So I played WOW when it first came out. Levelled a hunter to 60. Played almost entirely solo except for PK which I enjoyed a lot. What I did not enjoy though where the farmers. Those who hogged resources to sell them on eBay.
I haven’t played in years but are they still an issue? Just curious.
Not an issue, IMO.
They are an issue in that you must be careful of your account security, and be vigilant against phishing attempts and other such both in and out of game. Actual gameplay-wise they won’t have much effect. I haven’t even had to report an gold seller spam for a while now.
In the new zones especially resources are so plentiful that it’s not an issue at all.
I miss WoW… but with a 1.5 year-old I just don’t have the time…
Interesting. So there isn’t a big eBay market for characters and gold?
Nope. Violates the EULA. WoW characters and everything in the game are the property of Blizzard, and they’re just letting us play with them, kind of like getting to pick what color golf ball you use when you go to the mini-golf place.
There was at one time, but it was ended.
Now the “farming” comes more in the form of some sucker signing up for either gold or leveling services. You hand over your credit card information (to pay for the service, natch) and your username and password. The characters of the people paying for leveling services are used to grind gold for the chumps buying gold. Either way, a few days or a few weeks after you get what you pay for you sign on to find that either you can no longer access your own account, or your character’s stuff has been liquidated and the gold siphoned off, leaving you in (depending on your status as Horde or Alliance) a blue or red jockstrap (or bikini, for the girls) and not a copper to your name.
Customer service will help you to the extent possible and is not supposed to laugh at your sorry ass until they have ended the chat session/phone call.
ETA: WoW customer service can not, of course, help you with any non-WoW charges made to your credit card. Which is actually the bigger danger here. What’s your credit limit, again…?
PK?
There is a mayor market for characters and gold, it just isn’t out in the open. Gold and character sellers make magnitudes more money out of WoW than Blizzard does. Farmers are not a big problem though, the gold sellers have figured out it is much much easier to hack into accounts than to farm for gold. You won’t even notice they exist if you are careful with account security.
Player killing.
More commonly referred to as PvP, you old MUD dino.
Cite?
It’s been many years since i played WoW and i don’t remember exactly where i got that fact from but Wikipedia says the global market for gold farming was 3 billion annually and WoW is still the biggest name around.
If you get an authenticator (a cheap number-generating dongle) or the free authenticator app, you will never have to worry about account security again. I paid maybe $6 for mine, and it was worth every penny.
You don’t run into farmbots all that often. I haven’t seen any for a very long time. Then again, the world is now so enormously large that they’re probably all inside instances or super spread-out (or teleport-hacking under the world for ore deposits). And straight-up grinding is not the best way to make gold anymore–the days of runecloth farming in Tyr’s Hand (or essence farming in Silithus) are long gone.
That’s not quite true, you can still get hacked with an authentication.
I mean, you virtually don’t have to worry, but it’s not surefire.
You’re technically right, but in practical terms it’s never going to happen. Blizzard itself has been hacked before, sometimes devastatingly so (very recently, in fact). And, to date, the only way authenticator security has ever been broken is when an unauthorized person is able to physically take possession of the dongle. Well, that or when social engineering causes someone to voluntarily deactivate it, although I’ve never heard of that happening.
In the unthinkably apocalyptic event that hackers get ahold of Blizzard’s authenticator databases, manage to unhash them, and authenticated accounts start getting hacked, you can rest assured that Blizz will trip over their feet to make it right.
So very true.
“PKing” still gets some mileage, though I think its meaning has shifted. Now if somebody calls someone a “PKer”, it tends to entail that they do world PvP (as opposed to organized PvP like battlegrounds or arenas), and often connotes that they’re a griefer rather than an initiator of “fair” PvP.
For gold farming and character selling to be an order of magnitude more profitable than WoW, the average player would have to spend $150 a month on buying gold and characters. Do you think that happens?
Now consider that the average plyaer would never use the services. If one in four WoW players did it, they’d have to spend $600 a month to make these services an order of magnitude more profitable than WoW itself.