Fred is an ordinary level 81 Hunter in World of Warcraft that’s about to begin his very first profession of Blacksmithing. Fred plays on a low population server. Because there are less people on the server it is harder and more expensive to get items, especially ore and some components for blacksmithing.
In patch 5.2 Blizzard added a 1-500 leveling bypass to the game where you can level 1-500 by using Ghost Iron Bars. It takes exactly 4,412 Ghost Iron Bars to complete this step, which is an average of 12,000 gold with the price per bar of 2.7 gold each. From 500-600 you could go through another 1000 ghost iron bars making the grand total to level Blacksmithing to 600 about 15,000 gold.
That’s a lot of money.
Unfortunately, Fred plays on a low population realm. On a low population realm such as Cho’gall a Ghost Iron Bar goes for about 5.3 gold each making the total to level Blacksmithing to 600 approximately 28,683 gold.
About 95% of players make gold in World of Warcraft through random drops, questing while leveling, and daily quests. Very very few players farm materials and place them for sale in the auction house or utilize the auction house to make gold. Whether Fred plays on a low population or a high population realm, he would have made about the same amount of gold.
The fastest players can farm about 700 Ghost Iron Ore which is 350 Ghost Iron Bars per hour. To obtain enough Ghost Iron Bars to go from 1-600 in Blacksmithing would take about 15.5 hours of farming. The slowest players may take up to 30 hours.
This is the World of Warcraft you know today with bots.
Bots are responsible for over 75% of the things sold on the Auction House, especially minerals. Bots have gotten a bad reputation because they give players an “unfair advantage” over other players in the game.
But bots make materials available cheaply on the Auction House so players like Fred can purchase what he needs at the lowest price possible. This saves him 15-30 hours of his time. This might not seem like much but a casual gamer only gets to play about 10 hours a week on average.
So how did bots get a bad reputation?
Bots got a bad reputation from “legit players” that are trying to do what they say bots are doing, gain an unfair advantage over other players. These greedy WoW players make up a small percentage of the WoW community. Most of them have no job or life and can spend 40-80 hours a week on farming. They want to make more gold than they can even spend.
Most of these greedy players are hoarders, some of them having well beyond over a million gold just to show it off because they have nothing left to buy.
Millions of gold that they acquired from honest hardworking casual players such as yourself. The average player makes about 200-500 gold an hour doing quests and dailies. Quests and dailies are designed by Blizzard as the standard method of gold making. In other words, Blizzard feels each player should only make 200-500 gold an hour, yet these non-botting “legitimate” players are making as much as 10,000 gold an hour.
These greedy players that do all of the complaining have been trying to convince the other 95% that bots are bad and give players an unfair advantage over other players. How ironic, since the only thing these legitimate players care about is having an unfair advantage over regular players.
Maybe they are jealous or feel threatened by bots.
Let’s just take bots out of the game for a minute and see what that looks like.
Most low population realms would be controlled by a few greedy players working together to keep prices artificially high. They do this by buying out the entire supply of anyone that undercuts their prices.
Without a bot on that server to dump a mass supply of materials onto the auction house, these greedy players will have an easy time buying all the supply from regular players.
If you thought 5.3g was high for a Ghost Iron Bar, think again when the prices are 25g or more each. The cost to level Blacksmithing to 600 at that price would be 135,300 gold.
These “legit players” are shady. They aren’t going to simply post 5400 Ghost Iron Bars at the same price. As soon as you buy out the 200 they have posted they will post another 200 even higher.
This is how they get millions of gold. There’s nothing legitimate about them.
Before bots entire markets were controlled by a few greedy people. The high prices make players have to farm the materials. A lot of these players give up on farming beause they don’t have time.
This creates more market control by the rich players.
Because there would be fewer level 600 Blacksmiths to create epic items they can also price those really high. Instead of epic quality gear being low price and readily available the price will increase by a lot making the gear unaffordable by almost everyone except players that want to spend their life savings on it.
Now not only do they have all the gold and all the items, but now they have the best characters with max professions.
They have gained an unfair advantage over you, “without cheating or botting” but to me they are still cheaters. They cheat honest casual players out of their time and intentionally hold back their progress.
On higher population realms there are trading agreements between big sellers on the auction house. I’ve given people full control of one ore in exchange for full control of the market of another ore. The result is that prices stay artificially high and the market is controlled by the rich players.
Everyone always talks about how awesome Vanilla WoW was or how hard and awesome World of Warcraft used to be. It wasn’t hard because the content was hard, it was hard because access to professions and gear was heavily restricted by these rich players. When I first started I didn’t have a single epic item for a long time even when I was the max level of 60.
The more bots that came online, the more content other players got to experience.
Now the game is easy enough for those 95% players to not only enjoy the game, but have a chance at maxing professions, leveling alts, and enjoying raid content — something that was previously unavailable to them and was only a luxury for the few ultra rich wow players with time, money, and gear.
Bots are not the enemy, they help over 95% of the players progress and keep the other greedy 5% in check so they can’t rip you off. Bots are hated by the ultra rich because they take away the unfair advantage these “legit” players have had over you for all these years.
When you spend your hour doing quests or dailies would you rather be able to buy 8-20 Ghost Iron Bars or 60-160 Ghost Iron Bars?
You see, your time and gold are becoming more valuable with every bot that comes online.
Almost every player in World of Warcraft that has purchased anything off the auction house has bought something from a bot. I hope someday that your 1 hour of daily quests can buy all the Ore, Leather, Herbs, or anything else you need.
If you don’t want to support bots, then pay the extra gold next time you’re at the auction house, but don’t hate bots while loving low prices. That’s like shopping at Walmart and hating China, don’t be a hypocrite.