PVP botting is alive and well in SWTOR

Perhaps I’m naive.  Perhaps I hoped I’d simply never see this again.  But pvp botting is alive and well in SWTOR.  I’ve yet to see any in the other battleground yet, but I’m starting to see them often in Hutt Ball.  A couple of them I’m quite used to seeing, like SVCNGO on Tarro Blood.  We all know that SWTOR has just been released and that there is a whole host of additions and improvements that Bioware will be making to the game as soon as they can.  Let us hope that a reporting feature in PVP is one of them because BG botting became such a big deal in WoW at one point that there were several very large public riots on the forum about the issue.

BG Botting is both a means to level a character with zero effort, and for gold farming organizations, a steady means to earn gold.  And we all know where that gold goes.  It’s just one of the strategies that such organization take, but in this case it’s likely to be a fairly lucrative one because players have no means to boot AFK/Bots from matches.  Even in WoW, with the means to actually report and boot the characters, the bots have clearly won the war.  If only because after years of dealing with the issue the player base as a whole has become numb to the situation.  You continue to see complaints about them in matches of course, but often little is done to actually remove the characters from a match.  They’re considered just part of doing business.

But SWTOR is a new game.  And I truly hope that Bioware learns from Blizzards mistakes on the issue.  BG Botting is a cancer, and if not attacked and eradicated, will cause the same lethargy, criticism, and malaise that we see in WoW PVP today.