Comment by Levitz
9 hours ago
I think you are right on every point, but I think it's worth noting that WoW is kind of a different beast.
You don't play a "match", you don't play "against" other players most of the time, in this context "botting" and "cheating" overlap because having your character do stuff 24/7 unattended is an evident advantage over the rest of the population, but it's not like you are hindering anyone's progress directly the vast majority of the time doing so.
How often does actual cheating happen in WoW, anywhere it matters? M+? Raiding? PvP?
Most of cheating is botting. When bots farm dungeons or other activities, earn gold and then that gold is being sold at black markets for dollars to other players.
That's indirectly hindering other players progression, because it causes deflation (so you can't earn as much gold selling your ores); because it causes inflation (more circulating gold, yes, these are contradictory); because it denies other player farm (if bot gathered ore, other player have to search for another vein) and so on; also illegal gold selling increases expectations (other players bought super good gear, why don't you do that) and causes burn-out (because farming gold fairly is much more hard, than just buying it).
But mainly it just makes players angry, because they can see these bots moving in a predetermined route and stealing resources from their noses. I'm not really sure if bots are that bad in the grand scheme of things, but living players certainly don't like to compete with automatons.
There were also cheaters who used instant cast interruptions at arenas, but it seems that competitive PvP is not that popular nowadays so I'm not sure how it's wide spread.
That and back in my WoW days it was "competitive" raiding with "creative use of game mechanics" - although those bans usually lasted for a few weeks or so most of the time.
I only remember coming across one of these myself, basically a boss fight where you could exploit pathing to take one of the enemies out of the encounter.
This was all just for boasting rights - being server first for a given boss fight with an undergeared raid group.
It was always a coin flip sometimes to understand if the strategy you came up with was going to get flagged by a DM or not. Usually for brand new fights they'd come warn you before an actual take-down they disapproved of, and you'd only get banned if you ignored the warning and continued. I can only assume Blizzard had alerts of some sort so in-game DMs would be notified when a guild started a give encounter.
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