W͏o͏W͏ G͏o͏l͏d͏ S͏e͏l͏l͏e͏r͏ Reveals How Dark It REALLY Is | Asmongold Reacts

[@tuckersmoak6632]

When I was 15yrs old, I spent my entire summer vacation farming gold back in vanilla on a low pop server. Ending up selling all the gold I farmed for $1,500 and bought myself all the parts for my first self built gaming pc.

[@bartoszrura2804]

stonks

[@bradhinton2796]

used to use recruit a friend to level up characters to sell for beer and food money at our lan parties in high school. We'd generally max 2 characters a weekend and make roughly $400-700, which was amazing for a group of high school kids who would be playing WoW all weekend anyway.

[@redacted8008]

Somebody bought wow gold for 1500 dollars? Mother of god...

[@wiseferret4745]

Nice 👌

[@jr6366]

yea then when your bored you can sell your account too

[@WolfWood893]

The gold rush never stopped it just digitized.

[@Moped_Mike]

Not really, the gold rush was when a regular dude could do it, now it’s only botters and scammers.

[@plankton383]

Epic comment 😂

[@abel6298]

Read your bible! (KJV, preferably) ❤️😊

[@brandontobias1138]

What a line!! Bravo!

[@gackleballsg2034]

@@Moped_Mikemining bitcoin lol

[@phen6075]

blizzard: GUYS WE DID BANWAVE WE GOOD! botters: okay, time to upgrade, all bots are safe for another 6 months. blizzard: LOOK AT ALL THE CHAR BOOSTS PEOPLE BUY, THEY LOVE US.

[@Allexstrasza]

@@ninnikuprobability And those DK's, man are they a popular class! We did such a good job letting people create one without having a lvl60 on that server! EDIT: Unless it wasn't clear to you, 90% of the bots are DKs on classic

[@Tespri]

Blizzard bans bots only for money that banning brings in.

[@legendofthenight2008]

​@@ninnikuprobabilityKEKW

[@FuuuckOffff]

Blizz: TIME FOR A BANWAVE! Bots: beep boop buy new account beep boop buy level boost beep boop resub Blizz: THANKS FOR THE CASH INJECTION, SEE YOU IN ANOTHER SIX MONTHS!

[@CapnSnackbeard]

Real insights, here. We need to look under the surface of corporate BS

[@noobspawnersstreams4102]

Farming gold for the cats medical bills was a top goal move

[@rproctor83]

I've worked as a gold farmer my entire life, my father was a gold farmer and my fathers father was as well. Everything was fine until the bots came along and stole our jobs. They have no idea what it's like waking up every day at the crack of dawn and farming until it's time for bed.

[@gameburn178]

You are making this up... I like the narrative. But it is fiction.

[@Bear2th]

​@@gameburn178Nerdge

[@Peterpumpkineater-ry8on]

Make Azeroth Great Again!

[@mafinalmessagechangedaworl7131]

@@gameburn178no this actually happened

[@jessefrank3612]

Nah gold farmers really wake up at the crack of dawn ain’t no joke 😂

[@rjacobb]

If Blizzard bans all the bots, they'd have to show data on actual players. Which are dwindling across the board. Remember when Elon Musk said he'd get the bots off Twitter? Well suddenly it doesn't have 300 million users

[@samkaeppel1160]

But according to infographs of Twitter today they have 400 million unique active users.

[@MrMultiPlatform]

it has more

[@Youtuberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr]

@@Nightstalker314not really just a number of people who raid and do dungeons

[@Miranox2]

ChatGPT can speak better than most humans. With modern AI it's basically impossible to distinguish a human and AI through text.

[@draenog96]

​@@Miranox2it's actually REALLY easy but you'd have to have more than one functioning braincell

[@alucard92717]

I was actually a victim of the account phishing in wotlk, but they didnt even empty my account; they transferred my main to a rp server and started fly/teleport hacking in wintergrasp to farm. When i finally got the account back id sold off all the mats they farmed and dumped it into a dk alt before asking support to roll my character back, and they did in without question or incident. They really have never cared

[@NazzyDragon]

bought out before wotlk so yeah

[@Fuchsfeuer]

when my account was hacked and used to farm gold, the gm deleted everything and took away the gold that was farmed with it. ended up with nothing again. Ka why it wasn't like that with you. human error apparently.

[@richardfuller3566]

​@@FuchsfeuerI had the opposite experience. They left all the shit the hacker farmed.

