A player hunts the bots in WoW Classic. Although he received threats, he is now starting a new, big project.
For World of Warcraft’s 20th birthday, the developers have opened a number of new classic realms to provide a “fresh” start. As unfortunately expected, there are a lot of bots on these realms that ultimately ruin the economy and farm for the sale of gold for real money.
Fighting against bots often feels like fighting against windmills – but not so on the hardcore realms. Because every bot that is “eliminated” is guaranteed to be lost and has to start over.
A YouTuber has now declared a hunt – together with a website that documents every bot kill.
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What kind of page is this? The Clean the Bots website is all about eliminating the bots in World of Warcraft Classic in hardcore game mode. Since in Hardcore all characters only have one life and are then lost, the death of a bot character is particularly painful for the operator. This means he loses the time invested in each character.
Who is the site from? Behind the project is the YouTuber Madskillzzhc, who repeatedly shows in his videos how he catches bots and effectively eliminates them. He also has a few videos in which he explains how big the bot business is and how much money is actually made from it.
Almost 2 weeks ago he published a video in which he announced that he would stop doing this because the bot operators had his location details. The fact that Madskillzzhc published new videos shortly afterwards is viewed differently by the community. Some believe it was just a “PR stunt,” others think it’s good that he didn’t bow to the pressure.
His latest project is a website that tracks kills on hardcore servers.
How has the site been received so far? There is currently relatively little going on on the site and only a handful of players have actively participated in the hunt for bots and documented them. But new videos are regularly added that show how the bots were stopped.
What does a video have to contain? In order for a video to be displayed on the site, the video must prove that you have a bot in front of you (which can be recognized quite quickly by its behavior) and that the bot has been successfully switched off. This usually works by luring higher-level enemies to the corresponding bot and ensuring that the bot gets the aggro.
The site then uses the bot’s character level to calculate how “costly” the bot character’s death was for the operator.
If you need a little inspiration for your own bot hunt, you can find inspiration in the numerous videos.
Even if it is of course questionable how big the influence of this “movement” will really be, it is nice to see the impact of such bot hunts documented in numbers and videos. Because if Blizzard doesn’t manage to get the bot problem under control, then the players can at least organize a small “game within the game” to put a stop to the bots. But you shouldn’t forget to report the relevant characters anyway.
Even if Blizzard can’t compete with bots, they sometimes have stupid ideas – one only lasted 3 days.