I’m not advocating these, I dislike them both for a number of reasons; unfortunately these are the only real, time effective options to make gold any more. Name a gold farm, any gold farm, and it’s been botted relentlessly until anything it produces sells for dirt cheap.
People would do Righteous Orb runs, Dark Rune farming, DM:E drop runs, tribute farms, and various mage AoE farms during Naxx on multiple private servers. Because servers ran out of a Russians guys basement with unpaid volunteer mods were better policed for bots and multiboxers, so you could actually farm things of value to other players to sell without being outcompeted by flyhacking robots playing 24/7.
But hey, with all this botting EVERYTHING should be cheap right? No, because certain resources have an inelastic supply. In other words, more people trying to farm it does not result in more total supply of the resource.
We’ve reached complete farming saturation on some open world resources like Plaguebloom and Black Lotus. There WAS some supply elasticity with player effort at first, but we’re well past that point on a number of populous servers. We’re just further dividing a smaller and smaller slice of the herb farming pie and prices simply continue to rise ad infinitum.
Raiders are being priced out of the game, priced out of the activity they enjoy. And their only real choices are buying the gold for real money, or completing raids on behalf of people who have (in all likeliehood) also bought gold to buy gear.
yep this happened to me and i quit before naxx even launched with full raid bis and rank 14 gear in anticipation of the cost of raiding naxx on a weekly basis. I didnt even get burnt out on the game and still love classic, what drove me away was having to farm for raid consumes every week when everything is quite literally camped by bots and rmt’s
A whopping 5 or so gold on Argual compared to 210g Lotus and 85g a stack of Plaguebloom. REALLY have to wonder who continues farming crystals below the double digit mark.
Funny thing about Crystals is that they also had terrible issues with inelastic supply in Phase 1. Many complaints open world Mining was pointless. Then Dire Maul was released and it saved us from having to argue and read inane posts about how nobody needs Lionheart, or Thunderfury, or reasonable access to open world resources for the average player.
If only we were so fortunate with Plaguebloom and Lotus.
This is the only way I’ll come back to classic. A hard reset on gold/resources, or fresh servers. The current servers are just completely ruined, economy wise.
To the senior executives over at Activision, those are loyal and paying customers. I’m just glad the single Blizzard intern working on Classic is at least putting in some effort to disrupt the fly hacking botters with their last custom change to DME’s RTV nodes.
It’s not a myth though. It’s question of perverse incentives on blizzards part, vs a desire to maintain a games integrity.
Blizzard doesn’t give a damn about cheaters, as long as they are paying for their accounts, and they’re not losing too many non cheating customers.
They’ve figured out that they can have their cake and eat it too, by providing huge lead times on any sort of account penalty. So the bots will have farmed enough RMT money to profit, and buy a new account. If they were serious about dealing with the problem, they’d risk pushing bots into unprofitable territory, and the bots would just leave/give up, costing blizzard money.
A single intern making minimum wage, could be banning bots by the hundreds every day, that’s how low effort, and obvious they are.
There is no point resetting gold if they don’t police the problem, a fresh start where everyone can just cheat again and the people who don’t cheat have to play normally again is a horrible idea
It’s the pserver community promoting this. They come from servers where everyone plays “legit”, but if you become server donator you get to enjoy some “perks”. This has been a thing for over a decade, and we’re dealing with that same type of “vanilla purist” attitude here on Classic. Pretty much every server has a decimated economy at this point, and the only hope left is new servers being introduced with no xfers; but even that will be short lived.
I legitimately don’t understand how this company has run the most popular and most played MMO for the past 15 years and it still can’t combat botting and other obvious exploits. There’s no way Classic was ever a product that Blizzard cared to preserve.
a lot of these people were behind the no changes push because they knew everything they were going to exploit. They intimidated Blizzard into it’s hands off approach with Classic unfortunately.
None of this contradicts what I said, it is just a rant against Blizzard for not caring “enough” based upon the repeatedly debunked conspiracy that bots generate revenue for Blizzard rather than the opposite.
“Nu uh!! Everyone was totally on the up and up on my server!! My roommate who ran the whole thing never let anything slide!!!”
I haven’t the foggiest either since you can go to just about any 40-55 zone and find legions of Hunters running circles, getting caught on terrain, etc. I know they’re likely trying to find a way to automatically detect/sort them out since manual observation and reporting is limited and costs quite a few eyeballs worth of minimum wage (assuming you could even get people to do it for minimum wage).
It took League of Legends up until now to get to where they could better auto-detect people feeding on purpose as well as mitigate your losses if someone rage quits 10min into the game. Perhaps gaming companies just majorly suck at the under-the-hood quality control stuff?
