WoW Classic players find unintended counter to bots and it’s hilarious

Bill Cooney

WoW Classic players have found a bug that actually does a fantastic job of fixing the bot problem affecting the game.

Automated bots, that do nothing more than farm materials or NPCs, aren’t hard to find in WoW Classic. They’ve been a problem almost since release, and have shown no sign of slowing down.

However, a solution to the problem has come from the most unlikely of places: a bug that can affect NPCs.

NPC bug shuts down WoW bots

Specifically, it’s a bug that causes the NPC to spawn where players can’t hit it. A player would easily recognize something was wrong, and come back later, but bots don’t have that level of intelligence.

Instead, they just keep coming back to die by an unkillable foe, and if you look close you can see even more ghosts than actual characters clustered in one spot.

It’s a hilarious fix to the botting problem and also seems super effective. Now, some players are even calling for it to become a feature instead of just a bug.

“This is beautiful. It almost feels like something like this could be done intentionally to round up bots in the open world for reporting in one handy location,” one player replied. “Make it a feature, not a bug.”

wow classic characters running in a group
Season of Mastery is a whole new challenge, but still has a problem with bots.

Baiting and trapping the bot characters with the very NPC or resource they’re programmed to farm constantly is a beautifully simple solution to a problem that’s plagued Classic WoW for a long time.

While it might seem easy, there’s no sign that Blizzard will implement the change soon. Based on the number of bots stuck on this one NPC on one server in the game, whatever they’ve tried doesn’t seem to have been very effective.