[@Giliver]

Blizzard staff back then were individuals You could find good staff that'd help like their life depended on it while you could also find staff who'd essentially ignore all your needs. Nowadays they're all a grey blob that copy pastes the same bullshit again and again.(essentially they're all bad staff now, its hard to get help on more layered issues)

[@jeanocasio5432]

​@@Giliveralways happens whenever a company gets big enough, especially a software company.

[@Olivysg]

Over the years Blizzard has become such a big Job creator, it's just a shame that those jobs are occupied by people who break their TOS rather than enforce them.

[@jpmor7327]

its a perfect view into politics. its ran exactly the same way. create ToS, choose who can break it and who cant. enforce when necessary, profit.

[@Nesquick1121]

you should see my convos with them its exactly this

[@ferrer985]

in other words, they just gotta get rid of those specific TOS. I don't see a compelling reason to hang on to them

[@ProXcaliber]

It's part of the conundrum of having an online multiplayer game, especially nowadays. People want the cheaters and exploiters to be punished, and the companies are often happy to oblige, but at the same time the players who want the company to punish those people want their privacy. And yes, you can technically accomplish it with certain privacy intact, but at the same time, it will never be 100% effective and will typically take much longer to actually catch the bad actors.

[@RogerRabbit342]

Well, working for blizzard is hell on earth, soooo yeah

[@labozer]

I remember doing my daily mining farm in Cataclysm, seeing nodes being mined from under the ground right in front of my eyes. Happened every day.

[@lockekosta9014]

It is not illegal to make a business that goes against the ToS of a game. It's not illegal to break a game's ToS, just means that game can't be held liable and doesn't owe you anything if they take action against your ability to use their product. If it were, companies would be able to set legal precedents in their ToSes and you do not want to live in that world.

[@Fa1her_n_2on_gamers]

Had my account hacked once, was able to get it back after a couple days. Who ever had hacked it, used my highest level character to gold farm. My entire inventory was filled and I was loaded with gold. Got it back before he was able to off load I guess lol

[@Kratatch]

Same, they used my bank as storage and i got all my stuff back x2 + their stuff. Told the GM helping me getting stuff back and he/she just told me to keep it.

[@delivererofdarknessshoguno1133]

​​​@@ahis3233tbh, they could have gotten in trouble if it was discovered. Kinda like hackers in souls games used to get people banned by giving them broken cheat items.

[@Kratatch]

@@ahis3233 So i don't get banned or something and i was in direct contact with them in messages when i got everything back.

[@TheHungryTrollRawr]

did you get to keep the gold too? awesome little bit of karma if you did!

[@Fa1her_n_2on_gamers]

@@TheHungryTrollRawr yeah, I mentioned something to the dev that got my account back, they didn’t care at all lol

[@TheWolfram23]

Back in WotLK, I used blacksmithing to make something like 2-4000 g per day (though about half would go back into new materials). I just bought super cheap resources that the farmers collected, it was like crazy cheap for stacks of feliron (or something?), then make the full set of the lvl 69/70 blues for all the new max level chars that still had crap gear. Plate set, pally set, every type of weapon, I even stocked the craftable epics. Every day I spent about 1-2 hours buying resources and crafting and posting on the AH. I was easily able to buy a Mechanohog (I gave the engineer dude a 1000g tip) and that big mount with the vendors on its back... Kind of wish I knew how to sell gold.

[@mindofmotion]

I'd be happy to help you

[@ogdooh]

I think I found a “goldmine” in cataclysm where I would prospect ores and sell the uncommon and rare gems right back on AH. I could spend a few hours every day doing this and would loot so much gold every day when I logged in from my mailbox it was crazy. I just never thought about actually selling any gold, it was just fun and I imagined doing something similar IRL. So here I am trying to make money of stocks that are volatile and it’s not going so good 😅

[@HL-hd5yn]

@@mindofmotion how would i PM you?

[@dontlistentoanythingisay]

Had a friend who hired a divorce lawyer to handle his divorce, and nothing was being done as he asked for months. Come to find out, his lawyer spent all of his time farming wow gold instead of handling his cases. 😂

[@ajjameson154]

I really thought you were going to say the lawyer spent all of his time farming the dude's wife. lol

[@EnjoyCocaColaLight]

That's kinda hilarious.

[@Mdxfiend]

@@ajjameson154 that would have been a better actually funny comment

[@Deodrix]

​@@ajjameson154that's gold, Jerry. Gold!

[@0ffd]

@@ajjameson154 Hahaha i thought the same lmao

[@qh777]

The first ad I get is about hair restoring shampoo lol.

