Gold selling website interview out now: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mJ1_hayDzKm8oGw.html

I was a blizzard GM and supervisor for 12 years in France. The anti bot actions are done by a super small department of like 10 people and hunting bots is not even their main focus. GMs are ticket machines, following up on a bot report is working against your ticket per hour metrics, so most GMs would throw them away. I used to clean up the realm I was playing on every morning in classic WOW for fun and kept it clean for 2 years. But new bots would be up or even transfered over from other realms every day. Everyday there were about 10 teleport bots in ZG, 5-10 in Mara, 5-10 in Dire Maul. ~5 Fishing Bots around the world (usually Tanaris, Feralas, Wetlands), and about 10 groups of 5 multibox bots in various dungeons (leveling more flying bots). Blizzard wouldn't be able to stop it now even if they wanted to, they had the chance to put a stop to it back in 2008-2012 but they grew too fast and had other priorities. Pressure from Activision made everything worse. And we know they won't do it now because it would require hiring ~1000 or 2000 people to ONLY deal with bots and reports. There are so many things wrong with the gold system: no tracking, no proper logs, badly coded or non existant GM tools, limited access to existing tools, guild bank and auction house logs are a mess, mass actions are not really possible for GMs based on reports. The big ban waves are profiling based on account meta data and are made to have as few as possible false positives, so they catch only the most obvious blatant stupid bot setups (not the pros). There is so much more in criminal energy, stolen credit cards, actual paypal fraud etc. The only real way I see out of this would be to provide self government tools to the community and have a community based system to track and weed out bad elements like bots.

I used to sell gold back in Legion. No farm, no bots, just grueling work. Me and my friend would plan and experiment routes, professions, play with the AH, you name it. It always amazed me how we would spend hours farming gold in what we thought it was a mined field with a GM in each corner ready to ban us. Now it all makes sense. When we started to have our first transactions, we would announce blatantly in trade chat because we didn't know anyone, and having to do it through a middleman to sell it was too expensive, our families depended on us so every dollar counted. After a couple of months, I really was nervous because I said to myself "The fact that we're not banned yet, spamming that we sell gold through trade chat is pure luck. I'm sure our luck is gonna run out any day, and we got to have money saved to buy another account". But nothing ever happened, actually, I'm still using that account as a main, and play from time to time. I remember at the very end of Legion, how Suramar was FULL of Tauren druids (%50 herb speed + no unmount due to travel form), day and night doing that shit. That's when I kind of understand that we were merely a drop compared to an immense sea of bots.

im here before asmongold reacts to this

I have to say, this is one of the best research works i've ever seen. This series is getting better and better every time. Keep going and thank you, you are opening the eyes of a lot of people

Wow! that was a great video! keep up the great work love the new music and graphics

One thing that's often overlooked: This isn't 00's Blizzard, it's 2020s ActiBlizz we're talking about. They aren't going to seriously invest in a solution to botting and RMT unless it can be demonstrably proven that doing so will be profitable. Maybe something will change once Microsoft takes over, but that remains to be seen.

What stands out for me is that these people are so confident that nothing is gonna happen that they gladly expose all they do to you. What an embarrasment to Blizzard Entertainment!

Few months ago there was a big blue post of them saying "Over last few weeks 120K accounts got banned" - 120K accounts X 13$ sub = over 1.5M dollars a MONTH, and that's without buying any boosts. So i pretty much doubt that blizzard see bots as a problem. On Retail WoW i don't even see botting as a problem, the only thing me and my team or guild spend gold is for flasks/potions. Wotlk on the other hand has way bigger problem than botting, which is GDKP. If you ban GDKP what's the point of having 100K bots farming gold if players dont have anything to spend it on

What a wild ride! This video had so much information that I didn’t know about. Definitely subscribed

Bro this is fantasticly made, researched, and edited. Top notch 👌

this was such a great investigation video, love your style!

Really interesting! Thanks for all the effort, the information and the good video.

Top quality video! I love the synthwave theme and the driving intro. Very cool.

unbelievably good video, great job on the editing and pacing of the story. you've come a long way since i started watching you in WoD, keep it up :D

Always wanted a video like this, good work!

I absolutely love this style of video. Thank you for all of your hard work I'm subbed and hope to see more!

Amazing vid dude, proper documentary style You could apply this sorta format to other types of news too and it would be great

i normally dont comment on anything online, but these videos have been outstanding mate. keep up the good work!

