The Bots are gone. They’ve been Terminated. … Or?

Le Bot est mort. Vive le Bot!

I finally managed to break away from the PvP and questing to get back to the Burning Steppes with my level 58 Hunter. The new Beast Mastery talent tree wasn’t so bad. I appeared to be able to kill Dragonkin a little more quickly than I remember. (I’ve now taken a PvP full Marksmen talent build. Stay tuned on damage output and pet degradation once I establish that against the Dragonkin.)

Anyway, I was going to the areas there in the Steppes where I know the caster type Dragonkin are, and lo and behold, XOIUDF and his cat Cat and Brannerf and his cat Cat were gone. And a few others too.

They were such regular features of the environment, as they circled on definite patrol paths, like hands marking time of a clock, like seasons. To be without them seemed odd.

From a selfish standpoint I miss them. Nothing like kill-stealing, and skinning-stealing, from a Bot and getting a stack of Black Dragonscales for an hour’s effort. And the xp, albeit reduced since they’re doing half the killing, wasn’t too bad.

But they’re gone. All of them.

Or? So I thought.

Later, I was in Tanaris with my level 46 Rogue. Killing those Wastewanderer Bandits and such. There I see a Dwarf Hunter, level 48. He’s got some odd name: Hwyrazsfr, or some such. His cat is named Cat. (RP server mind you. But where’s the ? GM Ticket button gone to?)

Anyway, I watched him kill a bandit. “Okay,” I think, “He’s got no imagination and he recently tamed the Cat and hasn’t created an equally uncreative name for it yet.” I watch him kill two bandits. “He must be on that quest,” I thought.

And then the odd part. Rather than veer off to the next camp, full of bandits just waiting to be killed, the hunter instead appears to be moving in a large radius around the watertower. Ignoring all bandits that are obviously visible to me and instead going for them that are standing in a limited circular path around this tower.

The Bots are back. Stupid at the moment, but I guess clever programming will find a way around every limitation Blizzard implements in their macros and Lua language.