Bot mafias have wreaked havoc in World of Warcraft Classic

Enlarge / For months, clusters of bot-driven accounts have trawled around high-level zones, attacking monsters with uncanny precision before rotating toward their next target in robotic 90 angles. (credit: Blizzard)

Bots are terrorizing World of Warcraft Classic servers, stealing precious resources, monopolizing rare monsters, and inflating the virtual economy with truckloads of illicitly earned gold. Today, WoW Classic developer Blizzard Entertainment announced it has suspended or closed over 74,000 WoW Classic accounts over the last month, many of which were automating gameplay with bots.

For months, clusters of bot-driven accounts have trawled around high-level zones, attacking monsters with uncanny precision before rotating toward their next target in robotic 90-degree angles. These in-game characters are operated by scripts, programmed to optimally kill monsters and obtain rare, valuable items that drop from them. Lately, they've been targeting the sought-after Black Lotus, a necessary item for some competitive, high-level play.

World of Warcraft Classic is a punishing game by design, a harkening-back to the early days of World of Warcraft. It boasts little of the expediency that defines modern massively multiplayer online role-playing games; everything is an intentionally slow grind. To obtain a Black Lotus, players had to identify the specific spots where they spawn and camp there for between 45 and 75 minutes, waiting and warding off any competitors. For the last several months, when human-run characters attempted to muscle their way into the mix, coordinated groups of bots threatened them or closed ranks around the flower. So in late May, Loknar-who plays a healing priest in WoW Classic but still tries to kill bots whenever he sees them-decided to hold an anti-bot protest in the in-game city of Orgrimmar.

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