Are bots back?

With all the hub-bub over Blizzard's victory in the WoW Glider case, I was surprised in-game the other day with a bot. Not sure what time of day it was, but I was doing my Hodir daily quests on my hunter and ran into this Night Elf hunter running a race-track pattern in the area where the fire elementals spawn. The place where the anvil was before doing that part of the phasing quest(s). You know the spot. They drop crystallized fire at a decent rate. Prime bot'ing grounds.

I watched for a while in disbelief. I tried communicating with the character. No dice. (This is difficult on opposing factions, but not impossible.) I was thinking about attempting some griefing. Feign pulling. Mob tagging. PVP flagging to get it to fight me. I inspected the character trying to glean a little more info. The gear was terrible. +Strength on the bow. I could find no quest rewards. Finally, I'd wasted enough time and effort confirming my suspicions and summarily put in a GM ticket. I didn't just report it, I wanted to talk to a GM.

I had had a *horrible* experience with this same issue back in vanilla WoW. The various fields around Western Plaguelands were rife with this problem back in the day. I had a particular issue for an entire week in Felstone Field. I was rep farming myself and leveling up a pet from very low level, but doing it legitimately by actually playing at my computer. *gasp* This Dwarf hunter -- why is it always Hunters, by the way... as if the typical players view isn't already skewed to the "huntard" stereotype -- ran the same racetrack pattern. Back then, though, the bots were dumber. Or it was programmed poorly. For this one, you could tag the mobs and it would still come by an help you kill it. It was just set to a killing spree. Again... horrible gear choices. Just there to farm. I'm sure it pulled in some good scratch, too. This went on for a week. Every day I would report via ticket the behaviour and the next day it would be the same bot back in the same spot running the same pattern. Not sure if he eventually just got caught or if this was around the inception of Warden, but he finally disappeared a day or two before I was done with my reputation grind.

Back to the present, I had to log off and fully expected to get a canned response via GM ticket in-game. When I was able to log back in a couple of hours later, a GM hit me up almost immediately. (The new UI for talking to a GM works pretty well, by the way.) Well... at least I got to talk to them. They were very friendly and professional in that semi-extra-geeky roleplay way many of them use. He/she indicated they were still getting reports like this occasionally and would look into it. I neglected to write down the character name, but was 99% sure I had reported it correctly. This particular GM had a good sense of humor. After assuring me that they would take the report seriously and take action if warranted:

GM: "Is there anything else I can do for you?"
Me: "Can you spawn me a few dozen Everfrost Chips?"
GM: "I wish I could because I'd be exalted by now."

:)