As with every version of World of Warcraft, bots have been running rampant yet again on the WoW: Forever beta. It seems like the bots are always one step ahead, and on the beta, they have been exploiting the new Tauren racials to enter high-level zones to harvest valuable Herbs.
Using the Cultivation racial, bots have death-run their way to Winterspring to create duplicates of rare Herbs, such as Mountain Silversage, Icecap, and Black Lotus. While these reagents are basically useless in the level 20-capped Beta, this still goes to show the lengths botters are willing to go to manipulate the economy.
Originally, this Racial skill allowed players of any level to duplicate any Herb on a 23-hour Cooldown. However, to combat the use of this skill by low-level bots, Blizzard made some adjustments to the Skill in the game’s latest update.
Tauren
Cultivation now has a player-level requirement for every Herb. The level required is equal to the Herb’s level required to pick it divided by 5. Herbs that require a higher than 300 Herbalism skill to pick can be Cultivated at player level 60.
Now, players must be level 60 to pick the highest-level Herbs. Additionally, to encourage players to use this ability more often, the cooldown has been changed from 23 hours to just 1 hour! While this change is unlikely to completely extinguish botting, it’s encouraging to see that Blizzard is at least making progress against bots in this never-ending war.