Confessions of a Blizzard BotterFollow

This is my story about how I came to become a botter in wow. If you're still playing wow and down rate me for this I'm fine with that, or if you have some crazy vendetta against anyone who has ever been a botter I commend you for standing by your beliefs. Hell, some of you might even still be a botter. It really is that dirty little online secret for a hardcore gamer. Who knows, whatever you think I hope you enjoy the story.

As a former wow player who grinded my face off for **** I knew I'd never need I in time would come to hate people who botted, that was unless of course, I joined them?

It all happened when Wrath was about halfway through its expected life span. My guild had freshly transferred to a new server, gone horde and started recruiting for raiding spots. Knowing that I would never be able to fill my raid slot as much as I used to be able to I was slated to be replaced, I knew this was coming. But what ended up happening was something I'd never expected, GDKP. I was introduced to these gdkp runs on a high pop server and it was entirely foreign to me. I could raid when I had time and it was with people who were good enough but were also loaded.

I had found a way to get gear without having to put so much time into 4 times a week raiding. I was pretty AH savvy as it was and grinding mining wasn't that big of an issue for me but it was time consuming to no end. I would love the nights pre-marriage and pre-wife where I would get rip roaring drunk with my guildies on vent and mine the night away knowing I had a huge chunk of gold coming my way. Eventually though I would run out of gold and there wasn't a way to get my gear I wanted and the necessary pve evils for pvp.

Enter some new guildies. People who were multi season glads that wanted to pve between mad arena and bg sessions. I came into their midst and found out how they made so much gold all the damn time, botting of course. After awhile my general curious nature got the best of me and I asked about it, chances of getting caught, all the normal questions a non botter would come to ask. I got my answers and finally I thought I'd give it a try myself.

So I found the most reputable site I could find from their recommendations and purchased a 10 dollar wow bot that would go around killing things for me. Excellent I thought I could bot while I'm at work, or when I'm hanging with my wife and all will be well! Much to my liking I was right. I was killing a certain area for a few hours at a time, my bot would turn itself off for 3-6 hours and then pop back on and keep doing it. It would mail items to my bank toons, sell certain stuff, disenchant others and mail to my bank toons. Life was pretty grand, and the best part was I was getting some mad gold.

I started to watch my bot a lot to get an idea of how it worked. It was pretty amazing, no code injection, it all worked off of things that Blizzard themselves had implemented. Really the only way to get caught was to be completely stupid and do a marathon session. Which is why scheduling existed on the bot. In the botting community they say once you've botted you become an expert at seeing other bots, trust me I totally did.

I would pvp in bgs and I could pretty much immediately tell you who was botting it was pretty funny, but the unwritten rule in the botting community is that you don't report another botter. So I never did. Eventually my greed would grow and I wanted to be able to mine and herb which required an upgraded version of the bot that was able to handle the z-axis. So I ponied up some money and I had one.

This was about the time cata released and my miner/herbalist actually hit 85 before my main toon did just because I was getting absolutely loaded with the new herbs/ore. I made an absolute killing. I'd post over 300 auctions a night, and wake up in the morning with anywhere from 5-25k gold in my mail box. Gold cap was no issue, gold was never an issue and all of a sudden I could do any gdkp run I wanted and get whatever I wanted. Hell in wrath I saw some gear go for as high as 75k once heroic mode was possible for pugs.

I was smart with my bot, schedule things. Would never be on for long and I was always scared at new patches. Was this the next big ban wave? I survived two huge ban waves, the first was just a regular ban wave but the second one was what made me most nervous. The giant archa ban. So many people hated grinding out archeology and didn't want to do it. Well for 15 bucks they'd made an archa bot that did it all for you. The way everyone was caught was because of the way it opened up a private channel in game and started pumping coordinates into it. Bad business, no? All blizzard had to do was run a scan on chat logs and it knew everyone who was abusing this. A pretty big number of the multi season glads on AJ were hit with the ban wave and lost all their toons. Most of them quit at this point, most viewed wow as a dying game then.

Eventually for me, my love for wow would die down. I mean good things don't last forever, right? I just decided it was time for me to move on and I did. To this day I don't regret the fact I botted wow quite heavily. I mean yes in some ways it did take away some of the fun from the game but all in all it was pretty even when you weight the pros and cons. I remember when I got the baron mount legitimately before the nerf on the drop rate. I was pretty damn stoked. But eventually I started looking at things a little different. It wasn't about the chase of the rare drop anymore, it was about how much time will this take before my bot just gets it for me. I never did bot in pvp though, that was the one thing I enjoyed very much and never saw a reason to do it. Botting allowed me to get those pve pieces you'd need to have in pvp. I can't think of the name of the trinket, but it was a trink that was a strength/on use haste and my dk made quite good use of it.

