It looks like Blizzard might be finally addressing the rampant botting in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Recently, the game developer announced that they have taken action against over 120,000 malicious accounts, and plan to implement the restrictions on creating Death Knight characters from the original version of the expansion that never went into effect in the Classic release.
World of Warcraft has always had a problem with botting, but Wrath of the Lich King Classic has had an even greater amount of automated characters than in the past. This is in part because Blizzard did not restrict the creation of Death Knights at the launch of the expansion, meaning that new accounts could create a level 55 character immediately. This oversight ended up being a siren’s song for botters, who utilized it to jump into the game without having to level up to 55 manually before farming content and causing disarray in the game’s economy.
While Blizzard originally allowed Death Knights to be created on new accounts in order to let those players join their friends as the Death Knight class, they have now reinstated the requirement that accounts must have a level 55 character already in order to create a Death Knight. This will begin starting the week of March 20 as they hope it will deter malicious activity a bit going forward.
World of Warcraft has also seen a mass ban of over 120,000 accounts this week which had been determined to be engaged in automated gameplay. Blizzard stresses that this is an ongoing process, and requests the help of players to keep reporting suspicious activity in the game.
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Wrath of the Lich King Classic has been under fire lately for its rampant botting and extremely long help ticket response times. While these actions will likely help slow the problem, cheaters are still always going to find a way to disrupt the game economy as no solution can ever truly rid the MMO of bots in the long run.
