Are Ban Waves real?

[toyo]

So, I checked some news from tibia.com about the account deleting since 2008. Here's what I found

Jul 09 2008 - 650 accounts deleted
Aug 01 2008 - 200 accounts deleted
Sep 02 2008 - 650 accounts deleted
Oct 20 2008 - 70 accounts deleted
Feb 25 2009 - 146 accounts deleted
Mar 03 2009 - 5163 accounts deleted
Apr 02 2009 - 5103 accounts deleted
May 05 2009 - 5925 accounts deleded
Jun 03 2009 - 5594 accounts deleted
Jul 03 2009 - 5304 accounts deleted
Jul 31 2009 - 5138 accounts deleted
Aug 24 2009 - 4196 accounts deleted
Sep 07 2009 - 2390 accounts deleted
Sep 23 2009 - 2788 accounts deleted
Oct 21 2009 - 4963 accounts deleted
Dec 07 2009 - 7213 accounts deleted
Dec 22 2009 - 3113 accounts deleted
Feb 01 2010 - 6208 accounts deleted
Feb 11 2010 - 5158 accounts deleted
Feb 22 2010 - 5450 accounts deleted
Mar 08 2010 - 6819 accounts deleted
Mar 18 2010 - 4472 accounts deleted
Mar 29 2010 - 4762 accounts deleted
Apr 07 2010 - 4069 accounts deleted
Apr 19 2010 - 4974 accounts deleted
May 03 2010 - 5633 accounts deleted
May 17 2010 - 4412 accounts deleted
Jun 01 2010 - 5219 accounts deleted
Jun 16 2010 - 5758 accounts deleted
Jul 12 2010 - 7232 accounts deleted
Aug 11 2010 - 6656 accounts deleted
Sep 08 2010 - 6961 accounts deleted
Sep 23 2010 - 692 accounts deleted
Oct 18 2010 - 889 accounts deleted
Dec 14 2010 - 2036 accounts deleted
Feb 15 2011 - 2549 accounts deleted
Apr 14 2011 - 2438 accounts deleted
Jun 20 2011 - 3208 accounts deleted
Jul 06 2011 - 3313 accounts deleted
Jul 21 2011 - 1575 accounts deleted
Aug 18 2011 - 2760 accounts deleted
Sep 29 2011 - 3058 accounts deleted
Nov 03 2011 - 2011 accounts deleted
Dec 08 2011 - 2189 accounts deleted
Dec 22 2011 - 746 accounts deleted
Dec 23 2011 - 55 accounts deleted
Jan 19 2012 - 1497 accounts deteled
Apr 12 2012 - 5445 accounts deteled
Jun 05 2012 - 4848 accounts deleted
Jul 25 2012 - 6305 accounts deleted
Oct 17 2012 - 7376 accounts deleted
Dec 19 2012 - 6231 accounts deleted
Jan 17 2013 - 2461 accounts deleted
Feb 27 2013 - 5390 accounts deleted
Mar 15 2013 - 10306 accounts deleted
Apr 25 2013 - 5562 accounts deleted
Jun 25 2013 - 4844 accounts deleted
Jul 09 2013 - 1245 accounts deleted
Jul 30 2013 - 1581 accounts deleted
Sep 18 2013 - 2967 accounts deleted
Nov 12 2013 - 1473 accounts deleted
Jan 02 2014 - 2580 accounts deleted

SO IT GIVES US 240,019 DELETED ACCOUNTS IN 5 YEARS.

I dont really belive this much accounts were in Tibia ;) discuss

[Evancion]

I'm 100% positive that those numbers are real, but not exactly indicating what you'd like to see.
If there is a advertising bot (gold seller, realots, helgaots, or whatever OT) that gets banned every day for 2 weeks,
that's 72 worlds * 14, which is 1008 accounts. That's just Thais DP alone.
So, it's likely that a huge number of the deletions were gold sellers, free accounts, low levels, ect.
However, let's not deny the fact that high levels are being deleted too, and that is quite evident by using deletion detection websites.
Feel free to check this website out if you're still skeptical: http://mrthomsen.de/deleted/view

[Y2Quakepc2]

^

cant agree more

[toyo]

So I guess botting bans comes from reports and wrong made scripts

[allrandom]

Don't forget, anyone botting for gold to sell is probably running at a conservative minimum 10 accounts. Those 240,019 accounts may only be representative of 24,000 actual players which means they may only be catching 4800 players a year - 400 a month - 13 a day.

