This World Of Warcraft player is using an in-game plague to drive away botters

wow shadowlands pre patch notes — (Image credit: Blizzard)

The world of World Of Warcraft is currently under siege from the undead—and one crafty player is manipulating the necromantic plague to mess with the MMORPG's own mass of unthinking bot-controlled adventurers.

Ahead of Shadowlands' release next week, World Of Warcraft's Death Rising event is bringing the ramblin' shamblin' Scourge back to the game in a thematic return to 2006's Scourge Invasion event. This time 'round, players can be infected and temporarily turned into zombies, who can themselves attack and infect other players.

It's a good bit of fun before the awful seriousness of Shadowlands rolls in proper. But as PCGamesN reports, one Warcraft player has been using the infection to mess with botters—players using scripted accounts to farm monsters in lucrative locations.

Now, normally, botters have plans in place should anyone decide to come kill their characters. Run back, resurrect, resume grinding. But this doesn't work when they're turned into zombies, effectively paralyzing the character and putting a wrench into the owner's farming plans.

A few minutes into the vid, the botter themselves shows up and the language gets somewhat, well, colourful. They start off bragging about their botting activities, though quickly leave the scene when dealing with the plague becomes more hassle than it's worth.

Blizzard has been bringing their orcish hammers down harder on players using third-party tools to give themselves an edge lately, expressing a harsher approach on techniques like "multi-boxing" (mirroring inputs across multiple characters). I never reckoned an in-game disease would be just as effective in discouraging exploiters.

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.