Zarborough Day, 6-11-07

[Frybread]

If you lost your account in yesterday’s ban wave, and you need someone to talk to or a shoulder to cry on, here I am. I know you didn’t do it, Blizzard banned you unjustly. You have never once cheated or even thought about cheating. Your account was hacked, your brother used your account, and you installed Kasperevsky’s anti-virus program which set off Warden’s triggers. We know. Every botter is now aboard the no-dignity boat, flooding customer support phone lines and email hoping for an undeserved gift.

But not every botter is a geeky 15 year old farming gold for his main. Companies based in the United States, who service the average WoW player are hurting as well. Not only do they compete head to head with gold companies from India and China, after June 11th, many are stressed, profits are going down the shitter, and employees are being laid off. Simply put, a ban wave is a financial disaster for first-world gold farmers.

Through a friend, I was introduced to a successful WoW gold seller based in the USA. He wished to remain anonymous, so I’m not even using his alias.


The Botter wakes up every morning at 6:30 AM. He drives to his office, which houses over 150 computers, starts up his coffee maker and meets with his employees. From there, it’s constant work monitoring bots, updating advertisements, and shipping gold to customers until 9 PM at night. Botting is his life, as well as the life of his employees. June 11th 2007 hit his company especially hard.

[21:58] <Frybread> How many accounts did you lose today?
[21:58] <The Botter> 100 lol, not a good day. I have employees with nothing to do.

[22:08] <Frybread> What level were your characters?
[22:08] <The Botter> 40-70's

[22:08] <Frybread> How much gold would estimate was lost, in total?
[22:08] <The Botter> i dont want to think about that, lol.
[22:08] <Frybread> just a guess
[22:08] <The Botter> 2-10k per account, average of 5k x 100, do the math.
[22:09] <Frybread> oh man, that’s a load [note: $50,000] of inventory gone in one day. I can't imagine what you're going through
[22:09] <The Botter> Add 13k in business expenses just to run the business, this type of thing not fun especially if I have to lay off my workers.
[22:10] <Frybread> I think that's one thing people don't normally think about when they read about a ban wave, they assume 14 year olds cheating.
[22:10] <The Botter> yup, used to be an ok profit business, not really the case anymore.

[22:11] <Frybread> Does it make sense to stop what you're doing, considering the risks?
[22:11] <The Botter> I’d rather deal with the risks then work a normal office job.

[22:18] <Frybread> What did you do before the bots?
[22:18] <The Botter> software developer

[22:13] <Frybread> Do you have plans to rebuild your WoW empire?
[22:14] <The Botter> ya will have 100 up and running in a few weeks. 200 in a month or so. We have other software we are going to start using with IS to work in conjunction with isxwarden.

[22:02] <Frybread> 100 accounts and you need employees - so even botting, that's too much for one person to handle?
[22:04] <The Botter> 100 accounts, almost completely automated can’t be done by 1 person. All tells as well as everything else is constantly monitored.
[22:04] <Frybread> 24/7 monitoring huh?
[22:05] <The Botter> dont run 24/7, that’s just asking for it.


[22:05] <Frybread> What was the most annoying thing players would do to your bots?
[22:06] <The Botter> pvp servers, would have problems with other botters since their bots would hit us from time to time and my bot would kill them. They’d think we were killing them on purpose but it was just the bot reacting to being attacked lol.
[22:06] <Frybread> bot wars!
[22:06] <The Botter> yup lol, most bots are stupid when it comes to pvp.
[22:07] <Frybread> Was there a certain class you used, or did you mix it up?
[22:07] <The Botter> ya mixed classes.
[22:07] <Frybread> I figure hunters these days are too ubiquitous.
[22:07] <The Botter> ya, people see a hunter, they assume bot or chinese farmer, lose lose situation.


[22:17] <Frybread> Could you describe a typical day in this business? As the boss, what you do from morning (or afternoon) until night?
[22:17] <The Botter> nerve racking lol, never know when i'm goign to walk into the office and see another massive ban. work just like the rest of them, plus some. 70 hr weeks.

