A player is hunting bots in WoW Classic. Although he received threats, he is now starting a new, large project.
For the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft, the developers have opened a series of new Classic realms to allow for a “fresh” start. As unfortunately to be expected, there are also plenty of bots on these realms, ultimately ruining the economy and farming for the sale of gold for real money.
Fighting against bots often feels like battling windmills – but not so on the hardcore realms. Because every “eliminated” bot is guaranteed to be lost and must start over.
A YouTuber has now called for a hunt – along with a website that documents each bot kill.
What is this site about? The website “Clean the Bots” is about eliminating bots in World of Warcraft Classic in hardcore mode. Since in hardcore all characters have only one life and are lost afterward, the death of a bot character is particularly painful for the operator. They lose the time invested in that character.
Who runs the site? The project is run by the YouTuber Madskillzzhc, who consistently documents how he identifies and effectively eliminates bots in his videos. He also has some videos explaining how big the bot business is and how much money is actually being made from it.
About two weeks ago, he published a video in which he announced that he would stop, as the bot operators had obtained his location data. The community has mixed feelings about the fact that Madskillzzhc soon released new videos afterward. Some believe it was merely a “PR stunt,” while others appreciate that he did not succumb to the pressure.
His latest project is now a website that keeps track of kills on hardcore servers.
How is the site being received so far? Currently, there is relatively little activity on the site, and only a handful of players have actively participated in and documented the hunt for bots. However, new videos are regularly added that demonstrate how bots have been taken down.
What must a video contain? For a video to be displayed on the site, it must prove that one has a bot in front of them (which is quite easily recognizable by behavior) and that the bot has been successfully eliminated. Typically, this works by luring higher-level enemies to the respective bot and ensuring that the bot gets aggro.
The site then calculates based on the character level of the bot how “expensive” the death of the bot character was for the operator.
Anyone needing a bit of inspiration for their own bot hunt can get inspired from the numerous videos.
Even though it is certainly questionable how much influence this “movement” will really have, it is still nice to see the impact of such bot hunts evidenced in numbers and videos. Because if Blizzard cannot manage the bot problem, at least as a player community, one can hold a small “game within a game” to deal with the bots. However, one should not forget to report the respective characters.
Even though Blizzard doesn’t manage to fight bots, they sometimes have silly ideas – one lasted only 3 days.
