Blizzard Kills A Bot

I don't know how much the mainstream gaming media has covered the story, but apparently Blizzard dropped the ban hammer on quite a few botters in World of Warcraft over the past two days.  Well, WoW players are calling PQR, which I believe is the application in question, a bot.  I would call it a macro, but as macros are legal in WoW, I believe bot gets used to avoid confusion.

Image edited to show the last edit date.

According to the official description on the OwnedCore forums, PQR was:

"PQR is a bot designed to perform complex DPS, healing and tanking rotations for the player. It was mainly designed to reduce the tediousness of performing a complex rotation for hours on end, which for many can be a huge relief and provide them with a better WoW experience where they may have wanted to quit in other cases."

Note that I indicated "was"?  That is because, as the graphic above shows, that the download link was removed from OwnedCore's forums, probably at 4:02pm yesterday, Central Standard Time (GMT -6).  Since the application was freeware, Blizzard can't go after the developer's wallet, but if the lawyers were able to track down Xelper, perhaps he was persuaded to cooperate.

Someone posted a rumor that 510 thousand accounts were banned.  The users of PQR apparently believe that people who used the application in PvE were receiving 72 hour bans and those using the hack in PvP were receiving permanent bans.  The fact that Xelper took down the link has led to some conspiracy theories on the forums similar to ones seen when the EVE bot RoidRipper closed down due to aggressive action by CCP.

The story is ongoing, and the MGM will need to cover the story if highly ranked Arena players were caught in the ban wave.  I'll go through all the information I have and post something more comprehensive on Monday.  And for those of you who want to read some tears, I'll leave a link to the official ban wave thread.

Click here to read bot tears

UPDATE: I'm not so sure PQR is permanently dead.  I tracked down the statement people were using to say it was.

"I'm going out for the night, and I just want to be clear: I am not sure if PQI was the reason for detection. I am just saying that listening on that addon channel was a bad idea, and a potential avenue for detection. There are others. If people were banned for using PE (and have never touched PQR/PQI) There is certainly another. Another thought is that Blizzard may be able to see what addons are running, but these are all guesses for now. I highly suggest people do not continue to use PQR."