Gold Farmers Allow You To Buy Gold & Are Everywhere!

Do Not Buy WoW Gold, Buy A Gold Guide Instead

By no means am I a supporter of selling or buying gold in World of Warcraft.  For starters, buying and selling in-game gold are both offenses that can get your WoW account banned forever.  Secondly, it is too easy to learn to make gold on your own, especially if you are a reader of gold blogs and or a listener of gold making podcasts. 

If you really want to spend real world cash on gold, I would strongly encourage purchasing a quality gold guide instead.  If you buy a gold guide and learn the tactics for making gold yourself, you will not put your account in jeopardy and you will be able to make gold forever.  If you buy wow gold, then you will eventually run out of the gold you bought.  Then you will be forced to buy even more gold, since you learned nothing for sustaining your gold stream because you bought the gold instead of learning how to make gold from a gold guide or gold blogs.

Check out some of these great gold making guides instead of buying WoW gold.

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Gold Farmers Who Sell WoW Gold - Eye Witness Report

Last weekend I was taking my girlfriend to get her pedicure at a local nail salon and spa, when I ran across something I had never seen before in person.  This nail salon was ran by a Chinese family, as is common for nail shops in the US.  While waiting and observing the store, I noticed a younger Chinese man playing a game on his laptop.  Then I noticed that he had 4 more laptop computers scattered around the couches and counters around the waiting area.  I quickly realized he wasn't playing on the laptop in front of him, as he would constantly get up and attend to each of the various 5 laptops. 

I inched closer and got a peek at the computer screen closest to me.  Yep, exactly what I had pondered.  Each laptop was running 3-4 smaller windows of World of Warcraft and other games.  Each laptop had 3-4 bots farming gold and materials and this guy had a 5 laptop set-up.  That totals up to 15-25 bots working together to gather game gold and items to sell for real life cash.  I was sitting and waiting in the center of a full fledged multi-gaming gold farming operation, set up in the front of a St. Louis nail salon!  Who would have thought that my trip to get my girlfriend a pedicure would lead me to cross paths with a gold farming set-up?

Did I think to myself, "Oh, what an ingenious idea!"?  Nope.  I thought about what a scumbag this guy is contributing to ruining in-game economies across multiple games.  It was my first real look at the insights of an actual gold farmer and his gold farming operation and while it was interesting to me, it was also appalling at the same time.  Hell, maybe we will cross paths again inside Diablo III and their RMT auction house.

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WoW Herb and Ore Markets In Flux

Herbs Are Down and Ores Are Up

With the scare of the coming change to the vendorable price of the cut uncommon Cataclysm gems, many of the botters have already switched away from the bot farming of Obsidium Ore.  A lot of servers are already seeing a shortage of Obsidium Ore as well as a flooding of herbs on the Auction House.  It is obvious that the botters have switched from farming Obsidium Ore.  Some have even gone to gathering Elementium Ore, while the majority have switched to the bot farming of herbs.

Obsidium Ore is even on shortage and selling for a higher rate due to the lack of supply.  Herbs of all kinds are dropping in price as the markets are getting flooded.  Expect this to only get worse once Patch 4.1 drops if it includes the data-mined change to the prices of cut gems.

What Does This Mean?

Some players are in a frantic rush to prospect their Obsidium Ores, cut the uncommon gems, and vendor them for 9g each before the price could drop to 75 silver each.  Instead of dumping your ores to the vendor via gems, you might be better off selling the stacks on the auction house now that the prices has risen.

As far as herbs go, liquidate any products you have ASAP that were created from herb derived materials.  The value is going to plummet as other players start to be able to get herbs for far cheaper and in much larger supplies than prior to the big botting switch overs.  Mysterious Fortune Cards, Adventurer's Journals, Glyphs, Potions, Flasks & Elixirs are all going to tank, so dump all that you have pre-crafted before you are unable to sell them for close to what costs you already have sunk into them.  You will be able to craft these all for much cheaper than previously due to the flood of herbs.

