In China, the bot situation in WoW has spiraled out of control. For normal players, this is pure hell, as many images prove.
Anyone who plays World of Warcraft with open eyes and occasionally takes a look at the trade channel already knows them: botters and gold sellers promoting their goods. But if you think that’s bad, take a look at Chinese WoW. There, players live in a true ‘bot apocalypse’ that has reached extreme proportions.
What is it about? In the World of Warcraft subreddit, user tanyu1993 opened a thread seeking attention and help. Using many screenshots and smaller clips, he shows the current state of WoW in China. He fears the game will die there, as bots and gold sellers have it in their firm grasp. Normal gameplay is nearly impossible, as all public areas are clogged with advertisements for real-money gold purchases or sell-runs for real money.
Shady methods harass “normal” players: One example on the Chinese realms is the heroic warfronts. Here, sellers pretend to be normal players and gather a group to play the warfront. Just before the final boss, they kick all 29 other players from the group and invite 29 new players—those who paid real money for the kill. The 29 honest players who were kicked out are left stranded and must join a new group, fearing that the same will happen again.
Farm bots dominate the game world: But even in the open game world, normal gameplay is now very difficult. At many points, there are automated bots that often roam in groups of 5 to 20 characters, automatically killing everything in reach.
They earn their gold, which is then supposed to be sold in the capitals.
Capitals are flooded with spam: Especially bad is the situation in the capitals Orgrimmar and Stormwind. Anyone who enters these cities is almost immediately bombarded with sales offers in the whisper channel. Hundreds of sellers message every player and often even name their pets after the sales offers, which then roam the city vastly enlarged.
This spam is also found in the group finder. Anyone trying to find a “normal” raid group or dungeon group can hardly do so. The group tool is flooded with countless groups of sellers, making it nearly impossible to find one of the few normal groups.
Why isn’t Blizzard doing anything? In China, World of Warcraft is not managed by Blizzard, but by NetEase. According to Tanyu1993, it seems that NetEase tolerates the bots and sellers. Also, the game masters that players in China can contact for such issues seem to have little to no knowledge of the actual game and are rarely helpful. If an account is banned, it is only for a few days or only one single game account of the owner, while the other accounts continue their “work”.
Tanyu1993 hopes to gain some attention for the issue through his post on Reddit. Public pressure might help push Blizzard or NetEase to intervene and change the conditions in the Chinese World of Warcraft. After all, it also reflects poorly on Blizzard when a large part of the player base has to experience World of Warcraft under such conditions.
At least Activision Blizzard is currently looking for 2000 new employees – maybe one of them can do something favorable for honest players in China.
We, on the other hand, should be quite glad that bots and gold sellers are a minority in “our” WoW.
Could you imagine playing under such conditions? Or would you have long since put WoW to rest?