[22:26] <Frybread> Earlier you mentioned the industry had become less profitable. Any reason for this?
[22:27] <The Botter> alot of competition. add in when you try to make money, takes 3 weeks to lvl an account to 70 and work, it makes an ok amount of gold then you lose the account, paypal reversals, list goes on and on.
[22:28] <Frybread> So you get bans even when there aren't "ban waves"
[22:28] <The Botter> from time to time for selling gold, yes. We don’t really get banned for botting very often. I keep it minimal and out of the way of normal traffic where players dont come by very often.


[22:29] <Frybread> There are several reports about how Chinese farmers are underpaid, poor living and working conditions, etc. Anything you'd like to say about your US workers?
[22:30] <The Botter> 10.50 + an hr minimum. So starting pay is better then any fast food joint.
[22:30] <Frybread> Beats Starbucks!
[22:30] <The Botter> yup, plus we do profit sharing
[22:31] <Frybread> Where could someone find a job like that? Craigslist?
[22:31] <The Botter> maybe lol, dont think theres alot of jobs like that around. Most companies that sell game currency go under within 2 yrs, not a very stable business.
[22:32] <Frybread> So it's about the same turnover as most restaurants. How long have you made it?
[22:32] <The Botter> over 4.


[22:35] <Frybread> Do you do those in-game advertisements? Tell spam or group invite spam?
[22:35] <The Botter> no, worst thing ever. If someone wants gold, they can go to the net and find it. I find that in-game spam so irritating, and I’m a gold seller!
[22:36] <Frybread> Then you are the best gold seller ever, thank you for your time. You sound like a busy guy, I hope you're able to get overcome the ban wave.

[derkaderka]

Almost kinda makes you feel sorry for them....

Originally Posted by derkaderka

Almost kinda makes you feel sorry for them....

Yea, almost, but not really

I honestly wonder just how badly this kind of stuff hurts the in game economy. You should be allowed to get what you pay for.

10.50/hr +


WTF they are making more then me playing video games.

I need this job!

5k x 100 = 500,000

[Frybread]

Gold has a street value of around $100 per 1k, so 500k gold = $50,000. It's a risky business.

[colekutz]

We are led to think a farm subsidy could assist greatly

[Frybread]

Originally Posted by colekutz

We are led to think a farm subsidy could assist greatly

hahahaha, reply of the month

Originally Posted by Unregistered

10.50/hr +


WTF they are making more then me playing video games.

I need this job!

Actually, they are only monitoring bots. e.g. running them to farm-spots, corpse-runnning and all the other boring crap, not so much gaming.

No mercy, I hope you go down hard!

i work hard in the game to get my gold, its for people that cant be bothered to make there own. And by the looks of things, with how much he makes selling gold, theres a lot of lazy people. shame on you all.

Goldfarmer are ruining my ingame profits, so I gank every farmbot i see and write there names to the gm's. Nice to see it pays off.

i bet 40% or more of you so hard worked for gold is in fact gold bought by other players....if it wasnt for gold sellers youd prob have less + youd have to grind more...

you are just stupid as hell making it hard on bots

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Goldfarmer are ruining my ingame profits, so I gank every farmbot i see and write there names to the gm's. Nice to see it pays off.

You sir are an idiot. You being a prick and reporting bots to GM's did absoluteley nothing. The banwave was due to a warden update on June 1st/2nd, had nothing to do with your reports. So no, it doesn't pay off. Your gay ass reports mean nothing.

More Frequent ban waves plz!

Originally Posted by Unregistered

You sir are an idiot. You being a prick and reporting bots to GM's did absoluteley nothing. The banwave was due to a warden update on June 1st/2nd, had nothing to do with your reports. So no, it doesn't pay off. Your gay ass reports mean nothing.

What u mean by "Warden Update"? >_>


btw8t6

Warden = WoW's anti cheat program

Update = It will take your mother while you sleep

Warden Update = WoW's anti cheat program (Zarborough) will take your mother while you sleep

Originally Posted by Unregistered

i bet 40% or more of you so hard worked for gold is in fact gold bought by other players....if it wasnt for gold sellers youd prob have less + youd have to grind more...

you are just stupid as hell making it hard on bots

Seriously if you believe that your a morron bots are causing the costs of everything to go down because of the increase in competition. Just looking at the primal's costs pisses me off. 10g per primal and without bots they'd probably be up at 50 to 100g which would mean 5 to 10 times less grinding for cash. Not to mention its impossible to grind with 6 bots ganking every spawn that drops anything worth more than a copper.

