome to buy a new copy of WoW, and many do.

But a ban is a very meaningful disincentive in an MMO. Losing all your stuff is the MMO player's apocalypse. It's not about "this guy is a cheater, we blocked his IP", it's "this account cheated, so its player has lost everything".

Blizzard allowing you to skip a solo pve grind is very different from a bunch of botters shitting up your battleground and ruining your team pvp experience.

They have never sold max level characters. Not really.

A few months before the cap pushed up to 100, and after that fact was announced, they sold 90s. What is missing is, to have a decent character towards the end of an expansion requires you be both max level, and have had some time in the different tiers of content. Each expansion raises the cap, meaning that the different tiers of content at the old max level no longer are relevant.

For what it is worth, I hated that, and it's a very small part of why I don't play any more- but lets not pretend that this was some giant grind skip. The levelling game is very streamlined as it is, and the majority of the work to make a powerful character happens once you are AT max level.

I'm sure they will begin selling 100s at some point once there have been enough waves of content at 100, and when 105 or 110 or whatever is announced. But if you take them up on that offer, you'll end up with a character who still needs a decent amount of gear to matter- they are just giving you a fast intro so your friends can help you, or so you can be playing with the majority of the playerbase.

PvP rewards you for playing it. The character progresses from weakish pvp to strongish pvp gear, and then normally has to compete in tough rated combat for the final pieces.

Many players want to skip the first part of that- they essentially want to have gear on all the character classes so they can play whatever is most powerful.

The bots are disgusting. You'll enter a battleground, and it becomes very obvious who is botting immediately. When I started playing, the bots would mostly jump in place to avoid being marked afk (afk removes them from battleground). Then they implemented features to report non contributors. A few years ago, we started seeing bots that were smart enough to acquire enemies, move toward them, and press skills uselessly- thus rendering them unable to be kicked. The last time I played, you would see those bots sometimes, and it was always shitty to load up what looked like a decent battleground only to find your team infested with them.

It looks like Blizzard figured out how to catch those cheaters, which is great.

These are cheaters, plain and simple, and I love that they get banned. They ruin the game for the actual players. They aren't "skipping a grind" by having some guy hit hogs in a field, they are actual players who want gear faster by setting a bot to run a character overnight / when they can't play because of work or school. They just want more than everyone else has, and it's bullshit when it works.

Every MMO wishes they were as dead as WoW. Most wouldn't have had to turn off their servers if they were one seventh as dead as WoW...

WoW is essentially the only MMO, their own genre. Everyone who makes an MMO uses so many similar things to WoW that they are essentially wowlikes. At this point, they've added more things that stuck than everquest, have added more content of more types than most games ever can, all while being around longer than anything else can, and being wildly profitable the whole time.

Also they ban people all the time. What happened here is interesting because of the scale of it.

"I challenge you to find me some Men's Rights Activists who are doxing."

So, lemme tell you how this kind of shit plays out.

First, I google:
mra dox
Then I just link random shit.
Second, in each case, you claim "No True MRA Would Dox".
Third (optional), you make personal attacks on me if you can*

In some cases you'll be correct, of course- MRA has become a slur in a whole bunch of circles. It's just pretty much a catch-all, as the misuse at the top demonstrates, and it's a bogeyman- like, "you can't believe this, because some MRAs believe that".

Here's a case of reddit users trying to (and incorrectly) doxxing some woman unrelated to some trollish feminist:
http://www.dailydot.com/crime/...

This is also the very first google response, and I'd never heard of it until this moment. The second is literally from a subreddit called "against men's rights", which seems to have some data that you are more than welcome to pick apart (a subreddit with such a hateful title likely has plenty of unsubstantiated stuff, but it's a pretty long post- I bet some of it is real, right?).

Oh, the third response is AVFM justifying the doxxing that they admit to doing. That good enough? AVFM is an MRA website, right?

