If you trust Aggrend, one of the lead producers for classic wow, this is a direct quote from him in response to me asking him to shut off Free Character Moves (“FCMs”) from Grobbulus to Whitemane:
I’ve had a few people bring this up but i honestly do not see the harm in allowing this freedom of movement. Sure it might get abused sometimes, but honestly in a world where the economy is old and inflated, having materials come in regularly helps keep prices nominal. Not to say we won’t change it, but I’m struggling to see the actual problem with it.
This issue dramatically impacts us on Grobbulus. We are a single guild per faction and we do not have an auction house due to ultra low pop. We instead supply materials internally in a self sufficient way. It’s fine, we’ve been doing it for 3 years now, but as the bots ramp up to FCM materials off the sever, we have to compete with them for rare mats. Making it even worse, we don’t have an option to buy them from the AH… they leave our economy. We need consumes to help clear our raids when we do 30 person Naxx… not looking for parses or anything.
Just trying to play the game and competing with bots and humans (it isn’t just bots we see real players mule to Whitemane to make money) makes it feel really bad when we don’t even have the option to buy the resources from the AH that were now competing for