If you’ve played World of Warcraft for any long span of time, you’ve likely encountered a bot, a player character controlled by a third-party program. Maybe it was mindlessly thwacking the loot out of some small woodland creature, or maybe it was just staring at a wall. Whatever happened, it probably wasn’t this bad.
In the above video, ZybakTV comes across an entire player-vs-player environment — in this case the flag-based Eye of the Storm — overrun by bots. The bot type in question is known as “Honorbuddy,” a WoW botting mainstay that pushes ever onward — poised, determined, hands and feet calloused like the carapace of a worker ant — to earn honour, WoW‘s PvP-specific currency.
Under normal circumstances, farming honour takes a lot of time and effort. Bots, while very much against Blizzard’s terms of service, make this process much easier. To make matters even hairier, bot makers are extremely proficient at altering their bots so that, even if Blizzard can temporarily get a bead on them, they have to begin the hunt from square one shortly after. As a result, bots like Honorbuddy have been around for years.
Now, this video is obviously an example of a nightmare scenario. I mean, it’s practically some Invasion of the Body Snatchers shit. And while Honorbuddy continues to pop up in WoW despite Blizzard’s best efforts to smack it down once and for all, according to many players it’s not an epidemic. Still, it’s definitely a problem, whether it results in unintentional hilarity or not.
I’ve contacted Blizzard to ask what they’re doing about Honorbuddy — and bots in general — these days, if they have looked into new means of enlarging their net since their previous approaches only seem to reduce the robot hordes to useless scrap temporarily. I’ll update this post when I hear back.
Comments
7 responses to “Sometimes, All Your World Of Warcraft Opponents Are Bots”
cant pvp without em
obviously they are doing it for money, otherwise there’d be no incentive.
i’m assuming they harvest enough in-game currency to buy sh!t they can sell for real money.
Well the weird thing is PVP gear is all bind on pick up so you can’t sell it for gold (to sell the gold) and you can’t trade it to another player for in game or out of game currencies.
Most bots I’ve seen in PVP are 5 shaman groups which means your paying for 5 accounts to do it.
They sell the accounts with all the gear. DUH!
They’d want to be getting a lot for the account.
It’s a pretty significant spend to get there, and you’d want the character commissioned before you start but I guess it’s possible.
Players are not using bot only to sell accounts. Bot programs are being a prime example of why Blizzard have to consider that extremely grinding conditions can lead players to use them just to get stronger and to skip the chore, especially when intelligent scripting is free on the web.
Bots are here since the early times of Vanilla WoW. maybe I should start using them as well?
Don’t confuse bots with boxing though. Like to me, a 5man shaman group sounds like it’s someone boxing; playing one “seed” character and getting the 4 other shammy clones to mirror the effect of the first(like getting hit by 5 frost shocks simultaneously). It’s probably semantics whether it’s a bot or a script/macro, but I think there is generally an active player behind a setup like this. Being synced is incredibly powerful as you can instakill a lot of players like this… but I’ve seen it fail as well.
Then there are other true bots, that do things like target/deselect, and randomly mount or cast a spell. Back when I did bg’s all the time, I used to hate these with a passion, because you are playing outnumbered and tend to lose.