[@Reaper_One]

🤣🤣🤣

[@WilhalmBrion]

There are huge problems with saying you shouldnt have a buisness based off breaking a products ToS. It suddenly turns a a company's ToS into law. Just look at the fights happening between apple and Iphone repair shops.

[@Knezevic83]

I knew a Death Knight who programmed bot just to use Crowd Control and interrupt abilities on targets who are casting them, without targeting them, while he had full control over his character and DPS rotation. With their mediocre skill, he and his team mates reached 2400 easily.

[@KiraAcoh]

I actually made online friends somehow with a gold farmer. Most of the time they would message me asking me to buy gold and I'd just ignore them. They started randomly message me while raiding wishing me good luck on loot, or just trying to BS with me while I was running heroics. Eventually I found out they were doing it to pay for school, I forget if it was college or uni. Was an interesting point in WoW for me...

[@sera_venus]

I met someone who made money to buy a house in indonesia and was able to get married. he loved raiding with us and actually considered stopping selling gold to raid with us, he always bought us flasks. Unfortunately last time I talked with him his wife had a stillbirth

[@sera_venus]

Another one I met was not a gold seller (i think) but he was still in the same area as my other gold seller guildies. He was like the GDKP mafia leader or something. Last time I talked with him, his sister passed away and he fell into depression. I am not sure what remains of him as of now

[@sera_venus]

I met two other people who were brothers, and they led an IRL wow gold mafia in indonesia could you believe that?? The very first raid I had with them, my friend kicked them out and it was recorded on youtube lol. They're still alive and going, I don't think they play wow anymore though. I'm in their server still

[@sera_venus]

@@FreeToDoWhatWeTellYou U never kno tho things get crazy

[@yeahnope620]

I was getting gold from a gold seller for doing bodyguard type of work. Whenever I weren't doing arena or raids, I would be doing openworld pvp and part of that would be to establish control over zones where a lot of gold was being farmed. It seems that more than 1 gold selling company was active on my server and they were rivals of sorts. So by killing enemy faction characters that were being used by a rival company, I was essentially handing control over that zone to the gold selling company that happened to play my faction. They were grateful and were trading me gold for it. It was a fun gesture but frankly I wasn't doing it for the gold anyways. I was playing WoW whenever I wasn't asleep and I enjoyed wPvP anyways so I was doing it just for fun.

[@Morg2851]

Burn it all down, the game, the bots, the sellers, the buyers and the blizzard. Maybe its time to go back and play in the woods dressed like a damned elf and if someone comes over and tries to sell us something we should poke his eye out with a stick. Ffs.

[@TheMaaxZ]

Idk on the way to the woods you are more than likely to walk past 150 different screens that all show ads but sure worry about the guy who tries to sell you something in the woods.

[@Seoul_Soldier]

@@TheMaaxZ *pokes you in the eye with a stick*

[@doom8274]

@@TheMaaxZ you have to be european for your woods to be surrounded by ads lmao

[@AboveBellow]

Noob nerd

[@besame5504]

I am a 74 yr old great grandmother who have been playing MMOS for over 25 yrs straight. WoW was my first long term from vanilla launch for 8 yrs. I never had to buy gold, never thought about it in any game. I simply played, I made what I needed. This info here just made me chuckle. I remember interfering with the gold track bots in WoW when I was bored lol. Interesting though. Been playing FFXIV now the last 6-7 years, bout done with MMOs, not so fun anymore.

[@lukas8708]

So it appears that my 90yo grandma playing Thief: the Dark Project for the last 20 years is not a cosmic phenomenon :D

[@strikeforcealpha9343]

You're not a grandmother, you're a Queen.

[@MrBottlecapBill]

Sadly most gamers game because they DON'T like real challenges in life and are looking for the easy path. This is the only reason any of this was possible. People afraid of the grind and looking for the easy path in all things.

[@ursosentado]

Wait... have you been on Warsong realm back in TBC?

[@MrFluffyfox]

Come join me in League of Legends 😂

[@PR0nQQb]

I don't think the diversity hires at Blizzard are qualified to stop hackers or to tie a shoe

[@grasgruen84]

"warden cant go deeper into the systems whitout legal issues".. riot games: "hold my beer!"

[@thenameless24]

Im assuming warden was/is a hidden anti cheat meanwhile vanguard is not a hidden one it is very open about what it can and cant do so I think its more a legal issue with privacy being broken without user awareness before install

[@_Groy_]

Truly one of the Blizzard moments of all time.

[@isaacandrade3783]

Dudes a hero who saved that cat. What a savage. Much love

[@Tinytox]

"Why can't Blizzard do it?" Because each ban is one less subscription.

