Once again, bots threaten to ruin a game mode of World of Warcraft. Blizzard must intervene quickly – but will it work?
For nearly a week, the “Season of Discoveries” in World of Warcraft Classic has started. It’s basically a “Classic+” with new secrets, new abilities, and even a special raid at level 25. Every few weeks, there are new contents. Among the highlights is surely that some classes can take on entirely new roles, such as mage-healers or warlock-tanks.
But like many Classic versions before, there is a major impending problem in the Season of Discoveries: bots threatening to ruin the economy of the realms.
Where do players discover bots? In the WoW Classic subreddit, many concerned players are already sharing their observations. In many places, there are already groups of bots behaving suspiciously. For example, Solklar writes:
“I did the wolf and spider quest in Duskwood and noticed a lot of hunters with black boars and rogues that ran through checkpoints and generally moved like bots.
For every player, there were surely 3 or more bots, it’s really demotivating.”
Below, many others describe their experiences:
- “There were literally 30 hunters with Chinese pet names farming next to Sentinel Hill in Westfall – so many that I couldn’t even kill any mobs myself.” – xxhamzxx
- “I wish Blizzard would just mark them all as bots and send them to special bot shards, just like other games only place you in cheater lobbies if you are caught cheating. And then they get a 100% auction tax and can’t trade anymore or something.” – veroxly
- “The Barrens is full of troll hunters with gibberish names and Chinese animal companions. I have reported so many of them, but so far only received one of those letters from Blizzard saying that a sanction was successful.” – dealsforheals
- “And people in trade chat sell junk for 75 gold… and when you ask where people got the gold, they say, ‘Quests at level 25 give 1 gold, bro’ – No, ‘bro’, people are already buying gold with their credit card.” – whosyodaddy328
Why are there so many bots? There are several reasons for this. On one hand, bots have become so efficient that the initial costs for the account are already “recouped” before Blizzard can ban the corresponding accounts.
At the same time, the demand for purchased gold is particularly high in WoW Classic, and many players tend to participate in these illegal purchases. One reason is that many fans from back then no longer have the time to farm gold for hours and hence buy this “unpleasant” part of the game with real money. This is already being heavily criticized in WotLK Classic.
This, in turn, fuels a vicious cycle. Because if loot is distributed through gold bids, then everyone else also needs a lot of gold to receive an item. Thus, more and more gold is needed by the community, which only benefits the bots.
Whether Blizzard will succeed in banning most bots in the Season of Discoveries remains to be seen. However, experiences from other Classic versions suggest a rather bleak future.
