Can Blizzard do something about all the bots farming mats? It’s running the economy for people who want to make some gold from fair methods.
It’s really out of control lately, I mean is not even hard to spot, when you see 50+ stacks of 200 a random herb or meat being sold at an all time low price it’s clear indication that it he/she might be cheating, no way the player farmed for all of those through fair methods and didn’t get them from playing the AH either (or would not sell them for such a low price).
Multiboxing is allowed; botting is not. Telling the difference is not always easy, and blizzard does have a habit of figuring out how to identify a bot automatically before banning instances of it, which takes a while.
Complaining about a bot in the forums is pointless
Report the person in game. Just don’t expect the Blue Gods to come down and swat them.
If enough people report a character for botting, Blizz investigates. If Blizz thinks he’s botting, they will figure out how the bot works, how to detect it and how to break it. Then they will see how many others they can catch. Then it’s ban wave time.
It will take botters more time to recover. But they will.
Banning 1 botter is counterproductive. 1 guy gets banned, he tells others, the botting code gets changed, now Blizz can’t detect who else is doing it.
The only problem with that is the fact that you let the bots run rampant until you figure out how to break them.
Let’s take the Spirit of Harmony (SOH) and associated Pandaria markets as an example:
we know druid bots have been farming Isle of Thunder for weeks, generating hundred of thousands of SOH which they’ve been dumping on Auction Houses across US realms
As a result of the above market saturation, the SOH price has tumbled drastically, and in many cases is half of the normal AH price
This has bled into other Pandaria markets since SOH can be exchanged for multiple materials at the SOH vendor
The markets for these materials have also tumbled in price, as volume spikes due to the exchange of SOH
So from sitting back and not actively banning botters when they’re identified, it’s allowed multiple markets to crash and the botters have made millions of gold which they’ve already been in the process of on-selling. A quick estimate just from the SOH volume increase puts the botters farming value at a minimum of 90million gold. That’s approx. 750 tokens, or 62.5 years of game time, or $15,000.
Let’s not consider the flow on effects of all of this, and the time it will take for those markets to recover even after the botters are finally banned…….
Let’s not. I don’t CARE about side effects on 7 year old expansions, raw mats that are 4 expansions back from the latest. I just…don’t…care.
How? How have they “ruined the economy”? Is the economy “ruined”? I don’t think so…nope, the economy IS NOT ruined. The BFA economy for farming mats is the same as EVERY expansion since Vanilla:
– all new mats start the new expansion at high cost (50+ gold, a few higher)
– almost all mats drop below 5g within a couple months
In WoD prices dropped in a couple weeks, not months. Legion lasted longer. BFA lasted even longer. But the pattern is the same, for the last 13 years – NONE of that is new. NONE of that is because of botting.
It’s hurting the economy of players who try to make a profit from fair methods, that’s more than enough reason to ask for Blizzard to do something about it.
I understand mats starting at a high price and then dropping, that’s natural, and totally expected. But over the last 2 weeks (on my server at least) all the sudden the AH gets flooded with one person posting 50+ stacks of 200 of ‘X’ crafting mat at an all-time low price and that’s happening for a lot of different mats… Explain to me where do all those mats come from, it’s clearly not someone staying day and night non stop to farm for those.
Agreed. I wouldn’t even care about the bots if there was a way to make gold other than interacting with the garbage auction house. Unfortunately, and very stupidly, there is not. Bring back gold missions and I won’t care what you do or don’t do with botters.
I agree, that is definitely unusual behavior. But it is unusual in 2 ways:
(1) how did one player get more than 10,000 of a crafting mat?
(2) why is he/she selling them for so low?
If someone is using multiboxing and/or botting farm, that might explain (1). But it doesn’t explain (2). If their whole goal is to make a big profit, why would they throw away 2/3 of their profits?
Sometimes rich players artificially JACK UP the AH price of a mat by buying up everything lower. This seems to be someone trying to artificially DECREASE the AH price of some mats. Who would want to do that?
My only guess is…Blizzard employees. Maybe they decided that some players have been JACKING UP the AH price of these mats, and their solution is to flood the market at a lower price. But that’s a guess.
Are these mats that you get while grinding for other mats (like meat, that you get when grinding leather)? If so, some guild may be dumping them after 3 months of saving them while grinding something else. Guess #2.
Do you honestly believe Blizzard employees are massively seeding material markets on multiple realms at insanely low prices just to spite people who play the AH? Is this an out of season April Fools Joke?
Well that’s some conspiracy theories haha, I really don’t think it’s anything like that.
It makes perfect sense that botters want to sell as quickly as possible, they can’t really afford to sit on the mats to wait for the “perfect” opportunity to sell high, first they could get banned and lose it, and also it seems to be more than one of them doing it so the price is not really going up anymore.
This is not “obvious” to me. Neither is “don’t bother”. Both of your comments assume there is an EASY and WELL-KNOWN and OBVIOUS fix to the problem. But that is false.
If you think it is true, POST it. TELL us what this “easy, obvious fix” is. I can 100% guarantee that if it really exists and you explain it, Blizzard will use it…unless it involved hiring millions of employees and paying them to sit and monitor the game 24/7. That isn’t realistic (unless they increase our $15/mo to $500/mo). Tell us about your realistic fix.
The reality is that you are blowing smoke. There IS no easy, obvious fix.
I really don’t care anymore about bots and multiboxers. They don’t ban bots right away because they want to “study” them… thats a load of BS. They should be banning them on the spot but they don’t because they want the money. The damage to the game is already done the way they are handling it.
I say just let us all bot. No one cares and my support for a game that let’s it happen is gone. They always have an excuse why they let the people bot or multibox… so i simply don’t care anymore.