WoW bots use bizarre pet naming strategy to avoid detection in Season of Discovery

In the latest blow to Blizzard’s attempts to deal with botting issues in World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery, perpetrators have adopted a bizarre new naming strategy to avoid detection.

Season of Discovery launched to huge concurrent player counts and a general consensus that the developer had done an excellent job updating the original Classic formula. The game has new experiences, abilities, and powers, all while retaining the intangible feel of Vanilla Azeroth.

That said, there have been some issues. Many were unhappy with the implementation of the new Ashenvale PvP event, as it pertained to the reputation rewards and the motivation for players to progress through as intended.

Another major issue has been bots, and the culprits have adopted a hilarious new strategy designed to aid in avoiding detection.

Botters are giving pets “popular” American names, according to Google

In a Reddit post, one user shared their scarcely believable discovery that Hunter pets were being given names deemed popular in America according to a Google search.

Bots are now naming their boars, but only from the top google results for “American names.”
byu/Lesserred inclassicwow

The player claims they saw Hunter’s pet names change in real-time from Chinese characters to names like John and Henry. After Googling “American names,” those results showed up highest in the search engine. Combined with the often gibberish names of bots, this creates an amusing juxtaposition.

Many were quick to chime in with their thoughts on this revelation, with one comically saying: “There he goes again, he just vendored and mailed stuff to his bank, off to farm more cloth. Yep there he goes, the brave hunter Asdfbfdsa and his loyal pet boar, Steve. Godspeed asddbfdsa, you totally legitimate player that is online 18 hours a day.”

Others wanted to stress that botting remains a severe issue despite this funny naming pattern. One said: “I hadn’t had any run-ins until this morning with bots but dear god. Go to Thousand Needles, and there were at least 15 troll hunters with no named pets doing the same rotation/movement, and I legitimately could not quest. The mobs would spawn, and their scorpion was already tagging them; it’s honestly infuriating how concentrated it is.”

Blizzard has been mass-banning accounts but it seems they are popping up far more quickly than they can currently deal with. With further innovation designed to combat the issue coming in the future, time will tell if the presence of bots will lessen.