[@Kiauze]

The part about Blizzard controlling the tokens is something I've discussed from day 1 of the tokens being introduced. I clearly remember them saying that there were "mechanisms" in place to avoid the extreme inflation or deflation of the token, so this means there are degrees of control on the price itself, and the part about the value being dependent on player supply-and-demand is most likely an illusion.

[@Ekvorivious]

as asmongold once said: "a major fuckup? That's just another Tuesday for Blizzard"

[@nicholascowling7052]

They really shot themselves in the feet by both removing GMs, and by letting botting and gold farming go on for way too long. Back in Vanilla and Classic I probably reported hundreds of players for botting... and yet, the next day, next week, next month, you'd still see them grinding away.

[@PyroGam3s]

Yeah, i'm amazed that people do gold farming at all, its totally against the TOS of WoW and you can get banned and lose everything in your account.

[@justsayin2085]

@@PyroGam3s in the older MMO games if a GM finds you botting or hacking, they can either ban your account or worst an IP ban. so botting was something dangerous in the past. now its just a speed bump.

[@2mangos]

ya bring GMs back!

[@ShinYamiZakura]

Afaik, you don't ban bots on sight, you ban them in waves to delay botters iterations: if they don't know what exactly caused the bot detection to find them, they'll have a harder time patching their program to make a sneakier bot.

[@makaisenki]

You do ban waves every 3-6 months because the amount of chaos and confusion and disruption that brings is way more relevant than just instant bans they can use to iterate untraceable bots.

[@Cheeseybeaver45]

I don’t play wow but feel like blizzard doesn’t ban bots as much because all those accounts make them money. And if they ban all of those accounts it would hurt there bottom line.

[@dradonie]

The fact that some private servers do a better job handling gold sellers than Blizzard does

[@pizzaparty3901]

With all the different cosmetics in these games, I find lots of bots stand out by having vanilla gear, mounts, pets (or no pet). It sounds silly to me at first to think of this as a metric to catch bots. But when I play, it seems so obvious who's a bot simply through visual appearance. Then if I get suspicious watch their behavior for a minute. One key thing, bots never go afk, and are moving constantly and directly. A real person is rarely this efficient in their movement, often jumping or side-stepping for fun or stopping for half a sec to do something else.

[@ColdRoland]

You know how you detect bots? Whenever I was lvling in a dungeon for an unhealthy amount of time in Ragnarok Online, the GMs would notice that. A GM would teleport to me and talk to me. They'd just say hi, and when I answered as a human would, they were good. Maybe Blizzard should hire some people to be GMs...I don't know. Might help.

[@dimitar4y]

you imply they are incompetent or ignorant. No. They're well aware of it. And it's profitable.

[@ploed]

Same happend to me, when I was farming the Undead-Horse in the Dungeon (forgot the Name of the Boss) as Nightelf Hunter.

[@jordenug4797]

“Everyone knows where the bots are except for blizzard” yeah I wonder why

[@no0bbbb]

Cuz it's blizzard

[@spillingallover]

The hyperinflated "player" base via bots helps keep the shareholder value high when you can claim that your 20 year old game has hundreds of millions of players every month during quarterly reviews.

[@Ladadadada]

I still remember my first encounter with a bot. It was stuck running against a wall so I did an inspect and compare stats. It had more kills in the 4 days since the character was created than I had in 5 years. Surely it wouldn't be hard to detect when a character never logs off, never stops actively playing the game.

[@johnle6364]

my uncle was a south vietnamese gold farmer. hes a millionaire now with a few successful businesses and has a mansion in texas, california, and vietnam.

[@boomknight1015]

I don't see blizzard being super upset with botting because it's more users making them money with subs and it looks good on blizzard's bottom line. It's only really a problem with the logger problem because blizzard doesn't make money on it.

[@EnjoyCocaColaLight]

Not any more, though... they likely buy wow tokens as that's a dip in the pocket for gold farmers.

[@stealthymerc4156]

I am a 120 year old grandpa with a gaming addiction. I started WoW when I was in my early 100s. I have had 3 to 5 heart attacks while gaming but the need to finish dungeons and raids have kept me going and ignoring these attacks

[@IWubYooz]

I remember when I got keylog hacked. I think it was back in WoD and they took gold from a character who was free character boosted on an odd server and probably had like 80g on her maybe 100g with all the gear they vendored which was pretty insignificant considering I had a character-capped account and my main server had multiple high level toons and probably tens of thousands of gold across them. Guess keyloggers were so successful, they couldn't be bothered to check if an account had toons on multiple servers or not.

