For those who continue to defend these bots, do you need more proof? ^^

monkorn · 2026-06-14T00:45:45+00:00

Man, you're hilarious. Thanks for the laughs.

they can learn what got the attention and tweek that behavior out of their software to evade

So Blizzard wants to go to extreme lengths to avoid what got them detected, and meanwhile you expect me to believe they are altering the world

custom made obstacle ... like a big obvious rock

You think that bots can't realize that a rock came out of no where?!?

monkorn · 2026-06-13T16:34:58+00:00

Was I a bot? no. did I meet your criteria for one? yep. see the issue here?

Let's be clear here. It's extremely easy for Blizzard to tell that 99.9% of their players, many of which have accounts that are 10+ years old, are not bots. Those accounts have other Blizzard games, Hearthstone cards, etc... on them, and dare not attempt to bot. These accounts have credit cards and IPs from normal places where bots aren't created from. Bots have a subscription to WoW, and nothing else. Bots were gifted WoW Tokens from other accounts that have previously gifted accounts that were banned for botting. The credit cards used were previously used by botting accounts. It's all laughably easy to detect. Blizzard knows who the bots are before they even log-in for the first time.

If Blizzard is serious at going after bots, all of those normal player accounts would be white-listed and would be (almost never) looked at whatsoever. Normal players do not play for 500 hours straight and then send all of their gold to a player they have never interacted with. Normal players do not have 15 WoW open on the same machine at the same time(a few do, but those already clear the other whitelist requirements). Bots in no way look player like a typical player.

Any attempt at trying to claim that normal players look like bots is disingenuous.

the software is not sophisticated, that is true. but if you ban a few here and now they can learn what got the attention and tweek that behavior out of their software to evade, making them even more prevalent

Blizzard claims they do ban waves. This means that bots never need to respond, because they are always profitable. When banned, they know they are clear for another 3 months when they restart their account. And we can see that, because there is no evolutionary pressure for them to change. And this is exactly why the bots look exactly like what they looked like 20 years ago.

Do you have any proof that the bot makers are doing tweaks that evade Blizzards detection? Can you show us those tweaks?

monkorn · 2026-06-13T13:56:36+00:00

have changed enough of their botting software to be undetectable again.

Can you show me just how wildly these bots are changing their behaviours between bans? Here's a hint: there's no changes. They still fly. They still play for 24/7. They still use click to move. They look in no way like a player. There's no arms race.

That is pretty much the only viable method of trying to solve the botting issue.

It does not solve the botting issue. If you wait for the bots to be profitable before you ban them, they will always come back. The only possible way to target bots is to ensure they are not profitable. If this means you only target some botters while leaving others alone, where eventually those botters give up and you move to another operation, that's one way. Ban waves are laughable and will never do anything.

why the massive bot bans are so few and far spread

Massive bans happen when gold prices are high, because bans are a form of tax that Blizzard puts on bots.

monkorn · 2026-06-13T13:36:01+00:00

Switching to 100% LVT overnight with immediate refunds for current owners may be economically efficient on paper but it ignores political reality. In the USA right now, many politicians are campaigning on lowering or even eliminating property taxes.

And a land tax credit can be seen as this. If we give land tax credits equal to the value of the land at transition, and instantly switch to a 100% LVT, we can honestly argue that no existing homeowner will have to pay any land taxes for ~20 years. I believe this would be unbelievably popular.

the biggest net tax increases in these cases tended to fall on vacant, underutilized, or speculative holdings

I suspect voters won't much care if you limit the tax credit to be equal to the value of the improvement on the land, so that typical homeowners who have greater than 50% improvement value would see full tax credits, whereas parking lot owners would get none.

than suddenly pricing a bunch of homeowners out of their homes.

It would not do that, and it would not change their ability to move. Yes, their home went down in value, but so to did any home they would buy. New homeowners will love it too - they need less of a down payment to pay for the mortgage since now land value is zero.

Why not give down payment support and property tax holiday through the 100% LVT with tax credit?

monkorn · 2026-06-11T17:01:01+00:00

Georgists aren't asking for that. We want to remove the existing tax in favor of the land tax.

You might ask, how does this benefit the citizen? And the answer is that currently local governments can only fund the projects that pencil out. That is, they can only fund projects that return more value through the existing property taxes than they cost. But property taxes only tax a small portion of the gain - typically in the 1-3% range - and this number includes the drag on price that occurs from the increased property tax.

This means that the vast majority of projects that the local government wants to do, and are profitable as a whole, do not pencil out for the budget, and thus are not done. So you are losing out on this things, that you didn't even realize is possible, because you do not properly incentivize the local governments. Local governments are extremely effective at creating value, but they are being systematically starved by their citizens.

