So, it finally happened - somebody mistook me for a bot.
Not even five minutes after entering the Hinterlands I had already spotted three bots, all of them rogues. Yesterday I thought to myself: “one of these days somebody is gonna mistake me for a bot and report me, just for being a rogue out killing stuff. Then it’s gonna happen a couple of more times and I’ll be automatically banned.”
Well, I was out killing moonkin in hopes of getting the “egg-quest” to drop, when a lvl 60 alliance player ran up to me, watching me. With my tinytip-addon (an addon for enhanced tooltips) I could see the << YOU >> indicating he was targeting me, without having to target him. I finished off the mob I was fighting, started bandaging myself and whispered: “Mistook me for a bot, did you?”. He answered, saying there were two bots in this location. “Three”, I replied. He told me how sad it was that he reported between five and ten bots every day, and nothing seemed to be done about it. I do the same.
I used to wonder how these bots manage to make it to such a high lvl - these ones were all around lvl 50 - without getting banned. I mean, it is SO obvious that they are bots. But then it hit me; with virtually everyone boosting their characters to 60, there’s almost nobody left out in the open world, which has led to these bots running rampant.
In stranglethorn vale I saw two bots running the exact same path in a line after eachother, with both of them having almost identical names, only with slight variations. In gadgetzan I saw three or four bots running from the inn, to the repairman, then out into the sands to continue their business. I saw bots in westfall, of all places, farming light feathers. The shimmering flats have bots all over the place; the marshes of swamp of sorrows are overrun; and the waters of desolace are filled with druid bots farming that repeatable quest. I’ve seen bots literally lining up at the flightmaster in ironforge, waiting for eachother before flying off to eastern plaguelands and stratholme, and parties of bots filling up the inn in loch modan before venturing out.
And one of the most annoying things about the bots are that they are so damn easy to spot, yet are allowed to continue running around freely.
No guild, no pvp rank, full BoE gear, show cloak and helm (regardless of how ugly they may be), a few low level items despite being high level themselves, static and robotic movement, randomly generated names - they’re not hiding it at all. It’s like a punch in the face - “hey, look at me! I’m a bot and you can’t do anything about it! Report me all you like, I’ll still reach 60 and make thousands of gold in the process!”
I’ve never seen WoW in such a sorry state as this. It reminds me of way back when I played Lineage 2, where bots were so plentiful they had become just another part of the game.