DISCLAIMER: These writings are my own OPINION, that includes INCONCLUSIVE, LEADING, and CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE from SIMPLE RESEARCH that is supported with data which VARIES GREATLY based on gold prices.
Bots in BRD Spreadsheet with relevenant evidence(cannot post links on blizzard forums 
) (reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/m99i64)
It’s annoying that the problem has become so bad without response from Blizzard. Sure, every now and again there’s a banwave but has the problem ever really gone away? There’s multiple documented videos of bots flyhacking to ZG and plenty of well known botted locations, yet nothing seems to ever be done long-term. After watching MadSeasonShow’s “The Ballad of the Level Boost”(link here) and being a longtime fan of Runescape’s bot detective “SirPugger”, yesterday I decided to do some research of my own.
Initial numbers were taken between 1-3pm eastern time on 3/19/21 on American and Oceanic Servers. Doing a simple “/who blackrock depths rogue” I found that EVERY SINGLE populated server has a non-zero number of unguilded Rogues parked in BRD, for what is likely pickpocket farming/botting.
I certainly cannot prove that these characters are bots or not being piloted by actual players by this research alone. But when less than 1% of the rogues in Blackrock Depths are guilded, it’s pretty damning evidence IMO. Most players would be guilded at level 60 and over 99% of the rogues were level 60 when researching. Almost all of the character names are nonsensical and are out of the ordinary or unusual(think RP-style names), while the majority of actual players have readable and meaningful or memeful names. There is also a DIRECT-correlation between server population and the number of rogues in BRD at anytime. My findings estimate that around 1.2% of the Wow Classic Population is a suspected Blackrock Depths Rogue pickpocket bot. (1509/122,758=0.012*100=1.2%)
Will this be a problem when you can boost a character? I would heavily bet on YES. The bot problem is extremely rampant and it will only be exacerbated by the introduction of character boosts with TBC. This is only ONE of the botting methods that are being used and discussed here, meaning bot numbers are likely MUCH higher than this data shows. If this method of botting paired with a character boost, the bot becomes INSTANTLY effective at generating revenue. And thanks to a method easily googled, you can make ~30g/hr on the LOW end simply pickpocketing mobs in BRD. Also our friend google will even help you find a bot to use, though you absolutely SHOULD NOT DO OR EVEN TRY THIS, as it could and will likely lead to many ways compromise your self security. I know these characters don’t do this 24hours because I compared results after 6hours and the few servers I rechecked had bot numbers decrease by about half by 10pm when I checked again. Though a good portion of the characters that were in BRD after 6 hours were also the original characters there were at the beginning of research, this might lead to further investigation.
Let’s talk about the $$$$. Since you can’t play classic in trial form, all of these characters are paying for a subscription, this is bringing in Blizzard $22,500(1500*15)per month with just these numbers and botting method alone. Certainly enough to pay a few GMs to get a handle on the problem. If these characters are making the low-end 30g/hr average and doing this 8hrs a day, that comes out to 360,000g or $14,400($7,200 at 4hrs/day), worth of gold being introduced and newly floating around in the game everyday.
When it takes say 125hrs on average to get to level58 to become effective, that’s a total of 5,125g(41g/hr125hrs) that a character could make by boosting and using those 125hrs to farm instead of level the character. This profit is certainly WAY more than what you would make leveling or even low level botting. Converting that 5,125g to realmoney$$$ that gold is worth ~$205(5.12540) at today’s prices. Though this equation becomes much more complicated as gold prices change and leveling becomes easier with tbc prepatch. However, I’d still expect 90+hrs for a lvl58 conventionally leveling, which brings the total to 3,690g a character could make in 90hrs of pickpocket botting or around $148 at todays price. When a new character boost is likely to cost no more than $60 and a subscription is $15, or a total investment of $75 for a new bot, you can see the gold farming bots will ALWAYS be winning unless they’re taken out within the first 48hours of effective botting. Obviously the amount of time to breakeven goes down as gold prices go up and vice versa, but these are today’s numbers.
For these reasons I cannot support a character boost. Would I pay for a character boost? Oh hell yes. If blizzard had great or even semi-good bot detection or a handle on the gold farmers this would be a different discussion. Adding a character boost with the game in it’s current state would likely just bring more problems. If the botting situation isn’t handled than likely the only solution will be the introduction of the WoW Token to classic, which would bring further problems like more bots and even paid carry service spamming(arena carry anyone?) that are so very popular in Retail. I honestly think all the outcomes are bad, UNLESS they fix botting. But maybe Blizzard’s big brain plan is to not caring about the bot/gold farming problem, so that they can implement the WoW token to classic and take in even more $$$$ when you buy gold for your GDKP/carry run. I’m not very thrilled with the pay-to-win direction wow classic is headed, but I’m out of breath.
Please Blizzard fix bots before giving them the ability to instantly be effective.