Yes, among other things, they do sell gold for real money.
Problem is, Blizzard is taking it all into account now when designing the economy.
Why do guilds sell carries? Because material costs have increased dramatically with each of the last 3 expansions.
Do you know how much feasts costs to make? Multiply times 20 pulls per raid night. Or 40 potions per pull per night = 800 pots. Thatâs 4,000 herbs.
The reason guilds sell carries is because people sell their herbs for a lot of gold, but more importantly because Blizzard keeps designing the recipes to require more and more mats every expansion, whether for alchemy or cooking.
Can you IMAGINE what the prices would be like if the bots werenât driving prices down as much as they are?
Ironically, the best thing Blizzard could do is go back to the old days of needing only 1 or 2 herbs per potion. With a 60 to 80% reduction in demand, the motivation to bot would disappear.
At least for the farming bots. Those crazy boomkin squads, I dunno. Maybe people should stop paying huge sums for transmog?
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Donât bother. Itâs always the same people that come into these threads to defend their actions or claim that youâre blind and canât tell itâs a bot.
bOtS hElP kEeP pRiCeS dOwN!
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Yes they do, but the price for the gold is the same if not higher than tokens so again no reason to risk your account when you can buy tokens.
Do you really think itâs in Blizzard best interest to ban these bots? Theyâre making money of them as well I reckon. Even if they buy tokens to keep their accounts alive. It all equals money to Blizzard atm. Idk but nothing is been done about them.
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Since there is a lot of technical stuff that could be associated with the bot problem its best to just give feedback. If its a simple problem then by all means feel free to give your own solutionâŚbut giving your own solution SHOULD NOT be a requirement to giving feedback.
Automated flagging (note: not banning) can go a LONG way these days. Bot activity is so behaviorally different from player activity that it sticks out like a sore thumb with even the lightest analyzation. Itâs not a stretch to say that a small team (~3-5 people) with the right skills could probably cobble together something that identifies bots with 95% accuracy, working toward 99%+ over the course of a year or so as the data rolls in.
With autoflagging set up, GMs just have to flip through and mark the handful of false positives, which the system can then learn from. Itâll become a cat and mouse game, but after a while itâll be so hard to build a bot that fools the flagging system that bots will have to realistically simulate players at which point any benefit gained from botting has been eroded down to almost nothing, not to mention being ludicrously expensive to develop.
Itâs nowhere near as big of challenge as it may seem. Itâs a simple matter of two things:
- Will on Blizzardâs part
- The executives on top allowing budget to be directed to such efforts
The first may actually be the biggest factor. They may have run the numbers and found it more profitable to let the bots do their thing while making token efforts publicly to avoid upsetting players too much.
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And I absolutely hate those people with a passion. Yeah, prices might be down, but itâs also tanking the prices of the things I can make with those items such as bags on my tailor. I should be able to buy mats if I wanted to do so, then sell the finished product for a profit, not a loss.
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I donât know much about how shady companies operate, but I know businesses in general donât exist to lose money. I wouldnât know much about their pricing or why someone might choose that over buying tokens. The fact they exist, and there are many, implies they are somehow profitable.
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They canât do anything about it.
Youâll know them when you see them.
~15 or more boomkins running back and forth in an exact straight line spamming starfall and moonfiring anything that gets close. And I do mean an exact straight line; there is no deviation.
A single Druid rounding up beasts with moonfire and looting and skinning them. They can change targets and skin the different targets very, very fast. Just a skilled player perhaps? Would a real player keep trying to skin a mob multiple times while getting interrupted by the mobs still attacking him even though the mobs would die in one hit? Would a real player return to the exact same location to AoE them all down each time? Exact same spot as in, you could mark it with a raid icon and theyâll stand on it every time? And finally, would a real player attack a turnip punching bag for its entire 5 minute duration?
Herbing ones may not be quite as obvious because regular Druids will likely be in stag form while herb farming, but if you follow one for a little while it will become obvious. Iâve seen the bots run to a location where I know a herb spawns, pause for a very brief second, them turn and run in an exact straight line to another location where a herb can spawn even if there is no herb there. Iâve also seen them being attacked by a single mob, and even if theyâre about to die they still stick to their beeline. No real player would let a fox take them from 100 to 0 while picking flowers.
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if they were all using tokens, then sure⌠blizz would make a little money from them.
âŚbut a lot are using stolen credit cards, and stolen accounts⌠both of which COST blizzard money with charge-backs and time spent on account recoveries.
there has never been a magical bolt of lightning which zaps them off the face of the universe as they pop up.
bots are always taken out in waves.
but yes, banwaves are too few and far between.
There was a documentary done about the gold selling industry awhile back. Back during lineage, eq ect.
At first the currency was made by hiring labor in 3rd world countries and actually killing mobs to farm.
Then later this changed as the sellers noticed that the average user was an idiot, so they spammed in game for gold selling. These sites were not there to sell gold but to steal accounts because it was more efficient to strip accounts and sell the gold at the âlegitâ sites then it was to pay people to farm in game.
Which leads to current practice of script botting. Either with throw away accounts of compromised accounts. However with the introduction of the token the amount of spammed gold selling is drastically reduced to almost nil and the amount of gold selling for wow at least is also drastically reduced on these âlegitâ sites. This could be getting rid of left over stock or because of the token buying limit per week. Either way is way to little for the amount of botting that seems to be going on.
This is why I was asking how else can the gold be used to make real money for the bot controllers.
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Bots are unfixable, my friend. I love when they do ban waves, and I applaud any headway Blizz can make on them, but you really shouldnât spend much of your mental bandwidth on them. Report and move on with your day, it is all that can be done. If a game has any economic value, it will be botted. There is no solution, because for every one Blizz developer there is 50,000 bot developers. It is an arms race and Blizz is the little guy in the fight. There isnât any nation state defense department that can figure out what to do about bots, one video game development team isnât going to solve it.
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so⌠i just googled wow gold, and there are an insane amount of sites participating in sales.
(canât believe i actually did that) 
one of the most popular realms is showing 10,000,000g for $65.
youâre not going to get that rate for tokens.
funny thing was, in the google section of âPeople also askâ, was âis (name of selling site) legit?â
âŚwith a follow-up response of: âThis is a scam website. Paid for in-game gold and they told me some instructions, nothing has happened. If you cancel order you only get currency in their store. Itâs a scam .â
got a genuine Sherlock right there!
Op, what did they do to you to be considered disrespectful?
All my characters hang out in Org and I see a lot of so called âbotsâ in there, just hanging around being totally harmless. I think it kinda cool watching them all move together as they patrol.
If they are in the wild, bothering you, move your sorry self to another area.
People should be allowed to play what they want, how they want.
multiboxers.
those are multiboxers.
regular players.
not bots.
itâs kind of disturbing that people STILL donât know the difference.
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