Despite Blizzard Entertainment’s massive ban of thousands of players earlier this month for using bots to play World of Warcraft for them, the makers of the HonorBuddy have said that they are staying in the automated cheating business and will soon re-launch their service.

If the online game community were high school, then the bot making groups behind tools like HonorBuddy are the smug dweebs who sell their homework to other students. Of course, the difference here is that those smug dweebs are slowly eating away at the system that sustains them by breaking game balance and ruining the play experience for non-cheaters.

The primary purpose behind HonorBuddy is to allow players to earn rewards without actually having to play the game. The bot plays their character for them, allowing “players” to level new characters, grindout professions, or earn PVP rewards. Meanwhile, people who play WoW the old fashioned way (with their hands) have to put up with useless bots crowding PVP battlegrounds or other groups.

As bots become more popular, fewer real players want to stick around. This is bad for the games themselves, and it is especially bad for the studios that create them. This month, both Blizzard Entertainment and Daybreak Game Company went on massive ban sprees, removing tens of thousands of players from their games for using bots.

Risk vs Reward

People who pay for bots are the definition of “more money than sense,” as there is no guarantee that they will not be caught, and those who are discovered lose access to the game for months or even indefinitely. Because WoW is a subscription service, playing the game with HonorBuddy bots effectively costs double the usual rates, and a ban means that the money and the time spent levelling those characters are wasted.

Even HonorBuddy’s creators admit that their tools are not undetectable and warn players that there are no guarantees–other than HonorBuddy getting their money, of course.

“We must say that we have no idea what really happened and all we have are speculations,” staff member Bossland wrote on HonorBuddy’s forums. “Be aware that we have not seen the cause of the bans. … Again, we will give no guarantee and we have never given a guarantee, that our software is immune to detection or bans.”

Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment (c)