Actually, there’s no real profit involved, but boy is it fun.

Recently our beloved World of Warcraft has been seeing a horrible number of bots plaguing the landscape, killing indiscriminately to farm experience, leather, and curved raptor talons. Much to the dismay of the more cognitive patrons of the realms, many of the creatures being endlessly slaughtered are also required as kills or for drops to finish quests. In an attempt to help lessen their numbers, I tried reporting several of the bots to the Game Masters (as botting is grounds for banning an account), but alas the official channels and processes are slow, and I am impatient.

So, I started harassing the occasional bot I passed simply out of spite, and in doing so discovered an amusing quirk in their programming. It appears that by interfering with their combat in a particular way, it’s possible to confuse the bot and cause it to target you once it finishes its current fight. Once it’s got you targetted it will follow you around for a while, and you can lead it into a large pack of mobs, or off a cliff…

Unfortunately I don’t have a parachute cloak, and couldn’t find a high enough cliff to kill him. He hearthed after a few minutes when he couldn’t get out, and eventually wound up back on his set path. Ok, so, leading a bot off a cliff and getting it stuck is pretty cool, but I think we could use a little more cowbell…

So I had another think and speculated on the possible programmatic causes of their erroneous behavior. After testing a few theories, I discovered something even more fun. If you flag yourself at the right time during your bot-baiting, you can actually get them to attack you and flag themselves (assuming they’re of the opposing faction, of course). Result: Dead Bot.

A lot faster results, and a lot more personally satisfying, than reporting them to a GM.

BOOYAH.