Westworld of Warcraft
World of Warcraft was my first MMORPG. As a huge fan of Warcraft, and Blizzard in general, it was inevitable that I would play the game. At one point, it was my motivating factor to move out of my dad’s house, as it was financially advantageous for me to live there while going to school. He lived in the woods, so we only had satellite internet, and the 5s+ ping was never conducive to multiplayer gaming. Most of my multiplayer experience at that point was LAN games, but I couldn’t do that for an MMO either.
So I moved out into an apartment with friends and shared an account with my brother, Jared. He had a rogue he would play when he would visit, and we’d share resources as best we could. I had no clue what I was doing and didn’t even play on the same faction as my friends, because I wanted to play a shaman and didn’t know how the factions worked until I was too invested. This created a great rivalry with my friends, as Jared and I were “The Horde Players” in our group, which resulted in a few IRL “attacks” where an Alliance player would get IRL ambushed in their apartment so the Horde player would have a fighting chance.
I chose the route of PvP with my shaman because I could hop in and out of games at work, and used a priest my brother had leveled to actually raid in Molten Core and Zul’Gurub. I acquired my Benediction but sadly have never defeated Ragnaros…
I was forced to move back in with my dad and had to put my WoW career on hold. I tried to play, but the raiding guild quickly lost interest once they saw how my internet performed. I can’t blame them, but it was an experience that would prepare me for corporate life. I had taken on a new position at work, so I couldn’t play there anymore either. It wouldn’t be until that job “forced” me to move to a new city that I would be able to play again. Jared was conveniently going to school in the same city, so we lived together with various folks and were able to get him a separate account. At that point we had decided to really dive into the game: raiding and achieving server-first progression, successful BG groups and Arena teams, max professions on multiple alts, etc. This continued from the end of The Burning Crusade into Wrath of the Lich King.
It was about this time that I was laid off from the job that had brought me here and, having not finished technical college, I was forced onto unemployment and was working part-time at a BBQ restaurant I could walk to from the apartment. By this time, school was picking up for my brother, and we had grown burnt out with guild drama. We left our raiding guild and took up life as mercenaries, just enjoying PvP and keeping up with dailies.
It was around this time that I had decided to go back to school. I didn’t want to continue with my technical college career and wanted to go to the school my brother and friends were at, because it seemed to be where lives were headed in a good direction. Even though I had failed my first programming course in technical college, I still decided to change my major on the first day from I.T. to Computer Science. At that point my most successful attempt at programming was editing the Lua of a WoW mod so it would play specific audio files instead of the default ones in particular zones. Losing my job and having most of my possessions destroyed put things in perspective, so I decided to put some effort into this one. As it turns out, I really enjoyed and was good at programming. And software development in general.
Botting becomes the game
Around this time, Wrath of the Lich King was wrapping up. We had achieved server-first Ulduar and Immortal achievements (server first!). My brother even participated in the smaller guild’s server-first Undying achievement. We had multiple alts that covered all professions, but no time to really keep up with everything. Everyone is going to school full time, so who has the time to farm? Weekly PvP wasn’t viable, as you’d only have a few hours of playtime a week, and even then, the college life had a lot to offer.
I decided that I wasn’t too concerned with what happened to my account as I started to mull over how to keep up with the game, and the choice was obvious: botting. I wasn’t trying to grind to High Warlord or dominate the Auction House, but I wanted to keep playing and enjoy the game when I had the time.
This turned into its own game. The bot I used had an interface that let you write C# script for how to control the bot’s behavior. As a budding CS student, I ended up having as much fun working on the bots as I did enjoying the fruits of their labor. I would monitor it while studying for other classes and get tickled every time someone sent a whisper thanking it for helping them or telling it “you’re really good!”. I became very proud of my Turing Test WoW bot, and it wasn’t until Cataclysm when I finally decided it was time to wrap it up…
Friends had me running their accounts as well, so we had a small “army” of 4 accounts full of characters that could gather resources and work together in PvP. Eventually, THAT became the game for me. It was more about resource management and optimization rather than playing the game as intended. Spell rotations and placement were analyzed and optimized over days of farming. We had everything we could need, but Cataclysm had left a lot to be desired and life had already changed so much for myself and my friends. After “capping out” on what we could do, it was time to sign off. Many more expansions would come out that I couldn’t play, and the very brief time I spent trying out other MMOs never gave me the same feeling the older WoW iterations did. I would dive into Final Fantasy XIV, but after a falling out with the group I joined, I decided MMOs just weren’t for me. Too much time needed to invest, subscriptions needed to maintain servers and new content, etc. I didn’t want a second job, so I would swear off MMOs entirely.
Ten years later
Fast-forward nearly 10 years and my brother and I are reminiscing. I’m not sure how it came up, but I was streaming Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning and was really enjoying that. I simply loved the big player battles and city sieges. As was customary, I played a shaman, and I had the time to farm a little for materials and spent most of my time on stream doing warband PUGs. I experimented with a bot for WAR but never intended on using it, as the RoR gameplay loop didn’t require it and, for the most part, all parts were fun.
At this point I’ve been a software developer for quite some time. I was able to comprehend every aspect of how the game and bots worked together, how cheat detection worked, how game clients operated, packets, client-server ownership, etc., to the point that when my brother and I were discussing it, I was challenged again to do the parts of the game I hadn’t covered with my previous bot experiments: dungeons and raiding. I thought it would be fun to find the old bot that I used to use and see if I could use it to recreate the fun I had when I was writing behavior scripts and feeling like I was really testing how my work would be interpreted by live unaware users.
I shopped around using various bots that were free before it dawned on me: you’re a veteran software engineer and this has been around for over a decade. Surely something already existed that was more flexible, that could allow me to do what I wanted to. I finally stumbled upon Drew Kestell’s write-ups and it led me down a rabbit hole of even clearer understanding of how the botting process worked. Most of it I already understood, but to see it all laid out and to have the source code available was a huge step forward for me.
I immediately cloned the repo.
That was September 2023. Everything after it — the coordination layer, the headless client, two years stuck on collision, and eventually pointing a coding agent at the game’s own binary — is what this blog is about.
On scope. Everything on this blog runs on a private, self-hosted server using a legacy 1.12.1 client. The botting described above was roughly fifteen years ago, on an expansion that no longer exists, with an account long since gone. Westworld of Warcraft is not that: there is no one to gain an advantage over, because there is no one else on the server. More on the scope and the credits on the about page.