Hey,

The question of how long to bot and risk of ban is really proportional to the risk you are willing to take and to which extent. You need to figure out what your willing to lose, no lose=no gain. For most people that means to not bot on account that you spend $$$ in. Bans can hit randomly although no mass ban for HearthRanger user has happened YET, its safe to say that the highest chance for you to get banned now is by reports from other players.

Common sense:

1)More hours= More interaction with players= higher % of ban
2)More consecutive game time= more doubt on the legitimacy of the player= higher % of ban

To maximize your chance of NOT getting banned=

Use Less hours to accomplish what you want to do ( for ex getting golden portrait) + less run time per use

However, theres a catch, the less run time you use the longer it takes for you to get your goal which leads to risk stated #1
but also you have to keep in mind #2.

Dont bot in beginning of season, and you have to determine what risk your willing to take.
Generally bot as few as game needed never exceeding more then 6+ hours.

Good luck!

I would go with this option for sure. If not for nothing else then the ladies.


Ok. As someone who has been botting between 5 and 10 years, I can with confidence tell you that

1) Don't bot unless prepared to lose everything. If they're really out to hurt you, they will trace your other accounts and you will lose them too.

2)Time botted equals to risk of ban IF you have non-botting friends in your list, whom will get real suspicious, real fast. Solution is to a) don't let them atleast spectate the bot playing and b) rather not let the bot go solo at all so that you can answer chat requests. This leads us to

3) Prefer botting friends, actually either go totally solo or be friends only with people who has your 100% trust. Remember, if you cross them they can go on an offensive, resulting in bad exposure of your ops to Blizz.
4) Blizz relies on people reporting in blatant, ignorant and arrogant botters and will then ban these. They are easily the foremost reason to rage posts on forums, videos on youtube and even bad articles in gaming sites and the old press. This is very very bad for the brand and will be dealt with swiftly. In addition, arrogant botters are usually 100% f2p people and gives nothing but trouble to Blizz.

5) As BlackOak, who has extensive experience in botting Blizz products, stated elsewhere on the forums, Blizz seems to be utilizing the policy ' Pay and Stay'. So get out that credit card or log in to your paypal account and start buying packs. This will reduce your personal blip on the Blizz radar considerably. But remember, you still need to be prepared to lose everything some beautiful day.

6) And finally, the least important thing of it all, is that Blizz doesn't measure session lengths. You would not believe the amount of people doing incredible inhuman maraton lenght sessions which Blizz sees daily.
Amphetamines and other doping products are used widely, they can go up to 30 days without sleep, manically playing one fucking video game the majority of that time. In Korea, people fall off chairs and die because they have been playing for so long that the body just gives up. Smallborn babies are neglected and even have died because mothers play baby-care simulator video games.
What Blizz WILL do, however, is find one common nominator in how the bot operates the game, som technical detail which will work as a giveaway, a certain timing of the bot performing something, failing to do some certain movement, such things. Then they will forward the suspects to real people who starts working the cases and starts monitoring suspect accounts.
This will only happen if a bot in general starts to impact the whole game so much, that a mass ban op is needed.
This happened last year with the other bot, which got all customers banned from fall until christmas and then the botters went out of business. Droves and droves of people started making legendary ranks with zoolock decks and the HearthStone community started to take note, following up with crying foul.

Botting isn't for everyone. You have to be a bit reckless, careless, not afraid of loss and usually you make your own rules.

I bot because I'm intrigued by an ai doing a work which mathematically can be optimized by botting, plus I am not a young single guy anymore, but a family man. I don't have 6hrs per day to dedicate to playing a collectible card game no matter how much I would like to. I do like the thought of my very much loved for accounts not being in the bottom mud though.


So, be smart, be discreet, pay for your way, again keep your head low and finally, do not provoke any sorts of negative reactions from people who potentially might report you.


Best,

Anytime bro. Remember to hit that thanks button and it would be appreciated if you pay it forward here, with something you maybe can help someone with.
There's not many of us so in order to get HR out of beta properly we gotta work together. This post however I'm going to refer to in the future when people show up asking wtf botting really is. So I'm kinda being a lazy bastard here lol.

Enjoy uni. It is a real privilege to get to plug up the brain with the latest info from the world, by professionals.