Honor botting

Wow, I didn't even know that existed! Not Addicted has a piece about using bots to farm WoW battleground honor. The author argues that he can't compete in the arena without having lots of PvP gear, and all his PvE gear isn't helping, because it lacks important PvP stats like resilience. So he needs to grind honor in battlegrounds to get PvP epics, and as he finds that boring, he uses Glider to do so. Now I know there were people being essentially AFK in AV, and I knew bots existed to farm gold and xp, but this is honor botting. Not that the bot does some actual PvP, but he moves around and thus avoids getting AFK flagged. Funny quote:

"The best part about this is that now that I know how it reacts, it’s fun to watch the screen and see other people bumping into things, strafing around, and walking backwards five feet. Half the people in the battleground are gliding as well, and the other half are the retards I really don't have any interest playing with anyway; the guys who shout orders in capslock like they’re Genghis Fucking Kahn, or read some quote on a CoD4 loading screen and suddenly think they're Sun Tzu."

No wonder the guys trying to get the others to use some strategy fail, if half of their army consists of bots. This just shows how Blizzard's AFK flag solution totally failed to solve the problem. Can it really be so difficult for Blizzard to tell a bot from a real player, and set up a system where somebody who doesn't participate in the action gets no honor? As enemies in PvP aren't as static as enemies in PvE, I don't see how somebody could bot and actually do enough damage or healing to not stand out on the final score table.

But most of all it reveals that curious attitude of seeing a MMORPG as a serious of obnoxious obstacles before at some mythical point you reach the "fun" game. For me the advancement has always been the fun part, and being stuck at a high level cap with ultra-slow or no progression has always frustrated me. So I don't see the point of bots at all. It reminds me of a quote from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams: "Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself". Obviously if you use a video recorder like that, and never watch what it recorded, you didn't need one in the first place. And if you use a bot to play a game for you, maybe you didn't need the game in the first place. If by some means you could get to the absolute highest point of a MMORPG, the point where you have all the very best gear, and all the reputation, recipes, honor, gold you could possibly need, what would be the point of continueing to play?