I'm sure you've seen them by now: Hunter with a pig named "Boar," running in a pre-set pattern and merrily killing mobs even after you've tapped them. I've run into them in Azshara and last night came across a several in Tanaris. These seem to be the latest flavor of gold farmer, the bot farmers. I don't like them.
I remember the good old days when my servers' farmers had real people behind them! Whether you loved them or hated them, you could at least interact with them. The farmbots are another symptom of the new breed of in your face gold farming business model characterized by spamming tells that take up your entire chat window, and I hope Blizzard is successful in shutting both the bot software writers and the gold spammers down. (You know who I mean on both accounts probably, and I won't mention them by name, they don't deserve the free publicity. I will delete any replies mentioning any of these companies by name as well.) I yern for the days of the kinder, gentler, HUMAN farmers.
The human-controlled farmers could sometimes be annoying, but they weren't usually all that bad to deal with, and they weren't engaging in any in-game activity that everyone else hasn't -- we're all farmers at some point. Although they were working for gold-selling companies, which is an activity I can't condone, at least they were real players who you could interact with, and sometimes to your mutual benefit.
I remember when I was leveling my paladin from 58-60, pre 1.8 days. I decided to check out Tyr's Hand to see if I could grind on the elites there, as I'd heard they were good farming. Of course, the area was swarming with professional farmers! Well, instead of leaving or trying to compete with a dozen or so level 60 rogues and hunters for kills, I healed one of the more efficient-looking rogues. I got an instant group invite, and a ton of /love and /hug emotes. I had adopted my first farmer! I heal-botted the rouge for a few hours and we flew through the kills. My adoptee fed me a steady supply of water and mana pots from the drops, and I got an entire level of experience from one session as well as half the cash drops and my share of loot from group loot. I had just made some person's day on the other side of the world by increasing their productivity by a huge chunk and got myself a nice level out of it. Usually on my PVE server, the farmers were willing to lay off of quest mobs if you sent them a tell (well, usually several) and were nice enough to say, trade mana pots for mage water. On my PVP server, it was always fun to gank the farmers. Usually I'd get a free HK out of the deal, but some of those guys were actually pretty fun to fight. Ah, those were the good old days.
But, what can we do with these farmbots? Or to them. On PVP servers, we can kill those of the opposite faction of course, and on PVE servers or same faction on PVP servers, we can tag their mobs if we have instant ranged attacks and let them do the killing for us, which is nice, but not nearly as fun as I'd like.
What do you do with your farmbots? More importantly, what do you do to your farmbots?