[@Xi_11138]

A old friend that I meet from doing "stuff" got sued by blizzard and he showed me the papers he got from their lawyers. I asked him what he's gonna do now and he legit answered with "buying a picture frame lol"

[@Cmoneys13]

During classic, we had a mage who sold boosts on both alliance and horde and was one of the most well known boosters across both factions. He was using the gold to pay for his medical bills/education in South America

[@etnies4eva]

if you as a individual mindlessly farm a hyperspawn alongside a botter its quite possible the botter will actually report you for farming a hyeper spawn so your not competing with them in the ah and you will catch a temp ban it happened to me 1 time when i was trying to farm a classic engineering recipe in retail that i didn't realize was not available in the current timeline as a drop

[@dryco000]

Besides that GMs helping with the botproblem, they are really cool at problemsolving itself. I will never forget the interactions with them back in the days.

[@JDoeX]

People forget that bots pay sub fees, you have to keep them under control but you can't eradicate free money.

[@1000miles2paradise]

Some old MMOs that took real steps to fix the bot issue was to come out with a specialized currency with every expansion launch. The easiest way to stop botting was to make whatever currency that dropped or tradeable and then it be useless. The design of “If you didn’t loot it, you don’t have it”

[@WirxawTanev]

Exactly, the gold farming problem isn't about the farming, it's about the gold.

[@suilles]

yeah so i as a player would also lose my currency. those bots would just update to farm set "money" there you go. the farms go on. the people that run the bots are the problem. whatever the money name is they dont care they will just farm that and sell that new money kind.

[@1000miles2paradise]

@@suilles Failure to understand the original post. Your reply shows your lack of understanding.

[@doublezeroisourhero]

@@1000miles2paradiseyour typing made no sense so I can't understand it either

[@villyacethebar]

That sounds like a truly dumb idea

[@nivyan]

20:13 You either need to be famous or extremely persistent in order to restore characters fully. I got hacked in Burning Crusade and lost 3 characters - one of them having the Spectral Tiger mount and was my main since I started playing. I sent tickets every few months and kept asking GMs to just try and look, finally someone claimed it was gone. So I quit. I return in Cataclysm, and send another ticket just for the hell of it - and suddenly the characters were restored... missing gear and inventory. It was from back when mounts were items, so I also lost a huge mount collection.

[@worldgate989]

I bought gold one time, way back midway through cataclysm, 20 bucks for 40k gold. Chinese dude showed up, gave me the gold, then after they left proceeded to hit my paypal account 40 times in a row. Paypal was like, uh nope, and reversed all the charges. Technically i didn't buy gold, since it was refunded. Chinese dude had the audacity to demand the gold be returned.

[@ivanmatusic5540]

LOL. Why was it refunded back on paypal?

[@AlexM-bp2no]

RuneScape had a pretty decent bot catching strategy by implementing unavoidable random events that a normal player can complete but a bot won't

[@yellowflash5555]

You can ignore them if you don't talk to them I thought?

[@mkdboii1]

​@yellowflash5555 yea you can ignore them but the random events would break bots for example if a bot was cutting down a tree the random event npc would spawn in with the same ID and the bot would then click that random event thinking it was a tree hence the bot would get caught in a random event basically breaking it

[@Noxadrol]

Could something like that be done with the quests where a little envoy follows you?

[@nadegeschedler4940]

@@yellowflash5555 They used to be unavoidable.

[@MrDJdo]

Back in Pandaria our Guild master that didn't have much time to play used to bot a little during the day not to goldfarm but just a bit of stuff for himself or herbs for the guildbank. Me and some other guildies used to prank his character in the game when we knew he was at it again by trying to do all kinds of things like fighting those mogu statues that did that circle aoe until his character died. When he came back online he then started ragig for is repair bill lol. I do remember that he did get caught once and had to start all over.

[@majorrau4905]

Yeah just got a 2 week ban last week for buying gold 😕 oh well if they took more than just my gold and ended up stripping my characters I probably will just quit the game.

[@Cyd98]

I wish it was a lifetime ban. Cheater

[@ion1984]

i used to farm lands end beach in classic vanilla, I loved it. One day the bots came, about 5 of them. they ran wild for weeks and into months and its one of the reasons i quit. i just couldnt believe it was so blatant and I saw them every day and made dozens of reports with screenshots and logs and all kinds of shit and they just never did anything. it was so depressing.

