FYI, Bots level to max, then these accounts are traded/sold to farmers.
Those farmers do the manual work, bots cannot realiably compete for open world resources as they are easilly killed or out-tagged.
But lets look at the worst case scenario where a boost is used.
With the Silver River special
$5 sub
$22 boost
100g/hr (lowball)
8 hours a day
21 days a month
= 17,000g
Roughly twice the living wage in Jakarta
Roughly a living wage in Shanghai.
Actually leveling is going to be insanely profitable for botters because there will be a huge number of people rerolling professions that will need all the low level materials that the bots will generate. Players aren’t going to farm their own linen/silk/leather they will buy it. And huge amounts will be needed with every caster going tailoring and everyone else going LW.
The leveling requirements are nerfed in TBC.
A bot could do it in 3 days I’m TBC.
That is true, but I don’t think we’ve confirmed we are getting nerfed EXP. I’d bet on yes for a few reasons, but they are being more liberal with spicing design up this time around.
But if true the nerf is like 15% per level so it shouldn’t be that extreme.
A bot should still be able to level within 3-4 days in TBC.
The only way boosts will be profitable for a bot is if the money they could make in the time it would save to level (3-4 days) is greater than the cost of the boost AND the money they would have earned by leveling regularly .
People forget you earn gold from leveling - and you don’t have to invest extra money to do so.
OK, so the botter didn’t buy the account and boost, instead he bought 5 accounts, not 1. Now redo your math and tell me which is more profitable in a month, even with your inaccurate 2 weeks to level to max.
Here’s a hint, the 5 accounts is more profitable. Now let’s assume 2 of those accounts got banned by week 2, let’s go a step farther and say they never sold the gold on it to make a profit. Those 3 accounts by the end of the month still net more profit than the 1 boosted account.
Now this brings up another issue with the boosted account vs multi account for bots.
Risk vs profit. By making multiple accounts they lower the risk of a ban by flooding the game with thousands of bots, resulting it less chance of ban per account.
It’s not only more profitable for the botters to run multiple accounts its safer for them to do it that way in terms of the chance for the ban is less due to the sheer number of bottong accounts preventing all of their 5 accounts from being banned before a profit is made vs the one boosted account being banned.
People also forget the risk of ban and lost profit for having 1 boosted account vs multiple accounts.
Yep. That too. The impact of a ban hurts a lot more when you have fewer accounts.
It’s been mathed out to be about 30% less expensive needed to get from 1-58. Add in additional quests that are added from it and it makes it about 35-40% faster leveling without using instance boosts.
I’m not disputing your math, but I’m assuming bots are just going to keep doing what they’re doing which is grind mobs and unless thst ends up being not true the number I’ve seen is approximately a 15% nerf to each level…which maths out to being 15% faster.
The speed of which Blizzard bans accounts is pretty frigging slow. The bans they get are the cost of doing business and they always do get banned eventually and I’d wager the sooner those bots get into instances the safer they are from being reported by players who can observe their obvious bot behavior, but you ever bother to take time to do a /who and report suspicious players inside the instance?
I don’t think people forget I think they just write it off. My warlock is herb/alchemy and is about to ding 60, maybe tonight if I go for it. He’s sitting on 800g or so and that’s with getting lucky with black lotus and selling herbs/potions along the way.
I can’t imagine Botters who just level and vendor aren’t making anywhere near that much unless they luck out with something like edgemasters.
ITT people denying boosts will have mounts and skills trained and probably the profs ready to go, and somehow botters wont abuse this convience of instant accounts to go stick in dungs to farm until they hit cap.
Um… they literally won’t unless they grind those things.
The boost only comes with regular mount.
You have to think - a botter is probably power leveling themselves through instances.
which is where they would get their gold.
They get to sell the entire instant worth of goods for gold.
Maybe? But they have to have accounts to boost themselves to do that and they do tend to get banned it just takes time. Also consider that if they’re boosting themselves they’re not maximizing that account’s gold potential.
300g right now avg around $10 how much you think spell/moon/shadow cloth is going to sell on the first few weeks. They get one a day think they make back for the 15 they spend that months for 90 cloth.
sell the crafting only at 10g x 90 (1 of each cloth per day) = 900g = = $30 in gold they can sell - max $15 put into that month alone
What if there was a minimum time needed to use the boost service after an account was created. Like one month after WoW account created.
Most people coming to TBC classic have idle WOW accounts, playing retail, or playing Classic so wouldn’t affect them.
And if you are new to WoW, you probably should level from scratch anyway.
Awesome.
So I can boost a 58 mage with its mount, then go sell stock boosts to draenies to grind mats to level my proffs while hellfire dies down and then invade in the middle of the night?
Look at what some of these loser mutliboxers did with 40 accounts. Don’t let them buy a full dungeon team right away and hide in portals exploiting layers for gold.
It’s not a one day CD. If I’m remembering correctly the 1 day CD came in 3.0.
It literally doesn’t matter how much gold they can make per day. You are comparing a bot to a bot. The gph is a variable, and my numbers were merely an example. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how many days the bots get to farm gold per month. 3 bots farm are active at max level twice as long as the boosted bot. At max level, 3 bots are active for 3 * 18 = 54 days, while the boosted bot is active for 25 days.
The only educated guess I made was the time to level, and I think I erred on the side of the boost for that. It probably won’t take a bot 12 days to get to 70 given the xp reduction. Furthermore, the time to to level would have to be absolutely ridiculous for the boosted bot to win. Like 22 days or something.
The only assumption I made was the hardware cost was not a limiting factor. It obviously takes more hardware resources to run 3 accounts, rather than 1.
Why would you have only 1 boosted bot? The only time that really matters is the time it takes a nonboosted bot to reach max level as compared to a boosted bot, and how much money the boosted bot can make in that time. If that money can = the cost of the boost then it is worth the investment. In your scenario of 25 days and 18 days. The boosted bot is max level 7 days more than the nonboosted. If the bot can recover the cost of the boost in those 7 days then it is worth the investment.
Lets say hardware limits you to 3 bots. 3x18=54 but 3x25=75. So if in those 21 days you can make enough gold to cover the gold boosts then its prob worth it because the time you save puts u ahead of other bots. lets say the boost is 30$ each for 3 bots thats 90$. You would need to make enough gold for 90$. Lets say 10$ is 1000 gold, then you would need to make 9000 gold in 21 days of level 70.