Bots = Deserve their life to be a living hell
Botting companies = Deserve to go bust

One can only hope that blizzard bankcrupt the lot of you sooner rather than later

I, for one, love bots - as a skinner i will follow a bot around until I'm bored.

[mven]

Uhhh. Bots/gold farming/gold selling would be introducing ridiculous amounts of currency into the market which IMO would cause the price of items to go up not down. While bullshit frequently farmed items (generic drops off of world mobs) would probably go down as a massive flood of these items in the market would decrease their value, anything worthwhile would probably skyrocket. Basically it ruins the prices on items that individuals could hope to farm for a steady income while decreasing the overall value of the in game currency and thus screws the average player.

As for feeling sorry for them... they are breaking the rules and/or cheating. Why would I feel sorry for someone who would "rather deal with the risks then work a normal office job." ? He obviously knows what he is doing is "wrong" and is either unwilling/too lazy/whatever to make money by a more legitimate means. Get caught and lose your business? Them's the breaks!

[Frybread]

I feel sorry for them. It's a risky business, but someone has to provide the gold. If all gold companies were shut down and players had to buy from each other, no matter how anti-gold seller someone claims to be, they would sell their gold if the prices were right. If I offered you $1000 for 100 of your gold, I'm guessing you'd accept. You gold farmer you.

As long as they are eventually banned, the effects on game economy aren't so bad. I think it makes it more interesting, especially when you know why enchanting materials on the AH suddenly became expensive after June 11th.

I don't feel sorry for them, or the botters either.

On the gold farmer:

Point 1: He is a gold farmer, and got exactly what he deserved. Well, maybe not. He didn't die in a fire.

Point 2: His levelling customers must have also gotten banned. Good! Anyone who isn't competent enough to play te game needs to learn this particular lesson. I hope their credit cards were also flagged, preventing them from returning to WoW.

Point 3: His workers knew who/what they were working for. Maybe now they can get some honest jobs instead of being leeches.

[Arlochan]

Ughhh can u imagine if WoW went crazy with bot bans and had gms talk to every high lvl and if didnt responde blizz would send notice of suspicion of botting? Seems kinda unlikely because of the fact that over 7 million people now play WoW....

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I don't feel sorry for them, or the botters either.

On the gold farmer:

Point 1: He is a gold farmer, and got exactly what he deserved. Well, maybe not. He didn't die in a fire.

Point 2: His levelling customers must have also gotten banned. Good! Anyone who isn't competent enough to play te game needs to learn this particular lesson. I hope their credit cards were also flagged, preventing them from returning to WoW.

Point 3: His workers knew who/what they were working for. Maybe now they can get some honest jobs instead of being leeches.

im glad you think of it as that and not the fact that he has a real life job unlike you, you scumbag.

this person works hard at what he does, regardless if you dont like it.. it's his job.

so stop fucking hatting because your a little fat fuck stuck on your computer playing wow everyday.

So ... he's a criminal who would rather stay criminal than become honest.

There's millions of ex-cons like this around:

"I'd rather keep selling heroin to small children ... it's not good but it's better than going back to a boring office job ..."

Seriously - why even bother talking to this pathetic liar? People who bot gold, and people who buy it, ruin the game for everyone.

#1 Botting is NOT agaist the law ...just the TOS, (a contract).

#2 Botters do NOT cheat ... they just automate grinding (boring). FYI - almost all china and american botters use programs that play the game fairly, they just do it with a AI and not a person.

#3 There would NOT be 7mill plus players if it were not for the gold sellers, because less than 50 percent of the players out there (real ones, not bots) have the time to grind out the monies needed to buy all that OVER priced crud the "Power" games put on the AH.

[Frybread]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

So ... he's a criminal who would rather stay criminal than become honest.

There's millions of ex-cons like this around:

"I'd rather keep selling heroin to small children ... it's not good but it's better than going back to a boring office job ..."

If you want to make a comparison to a drug dealer, try Blizzard.

sorry, but I can't support an industry doing things like this... it sure is work to earn your money like this, but it's like wildering in a nature reservat

This will never get rid of the real farmers the people who make money from the game, they will just keep coming back, at the end of the day the only people it hurts are the people who want a life the ones who want to go and interact with real people and dont want to sit in front of a computer screen for 12-14 hours a day to get the occasional uncommon/rare item. I think south park summed up wow players quite well in the wow episode and i think blizz thinks the same of most of its users.....sad people who have little else in there lives.