[allrandom]

Pardon my thinking above. The same player could be getting banned repeatedly is what I meant. Deletions of those accounts aren't indicative of the impact of bot detection on the actual botting community is where I was going.

[Y2Quakepc2]

Don't forget, anyone botting for gold to sell is probably running at a conservative minimum 10 accounts. Those 240,019 accounts may only be representative of 24,000 actual players which means they may only be catching 4800 players a year - 400 a month - 13 a day.

doesnt make sense at all

[allrandom]

doesnt make sense at all

I caught it before you did!

What I was going for is that the numbers are the same sort of inflated statistics cops use when they want to make themselves look better.

For instance, if the cops make a bust of a pound of coke, they make a statement saying they made a bust worth $x. What they don't say is that they arrived at x by breaking that pound of coke down into dime bags and multiplying that by street value. They don't point out that nobody would try and sell a pound of coke by the dime bag and the actual value of the drugs seized is 1/10th of what they say it is.

My point is that 240,019 accounts may be 240,019 individual accounts, but individual accounts are irrelevant since players most often bot on multiple accounts. 240,019 accounts deleted doesn't mean 240,019 players were caught botting. It means 24,000 players were caught botting most likely.

That makes a huge difference. 10, 000 of them could have been using tibia auto which is a lot different than using xenobot. And as mentioned above, many were probably blatantly automated throw away accounts.

[Y2Quakepc2]

i get your point brother but still

who says out of those 240K accounts the average accounts per player is 10?

You don't really know that, its a date that not even cipsoft would know i believe.

Still, what we can say 100% for sure is that out of those 240K accounts there's a high % of lvl 1 spammers - lvl 8 yellers, now also dicers, between other reasons not related to cave botting. But we couldn't still know what this % is

[allrandom]

i get your point brother but still

who says out of those 240K accounts the average accounts per player is 10?

You don't really know that, its a date that not even cipsoft would know i believe.

Still, what we can say 100% for sure is that out of those 240K accounts there's a high % of lvl 1 spammers - lvl 8 yellers, now also dicers, between other reasons not related to cave botting. But we couldn't still know what this % is

Right, which is why I used qualifiers like "may".

10 seems like a pretty conservative estimate for anyone serious about botting for gold selling. It's probably a lot higher - like the guy on here that mcs 40 accounts.

Whatever the number is, if CIP is catching the same 100 idiots 2400 times over 5 years I'm not going to worry too much. And that's why I say the number of 240,019 itself may be real and accurate, but still not indicative of the reality of the situation.

[Y2Quakepc2]

i strongly believe the average botter bots up to 4 clients

i say it because i've met so fucking many in tibia, i've met massive gold sellers, normal gold sellers, bot-to-pay-prem, bot-to-lvl-up, bot-to-heal-nohands, etc
and i can say that those massive gold sellers are just a very very few of the total ammount of botters

most of the botters i know in tibia (aside from xenobot forums obvs) bot 2-4 clients at the same time, and not even 24/7.

I agree those numbers have many many things to discuss about, but also we're not counting the bans of people who didn't get banned in a massban

What i want you to understand is that we can't really say much about these kind of topics, we're never sure about such things and the risk of getting banned is always there.

[allrandom]

Of course the risk is always there, and I'm not trying to say that there isn't. Statistics, however, can always be manipulated.

CIP doesn't release those numbers as a matter of customer service. They release them to make the community at large think they're listening to their complaints and to make people afraid to bot - it's in CIPs best interest to inflate the numbers however they can. Hell, they could be doubling the numbers for all we know.

[sausting]

What i want you to understand is that we can't really say much about these kind of topics, we're never sure about such things and the risk of getting banned is always there.

most sensible words posted on the topic of banning in a while.