WoW Classic players are offering to be Blizzard’s personal bot banners—but it could be too much power

The bot situation has become so bad in World of Warcraft Classic that players are willing to take up the job of being “bot banners”—totally unpaid, mind you—but some in the community agree the power these eager volunteers would wield may lead to corruption.

Regardless of whatever game you’re playing, bots can be a pretty big nuisance, especially in WoW Classic where they can cause glitches in large cities, break quests, and destroy economies via the Auction House. While Blizzard has been racing to fix the botting issues that have popped up in Season of Discovery, players don’t think it’s enough; and they’re even willing to do Blizzard’s job for them if it means things get resolved quickly.

Some WoW Classic players pointed out that this wouldn’t work especially well because there’s more to banning bots than banning players with unusual usernames, like “owbfowfe.” While that username example does sound like a bot, it could just be a real player who decided to button-smash their character’s name because they couldn’t think of anything.

Just as problematic a problem would be corruption, others warned. If players were given the opportunity to ban bots, many agree it’s too much power for one person, who could ban real players just for fun or because they stole a loot drop.

The devs did recently admit the WoW Classic team needs to do a better job of vocalizing information around bots and ban waves, and Blizzard even banned over 73,000 exploitive WoW accounts some weeks ago. While it would be nice to see more ban waves, there are rules the devs need to follow to ensure only bots are banned, and it’s apparently easier to do this in batches. It may not be perfect, but Blizzard is still trying to get rid of them… albeit slowly.

While some think the real reason Blizzard is “sitting on its hands” regarding bots is because the company is making substantial revenue from the new accounts, it is worth remembering these subs are often paid for with fraudulent credit cards, with most botted accounts eventually issuing chargebacks; meaning no one wins.