Why I hate bots

Just a few weeks ago I started to get more and more tells in game from people with names like "jdjjssdffggh" asking me to go to this or that website to buy World of Warcraft gold. And prices were constantly falling, to as low as $40 for 1000 gold. Somebody told me that there was new bot software out, and in fact you could see a lot of hunters in obviously bot-controlled movements farming the best spots in the game. On the new server I made my Alliance priest on, of the first 10% of players that reached level 60, an astounding 67% were hunters during off-peak hours. Meanwhile I get less tells, and the gold prices seem to have gone up again to $60 per 1000 gold and above. Rumor has it that Blizzard found a way to detect the new bot program and banned thousands of them. Well done, I say!

Having said that, I must add that my reasons for hating bots are probably different than those of other people. Because I don't mind "normal" gold farming, where somebody (Chinese or not) is playing the game in a more or less regular way, trying to maximize the amount of gold earned per hour, and then selling it to other players with less time and more dollars. As armchair economist the concept of time being equal to money isn't new to me. Whether a player farms gold himself to buy an epic mount or whether he pays another player to farm that gold for him does exactly the same thing to the game economy. Making that transaction illegal only distorts the game by favoring the time-rich over the money-rich. Buying gold isn't any different than paying somebody to mow your lawn.

All that is only true if the gold enters the economy by somebody actually playing a character, killing mobs and selling the loot. As soon as the gold is created in an automated way, by means that aren't available to the average player, the equation changes. Worst of all are money dupes, or other cheats that create gold out of thin air. While fundamentally being the game programmers fault, somebody finding and using the dupe bug can bring the whole game economy crashing down. But bots are equally bad, because they allow a single person to run many bots at the same time at a much lower cost than paying somebody to play. Having to pay the gold farmers a wage limits the amount of gold that can be farmed per server. Even the most skilled gold farmer needs 20+ hours to gather 1000 gold, and at a sales price of $40 that just isn't feasible.

But my main reason why I hate bots is emotional. It devalues my achievements in the game. I might be proud to have reached level 60, or having made a certain amount of gold. And then I watch a bot character doing both of it faster and without human supervision, just controlled by some sort of extended macro. That dispells any illusion that I might have that playing World of Warcraft would actually require some skill. I stopped playing chess when cheap toy computers got powerful enough to consistently beat me. I often quote Sid Meier who said that a game is a series of interesting decisions. As soon as I feel that the decisions aren't interesting, because even a bot can do them, the game stops being fun.