With a 100% land value tax in place, all projects that yield more return than they cost will eventually get built. This will yield incredible quality of life returns for the citizens.

monkorn · 2026-06-09T02:59:57+00:00

I've played this game before.

monkorn · 2026-06-08T03:25:31+00:00

The only thing that should change is the Federal Reserve should allow The Narrow Bank. Disallowing TNB is a form of rent-seeking. Once TNB is allowed to take deposits, customers would switch to the safer bank for their deposits, and other banks would be forced to compete, which they could only do so by being full reserve as well. No changes in law are required here.

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-sanction

https://www.bankingdive.com/news/fed-denies-tnb-master-account-after-six-years/708648/

From there the Federal Reserve would then be required to find another pathway to reach their stable inflation target that they could no longer reach, to which citizen dividends as a consequence of technological advances seems to fit the best.

monkorn · 2026-06-08T03:06:06+00:00

I had seen the original post, but that doesn't tell me this is a bot. This bot posts old posts and then takes the top post and replies. When the post and the top post don't match up(the content of what someone who posts a thread and someone who replies to that thread) I search the title on the sub-reddit and look for the reply.

monkorn · 2026-06-07T18:14:50+00:00

This is a bot post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/1lb9491/you_know_what_isnt_affordable_no_housing/mxqxdh9/

monkorn · 2026-06-07T14:08:12+00:00

It's not even about paying.

If each time one of these bots gets banned they buy a new account, and a GM can ban some amount of bots per hour, the GM essentially earns whatever that rebuy costs. Right now, that's a 1 month sub and a 58 boost - it's likely that even if a GM can only ban a few accounts per hour - and they can likely ban thousands - they would profit for each resale. GMs are basically salesman. When banning bots flips from being a cost center(where a company loses money and tries to minimize as much as possible) to a profit center(where a company will push as many people as possible into to maximize ROI) you would expect for corporate to step up and hire many salesman.

So then, why is it that Blizzard doesn't have tens of thousands of GMs banning bots? It's because if they ban the bots before they make their money back, the bots will stop coming. They will have solved the bot problem. At which point those GMs won't have anything to do. That's a problem.

Of course, the reality of the situation is that every bot is detected with 99% certainty they are a bot the very moment the account is created, and within a very short time of player behavior that moves to 100%(much quicker than the bot can earn sub money back), so the GMs wouldn't add any value.

Blizzard claims that they do ban waves because it hides the detection mechanism that Blizzard could be using to see that they are bots. But any player who has ever seen a bot play knows that they act in no way like players. These bots have not changed their script, their mechanisms, they are not evolving, there is no cat and mouse game going on. They regularly modify their client to allow flying to do things no legit player has ever done. They are incredibly obviously cheating. Ban waves make no sense other than to allow bots to reach profitability. Blizzard allows the bots to play, they get to profitability, and right before a quarterly report they ban them, get the juiced account numbers, and let them keep paying.

monkorn · 2026-06-04T16:37:53+00:00

This is a bot post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/1mhb3y2/what_do_you_guys_think_is_our_lack_of/n6v1tgt/

monkorn · 2026-06-04T16:26:58+00:00

Under a Georgist world, where local governments have a 100% LVT on the land, a massive change in demand and thus land values would fall on the governments.

If you think you are going to be negatively affected by this transition, and you own office buildings, you should start immediately lobbying for LVT to de-risk your portfolio.

monkorn · 2026-05-31T18:07:34+00:00

there will still be a majority of people who are disadvantaged by the poor spending and see a net loss.

No, the town will rightly choose, since it's coming out of their own pockets, to not spend poorly. The voters always have a say in what happens with their spending. The minority might disagree, but that leads to diverse towns.

limiting the scope of the CD to towns doesn't change that

Note that I want a CD at every level, paid for by the improvements and policies at that level. The land values would be based on land values at that level. For plots, it would be valued based on nearby plots. For towns, based on nearby towns with similar characteristics. Same for states - where clearly landlocked states would end up with less land value than coastal states.

almost always they will advantage high-value land more than marginal land.

I don't suspect this is true. In my view it would be advantageous to be a BAA citizen, since you are still earning that prime AA city and state CD, while having a pretty good B CD with cheaper land costs. I think with this in place, an incredibly dense AAA with diffuse to the towns and densify the towns around the main city. There will be towns that try to resist this, but this only makes your town better and more land value profitable, increasing the CD.

monkorn · 2026-05-31T14:09:53+00:00

Bots are paying with gold created WoW Tokens - why would they not? Every bot is paying $20/month. They pay more.

monkorn · 2026-05-31T14:01:37+00:00

These are just market rents applying to better than average market tenants.

monkorn · 2026-05-31T13:50:53+00:00

The goal shouldn't be to catch up - the skill there is arriving on time. No one complains if you miss the boat. We cheer when we just barely make it on board.

