Botters, how do I love thee?

Let me count the ways....

Botters are annoying, especially to legitimate farmers. They are unstoppable forces that cannot be competed against. No matter how hard or how long you farm, you can't beat them. For a real, player farmer, they are irritating, even rage-provoking. For a crafter, they are your best friend.


Ripples passed through the gold-making community about two months ago when, suddenly and across many servers, herbs, ore, and leather disappeared from the Auction House. Prices soared from 12/g stack of Saronite Ore to 36g or more per stack. Casual scribes were forced to give up the market, faced with an absence of supplies for their business. What happened?

A little sleuthing digs up that Blizzard released a new version of Warden, their anti-cheating program, and broke or blocked many if not all of the prominent botting programs. For farmers, this meant huge profits from material-hungry crafters. For crafters and buyers, it meant a massive market overhaul starting from the ground up. It took several weeks, but eventually the increased price of mats bumped up the prices of crafted items. From what I've seen prices have stayed high since then as people get discouraged and abandon the markets.

Today, for the first time since the ban wave, I saw Saronite Ore for 12g and 13g a stack. Huzzah! In the last two weeks I've lowered my snatch numbers from 20g to 15g for Saronite, 15g to 9g for Tiger Lily, and 25g to 15g for Adder's Tongue.

From buying so many items I know that there are approximately 2-4 botters on my server and a few more seem to have showed up. Great news for me - since I am one of the most diverse and large-scale sellers on my realm, I snap up their mats, process them, and profit. As more people quit the game before Cataclysm I predict that in the coming months my profits may increase based on more crafters leaving the game (I have already seen this happen in the epic gem market). For now, I'll continue to buy and sell, and tip my hat to the botters that make a good crafting market possible.