[@adamlastname9731]

I took a break, came back near the end of Cata. All my stuff was gone, including my teebu's blazing longsword that was not yet soulbound. A GM recovered all my stuff except for the sword because she didn't believe that i had one of the rarest items (at that time).

[@gradystephenson3346]

Could of easily proved it with screen shots of ur toon wearing it

[@adamlastname9731]

@@gradystephenson3346 it wasn't soulbound, i never equipped it. never could bring myself to sell it, never could bring myself to equip it. i never did get it back.

[@mooney3350]

Back in Vanilla I mostly played lvl 19 twinks without a main. I was fairly succesful because I stumbled upon the fact that one out of the WSG faction gear items was disenchantable (Can't remember if the other level versions were) and it disenchanted into Small Radiant shards. I was able to level enchanting enough to disenchant it and made a small fortune. Hence I funded my twinking with PvP! Sure I didn't quite have the best of the best stuff, but damn near so and got me endless hours of WSG ownage :)

[@ElgothReinholt]

Disenchanting doesn't require a lvl of enchanting lol

[@Ladiessurfer217]

It does from TBC onwards. It does not in Vanilla/Vanilla Classic/SOD.@@ElgothReinholt

[@darrenegan3891]

Ahhh the memories of terrorising wsg as my 19 twink hunter 🥲

[@papahuge]

The most interesting and shocking part of this whole video, is that people still care about and play World of Warcraft. Incredible!!

[@AndrewJnsn]

Gotta love how the IRL villains of WoW are much more devious than the in game villains

[@AurielTheHopeful]

I have been playing WoW for fun for over 20 years. It's a game that I'm passionate about and I still feel the same excitement I felt when I was a kid. I'm from Venezuela and, unfortunately, most, if not all, people live on selling gold to be able to bring food to their homes

[@destroyFTP]

Over 20 years? Did you play beta as a kid or something it came out 2004

[@italocampoli8643]

i play too from Venezuela, i've always sold gold since TBC haha

[@zokora3656]

@@italocampoli8643 and i dont even judge you for that. Easy money and blizzard doesnt care. You also dont sell to people who cant afford since its a luxury. Venezuela also seems to be pretty stricken by poverty, all power to you to make your life better you aint hurting nobody

[@vaxxeenmtg9733]

In our classic guild we called ourselves the League of Nations because we had people from Venezuela, Panama, China, Canada and the US as far as I know. We loved our farmer boys

[@albertosanchisgarcia9129]

Me lo estás diciendo en serio? Sé que la situación es mala allí, pero no sabía que farmear oro fuese una forma de conseguir dinero mejor que un trabajo tradicional. Espero que mejore la cosa, es un pais precioso

[@ramigilneas9274]

In classic WoW GMs didn’t just ban bots… they even banned gold farmers if you reported them. Of course GMs have the tools to find out if someone sells gold… but after a while they were no longer allowed to use those tools. If you reported a bot during Burning Crusade the GM would only respond that the bot will be banned automatically during the next ban wave… of course that didn’t make much sense.

[@LouisVuittonJon]

Ive been banned every time i botted on a private server, but ive never even heard of someone being banned from live servers

[@ScytheNoire]

Blizzard does maintenance on a regular schedule. Just ban accounts on that same schedule.

[@michaelmarlow6610]

I really wonder how many started in other games. I learned some of the basics to farming gold in RuneScape and kept it up when I got to WoW. It supplemented my income all the way through getting to my career. Gold, runs, and raids were my lifeline.

[@Flo-sw4hz]

hot take: Maybe blizz iself supports Gold selling websites for profit

[@MoonkaCake]

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a dev who runs a site.

[@splinte111]

i wouldn't be surprised if some admins actively spawned gold and sold it to farmers for a little extra profits.

[@user-tf3qv9jg2k]

“Just from opening an email, it would install a keylogger” I don’t believe that’s how it works lol, you’d have to click a link in the email for something like that to happen.

[@IlIIlIIIIlIIllllIIlllIII]

Incorrect.

[@Gigglegrassing]

yea caught that too, i figured they must click the attachment at the bottom

[@brunomarques7713]

You used to be able to embed executables in images, and they would run when the image loaded on the screen.

[@clayp6415]

So I started in Burning crusade, played through that, and also WOTLK. I had quit for awhile and decided to give Cata a try. Played maybe a month and quit again. I got an email months later saying my account was banned. My account was hacked, they paid for subscription to get in, stole everything, then used my account as a spam bot to advertise their gold selling website. I appealed it and got the ban removed. Weird part is I had an Authenticator and they still got in. Never figured out how, I didn’t open any weird emails or download sketchy links. Was very strange.

