WoW players outraged over Blizzard’s “joke” response to botting issues

World of Warcraft Classic has been out for over a year but lately, the still-loyal player base has had to deal with endless waves of automated bot players, and Blizzzard’s response to the issue was literally a joke they made back in 2006 come to life.

As a re-release of a game that originally came out in 2004, players have had plenty of time to perfect their WoW Classic strategies, but it also means cheaters and botters have had just as much time to perfect their craft.

“Bots” as anyone who’s played an MMORPG before will know, are automated characters that only exist for one purpose, say running an instance hundreds of times a day for loot and mats to sell for gold.

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Rampant botting has, unfortunately, always been a part of World of Warcraft, but it’s become a major problem in recent months for Classic, with so-called “bot mafias” running up the prices for certain items and mats on the auction house. They’re also a huge problem in the cross-server PvP Battlegrounds, where bots will just stand around to gain the minimum honor and nothing else.

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Classic fans have been complaining about the rise in roboplayers for months, but Blizzard’s long overdue response to the problem seems to have satisfied almost no one, and was actually a joke from a set of fake April Fool’s Day patch notes from 2006.

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Blizzard’s current attempt to combat bots is to cap instances and dungeons to a maximum of 30 a day, instead of a widespread ban wave that most players want to see.

This strategy is seemingly pulled directly from a set of joke patch notes back in 2006, that jokingly deemed “it was necessary to limit the number of times a player can enter a dungeon per day.”

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“This was done to prevent the economy from being flooded with overly valuable items, and to ensure that players weren’t acquiring too much gold during what we’d consider a reasonable amount of play-time,” the tongue-in-cheek notes said. “We realize that many players enjoy repeated trips to their favorite dungeons, so we’ve made this new limitation as least restrictive as possible. Each character on a player’s account may enter the same dungeon up to three times per day, and may visit a total of five dungeons over the course of a twenty-four hour period.”

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Obviously, this has rubbed WoW Classic players the wrong way, with many pointing out that this change is, quite literally, a joke from the past come to life.

There’s one theory as to why Blizzard chose to limit instances instead of bans, and it’s that they can’t collect subscription fees anymore from accounts that get locked out.

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Not every single player has the time to run over 30 instances a day, but it doesn’t take a no-lifer to realize that Blizzard’s response to the biggest problem in WoW Classic right now is quite literally a joke.