I have never encountered bots before but I think I have now. There were 3 druid tanks in Ardenweald killing panthers in mass, and I believe one might have been skinning them? They were so fast and efficient it was impossible to beat their moonbeam target strikes. I am going to assume that they were bots because their names were a jumble of consonants. Later I ran into a similar group doing the same thing, fortunately they were not in an area that was required for leveling.
I just didn’t see the point. Is this allowable in the game? Does Blizzard care about this kind of in game activity?
Like day 3 launch I decided to try out the expansion on one of my accounts. Went thru the leveling up to Maldraxxus I think. When I got to the zone first flight path I mounted up and rode towards the quest giver and there was 1 character by the water killing rylaks (the flying mobs). At their feet were a bunch of em, so I started to skin them
Needless to say they were there for a while. I lost interest and went on. It was basically a mountain of hyperspawning rylaks at this character’s feet. Point is skinning is only possible with one character. So as far as I can tell most of them are just solo and in various leveling phases of the game.
You see the max level farmers stacked on top of each other who don’t really care. Because they’re probably multiboxing not botting. The actual bots are very deceptive and don’t make themselves known. Like back before they made nodes multi-tap the bots would be under the world farming herbs. You couldn’t click report them that way.
When you have an automated program doing the work you don’t need nor even want to stack up the bots. You run them headless across different leveling instances and different accounts. Completely oblivious is the typical player of what’s going on. Dozens of accounts in different servers and locations, different shards all farming herbs or skin or whatever.
So keep raging at the guy you see playing 5-10 characters. He’s not the one tanking the value of your crafting mats. Rest assured of that.
I have a single leatherworker with a ton of LW mats, skinning high spawn mob in a quest zone with the efficiency in a set space as these guys where? The more I think about it, it has to be bots. I have nothing against multiboxers, I think they pretty funny on a pve server. These guys were working independently as if on a script , not moving a fixed position.
Personally I don’t use the AH for this kind of stuff , and am able to gather all the mats I ever want for LW in surplus. Skinning is multitag now too somehow, I don’t exactly know the precise mechanic. I guess it is tagged by whatever you hit?
They are not necessarily bots but rather real players just spamming one to two abilities and farming BoEs…
There are BoE farm groups listed in group finder and druids are the most desired for their massive starfall spam… I know because I’ve ran a boe group during week one, and we’d be like 2-3 groups deep of 5 players each pulling everything in an area… how do you think I got this bow that my character has equipped that I had by day 3 of SL launch
We would just mass pull all the near instant respawning mobs mass kill literally hundreds and only pause to loot every few minutes or so hundreds of corpses at a time.
Yeah it’s either actual players or bots in that case.
The guy I encountered was clearly AFK or a bot, as he didn’t seem to mind me stealing his skins as he was killing the hyperspawns. Said nothing at all.
I think I know where you are talking about. That mob spawns instantly so people farm it for the egg that hatches a mount. I can see someone with skinning just sitting there If others are farming the mount.
Were they all moving together, almost like one character with several clones? If so that isn’t necessarily botting, it’s multiboxing. That doesn’t mean what they were doing is allowed as the main way to accomplish what I just described was recently banned, but it’s important to understand the difference. A bot is a character being completely controlled by a computer program, while a multiboxer is one person controlling multiple WoW clients at the same time. In my experience bots are usually singular characters, or at least the ones I’ve seen were, though I can definitely see how the two concepts could be combined (would this be called ‘multibotting’ or something like that?) which is probably what caused Blizz to ban input broadcasting software.
It was definitely not multiboxing, I’ve seen boxers.
There was a pile of dead panthers and when anyone spawned they targeted ten times faster then I could ever, unless the target was out of range, and they never ever moved to grab the slightly out of range panthers. That was the only way I was able to complete the quest.
If I have ever encountered bots previous to this, or I have never noticed. I thought the dead give away was their names like HJKLG.
Anyway, it was really annoying since it was in a current expansion leveling area and there was absolutely nothing I could do to challenge it. Wonder if Blizz will do anything about them once I reported it.
They were not skinning as fast as they were killing, not even close. That is why I was so perplexed! These were normal high frequency spawn mobs too. It just did not make any sense.
Yes since day 1 of WoW there have been bots.
It is a never ending cycle.
Do your part, if you feel that someone is botting report them and move on.
Blizzard will investigate.
Blizzard will patch / test warden to break the bot.
Blizzard will send out patch.
Blizzard will ban all the botters.
New bots will arrive.
Rinse repeat.
What’s crazy about bots in WoW is that if you open the “Who” search feature and you just press “Refresh” at the bottom left you will see an entire assortment of randomly named players that are playing Druid and sitting together farming mats/mobs all usually in the same guild… but not getting banned for botting.
I can still skin stuff that others killed, so long as they looted it. Like it’s always been. However, sometimes I see corpses with sparkles on them that I can’t skin. so I just look for the skinning cursor when I mouse over them.
One time, I stopped a skin/bones bot in BFA by pulling one of his tagged mobs away some distance, then hexing it. The bot always mounted up to get to the next pack no matter how close it was, so my keeping the mob alive and too far to reach meant the bot stayed in combat and couldn’t mount. After about an hour of that, the operator returned, said ?? a couple times, and logged off.
