Since its inception, World of Warcraft: Classic has been absolutely plagued by issues with exploitive bots. Primarily taking the form of gold farmers, there’s plenty of different aspects of the game being harmed by the botting.
It’s far from uncommon to see someone with a handful of characters following them, perfectly mirroring their actions as they powerlevel. Often this will be a single player followed by several automated players set to follow the same commands as the player’s character.
Blizzard’s worked towards a resolution, but the problem seems to be quite distant from actual success. As players continue to grow in frustration with the problem heavily impacting their game, Blizzard decided to be a bit more militant over the problem.
“Over the last few months, we’ve been accelerating our efforts to deal with certain kinds of cheating that players often call ‘bots’ – the use of automation to play the game in exploitative ways,” Blizzard mentioned in an announcement we previously discussed.
In the same announcement, Blizzard encouraged players to continue reporting the bots. This allowed them to swiftly sort and ban those that were guilty of the exploitative behavior to help weed out the bots.
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Earlier this month, we discussed Blizzard’s actions in battling the bots. In essence, the developers announced that they had banned tens of thousands of botting accounts – roughly 74,000, to be exact.
Now, however, fans have taken to social media to discuss whether this is something that is actually helping. Banning the botting accounts sounds effective on the surface, right? It eliminates the account guilty of banning entirely!
The issue is that the groups that use bots tend to just… make another account, easy as that. With nothing at the gates to stop these accounts from being made and Blizzard only banning them once they’re active and reported, the issue effectively remains untouched.
Furthermore, many players have begun accusing Blizzard of doing this on purpose. Allowing bots to make an account, pay that month of subscription fee, and then ban them so that they create another account with another subscription fee ends up more or less doubling profits.
It’s highly unlikely that Blizzard is choosing to let bots run rampant through their title for profit’s sake, as they’d ultimately end up in the red once their game died as a result of no one wanting to play it. Still, one has to wonder when the botting issue will show some sign of being rectified.
