I didn’t say farming for gold. I’ve spent the better part of the last year in a goldless economy and it’s been the best WoW experience I’ve had since launch in 2004. If I want something, I go out and get the mats for it, then craft it myself. If I can’t, I arrange a trade with my guildmates. If I don’t want to do either of those things, then I just do without.
While I would accept that there would be a spike due to FOMO on the anniversary servers, I’m certain that’s not universally true. There was plenty of gold buying going on prior to their anniversary server announcement and there were two key drivers of it… GDKP and parse-culture raiding. If you want to get gear, especially if you have no prior community, you need gold. If you want to raid on most populated main cluster guilds, you need consumables. For consumables, you need gold… and if you don’t already have a carry-capable toon for GDKP runs, you don’t really have a great source of it.
A lot of folks say you can just herb but you can’t. I used to play on the main clusters too (Mankrik) and resources were just farmed out. I made a bit of gold selling shadow pot mats that I was able to scrape together at odd hours or by getting lucky but that was a drop in the bucket compared to what I would have needed in order to be an active raider on that cluster. The compulsion to buy gold in that environment is certainly strong.
Finally, there’s one more compelling point that demonstrates the RMT economy on Whitemane… the fact that my server, Grobbulus, was overrun with bots and professional farmers. There’s nobody to sell to on my server, we’re just one Alliance guild and one Horde guild, and we all farm our own stuff. The AH is generally empty except for a few token items that guildies list just for fun. Yet these accounts farm things like lotus, arcane crystal, and dreamfoil all day long.
There’s only one place those materials can go… Whitemane. Our server has free transfers there, remaining even though we’ve campaigned Blizzard to shut them down for a long time now. The conclusion is inescapable… those materials are sold for gold and that gold is, in turn, sold back to the players of Whitemane. These are large-scale operations running overseas.
So yea, I think the only reason you’re seeing a lull is because folks went to the annversary servers. This corresponds to the lull we’ve also seen on Grob, with all of the professional farmers except that one crew leaving. We still have a few bots as well but it’s maybe 10% of what it was in November.
That’s a lot of bots and they can do more damage than you think. We had maybe 15ish professional farmers who managed to deny our guild access to lotus for a good while. We started actively hunting them too (so much so that we got IRL threats, lol) but it got to the point where we’d have 1-2 people corpse camping them while someone else ran around the zone collecting nodes. As soon as we stopped, they were right back to it. Bots never need to sleep but even the humans in these farming operations are playing 16-20 hours a day.
Honestly, I’m truly thrilled that you guys went after them on Whitemane. I have a strong distaste for what the game has become and so it fills me with absolute glee to know that you guys hunted them the same as we did. Unfortunately, all it really does is make a small dent. It makes us feel better, but they’re still making money. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be there.
Hey I appreciate the invite. I’d love to play more with you guys, especially in PvP, but I just dont’ have time to dedicate to more than one community and I’m exceptionally happy with the one I found on Grob. You guys are always welcome to join us over there, though sadly you have to reroll these days because of the transfers changes 
If you guys do want to do some PvP though we could always try just coordinating our queues via discord or something like you and I used to do in AV. There’s not that many games popping these days and so I think odds would be pretty good that we’d get into the same game.