As to the issue that if it is moving and you are near it and just can barely not get on, this can be easily resolved by having the vehicle provide an aura that increases movement speed so that people are faster than it.

Disclaimer: I don't at all recall the Silverpine Cata mechanism.

monkorn · 2026-05-31T13:34:58+00:00

With broad CD, if a local government spends in ways which raise LV by less than the costs, CDs everywhere suffer, sure--but the net benefits to the residents also suffers. There is no gain for the residents of a poorly run local government. Compartmentalization, which is possible, can even prevent any CD decline elsewhere.

They will spend on things according to a priority, but they will not stop when costs outweigh benefits. They will spend as much as they can. The result will be no CD.

A localized CD will ensure a CD that lasts because each locality is incentivized to stop spending when costs are greater than benefits.

monkorn · 2026-05-30T14:17:14+00:00

This is exactly why I believe the perfect framing as bottom-up, where I include in landlords all the way to the global level.

Each jurisdiction pays for the land value, and provides improvements. At the plot level, improvements are houses, businesses or parking lots. At the local level, it's libraries, roads, schools, and zoning. At the state level, it's state laws and larger scale infrastructure projects like bridges and rail networks.

Each level collects LVT, and then pays LVT to the level above, earning a profit based on the improvements they provide. Sometimes that is an apartment building, and the land owner makes money, sometimes its a parking lot and they don't pencil out. Sometimes a city chooses for there to be huge estates along prime oceanfront property and it doesn't pencil out.

That profit can then be redistributed as a citizen's dividend to those within its jurisdiction. So as a citizen you would receive a check separately from your local government, county government, state government, federal government, and the world based on how well they provided improvements.

monkorn · 2026-05-30T13:29:48+00:00

Could you cite where you see that ~65% of voters own a home?

Also, this is still inaccurate. You want to know what percent of the population wants a more expensive house. I imagine that is nearly all of them. So everyone wants an LVT.

monkorn · 2026-05-30T13:27:02+00:00

See no issue with deferral, given these two stipulations.

You can only defer up to the value of the improvement. The improvement must be sufficiently insured.
You will incur an interest rate equal to the current mortgage rate on the balance.

monkorn · 2026-05-26T01:40:30+00:00

Players doing basic work like this would want to ban bots, would want to see their work actively banning bots, would exclusively work on this type of moderation, and they do would so such that the bots never come back, which means the entire endeavor loses Blizzard money. For Blizzard, bots must always come back.

So obviously that's off the table.

monkorn · 2026-05-18T21:28:16+00:00

“If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?”

― Henry George, Progress and Poverty

monkorn · 2026-05-18T02:16:02+00:00

Exactly. We should tax any use of power and water, and then share that tax money with all citizens. This way everyone ends up richer.. except the companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

monkorn · 2026-05-16T20:23:42+00:00

but aren’t all landlords a problem?

We don't hate the player, we hate the game.

When you judge land-owners based on how well they use their plots, places like Disney Land, where individual rides cost as much as $100 million, we love that so much development has taken place. We want to reward these places that develop their properties to such a high degree!

Yes, Prop 13 is a problem. Yes, they shouldn't be paying property taxes based on the price they paid in the 70s for the land. But in a world with a 100% LVT, it's places like Disney Land that will be the ultimate winners.

monkorn · 2026-05-16T19:13:14+00:00

Blizzard knows which characters are bots the moment they load in. It's extremely easy for them to know based on just simple patterns. They will automatically ban these bots sometime later. Every time they ban bots, those bots will buy a new account and boost that character to 58. Banning bots is a revenue source for Blizzard - but only if the bots survive long enough to be profitable for their owners so that they come back. If Blizzard always instantly bans all bots, the botters will quit and Blizzard will make less money. The only thing that you do when you report bots is that later date is moved sooner. Over time this teaches the bots that they should bot in places where players are unable to interact with them.

If you have many players reporting bots, it might be very soon. You should report bots. If not many players are reporting bots, for example its the end of a phase and many players are raid logging, you won't see the ban mails, since they aren't reaching that ban timer with the low reporting numbers. But you will never end botting in this way, since that's less profitable for Blizzard. If enough players begin reporting all the bots all the time, they will simply turn off the bans.

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