Bots are once again threatening to ruin a World of Warcraft game mode. Blizzard has to intervene quickly – but will it work?
The “Season of Discovery” has started in World of Warcraft Classic for almost a week. This is basically a “Classic+” with new secrets, new abilities and even a special raid at level 25. There is new content every few weeks. One of the highlights is certainly that some classes can take on completely new roles, such as magician-healers or warlock tanks.
But like so many Classic versions before it, the Season of Discovery also has a major looming problem: bots that threaten to ruin the economy of the realms.
Where do players discover bots? Many concerned players are already sharing their observations in the WoW Classic subreddit. In many places there are already groups of bots that behave suspiciously. Solklar writes:
“I did the Wolf and Spider quest in Duskwood and noticed a lot of hunters with black boars and rogues running into checkpoints and generally moving like bots.
There were probably three or more bots for every player, which is really demotivating.”
Many others also describe their experiences:
Why are there so many bots? There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, bots have now become so efficient that the original costs for the account are “recouped” before Blizzard can block 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 of the reasons is that many fans from back then no longer have the time to spend hours farming gold themselves and therefore buy this “unpleasant” part of the game with real money. This is already heavily criticized in WotLK Classic.
However, this in turn fuels a vicious circle. Because if loot is distributed through gold bids, then everyone else also has to have a lot of gold to receive an item. So more and more gold is needed by the community, which only benefits the bots.
It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will be able to ban most bots in the Season of Discovery. However, the experiences from the other classic versions give rise to fears of a bleak future.
This is a shame, especially because the season of discovery is so popular that there were even queues.