Farmers and Botters and Gnomes

I’ve been up to the devil’s business lately in World of Warcraft — nothing illegal, sploitish or untoward, I assure you. The whole thing hasn’t played out yet so I can’t write out the unseemly details until I get everything that’s coming to me. (That’s a little teaser.)

Fortunately for me, the WoW forums has provided some entertainment.

First, amusing and innovative, a gold farming outfit took to the skies to advertise their gold site across several servers: “Gold Spam: Going to new heights. Literally” and “Emerald Dream server just got hacked it seems“. Mods and the original posters pulled the screenshots before I could capture (damn them!), but basically, gnomes fell from the skies to their deaths to form the words and web addy for a gold farming site.

From the first post:

Server: Skywall
Time: 1 am server
Gold Spam of the Month…

Level 1 gnome warriors are falling from the sky in Ironforge to their deaths, and instantly releasing leaving their bodies on the ground in Ironforge.

“Nothing new” you say? Well, so far the bodies have spelled out < < The Name Of A Site That Will Not Be Mentioned >> and keep falling to form more letters as I type this.

I’m currently at the noob starting zone for the gnomes, in Dun Morogh, and have been watching lvl 1 gnome warriors being created, “flying” 20 feet into the air, then walking towards ironforge. STILL IN THE AIR.

Oh the gnomity!

Emailer Indy, who never goes on an adventure without a hat, found this interesting – bound for deletion – thread: “From the Front Lines (A botter’s story.)” Confessed botter Andeasdr wrote:

Short introduction about myself.

1.) I’m a bot developer.
2.) I’m an American.
3.) I work for companies that cheat at WoW for a living.

Purpose of this post? Several reasons.

1.) High five to Blizzard. I botted and cheated at this game for well over a year without a single ban. June ban wave knocked out 8 of my personal accounts (including my epiced out 70 main), and over 200 company accounts. Never thought I’d see the day that Blizzard would completely devastate the botting community, not only dealing a nearly lethal blow to the most popular, but as well as decimating the less popular alternative program.

2.) Let players know that Blizzard -is- dealing with bots. They may not deal with bots in the way you expect. Reporting bots may at times seem fruitless, but trust me, they are doing their jobs. I’ve seen complaints on these forums many times, and can think to myself “If only people knew”. Blizzard can not delve into what they’re doing, and you don’t see much proof of their accomplishments, but they’re there.

3.) Let players know that Blizzard is keeping up with this. I stopped cheating on personal accounts after the last ban wave, so the second ban wave they did a couple days ago didn’t hurt me personally (unless you count the wallet). Yes, they’ve just done two ban waves in the span of 3 weeks. While everyone was trying to recuperate losses, they go and knock the crap out of them once more.

4.) Let players know that the asshat spammers have nothing to do with me. They trip whisper detection and auto-replys so often, it pisses me off too!

5.) Let you know that not all of us want to ruin the game to fill our wallets. I am in this profession because I love Blizzard games, and I’m good at what I do (and who can argue with playing games for a living…). Given an oppurtunity to work for Blizzard instead, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately they don’t pay relocation costs and have no HQ close to where I live, nor do I think I’m qualified…being only 21 and having little schooling.

Basically, Blizzard is doing a killer job. Love this game, love the company, and a huge fan.

Blizzard’s Public Relations isn’t so hot because they have to keep many things secret, so if this post can help improve yalls image, I’m willing to endure the flames.

Oh, and I absolutely love the plausible deniability you gave botters a few days ago with the server news. “Players may experience disconnections or be unable to connect.”.

Was a good laugh when we realized that everyone getting DCed and Banned could use that as a cover story.

Thanks Blizzard for everything you do, you’re one of the few companies I actually believe does what they do for the customers. No matter how much some of the outspoken ones whine and complain.

The forum websleuths do their best to debunk his claims, but my opinion, he remained un-debunked.

Someone mentioned the EQ hacks that used to go on which reminded me of that one EQ proggy, had to run on Linux, hell if I can remember the name tho. What it did was, you would zone in and could see what bosses were up and what loot they had. Anything Linux and dual boot and I’m defeated, so lucky for my guild, we had a guy.

So this guy would zone into … say Sebilis … and then tell us, “Nah, you don’t wanna do Sebilis. Maybe Howling Stones has something more to your liking.” and off he’d go. He was richer than God and never got caught and I learned an important lesson: In games, just like in real life, it’s good to know A Guy.

6 thoughts on “Farmers and Botters and Gnomes

  1. Huh. That’s what I get for not logging in to WoW so much lately. I miss all the fun!

    Gnomes falling from the sky. Now that’s clever marketing.

  2. ShowEQ became the norm in high end guilds even before I left the game (around the Planes of power expansion i think … but I hated SoL as well).

    There were equal programs for both DaoC and rumored to exist for WoW, but with instancing that type of program is pretty useless in wow.

  3. The botter’s story thread hasn’t gotten deleted. It has, in fact, hit the 500 post limit. There’s some entertaining reading in there, I think, for those of you who haven’t looked at it… might want to do so before it falls away.

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