Now, for the first link (or any, really), you could go with:
1) "We don't know that these are MRAs"
2) "Technically, they didn't dox her, because they found the wrong chick (or other technicality)"
3) "They didn't act like the kind of MRA that I follow, so they don't count"
4) "Ok, but in this case, it was justified"

But it all misses the point (even if one or more is correct for any given case). The point is, you know full well that if you post some really well phrased, interesting, or extreme position in the gender war, a legion of anonymous people with entire skeletons to pick have a real chance of shitting all over you. Maybe you get a few bad emails, maybe you get some scary snail mail, or maybe you get SWATted, who knows, right?

*bonus points for my core point IF- you identify as "MRA" or "feminist" and already opened my username in new tab.... you know, just to check. Can't be too sure who is on what side of what is apparently a damned war, right?

Ads are harmful. They are a form of statistically-proven mind control that are legal for free speech reasons. The best thing you can say about ads is "we don't take down advertisers with guns, because we allow free speech". That's the strongest argument they can make. They hurt consumer choice, increase debt, create expectations of products that they don't live up to, push towards a version of society with defective bullshit, hurt popular opinion of home-grown solutions, lower mindfulness, and change the overall discussion to be about "why don't you drink X" instead of that not even being a relevant topic.

It's so insidious that I actually lack the vocabulary to even phrase the previous sentence properly, and it would take a well formed article to even express the opinion. Short version: advertisements already control everything. Even if you don't buy advertised products, that's a deviant choice and you have to defend it.

Now, lets take the tech side, and the property ownership side.

1)- You buy a device capable of doing your bidding.
2)- Instead of that, it tries to control your mind on behalf of third parties, who offer you no compensation, and only seek to harm you.
3)- This idiot argues in favor of you not having control of the device that you paid for, because he wants to control it, and you.

What a scam artist. I celebrate every ad blocked, I cherish every webpage rendered into content instead of horseshit.

NOT using an adblocker is immoral. It hurts you, and by becoming familiar with brands, you unwittingly become their agent- and thereby you hurt your friends and family. If someone were to ask you about some random shit brand whose only merit is that they advertised, your response will be something like "I dunno but their ads are annoying/funny/cute/dumb". That's a huge fucking win for some shit company. It should be "who knows, never used them". But it isn't. Because advertisers won.

I think this is the first time I've seen "MRA" in a slashdot headline (I could have missed some, but I do check reasonably often). It's certainly the first time Return of Kings attention-getting trollish posts (including stuff like "why girls with short hair are damaged" and "why to date a girl with an eating disorder") has baited slashdot, that I'm aware of.

But the bigger concern is- is slashdot going to really enter this territory? This is hugely controversial stuff. We've already seen "feminism Friday" become a thing- normally some genderwarrior-bait story near the end of the week, normally told from a feminist perspective- sometimes legit, sometimes not. One piece that is largely controversial on slashdot is the "should we bend over backwards to get girls in tech" thing, obviously built in controversy for a bunch of professional tech people, and we see it *over and over again*.

But this is beyond that. You would expect people to have differing opinions on that stuff, and whether you are opposed or in favor, it's pretty relevant. Random gender warring stories, such as this, are not.

I'll also point this out: the editorial staff seems to be pretty strongly on one side. It may be difficult to give MRAs a fair shake, but certainly, by calling RoK an MRA website, and by linking that as the first thing ever, they aren't even fucking trying. This would be like calling out "feminists" and then linking to some really ludicrous 70s-edge position as being the standard-bearer. A Voice For Men's website is probably a better place to start if you want to actually go find non-strawmen points to analyze / refute- they at least self identify as some version of MRA, not some reactionary / PUA crossbreed like RoK.

The people who discuss these gender things online tend to be full-on soldiers, on both sides. They will do or say anything to slam the other side, they will dox, they will make false claims, they are fighting a fucking war. And you want the slashdot commenters to be in on this? Gross.

Who cares?

If we have an option between "windmill that kills birds" and "windmill that does not do that", the second has a bit of merit because of that fact. It's in the discussion. Certainly, the decision to expand new windmills is affected by the bird-death argument: we could probably stand to use an order of magnitude more windmills, after all, and by your estimate, they would then by tying the cats.

Cats are atopical. I'm sure a bunch of crap kills birds aplenty. This is a discussion about windmills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...