At this point, the gold sellers are pretty much a part of Blizzard Staff - they ultimately earn blizzard more money than the GM's that used to police them. It's not like "For every bot in the game, 1 regular player quits because of bots", it's more like "For every 100 bots, 1 player quits because of bots".

After your last video, I set up my own private server purely so I could play around herding bots on it. It's a surprisingly fun time!

As the creator of Glider, stumbling across this video was quite the surprise. I've been following the trend of the game (and overall decline of Blizzard) from afar and seeing these same old problems back again has been surreal, especially since the scope of the RMT impact is just so huge now. Seeing the various guesses in the comments about Blizzard's apparent inaction is a bit sad, things were different back then. But, hey, maybe the Microsoft acquisition can breath some life into those greedy old bones. Anyway, super cool vid, enjoyed it all.

Glad I could help with this video ^^

Awesome editing !

Using a razer synapse macro is completely different than using an actual bot. The macro has set timings which are always the same and no random movement etc. a good bot has random delays and random movements included which makes it way harder to detect.

Amazing video as always 🔥🔥☺️

Thank you meta for showing us how to set up a shell company🙏🏻

Amazing retro editing love this

I've always figured it was part of Blizzard's business model even if it seems conspiratorial

It wouldnt perhaps be a bad idea for blizz to implement some sort of "Player Paragon" system where a few knowledgeable + trustable players in each server are given a level 1 semi-GM level locked character that could TP to known bot locations + flag em for deletion, they'd then only need to hire a small handful of people to confirm those paragons actions, blizz could thank them with free subs and blizzcon tickets or something.

This had MadSeason vibes!

1:30 I was looking for a gaffe in your driving clip like last time where you stopped to remark that the air was cold and you did all of that for a short intro. Then I'm greeted with a huge "STARING" instead of "STARRING" lol. Metagoblin is just staring at us, peering at me through the monitor :S

Very interesting and cool video! Good job!

Fantastic video! Thanks mate!

This video was super interesting, Keep it up friend.

Absolutely loved the music choices used

23:23 "to help them in their fight against bots" and there is the issue.... there is no fight. There is just a pretending to do something through "bannwaves" and earning the sweet sweet bot subscription money. Sure eradicating 100% of Bots is nearly impossible but dim them down to a marginable level that nearly has no effect on the game and its economy shouldn't be a Problem for a hugh Company like Blizz if they really wanna do it.

loved it, thanks for the vid!

Incredible video, thanks for your hard work and showing the reality of the state of the game regarding RMT.

This is like, professional-grade documentary film-making. I don't know if people appreciate the time & effort that goes into content like this. I stumbled upon this randomly in my Recommended and am truly impressed. Just earned a new sub!

Dude, love the 80's vibe / intro. :)

Hey dude this was awesome great job man I am sure it was a lot of work.

Loved this, thanks!!!!

Asmon sent me here and I gotta give this vid some love, well done!

Imagine some type of subscription added to the game to improve the game and hire GM's to ban bots. That would be pretty nice.

One thing you mentioned about a captcha being put in for botters, they tried to do that in Runescape Classic, the bot makers found a way to send the captchas to people that were actively on their computers with out them knowing they were entering it for a bot on RS. There's a video on it somewhere I think by "Sir Pugger" or "Colonello".

I like the madseason style to your video good going

best video ive seen in a while on this stuff man. i do feel there isnt much hope. i think its become too big, profitable for blizz and ignored/throw under the rug for them to ever address it properly. if it means breaking egos and exposing a lot of ill intent from X amount of employees in various areas of the company(or companies), it feels like one of those situations where its a 0.01% chance any kind of redemption is had. if it ever does get fixed, i think we will see layers upon layers of issues brought to light, usually when the holes dug this deep, theres a lot of people digging. WoW still one of the greatest games of all time though, the lore (for the most part), is fantastic, the game design, the adventure, a true testiment of community and creativity of the digital age. It will never lose that, that cannot be corrupted imo, unlike the actually 'gameplay'. Keep up the vids man!

I've been loving your 20-40 minute WoW videos recently! They're awesome - hope you keep doing em :D

2:05 I'm a dog guy, not a cat guy. Kek! Thanks for the feature, good vid too btw.

This was eye opening. Great research brother

could it be possible that a few employees are owners of a big gold website ?

