Bot Spotting 101
Doc Robot has a short but sweet guide to how to spot a botter (or, sometimes, a farmer) wandering around the World of Warcraft. Warning signs: they behave erratically, don't answer tells, use repeated attack patterns, and so on and so forth. Chances are that if, like me, you play on one of the higher population servers, you've seen this stuff happening, even if you didn't know at the time exactly what you were dealing with.
My own bot story is pretty funny-- I was leveling my rogue through Stranglethorn Vale, killing and skinning panthers to grind and make some money. Along comes a paladin-- she walks right up to a panther near me, and proceeds to kill it. I play on a PVE server, but I've got no love for the alliance, so I did what I thought was an appropriately undead rogue-y thing to do and I ninja'ed the skin from her on that kill. She tried to skin, failed, and... moved onto the next mob. I got no reaction out of her at all. So I let her kill the next mob, beat her to the skin again, and still nothing. I did this three or four times, and I didn't get so much an emote out of her-- not even an angry look.
I couldn't believe that someone would let me get away with this, so even despite the fact that she was a few levels ahead of me, I went ahead and flipped my PVP flag on, and threw down a few /taunts. Still nothing-- she just keep rolling on in her pattern without even acknowledging I was there. By then, of course, I knew I was dealing with a bot, and so for an hour or so, I tagged her panthers, let her kill them and gain experience for me, and then ninja'ed the skin out every time. Wonder if that botter was surprised that his paladin wasn't very productive that hour.
Unfortunately, I never did report her, which is what you're supposed to do when you find a character botting or farming (as the article says, it's usually a hunter, so my guess is that my paladin was simply being powerleveled). Blizzard is doing everything they can to battle this stuff, but my guess is that it's much more rampant than even they will admit. Have you seen a bot? What did you do when you discovered it?