On a side note, bots are good for the economy you watch prices sky rocket oh and see how little of somethings there are.

And to the moronic person who wrote this:-
On the gold farmer:

Point 1: He is a gold farmer, and got exactly what he deserved. Well, maybe not. He didn't die in a fire. --- You would wish someone dead for harvesting virtual currency, you sure not right in the head boy.

Point 2: His levelling customers must have also gotten banned. Good! Anyone who isn't competent enough to play te game needs to learn this particular lesson. I hope their credit cards were also flagged, preventing them from returning to WoW.--- Some people have a life and dont want to miss out on reality, not a case of being competent at a game.

Point 3: His workers knew who/what they were working for. Maybe now they can get some honest jobs instead of being leeches.--- This was an honest job in no way was it harming anyone in the real world, maybe now as they dont have a job they may go and do something illegal, like burgal your house, rob your car or maybe just kick seven shades of sh*t out of you and rob what you have in your pockets (if you acctually venture into the real world).

At the end of the day blizzard dont care about you its all about the £££, if you think its been done for the benefit of you...think again.

Flame me as u see fit but i know i got a life...

[mven]

Originally Posted by unregistered

#1 Botting is NOT agaist the law ...just the TOS, (a contract).

#2 Botters do NOT cheat ... they just automate grinding (boring). FYI - almost all china and american botters use programs that play the game fairly, they just do it with a AI and not a person.

#3 There would NOT be 7mill plus players if it were not for the gold sellers, because less than 50 percent of the players out there (real ones, not bots) have the time to grind out the monies needed to buy all that OVER priced crud the "Power" games put on the AH.

#1 If it is against the terms of service you are breaking the rules you agreed to upon signing into the game and thus deserve the ban you receive.

#2 Using third party programs to play for you is against the rules. Last I checked breaking the rules in just about any game was considered cheating.

#3 I don't think there would be 7 million plus players as a good number of those accounts are bots and/or farmers. I don't think over 50% of the WoW population buys gold/items w/ rl money. Some of us don't mind playing the game as it was meant to be played (though I haven't played WoW since february).

Originally Posted by Arlochan

Ughhh can u imagine if WoW went crazy with bot bans and had gms talk to every high lvl and if didnt responde blizz would send notice of suspicion of botting? Seems kinda unlikely because of the fact that over 7 million people now play WoW....

This is really my biggest problem with the whole banning shizzle. A friend of mine had some low level player hand him a huge chunk of gold in game. Not really thinking about it he accepted and the next day his account was banned. He could have been lying to me or it could have been some one trying to get rid of some duped/bought gold. I do assume however that some innocent accounts have been banned over the years. I would rather see 100 cheaters get away with it than one good player lose their account over something that wasn't their fault.

Originally Posted by Frybread

I feel sorry for them. It's a risky business, but someone has to provide the gold. If all gold companies were shut down and players had to buy from each other, no matter how anti-gold seller someone claims to be, they would sell their gold if the prices were right. If I offered you $1000 for 100 of your gold, I'm guessing you'd accept. You gold farmer you.

Why does someone have to provide the gold? If less people were farming gold, the price of gold would be ridiculous and thus less people would be buying gold. Obviously blowing a few hundred dollars for an epic mount is something that most people with an okay job can afford. Bump that number up to a few thousand and I think you'd see a severe decrease in the number of gold/item purchases. Sure everyone here would probably sell off 100g for 1000$. But who would buy it at that rate? That's $50k for an epic mount. You can buy a nice car for that rofl.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

#1 Botting is NOT agaist the law ...just the TOS, (a contract).

Did you know that there is such a thing a "contract law"? Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

#2 Botters do NOT cheat ... they just automate grinding (boring). FYI - almost all china and american botters use programs that play the game fairly, they just do it with a AI and not a person.

Botters cheat. They can't take the time to do it themselves, so they have a program play the game for them. Perhaps it's because they are too stupid to know how to make gold without grinding and without bots.

