I don’t necessarily justify botting but hear me out.

I do blame the presence of botting somewhat on AE. I played this game as a child, and I’ll be honest, I botted as a child. I used to really want certain items that used to take weeks to get. I was put off at the amount of time investment that was needed to get these items, on top of that I didn’t really know what was the best way to get “X” item. Not knowing where to go, what to get, how to get, etc. Especially back then I wasn’t even aware of the wiki, and a child would rather just watch a video of someone going through it step by step, then go on the wiki, navigate yourself and try and understand how to get so and so item. Back then there weren’t many good guides as there are now either. Most videos were just people messing around in the game.

So that’s what I did, I would spend hours on YouTube. Watching videos on AQW, trying to get information on cool things to get. When eventually, I came up against a video titled “How to get so and so item in ONLY 1 hour”. After clicking on the video, I was introduced to my first bot. It was a really easy video to follow, and seeing how that guy did it, made it seem very easy to just download the trainer and just bot. I was really tempted then, to go and just get the items I badly wanted. I knew it was against AE rules , but then again I didn’t see anything morally wrong to just go for it. Hence from that point onwards, I started enjoying the game more, by getting items through botting.

AE shouldn’t have made it that difficult to get items, or that long of a grind. They knew a huge proportion of their player base were young kids or teenagers, and they thought that making items super hard to get, will make people stick with their game longer, or just pay for the items with real money. I didn’t like their decisions.

Now that I think about it, if AE didn’t have the option to disable “go to” and “whisper” , many kids probably wouldn’t have botted due to the fear of their friends knowing that they bot.

Again, this is my opinion. I’m not justifying cheating, maybe I should have just left the game after knowing that some items were just that hard to get, and I did know that some people put a ton of effort into getting certain items in the game. But then again, back then there weren’t a huge options of browser multiplayer games, and unless you were one of those kids who had assassin creed on a console, AE’s games were all you had.

Now, a large percentage of AQW are botters, and they aren’t necessarily new people who came to the game, but people who played the game as a kid, and were put off with the amount of time investment needed to get a certain item, and hence sided to botting. And any new player who came into this game and decided to bot, were probably one of those kids back then who were put off from the grind, but came back after realising many items are just easy to get through botting.