[@notsure4666]

Blizzard makes like 20 mil a year off the bots. You think they're just gonna give up their yacht?

[@Killgore316]

Nothing will ever stop the gold farmers, if the detection improves, the anti-detection will improve. Blizzard could have said "okay, be a gold farmer/gold seller but we want a cut of any real money you earn." But they went the much more profitable route to make gold farmers the "frenemy."

[@christopherconkright1317]

I had a GM follow me a while but I was so bad he gave up I was a bot. I know since he told me.

[@Andy_Classic]

Looll GM - "git gud"

[@therealmonkfromtibet]

HAHAHAHAHA

[@christopherconkright1317]

@@Andy_Classic yea basically lol

[@Warkillable]

I remember I had camped a bot on my rogue for what felt like an hour or so. Finally a real person got on the character and tried to fight back.

[@RE-sc9bz]

My man. Total Bot Death.

[@UnknowN-do2hp]

but the bot never gave up and kept going :[ @@RE-sc9bz

[@Notshane_]

Thats really funny because I ever had the same experience.

[@Tokenofficial]

"yeah, theyre never gonna figure this out ever" with the eye roll made me laugh so hard

[@georgep6495]

I relocated to another country just before the first covid lockdown, they pulled the job offer a week before I would start. Was stuck in a foreign country with no job and no flights back home - I nonstop farmed for black lotuses for 14+ hours a day for over 3 months to pay for food and a room untill things calmed down and I could get back home. Dark times.

[@Trebbell]

I sold gold back in 2007-09 and the money was amazing and if I still played I assume I'd still be doing it. A friend and I controlled the gem market on a popular server along with farming. We never sold a ridiculous amount at a time, never got banned, don't think we ever raised suspicion. I saw a ton of Chinese farmers botting non stop that never seemed to get banned either. Level bots as well were running non stop. Eventually got burned...between the gold, arena, and high end raiding I spent way too much time on the game and can't say I miss it.

[@Go0dToBeBad]

i've seen a private server with a captcha-like system but somehow blizzard can't make it huh

[@junkiexl86]

Capcha to get in game? That wouldnt do anything. All bots are manned toons at the start. They log them in, get them where they need to be then run the auto script on them, then move on to next toon, rinse and repeat.

[@Go0dToBeBad]

@@junkiexl86 nah if you are running in circles near mining/herb nodes window pops up and asks you to type captcha or do easy math

[@Sgt_SealCluber]

Back in Wrath I got key logged twice (because I didn't completely get rid of the key logger the first time) and I actually got back DOUBLE what I had the first time and then double that double the second time. So I actually got 4x my stuff.

[@agentscarface]

Once I got my account hacked, but because I knew a little bit of chinese I asked them "nicely" to take my gold but dont dont disentchant all my gear from all my chars, they did so. I had two different accounts back in the day.

[@MeeSeeksAndDestroy]

i'm a female so i made gold just by existing. there were only two times i had to make an effort to catfish people into thinking i would meet them for the sake of a payout. i was 14, dont blame me

[@AlaskanGamerGuy]

That's gross. You were underage and catfishing men in a scam that involved selling yourself for I'm-game currency?

[@AlaskanGamerGuy]

That's gross. You were underage and catfishing men in a scam that involved selling yourself for I'm-game currency?

[@Do0mtrain]

I bought Diablo 3 + Reaper of Souls expansion selling gold to a guildmate back in MoP. Those were the great days. (Better money spent than on D4 NGL).

[@prudentparatrooper385]

I farm gold on wow so I can win at Lost Ark. 😂😂😂

[@banzaiib]

19:30 also, pre 2fa, many people would use the same password on fan sites as they did for the game, and hackers would rip those site passwords and steal accounts that way too.

[@MrGivmedew]

A primary way that the gold websites got people’s passwords for WoW is they would force you to set up a username and password on the website. A decent percentage of people would use their WoW password.

[@daniellarsson3453]

The answer is so simple it's just funny: Blizzard makes money on bots. Period.

[@callistio3828]

Farmed gold to pay for his little buddy 🤝😿

[@EternallyGod]

I came across a chinese gold farmer and i thought it would be funny to bring him into one of our raids and gear him out since we had the top raid on farm and we were just gearing alts anyways. So i got a real life friend who knew chinese to talk to him and get him to join our raid and we geared him out better than 90% of the people playing the game at that time.