I hope you enjoyed reading my story, feel free to ask questions and I'll gladly answer them to my fullest ability. Want to flame me, go right ahead. I figured it's been well over a year since I touched wow and people would enjoy hearing a story from one of those people.

<3

I'm guessing it's because he's intending it to be more about the botting, less about the game.

Frankly, when it's entirely solo, my irritation towards botters is fairly low. I don't like what they do to game economies, but that only matters in games where the economy itself matters (like EVE). But if you bot in any group context in any game (assuming it's not a group of all bots/botters), you can GFY.

I think the desire to bot is more indicative of core flaws in a game. It's a statement that not only is there unfun stuff you must work through to get to the part of the game you consider to be fun, but that it is so incredibly unfun that it's not even worth the effort to complete it conventionally to get to the fun part. What you have is a bad game that really isn't worth your time. When you find it's time to start botting WoW, then it's time to start quitting it, for your own sake.

I don't get it- you were poor, bought a bot, made money, then quit?

Anyway, bots are bad, ruins economies, destroys all life, kills puppies, all that stuff. Don't do it kids.

WoW doesn't have economics to ***** up. :p If I was still playing ffxi I probably would have made a bot that turns pages in automatically.

I don't agree, actually, though I don't doubt that it's often the case.

There's a type of person out there, that if a reward is presented, they'll simply take the easiest, quickest path available to getting it. You see them in games like CoD and BF, say, sneaking into a corner of the map with a buddy in a free-for-all, taking turns letting each other get free kills.

They're actively turning an otherwise fun activity into work, in order to expedite the rewards process. In CoD:MW2 they'd do it for hours on end for stuff as minimal as new cosmetic emblems. Wouldn't matter how fun it is to simply play the game to them; the important thing is that they get the reward...the means is irrelevant.

Edited, Dec 2nd 2011 11:32am by Eske

You know it's going to sound funny but there were bot scripts that were actually better performing than some players. As an example. I didn't bot pvp, but except a few times to test a few things out for pure lulz. When I was doing rated bgs on my dk I was always flag carrier so I had a blood spec that was built around massive mitigation and a huge health pool. So I got this bright idea to see how my dk would fair in pvp. Lets just say with blood presence and death strike my dk died maybe 3 times across 4 bgs and would usually end up with 5 or 6 kills. Fully buffed in my gear I was sitting around 170k health.

They won't be able to ever get rid of botting, no matter any game. The very base fundamentals of how the game operates are what most bots abuse. Putting coordinates into a game are pretty much required but the problem is that the coordinates are what they use for movement. If you watch bots that are improperly set up they are rigid and you'll see defined movements, if you watch bots that are set up correctly they will have the ability to do smooth turning and instead of following just one specific path, they have variable paths to follow. Some of the more intense scripters would build upwards 15 variable paths to choose from at random. This coupled with the ability to set up variable log in is why you'll never ever catch a smart botter. They might bot for 1 hour here, 2 hours there, another hour here. Here is the real kicker though, they can run one script, that will call up to 5 or 6 other scripts that do various things. One might go mining in one area, the other could fish in another area, the other could be farming for vanity pets. The possibilities of keeping it entirely random are near limitless.

If you are going to bot to get gold, then use the gold to buy gear because you don't have time, why the hell are you even playing the game? I mean, what content is left?

I never saw gear as the end in any games, and I'm willing to bet I've enjoyed them way more than most.

i don't get it. there's a million things i'd do before buying a bot to play a subscription game.

I can definitely understand why people bot in MMORPGs when playing a game becomes work until you've reached a certain point where you can enjoy the game. If something work related on an actual work place could become automized, it would eventually to reduce cost. In this perspective the cost would be time spent playing. If you value your time a lot you would look into ways to make yourself more efficient. By automizing certain parts of the game doesn't mean the botter itself doesn't have time to play the game, but rather value the other parts of the game more.

An example I have is where you have to repeatedly spam magic on yourself to level it up. In Final Fantasy XI you could throw for example enhancing magic related spells on yourself over 10 000 times before the skill is capped. You could spend the amount of time skilling it up manually or you could do some research and find a way to automize the progress with third party software. As far as I understand this method is not botting because of your character doesn't react to certain events. I understand however that Blizzard doesn't allow you to run anything that automizes your character in the ToS. On Final Fantasy XI You could let your character get remote controlled by others if you don't feel like throwing a single buff on a single person for 3 hours in a row. This is botting because your character reacts to something.

Final Fantasy XI absolutely love to put ledges at inconvinient places. A run to a quest related ??? on the map could take 30 minutes extra because of a single ledge is blocking your way, making you run around the entire map. There exists hacks that let you move your XYZ cordinates but SE do track movement.

If people feel like taking part of epic boss fights and go on epic adventures but feel the grind is hindering them, then it's understandable that they would modify the game. I do feel that MMORPGs make you run in a hamsterwheel sometimes.