News: Player Makes 8.5 Million Gold While Botting

We recently stumbled upon an interesting story about a player that made 8.5 million gold while botting on the WoW auction house.

Facebook image and caption about his experience

Perma-banned in World of Warcraft: for botting.

Less than 3 years ago, I engineered a way to sell items at the lowest price and keep them that way every 15 minutes via an add-on and a bot that I wrote. I spent 1-2 hours to restock daily and it took me several months before I took over the Auction House as a Walmart on both Alliance and Horde factions.

Over the course of 3 years, I have sold 60,000 items and accumulating 8.5 million gold to my name.

To put 8.5 million in perspective:

Until 2011, the maximum gold a character was allowed to hold was 214,748g, 36s, 48c. That amount was enough to get interviewed at http://www.warcraftecon.net/hall-of-fame. I had about 20 times of the gold cap. My raiding guild at that time kept around 30,000g. I had 200 times of that. A typical player keeps up to 10,000g around, making me worth over 850 players. I normally kept around a 300,000g worth of items on the Auction Houses at any time, which I once estimated to make up 5-10% of the entire market – that means I can probably buy out the entire economy 3 times over. To farm this amount of gold without playing the economy, one must mine or gather herbs for 30-50 hours a day for 3 years. There were unconfirmed rumors of player(s) holding a world record of somewhere around 2-4 million in some German servers – makes me wonder whether I was indeed the richest among 12 million WoW players.

8.5 million gold currently sells for US$4,000 and costs US$8,000 to buy.

Until I was banned, my bot had over 270 lines of instructions that alternately logs in my two characters in both factions, cancels all undercut items via an add-on (it also by-passes the anti-bot check), walks backwards to reach the mailbox, retrieve the mail via another add-on, walk forward again and post every undercut item that is also profitable. My bot even knew to re-log with my password when it disconnects from the server. The bot ran for 22 hours a day, permanently keeping my account logged on except during Tuesday maintenance. Somehow, Blizzard left me alone despite complaints from my competitors – one of them being a bad-mouthed Australian family that spends their day rotating in shifts trying to put me out of business by selling 20% of the items that I was selling at a loss.

I have also written a bot that lets my characters join the Alterac Valley battleground automatically and move every 10-60 seconds to prevent getting AFK-kicked, helping me make 6 level 85 characters so that I could max out 12 crafting professions.

It’s been 3 good years of WoW, although I spent months at a time not killing anything but staying in town to craft items and figuring out more efficient ways of running my enterprise, or coming up with more secure ways of transferring items cross-faction via Booty Bay (at one point there were 4 stalkers who tried to snatch my items whenever my transferring characters log in to sell items at low prices to each other). Cheating was definitely more fun than playing it properly – I sucked at playing the game properly. I was going to wait till I reach 10 million before I make an announcement, sell it all into real money and donate it to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but I guess that will have to wait.

R.I.P. Dorkmage. As for now, Skyrim.

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