An Interview with a Bot on Gold Making Podcast

Zanzarful and I (Jack the Dipper) run a new weekly podcast called The Auction House and as the name suggests the shows are about gold making for new and advanced users gold makers in World of Warcraft. Two weeks ago we did the recording with a small-time botter in World of Warcraft. We were curious about how they work, think, operate, how those communities are, and what is Blizzard doing to prevent it.

Especially in classic, botting is a huge thing and will be even worse when TBC gets released (talked about in the podcast). Because there are no tokens, botters can make use of a situation like that and offer players an alternative to get gold.

Now before you start pre-judging the interview or why we are doing this (what I hope you won't do), it's not made to promote botting or giving it a spotlight. Because it is a bad part of World of Warcraft and many other games, we think it's still important to talk about it. Maybe Blizzard can learn from this? Who knows? We want to give you an idea of what all this botting is because there are a lot of people with questions about this subject.

We want to thank all the questions we got from the r/woweconomy community for this interview. We certainly had some WTF moments in this interview but still, we wanted to get some insightful information on botting in World of Warcraft.

It was really hard to find a botter that actually wanted to do an interview and we did not expect it would be easy because it is a pretty closed world. Luckily we could get some info about the whole community.

You can listen to the podcast here;

• Spotify
• Apple Podcast
• Google Podcast
• All the Platforms

Here are the questions we asked the botter;

1. How long have you been botting?
2. How did you start/get in contact?
3. Is he botting on home computers or some virtual servers? I can only assume that it needs a huge processing power to have that many clients online, energy costs at home would also probably be super huge. – Lembaspl’s
4. Do you feel blizzard does an adequate job at bot detection? – ChaoticNeutralFTW
5. What is your goal with botting? (what is the reason behind it) – IT-resolves
6. What is the botting community like? – IT-resolves
7. How much of your botting process is self-made and how much is made by others? Do you write your own bots, or pay for them? – IT-resolves – DirtyIby
8. Do you simultaneously play the game legitimately – TomleBadger
9. What is your perspective on botting? – TomleBadger
10. How many accounts did you bot with? – DirtyIrby
11. How do you play the cat and mouse game of trying to stay ahead of Blizzard’s cheat detection?
12. Which economic activities do your bots, and other bots in general, automate? Besides gathering, is crafting being automated? How about buying and selling on the AH? – DirtyIrby
13. I'd like to hear a little about the differences between paid/private bots and the free/public ones and the types of people that use them. What do they do differently, and how much of an effect does it have on their earnings and ban rates?
14. I'd also be interested to know how they pick realms. What factors do they take into consideration? – Fisherman_Gabe
15. Did the input broadcasting ban have any effect on your botting operation? – ChaoticNeutralFTW & DirtyIrby
16. Do you know the extent of the botting software/program? like running a fishing bot or something else – Idontupvotereposts
17. Do you think botting should be allowed by Blizzard and why? – BigFudgere
18. Are botting raw materials good for the wow economy when it’s about the cheaper crafts gold makers can make? – Cathbadh
19. Are there techniques, bypasses, workarounds, or anything on botting topic – vodka
20. What's their view on the ethics of botting? – Samadan
21. What’s being more botted at the moment retail or classic?
22. Did you get caught? How often did it happen? How long were the bans?
23. What kind of addons did you use while botting and posting on the auction house?
24. Did you have a couple of returning buyers for in-game items/materials?
25. Did you have a couple of returning buyers for selling gold? People/guilds/websites that you consistently sold gold to? How much money did you make?
26. Level boosting with botting in dungeons? How does it work?
27. Is it easy to get into the botting community?
28. What would impact the botting community hardest in a policy change from blizzard?
29. How would u solve the botting problem and do you think Blizzard is doing enough?
30. Is WoW the most popular botted game? What other MMORPG’s are popular for botters

I hope you enjoyed it even if it is not the most positive subject in the World of Warcraft, but we think it is important to give it more attention, especially to Blizzard about this problem.