Creating a WoW "bot"

Community General Discussion
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First of all, I’d like to know if all “bots” are considered illegal or that there are exceptions to the rule. The only semi-useful topic I was able to found on this while Googling is 9 years old on reddit, so I don’t think this is still 100% valid.

You might want to argument a question as in where’s the fun in playing a video game if you’re letting AI play for you, to which I would reply, we all have our own interpretation of what is fun.

This idea stems from creating macro’s. I love the concept, but I already found it to be pretty lackluster in what you could actually do with it. Situations in where I could have the macro dictate /cast [@ifnoundead] Fear or /cast [@ifbelow20%health] Shadowburn. That sort of stuff, I love that, but it’s not possible with the current macro system.

One of the reasons that prompted me to consider using macro’s even more is because I seriously dislike having to press a gazillion different buttons. I’m playing this game in PvE, for fun. Not to compete with anybody; it’s just for me, to have some downtime from my life and my brain constantly analyzing life.

Alternatively I’ve been contemplating utilizing a controller rather than keyboard and mouse, but honestly, if programming a bot, that would fight for me, based on my own programming, is possible, I would probably prefer this over a controller as this would be an amazingly fun journey for me to take. But I don’t want to get banned in the process, so hence my topic.

Also, if the above is allowed, any advise on where to start with learning myself how to program my own WoW bot? The only thing I’d be doing is moving my character as close as it needs to be, to an enemy mob and from that point on, the programming kicks in until all enemies are dead. The only thing, at all times, I’d be doing is moving my character and monitor the process of it fighting according to my programming.

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Will get you banned as you are not in control - any automated system would flag up

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Bots are all illegal, where a bot is defined as any mechanism that breaks the correspondence of

1 Action = 1 Keypress

(* And “illegal” means “Against Terms of Service and will get you banned”)

Autonomous bots, that script your character to move and do things without you pressing the keys, are of course obviously illegal.

Rotation bots, that automatically cast for you even when you are moving your character, are of course obviously illegal.

More subtly, Blizzard have on occasion defined botting to be setting up actions to take place while you scroll your mouse wheel.

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If you want the AI to play for you - as in, you want to step away from the keyboard and have a program play your character - this is forbidden.

This can still be done, but since this is forbidden, they don’t make it easy and you will have to step outside of add-ins, into external programs. Unless you are a developer of some kind, the difficulty is likely too much, your best bet is to adopt one of the existing bots. If you are a developer, then the difficulty isn’t big. In general, I wouldn’t recommend creating a bot, the results are pretty limited (ie, are you interested in gold / honor? that’s about the extent of what they can do and it’s pretty meh) and the process of creating and maintaining it isn’t particularly interesting. You will spend most of your time trying to avoid detection trying to predict what it will be based on. If you already know how to program, you won’t learn much in the way of interesting stuff, it’s pretty mundane. If you don’t, this is not a good way to learn it, there are much better and more interesting ways (online courses, for example).

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If you want to work on a bot programming project, do it with Starcraft 2. It has an actual API for this and it’s legal to use. Blizz released that for AI research projects.

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Okay so a fully AI programmed bot is considered illegal, as it does everything, apart from movement, for me. But how about something more akin to more intelligent macro’s? Is it possible to delve deeper into this without breaking the rules?

So basically I would have an external program linked to my WoW account that allows me the same things as the WoW macro’s would, but with added commands such as /cast [@ifnoundead] Fear or /cast [@ifbelow20%health] Shadowburn etc and ofcourse, no 255 character limit.

Would this be within the confines of the rules and at all possible?

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No as you are still automating a process from outside the confines of the game client.

A program that you run to automate anything will get you banned. basically you either Macro in the game or risk your account being banned.

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The devs police the API to allow only the automatic commands they want. And sometimes they disable some of those because they consider them too powerful/

Anything that enables any command that can’t currently be macroed would be bannable. Especially an external program! :scream:

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or

Reading these forum posts here makes me wonder if I’d truly get banned. I’m getting the impression from that thread that Blizzard doesn’t care at all.

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I mean, if you really want try it…

but as everyone has said if they catch you, youll be banned

EDIT - and they definitely are banning people i report anyone who looks to be using the old multiboxing cheats, so they dont alt tab to press the nodes individually, and probably 90% of the time i get a message to say they have been banned. So blizz do police it

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No external programs allowed. The rest depends on what you want to automate. If-no-undead — no, cannot do this. If-no-target, if-target-is-enemy, etc, you can check which conditions are allowed in macro writing guides. Addons can check many things, but a number of things are disabled during combat.

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The conditions which are allowed are just not intelligent enough sadly.

I’m thinking maybe i`ll just have to consider going for a private server with this idea.

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At least then we’ll have fun reading the “I got banned for absolutely no reason” thread he starts afterwards :man_shrugging:

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But you are trying to get a macro to do the thinking for you, if that was allowed everyone would just have 1 button rotations allowing the AI to do the thinking…

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That could work. You can also create your own server and install it on your own system, then tinker with it.

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Yeah but you’re not going to see whether or not I’m using an automated program to help play solo PvE. It’s not like I’d be bothering anybody with it or exploiting a mechanic to win PvP or amass large amounts of gold.

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Forum posts are not Terms of use, and should not be used as a pass. if your account is banned, saying"but i read a forum post saying xxx" will not get you anywhere.

The only time you might have a defense in that regard is if there was a blue post saying it was fine to do something, and even then, its pushing it.

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We don’t need to see it - its an automated system within the game that looks for third party out of client programs that interact with WoW - that is what will flag you.

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No matter how trustworthy someone is that “ill only use it here” argument doesn’t hold any water. Its not a singleplayer game.

Someone would exploit it. hence its banned.

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Is this about using extra accounts to create NPCs that would allow you to do an instance solo? Because if yes, (a) I am afraid that this is not easy to do (from the client side, for Blizzard it’s easy) and (b) there is a much easier way - just ignore instances in the current addon and stick to those in the previous addons, pick a tank class and solo them.