buddy you are GROSSLY underestimating how much money these guys are making from this stuff at scale
and they don’t develop most of the bots code themselves, they obtain huge blocks of it ready to go and customize them a bit
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No. It’s broken for everyone. When it takes 10 hours to farm 3-5k gold because bots control the market, that means its broken.
And when you need gold for lategame progressions, it’s an issue
thanks tho!
Yep 
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10 hours on what realm? Bet I can do it faster.
Go to tap a herb node,
CAPTCHA prompt pops up
I am not a robot.
All this would do is kill more basic bots. More advanced bot-makers can get around stuff like this.
It’s what happened with random events in OSRS, bot makers learned how to solve them so Jamflex made them optional.
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I know, it sucks that most people’s imagination falls short at . . . Captcha, but in a modern game, with a gamified harvest system, it would be more like a 3D model that you interact with.
Bots are really bad at seeing depth (and the people who are good at it, are at like MIT or already have millions of dollars working for Tesla), so there would be different time challenges related to memory and tactile skill on the 3D model to represent time spent harvesting.
There are zero script kiddies out there that can program a bot to think/see depth. And the people that can are the top of their field and have zero reason to play the gold reselling game. Just not realistic. The reason gold selling is a thing, is because the low barrier for entry.
If this was for a financial system, sure, trying to trick the bots isn’t the move, but this is the gold reselling market, you aren’t going to get top of their field coders It’s just not even realistic when you have a basic understanding of computer science.
This reminds me of the JC minigame in that one profession quest in legion where you chip away at a gem.
But I have to wonder, do harvester bots really exist? The only bots I see are just mass killing mobs and looting them. No gathering professions involved, not even skinning, as far as I can tell.
Google can answer that quickly 
I would say keep them harvesters on their realm would control botting. This all started by cross realming a more of you solve your own problem than the whole of the game.
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Can’t help but to agree. If CRZ didn’t exist I think people would generally see less bots, not because there would be less but you’d only see bots explicitly on your server and not someone who phased to your server because of CRZ
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If we’re talking about crafting/gathering, the leveling squish wasn’t as big a negative, as their changing it so current content only requires 150 skill ups or so in current content. If they’d stuck with WOD style professions, you’d need like 800 skill ups or more, starting fresh with a profession.
There’s not any reason that professions need to be tied to your level at all. FF14 figured that out, by making crafting/gathering it’s own leveling system, and it worked fantastically. A new player that just wants to level and play the game, can without too much trouble. But if you want to craft, it’s an entirely separate progression path, that most people won’t have the will to engage in, so crafting ends up being super valuable.
The “problem” with mats is the ridiculous amount of mats devs have made a requirement for crafting gear and alchemy products in order to make players play longer to farm them, and to make them hideously expensive so players without gold will need to buy tokens to pay for legendaries and consumables. This is what has made it profitable for outsiders to turn wow into a place of business that can generate cash.
But this pales in the shadow of the big RMT business that is paid carries. I see advertisements all the time openly linking to sites that advertise services that go well beyond anything that would be available in-game without those sites. The game has been changed to make it harder for someone who isn’t already elite to break into end content like mythic+, raiding, and rated PvP. At the same time other sources of gear have been nerfed into pointlessness, making the only gearing path for many paid carries. Content has been made intentionally much harder to pug. So a lot of players, realizing they have no options, are utilizing services on these RMT websites to get started or to get their alts geared up fast.
Starting pugging at mythic+0 is going to be excruciatingly slow for a mediocre player. Buying a package of 8 m+ carries with a loot funnel will get them geared up tonight.
This is where the real corruption is coming from.
The harder they turn the screws on players to push increased token sales, the bigger the incentive they are giving the RMT folks to muscle in.
If CRZ didn’t exist, most realms would be utterly dead. You would next to never see anyone in the world.
Remember when they first brought up level scaling? Everybody at the time thought leveling was fine. There were lots of options. People who wanted fast options could get powerleveled. Leveling at the start of Legion was fast and easy, and you felt power progression the whole way through. Lots of people enjoyed leveling enough that they did it by choice as their end content.
But Ion said that new players were insisting on long, slow, hard leveling, which is what level scaling brought. And we were told that leveling would feel much more rewarding if it was harder and longer. Leveling went from 30 hours to 120 hours with hp bloat of mobs that made it take forever to kill endless undifferentiated trash packs. Leveling dungeons went from 10 minutes to 1 hour plus as levelers slowly ground down high hp mobs.
Did that bring in new players? Heck no! And it was soundly rejected by the playerbase. Nobody liked it who actually did leveling. The only ones who did like it were old-timers who thought new players and alts people shouldn’t even be playing should have to go through this hazing. Lots of players quit. Lots of players abandoned the new allied race alts they had created because they couldn’t face a month of playing full-time to get heritage armor on each one.
Devs created this mess and they had to fix it. Since they still have no idea what players want (changes to the game are being made based on what players ought to want or what devs see as good for them), they decided to just make leveling quick to push everybody into end game fast.
Well, it’s fast. But it’s more boring than ever and totally disjointed. What “story” there was never there - a lot of old zones really have no story - long gone - having been removed for reasons - or locked behind raids that - oh look what they did to legacy raids - a leveler will never see.
And people who used to like leveling, which I was fine with until level scaling, have nothing. Lots of people didn’t want to fast forward to end game so they could start grinding chores and have to compete against elites they had never had to play with before, because there were other things they could choose to do.
What’s done is done. When the game is reduced to mdi wannabes, mythic raiders, and top rated glads, it will be a tiny game with a cult following. Average players will be gone as they realize that no amount of cash thrown at paid carries can buy their way into competition.
If they could roll it back to giving us the option to take early Legion leveling I’d jump at that. But classic leveling totally sucks donkey eggs. It took me months to level up my character because I was so burnt out from endless end questlines of retail that I just killed mobs for the most part. Which is an option they don’t want people to have, so it’s been removed from retail. Boe’s in classic could be equipped and used as you leveled. In retail they will drop below your level so they can only be sold or disenchanted.
There are so many leveling options that have been removed since the start of Legion that what you are proposing wouldn’t fix it. The people who couldn’t stand the new leveling are gone. Leveling is just hazing now.
Just get rid of the node timers… once its tapped its gone
Bots swarms would still be pulling a million gold a day or more and would further break immersion, with swarms wandering around like blind lemmings.
I think its well within the scope of the design team to come up with a dynamic harvesting system that is actually fun and rewarding.
Could be a combination of mechancs that changes. You spin the 3D model and trace the nodes, then when something flashes you get a crit if you can hit it in time, then you could drag stuff around, all with a timer. Speed and accuracy would increase your success score, without a binary pass or fail, you have a range of success.
a captcha for every plant, ez fix
*yikes someone already pulled that one -.-
great minds i guess 
I super dig this idea, OP!
Honestly I think this is an interesting idea but I’m not sure how it could be implemented. But at least you’re thinking outside of the box and looking for solutions, OP. Well done.