A Guide to Farmers In World of Warcraft

Trounce writes "Game Guides Online has a lengthy article exploring how farmers work in World of Warcraft, including their daily quotas, techniques, schedules, and how they hide their gold surplus from employers and possibly thieving partners. It has a section on how players can benefit from shift changes and score items at low prices (which can then be re-listed at a profit). From the article: 'Of course, farmers who stay on past the ends of their shifts, while their boss and/or partner breathe impatiently down there necks, are even more amenable to agreeing to ridiculously under-market offers; so keep looking for bargains after 6:00 as well.'"

game guide.

[JVert]

Article is at best interesting.

Anyone ever used the warcraft game guide? Can't belive its actually worth $75...

Planting the seeds...

[gizmoiscariot]

Ill agree with the Uldaman thing. At any one time on my server (Lightbringer) you will mysteriously see 10-20 Level 60 Rogues, many of which have interesting names, most of which are Chinese.

Farming tends to bring a lot of items into the mix, however the problem is that those of us who play the games and then try to sell the items we find, find that we aren't getting anything near what we probably should because others who find a bunch of those same items sell them for much cheaper. So yeah it keeps prices down however in some cases thats bad when the rest of us want money too.

what about bots?

[slicer622]

sure, chinese peasants are cheap, but you dont have to feed, clothe and shelter processor power.

Re:what about bots?

[HTL2001]

parent has a great point... for the MMO I play (Ragnarok Online) there is even an open source bot. In the past there were several, and well documented cases of people from everywhere running farm bots on trial accounts, gaining ~9mil per character in 2 weeks time (e-bay price was ~$6/mil at that time). And this was with paying no money for a subscription as well... if they had bought a subscription (which some had) they were able to make a lot more.

the problem with bots is they can act realy dumb, (for instance, in Ragnarok, moster locations were changed drasticly, making it hard to bot without significant setbacks and making it horrably obvious that you are botting) and may not stand up to whatever test the GM's of a particular game have to detect that someone is not using a modified client or something other than the client
I suppose a single person could watch over several bots, but unless they were graphical representations and took into account the way the real client handles packets, it would probably be easier for one person to watch over several machines running the game using the macro option (or even, one machine using a splitter program, though I don't know of one)

His analysis on the effect on the economy...

[Sathias]

...is majorly flawed. No-one has argued that the selling of large amounts of items pushes up prices. What has been argued is that people buying larger amounts of gold than they could ever get in causal play gives them a big burning hole in their pocket. Why wander around collecting herbs if you can take a minor dent out of your supply (which you can just spend money to buy more) to get them instantly from the AH?

It is exactly the same reason that the US can't solve its budgetary problems by "printing more money". Increase the supply of money and you push up inflation. The 24-hour high-pressure farmers increase the rate of gold into the server by a lot, and this has the same effect.

If you ask me this article looks like it was written by someone from one of the gold selling companies, giving helpful hints such as when to be one of the farmers customers, in order to legitimise their business. It's a pity they have to ignore and argue against basic economic principles to do so.