I'll admit, I'm disappointed. I started playing WoW again about 3 months ago, after a 6-7 year break. The nostalgia got to me, and I wanted to see if I'd still enjoy it. I did, and played legit for about a month. Then I came across a post about botting, and after leveling a couple new toons 1-100 legitimately, remembered how much I HATE the level grind. If I want to have one class of each character at level 100 on each faction, which is what I want, so that I can play with each and pick which one I like the most, that's 22 characters. The grind is just so damn tedious. It's not the least bit enjoyable, and I only really enjoy the end-game PvE content. Once you've played each faction once to level 100, the quests get quite repetitive. And dungeon running over and over isn't any fun either. With 22 characters, and estimates that put the leveling time at 100-120 hours /played per, that's a total of 110 days /played. That's absurd. The main reason I left WoW years ago was that it was consuming WAY too much time. It was too tough to be competitive in the end-game with just a casual amount of playtime. I understand that I'm not entitled to 22 level 100 characters, or competitive endgame, and obviously it's blizzard's expectation that you spend a ton of time for those things. But I do find it a bit hypocritical that they have an in-game tooltip on the loading screen that says "Remember to adventure outside of Azeroth with your friends too" when it can take 20 mins just to travel from place to place sometimes. I don't think this game is casual friendly. I'm sure a lot of you will say that it's nowhere near as bad as other MMORPGs. Well that's great, I don't play those games. I played WoW, and enjoyed having a life outside of the game. Botting enabled me to enjoy the parts of the game that I really liked, while still only spending a couple hours a day playing, or taking several days/weeks off at a time. Another thing that I actually like, but only if I can bot, are garrisons. I only had a couple level 100s, but I can't imagine what it would be like having 22 of them and not having a bot. I estimate the garrison daily activities take 10-15 mins per character, if you're being efficient about it. So doing the garrison dailies for 22 level 100s would take ~3.5-5.5 hours. Even with just 4 level 100s, you're looking at about an hour per day on the garrison daily stuff (profession, mining, herbing, mission planning, etc). This game just isn't designed to be played casually, but that's what botting enabled me to do. I realize I was cheating. I'm not going to try to get any refunds, or really cry about the 6 month suspension. I am going to request blizzard not continue charging my CC over the next 6 months, because that would be absolute bullshit. I don't know if I'll use my other account now (that I have never even logged into...not even sure how it got attached to my account tbh), or just abandon the game. I don't know if I'll return when my 6 month suspension is up. I was going to give multiboxing a try, as that might help with the leveling speed, since it would allow me to RaF. Unfortunately, none of my RL friends play WoW, so that's just not an option. But boxing brings with it it's own time commitments of learning how to box, setting up the programs, macros, etc. Another huge time commitment. I will say that I never PvP botted...I don't enjoy PvP, and so I never felt like my botting was cheating anyone else out of anything. I'm sure the vast majority of WoW players (non-botters) would disagree with me, but that's what I think. Those are my thoughts on the matter. I enjoyed WoW, but am definitely looking for a different game that isn't as tedious or as big of a time-sink and still allows someone to enjoy endgame content.