Great video, this is fascinating😊

Dope video!!

I think a lot of people got their start in RuneScape farming and selling. I did and continued it in WoW for years until I finally dropped the game. It supplemented me through high school and college when I was at my brokest.

Great content m8, love seeing the dark side of gaming like RMT business and such

Thanks for the vid

thanks mate for your video

you've been doing these for years, you really deserve a bigger crowd you've done nothing but good for the community that still gives wow a chance despite the years of torture they've let their player base go through

Good work!

Thanks for the dedication.

Great video as usual, and hello from Asmon :P

the footage with multiboxing pcs made is eye opening

Botting and gold farming is a plague in all MMORPG's, it seems like. Thumbs up for bringing light to it!

solid video man /respect

I actually was the sole owner of the entire glyph market on one of the EU servers back in the WotLK days having access to every single glyph out there. Gold was just flooding in. The cost to produce the glyphs each day was just a matter of getting the mats for a fraction of the price, once you had that sorted it was easy gold. Addons automated just about anything. I kept it legit but those were the fun days.

All those corpses in stormwind gave me such a nostalgic flashback

Great work

Commenting for your hard work

Never thought I’d be this interested in journalism about gold farmers of my childhood game 😂

Common MetaGoblin W! 🎉🥳🥳💰

Thank you for your work.

What blizzard should do is to hire the guy who invents these bots to tackle them down. Seen some games do that succesfully like runescape have done earlier for example. Great video!

22:22 Runescape has this. The game will sometimes bring you into a mini game or give you a captcha code to fill in to continue playing.

That cat must have been really loved, such a heartwarming thing to hear!

The intro is slammin

I used to farm gold, and sell accounts. Up until cataclysm. My largest sale was 1500$, fresh max levels were 80-100$ and I was living decently alone. It was the community for. Where we farmer D2 gear and runes and sold them.

Towards the end of wotlk I lvl'd all my toons and maxed out my profs for cata, cause I didn't play wotlk, but while lvling in ice crown area, tons of people were farming by those cauldrons. I reported all of them everyday, and received a thank you letter in the mail from blizz, sometimes 3-4 a day.

Metagoblin is the meta journalist 😮

Love the STV Vice vibe!

If anyone honestly thinks Blizzard has ever made any actual attempt to stop botting or RMT, they simply lack the capacity for critical thought This is clearly a solved problem that they simply refuse to address, because they obviously benefit from ignoring it imo the biggest losers in all of this are the people buying gold, because I can think of countless better things to waste real money on than wow gold

excellent reporting

Very well made video

At least I hope with cataclysm and raid difficulty ramping up guilds will have to adjust to more oldschool, dedicated group loot systems. Of course GDKP will keep existing for normal raids but for heroics no way pugs will be able to clear the hard bosses.

Great video Goblin! O glider was the days, back in original tbc I would have my dial up internet at my parents house and put on glider while I went to school. Some days if you didn't get a phone call you could make bank lmfao. Those were the days.

This is why I play on a low pop server. GDKPs are almost unheard of, and the pots never get nearly that big.

very informative video. I learned alot about bots and why RMT is so bad for the in game economy.

As someone that had only played the free trial off & on till a few days ago (I bought Dragonflight) & not since Cataclysm I find this fascinating. Also, I'm so lost in WoW currently lol.

Love the vice intro

When I spent a lot of time in an internet cafe in China playing stuff like CS 1.6 which was huge there around the same time as WoW, I made friends with the owner and he had one of his friends approach me who owned a company that made game bots. He asked me to help him sell it on the Western marked and he couldn't believe it when I told him it's illegal there.

i remember the wave of teleporting mages in tbc classic herbing botanica endlessly... if a mage was below level 70 in botanica it was impossible without hacking to even enter the dungeon

this deserves support

Imagine going back in time to vanilla with all the knowledge of modern classic era mage farms. You'd make like 100/h

Amazing vid

I would do about anything to escape working in a factory im currently at

you can farm RFD faster as a Rogue, also loot all the Herbs and open the Chests. I did like 7000+ Runs in Classic

They don’t want it to “not be profitable for botters/goldfarmers” because they want them to purchase level boosts and game time. Blizzard is skimming their own profit out of the botting situation without trying to improve it because if they fix it, it costs them money and they make less.

Teleporting a lvl 7 around mining from Cata to WoD is *WILD*

Really good content

Thanks meta this was very interesting