[quote]#3 There would NOT be 7mill plus players if it were not for the gold sellers, because less than 50 percent of the players out there (real ones, not bots) have the time to grind out the monies needed to buy all that OVER priced crud the "Power" games put on the AH.{/QUOTE]
Let me get this straight. You're saying that WoW's success is due to gold sellers? I think I have just found the epiphany of stupid. You put out more stupid in that one sentence than the entire universe normally puts out in a year - Quasar stupidity.

Honestly, I have no problem with gold farmers. If someone wants to buy gold for cash that they spent all day working for, fine. I personally think it is a waste of money buying something that you don't need to play the game with. I'm doing fine, and I've never bought any gold.


Botting on the other hand is against the TOS.

Now, because of botters, people who are helping out their friends buy giving them some gold to buy something that they can't quite afford, is looked upon as cheating.

Now, gold farmers and botters are lumped together. Now, I know grinding for gold and selling it would be long and tedious, but at least its honest. Not that I would ever want to do it. Takes the fun out of the game. Its boring enough trying to level a player to the point where you can PVP.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Did you know that there is such a thing a "contract law"?

Contract law works both ways, you can sue for breach of contract but the contracted can also use the courts to invalidate clauses. Yep and thats Blizzards biggest problem. Notice that even in the latest lawsuits they are going after the spammers and not the actual gold sellers. Why ? Because it is very doubtful that they would win against the sellers and they could find themselves with their term of service invalidated by the courts and lose all control of the game.

[quote=Unregistered;12078]im glad you think of it as that and not the fact that he has a real life job unlike you, you scumbag.

this person works hard at what he does, regardless if you dont like it.. it's his job.

so stop fucking hatting because your a little fat fuck stuck on your computer playing wow everyday.[/Q

so says the internet tough guy.......lol

[Khatib]

This unregistered guy is kind of an idiot.


There are all sorts of fairly reasonable ways to defend gold selling/buying. You are not using any of them.

There are really no good ways to defend botting. You are using every bad one to the extreme. Especially trying to call it "not cheating." Dude, just give up, and crawl back in your hole, while your bot plays your toon and no one notices who you are on your server, unless they think of you as "that dirty botter."

And lets be honest here, MMOs are only partly about your gear and gold. They're mostly about garnering a big rep. Be it famous or infamous to the server, or just a great rep among a small group of friends. But they're never about bragging about your bot's outputs.


To Frybread: Great article/interview. Extremely interesting snippet to read.

[Frybread]

Why doesn't anyone blame the developers? It's not a farmer's fault the game is so easy bots can play it.

A great example of developers fixing the problem are the old Auto-It fishing scripts that destroyed the fishing market. To cure the problem, Blizzard changed the game. They made random "fishing nodes" that last a few minutes, which not only rewarded real players with better fishing, but made Auto-It scripts obsolete.

They shouldn't stop with fishing. Why not make hunting more dynamic? The same monsters who are the same level spawn in the same spot. They need to change it up.

Why not add PvP death penalties, so players could police bots and farmers?

This forum uses CAPTCHA - random letters you have to enter, to keep spam bots out. Blizzard could do something fun, not quite random letters, but something rewarding players had to do once in awhile that bots simply couldn't.

There's a million things they could do to stop bots, in addition to banning. You can talk about horrible greedy farmers, but the existence of bots and farming is simply a design flaw.

[Naolin]

yeah I never understood why they don't have a CAPTCHA system in WoW, just make it pop up when you log in and be done with it. Sure it won't stop the gold farmers that really sit behind the computer to farm, but it might stop a few gold bots.

[Frybread]

Random letters aren't fun to enter, for a game you need something entertaining. Just as an example, in every group of mobs there could be one spawn that you'd have to recognize in order to kill. It would randomly be a bear, an elemental, or a murloc. While killing it, you'd have to say "DIE MURLOC" or "DIE BEAR" by either typing it out or saying it into your mic. If you're successful, it drops 3x the normal amount of coin. If you're wrong, insta-death.

That's a form of CAPTCHA that's rewarding and could fit into a game.

But like I said, there are millions of ways to deter botting that are way more creative than my example or ban waves once every 6 months. Blizzard solved it with fishing, they should do it again with hunting.

[Khatib]

Originally Posted by Frybread

Why not add PvP death penalties, so players could police bots and farmers [and each other]?

QFT. (+ an edit)