Botters: To Report Or Not To Report?

(Long post but well worth the read - please stay with me here)

Botting
Using a 3rd party program or an add-on to perform tasks within the game that automate actions is a bannable offense.  Sometimes developers skate the grey areas of what is automation, as is the case with the heavily controversial QA3 auto-scan auto-undercut plug-in.  This plug-in is soon to be broken in an upcoming patch.  In my opinion, disabling this can't come soon enough.  Anyone who has ran across a competitor using this "cheat" is likely to be rejoicing as well with the news of its downfall. 

The Villian
On my server I have been battling in certain markets with a well known (and hated) user of this QA3 plug-in.  I have reported him for botting, even though I know that this program was still in the grey area in terms of legal or illegal.  Nothing happened and he continued to drive more and more people out of his markets.  This guy was camping the auction house with his level 2 semi-botter.  Let's call him Bankbot.  Bankbot was almost always on, and almost always marked as AFK, but very rarily did he drop connection and relog on.  Using the plug-in, Bankbot would post one of each of his glyphs and gems, then when u placed an item cheaper than his, it was a matter of minutes before his plug-in would undercut you.  Imagine this happening pretty much all day long in multiple markets.  As these markets were near impossible to profit in, I focused on other markets I was able to maintain sales in.

The Sidekick
Switching focus a bit:  A few days ago I was logging onto my mage to run the daily Coren Direbrew dungeon for easy Frost Emblems.  Since he is dps and the queue can be a bit longer, I usually would just kill beasts and use the mage's skill at Skinning to pass the time doing a bit of farming while the dungeon group forms.  During my hunting in Scholazar Basin, I ran across an intersting specimen.  Let's call this guy, SkinnerBoy.  Suprise suprise he's a poorly geared cookie cutter Beastmaster Specced Hunter.  Oh look!  He sends in his pet after beasts, stands back and autoshots only, then closes in to skin after the kill.  Next he and his pet head to the next creature, rinse, and repeat.  Hrm.  I notice his delay between creature death and skinning start, so I tag along.  With the delay I am allowed to kill and skin my own mobs, as well as instant cast on his targets as soon as his pet starts to charge.  Hrm.  So he is basically killing mobs flagged by me, and I am stealing all his skins as well as killing and skining my own.  Skinnerboy is obviously a botter.  He never complains, never says a word, never breaks from his obvious bot cycles.  Bong! My Coren group is ready and time for some jokingly easy Frost Badges.  Before I head to The Grim Guzzler, I report this cheater with an explanation of why I know he is botting.  I get the standard: "We will watch him to make sure and if true he'll be gone soon enough."  Yup - I'm fighting the good fight.

The Conspiracy
Today I happened to realize that I haven't seen Bankbot camped at his normal spot all day long.  A quick search on The Undermine Journal shows that Bankbot hasn't posted  a single auction since early Tuesday morning.  Wonder where he has been?  I further delve into the excellent information provided at The Undermine Journal about this hated competitor and do a review of all the markets he is in.  Yup, there are the glyph and gems markets he has ran me out of, but I look further.  It appears that he has an even bigger foothold in the Armor and Item Enhancement markets.  Digging deeper it shows that Bankbot is a major supplier of scrolls, but he sells 3x as many Leg Armor Enhancements.  Looking into his armor sales, they are 90% crafted Leather Armor items.  Wait a minute!  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

The Hero
If my hypothesis is correct, Bankbot and SkinnerBoy are on the same account!  I reported the obvious botter SkinnerBoy and in turn may have possibly got the most hated villianous semi-botting Bankboy banned as well.  Could it be true?  Could he have been so dumb?  Only time will tell if Bankbot appears camped at his usual spot in the Orgrimmar auction house.  If I really did get Bankbot booted, then I am surely the hero of the day for my Realm.

What is your take on botters?  Do you report them?  Do you exploit them?  Do you appreciate their ability to provide low cost bot derived raw materials?