Over the past few weeks, World of Warcraft developers Blizzard have been cracking down hard on bots, with almost 100,000 bots being reportedly suspended less than two weeks ago for 180 days. So, at first glimpse, the crackdown was not as hard on bot accounts, and those who run them, as some might think. Speaking at the time, Blizzard community manager Josh Allen said:
“We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as “bots.” We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.
“If you believe that you’ve encountered a player abusing a bot, exploit, or cheat, please let us know! You can do so by using the right-click report functionality in the game, and/or by emailing information to hacks@blizzard.com.”
However, the developers of Honorbuddy – which allows World of Warcraft players to collect honor in PvP without actually engaging anyone and requires no input from the player – have said that the service will be back again as soon as the developers can get it up and running. Speaking in a statement on the official Honorbuddy forum, staff member Bossland said that Honorbuddy was only detected once, which resulted in its closure earlier this month.
“Some of us seem to forget the Gilder times, or were not around in 2006-2008. With Glider you knew that there where 2 software detections a year, it just happened. With Honorbuddy you thought that we are unbeateable, we never thought that, we’ve succeeded since 2010 – Honorbuddy had not a single software detection. It seems there is one now.”
As the Honorbuddy developers continue to try get the service up and running, they are still denying that 100,000 World of Warcraft accounts were shut down, saying that Honorbuddy had never had that many active accounts.