New Low

Today's post is all about World of Warcraft, so if your not interested, move along!

I've never really used my blog as a confessional, but I feel I need to come clean on something. Cleanse my conscience... or at least admit my guilt. Last night, I did something I previously considered a horrible thing to do: I became an AFK BOT. It worked better then I thought it would... and the possibly the worst part? I enjoyed it.

AFK BOT? What is that you ask? Allow me to explain. AFK BOT (short for, Away from keyboard, robot) is the process where by, my character in World of Warcraft gains points or "improves" while I'm not even there. Through the wonders of computer automation, I get to gain certain benefits while not even playing (in this case, while I'm sleeping).

So now you must be thinking, "Shawn, you must be really smart to somehow make your computer play video games for you while you aren't even there!" Well, not exactly. A couple Google searches and 7 lines of "coding" is all it took to get it setup. A properly motivated 12 year old could figure out how to do it.

So why then, is this such a bad thing? For starters, it's cheating. Trying to argue any else would be simply semantics. No matter how you try to justify it, it's still wrong. In the same way a hacker tries to say that it's okay if he breaks into someones bank account just to "see if he can do it." Just because he might not actually take the money, it's still wrong. It's a way to improve your character at an artificially faster rate. Through this means, I could technically have my character "playing" 24 hours a day if I wanted to.

More importantly, through this process, I am directly taking away from other peoples enjoyment of the game. The way it works is, my character gains points due to the work of other people actually playing. So in effect, I ruin there game just to benefit my character while they are doing all the work to gain the points. My character just sits there not helping.

Needless to say, they are going to be addressing this problem soon. And I'm actually glad they will be. What it came down to for me, is that, I want to enjoy the game but I can't if no one else is playing either. This thing that I'm doing isn't new, and in fact, a higher percentage of people use this method over anything else in order to get free points. Until then... I'm hooked on being able to get points while I sleep. It will allow me to enjoy the game faster and not have to spend so much time playing WoW on the weekends.