WoW Players Use Zombies to Fight Cheater Bots
There is an on-going event with the undead scourge in World of Warcraft, which befell Azeroth before the release of the Shadowlands expansion. The funny thing is that one of the players found a way to use the zombie invasion to fight bots.
World of Warcraft players are preparing for the launch of the Shadowlands expansion. Blizzard has decided to make their waiting more pleasant with a special event: Death's Rising. According to the name of the event, hordes of undead have arrived in Azeroth for a short time, enabling us either to defeat them or to join the zombie army and infect other players.
However, this reference to the original 2006 Plague invasion has another use, although rather unforeseen by the devs. User Moxxface from Reddit showed that zombies can be used to... spoil farming bots. Usually, characters controlled by external programs or other scripts have no problems with gamer attacks - they simply return to their corpses, are resurrected, and continue their tasks. However, as the video below shows, they are completely helpless after being transformed into zombies. At some point, there were also some real players, probably dissatisfied with this interference. One of them, in rough words, said that he makes more money than Moxxface and it's not his business that he uses bots. Nevertheless, he and his associates soon gave up, as evidenced by the sudden logouts, that looked suspiciously like rage quits.
It's not hard to guess that the community focused around WoW welcomed Moxxface's video with applause. The entry on Reddit gained more than 3.3 thousand likes, and both below it and in other forums, there were numerous comments unanimously praising the user and, of course, mocking the bot-using players.
The bots, like all scams, are a much worse scourge in online games than any undead invasion. Unfortunately, World of Warcraft-style MMORPGs are no exception, as Blizzard is well aware. Recently, the company has cracked down on multiboxing, enabling "players" to send commands to many game clients at once. Back in June, the developers thanked fans for reporting these and other scams in the game, and assured them of the increased efforts to deal with similar practices.
Of course, it is impossible to completely eliminate the scammers, or at least so far no one has managed this feat. The only consolation is that this will enable us to see further creative ways to fight such "players". May we see them more often and to the greatest annoyance of the scammers.
