Advertisement

The World of Warcraft bot-killer exploit

Tired of gold spammers clogging up the bank square in Stormwind? Lots of other World of Warcraft players feel the same way and have (apparently) found a way to deal with this issue firsthand. The site TechnoLlama notes a technique where Shamans can kill off the Level 1 goldspammer bots, despite being a part of the same faction. By logging off just a moment before their Fire Nova totem detonates, it essentially turns the explosive device into an unaligned item. When it goes off, it does damage to everyone around it regardless of faction.

Even a level 70 totem doesn't do that much to your average player. The damage done is more than enough to kill a level 1 spambot, though. All of this is outlined in a post to the official WoW forums. It's (of course) been deleted, but it can be viewed in whole via Google cache. This unique post and discussion was highlighted by the commentary site Terra Nova. Commenter Greg Lastowka notes that this is a unique response from a fed-up player community. He ties it back to a previous discussion on the site about appropriate levels of RMT control.

What do you think? Should players be allowed to "take the law into their own hands" when it comes to gold spammers?