In World of Warcraft, bots are still a problem. A video shows how effectively they farm and the crazy amounts of gold they generate.
No matter if it’s in the current retail version of WoW or WoW: Classic, bots are a problem everywhere. They disrupt the server economy and take over entire areas. This has now also been shown by the Reddit user tehSunn, who found a particularly crowded spot. Here, the bots earn so much gold that their usage has already paid off after just 7 hours.
What can be seen? In the video, the area Gorgrond is shown, the reddish swamp near the Heart of the Swarm. Here, there are mainly enemy types like the Fungus Stalker and Mushroom-Covered Glutton. Several dozen druids run back and forth as moonkins on fixed paths, killing the enemies in fractions of a second with instant spells and looting them afterwards.
If you cannot see the embedded video, click on the Reddit post to view it directly in the WoW subreddit.
If an automated bot farms 7+ hrs. it earns for a new acc. to replace itself (when banned) from r/wow
What is so effective about this spot? The shown area in Gorgrond has a peculiarity found in certain places in the game. There is what’s called a “hyper-spawn” – these are areas where enemies respawn particularly quickly when too many are defeated. If about 8 out of 10 enemies in the area are killed, WoW immediately makes the first defeated enemy reappear, so there are always a few foes present. The normal respawn time of a few minutes is circumvented here.
Such hyper-spawns mainly occur in places where many players are expected, who need to go there for quest lines. To ensure no one has to wait forever for respawns and is slowed down, enemies reappear after just a few seconds. This is something bot farmers take advantage of here. With enough druids, this creates an endless stream of enemies.
What do the druids farm there? Many enemies in WoW drop gray items upon death. In the past, these were often useless weapons; in recent expansions, they are mostly thematically appropriate objects that logically fit with the creatures. Animals drop items like fangs, which sell for several gold pieces. The two “Glutton” mobs drop gray items like “Skeletal Poison Gland”, each worth about 6 gold – many drop even 4-5 of them simultaneously. And that’s just one of several possible gold-producing items.
Additionally, there are green and blue items like equipment that can simply be sold for the raw gold price at the vendor.
Millions of gold per month: All this brings a bot around 30,000 gold in an hour, allowing it to earn the price of a WoW token after about 7-8 hours – equivalent to the monthly costs of a subscription. Everything earned after these 7-8 hours is “profit” that the botter sells.
A few numbers to understand the scope:
- If a bot druid farms for a full day, it has already earned 720,000 gold.
- After a week, it has already earned over 5,000,000 gold.
- If it runs for a whole month, that adds up to over 22,000,000 gold.
These amounts are then multiplied by the number of active bots that a botter has. If a botter has 5 accounts running simultaneously, they earn well over 100 million gold a month.
Since many gold farmers make a living from it, they try to evade automatic detection by Blizzard by any means possible. Therefore, it can often take days, weeks, or even months before developers notice new bots. By then, such a bot account has already paid for itself multiple times and generated some illegal profits.
Thanks to new rules against multiboxers, Blizzard could possibly discover such botters faster soon.
Have you also discovered such bot farms in the game? Do you take the time to report such accounts?
