Sometimes, All Your World Of Warcraft Opponents Are Bots

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 honor, WoW‘s PvP-specific currency.

Under normal circumstances, farming honor 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’ve 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.