[@notcoleman711]

'They don't need to invest in AI they need to invest in i.' absolutely legendary

[@pntbller14]

I mean the biggest thing I can think blizzard gets out of this is their current player numbers for the game are significantly higher with all the bots and a continued incentive for those bots to come back following each ban wave means it stays steadily higher than it would be save for the periodical mass bans that then result in all the bots coming right back

[@MattMonk]

I was camping the shaman room in Blackburrow in Everquest when that was new content the first time someone told me about gold farmers. Do the math, I feel old. It's been a thing though for pretty much as long as MMOs have been around.

[@Nihongofreak]

Teleport farming bots was part of what made me quit WOW. It was impossible to legitimately harvest anything because of all the underground teleporting bots that never got banned.

[@holobolo454]

Corruption at a toxic company like blizzard? WHO SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

[@lesbo37]

A key part that is missed is that bots in the game still count as active players and active players is still very much a key metric for the game. No one will start playing a dead game but if you've got a few thousand bots active at any time that don't really cost you as the game supplier financially then inflating the player count makes it all worthwhile. You ban them every few months to placate your existing player base while getting a few months of benefit from it.

[@peterga3658]

300k gold ????? 12$?????????? i remember back in 09 making 5-8k a month with my Herbalist alch Rogue . selling 1000 for 35$ then 30 25 20

[@Bl3s5in]

I quit the game for multiple years twice. WoD launch(ability prune, warrior destruction, number crunch) and bots in legion. I assure you one full time worker could ban so many bots a year that they would lose interest. Let alone say a team of three people. Imagine what you could do with gm powers 8 hours a day to clean up say 100 servers or however many there are.

[@atomiklam]

I was a GM in 2014 and 2015. The tools they have is just a modded WoW client with a Blizzard addon. The addon lets you go invisible, fly, teleport anywhere, nuke player connections, teleport characters, etc. If we suspected a bot in MoP, we would teleport the character to someplace like inside of a hut and watch for it to auto-run into walls. I doubt they've upgraded anything since then. No chance that a team of 1000 GMs with tickets to answer, fraud calls from moms, and loot disputes to browse logs for has any extra time to go hunting for bots. We were outnumbered 1000:1 a decade ago, it's orders of magnitude worse by now.

[@T.K.9]

I remember when pokemon go just released. And my brother made multiple accounts on multiple devices, capturing and nurturing said accounts and proceeded to sell such accounts lol. It also still goes on to games like FGO, Genshin, and other mobile games where you can farm "free log in stuff" or even stuff they give and once you have enough. You can re-sell them as starter accounts.

[@swadlol]

I was making about $30 an hour farming gold from the bugged instant respawn fel boars in bc (don’t think anyone else knew about it cus I never saw anyone else farming it)

[@eternusal]

if they added a captcha into the game, say you're mining and no enemies are attacking you, they could pause you, send you to a new screen and make you check your email for a code - that would stop 85% of bots.

[@Dillonian]

crazy how blizzard checking your tasks is "too invasive" but vanguard installs a rootkit to your kernel and nobody bats an eye.

[@jjbeast2119]

i went to school with this kid in montana back in the day i never knew how he had money in a our small town till he started telling people at aschool and around till he graduated

[@SeanTheOriginal]

Blizzard GMs are also in on the gold selling. I once had my account hacked the INSTANT I removed the physical authenticator to replace it with the phone version. Then when I filed the ticket for it, THE SAME FUCKING DAY, got everything back. That just tells me GMs were waiting for people to remove authenticators for whatever reason, swoop in and remove everything sellable, send it to their own character, and then replace everything that was stolen.

[@natesturm448]

Our boi started his bag life for a cats health. Absolute Chad move.

[@UnknowN-do2hp]

"Gold" word is one of indeed the most powerful word invented on this planet

[@wyattshelton2080]

dude i came across a group of like 200 boomkins going to town on the coast of pandaria one time. after a 6 year hiatus from the game. was crazy to me

[@xMrPaintxx]

I gold capped multiple times in wrath by running an addon that scanned the AH multiple times a day and then would accumulate the data and display long term bar graphs for every item on the AH... So basically you could just find something that was in a valley, buy all of it, jack the price up accordingly and profit... Repeat this a few times a day with various items and I'd often log in to a mailbox with thousands in it lol... Bought myself a max level guild and bought out all the storage for personal use 😂

[@SurpriseMechanics]

I remember the first time in WoW I really sat down and grinded gold was in Burning Crusade, just before the engineering flying mounts were about to be released. I farmed out fel iron or whatever because I knew a bunch of people were going to try and juice up their engineering to learn those mounts.