I wouldn't know if these type of people are farmers of gold or just making accounts that are used to be a farmer. I seen a few times a high lvl somewhere in the 60's possibly running around with like 5 to 8 lvl 12's following him, just running everywhere he goes.

Im sure thats something illegal going on there no?

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So you're using a nebulous sort of logic to qualify a social act normally considered to be morally repugnant in order to justify your own inability to procure freely-available in-game resources?

Being an alt-aholic, I have a lot of alts. Hey! One is a level-70 BE Fem Huntard with a pet named Cat. OMG!

I've responded to similar logic deficits, like yours, by creating a Demon-Soul Horde guild by the name of . Seriously. Look for me while I'm skinning on the Outland plains.

Does anyone at WowInsider proofread these things or is it the new company policy to embrace the "John Dvorak" style of trolling-journalism?

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So a guy powerleveling toons is illegal? Guys really need to get to 70 and loose the envy.

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DND while Fishing = Bot (instant report)

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Why grab nodes out from under them if their only profession is skinning? What are they going to do, skin the ore?

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Yeah, that checklist is pretty accurate, except Dwarf is missing on the race list, lots of bots are Dwarfs. Though if you're still not sure that they're a bot, just watch them for a few moments, their movements are usually jerky and 'abnormal', not something you'd see a real player doing.

Finally, and this is something I've done a number of times, if they are killing the same mobs, kill steal from the bot. If they don't complain or even react to you killstealing their mobs, it's clearly a bot!

One fun thing I like to do to bots that are the same faction as me, is make a crapload of Heavy Leather Balls, and then follow the bot around while throwing all of the balls to them. This fills up their bag slots pretty rapidly! I even got a bot supervisor to come online once because I'd filled his hunter's bags up with balls! He started throwing them back and asking me to stop. I promptly told him he'd been reported for botting. Didn't see the bot after a couple of days!

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I've been spotting a suspected farmer around the Halaari plateau for the last couple of days, while I was farming Kurenai rep.

The basic stuff I usually go looking for is:
The gear: All BoE, usually have some VERY strange stuff - my personal favourite was the one with a staff with +attack power in various druid forms..
The actions: Following the EXACT same path every time & after killing a mob, it runs back to the pre-programmed path instead of running straight for the next mob. Even hardcore human grinders would have a hard time explaining the point of that..
The toon: Always a Belf/Nelf/Troll hunter with a pet that has the default name..
The playstyle: Extremely jerky due to latency (I've played with people whose latency were in the 3-4-500 ms range & they didn't have any of these issues) & if pet dies the hunter WILL die too instead of just feighning death. Most human grinders usually follow the same playstyle as the bots (Mark > pet goes in > serpent sting & autoshot until death) because it's the most mana-efficient one, so it's not entirely "safe" just to be looking out for those.

I usually report them to the GM's whenever I spot them. I don't care if they're banned fairly quickly or not, as I suspect Blizzard of pooling them all, and then banning them in one big move, to show off huge numbers of banned bots every now and then.

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A lot of you are missing part of the justification for believing the person to be a farmer, the letter-salad name. It's not just a BE female hunter with a pet named "Cat," it's a BE Hunter girl with a pet named "Cat" sporting her own name, ou know, a name like "Aiuigjfd."

I don't know about anyone else, but this looks like something I would automatically file as "spammer" or "farmer" too. The few of you getting all riled about this need to read the whole thing. Stereotypes can be wrong but without a modicum of truth to them they generally do not become stereotypes. And the reality is that the traits listed there, when combined together with a lack of reaction (or reactions that don't make sense), it is almost assured that you have a farmer on your hands. And if someone is going to follow that to the letter for the specific purpose of emulating a farmer, why should they expect anything different than the norm to which farmers have grown accustomed?

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Well, it is pretty easy to tell which characters are goldfarmers, especially if you notice them in the same spot every day. And if they're on 24 hours a day.

The best thing to do is to just report them to Blizz saying "I suspect that this person is a gold farmer", and they'll check up on them. Or not. I'm sure they're not going to ban someone who is a legitimate player; they have lots of ways of identifying this sort of behavior.

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I have run across a lvl 60 rouge making very calculated moves from lockbox to lockbox in the Wetlands. I wouldn't have cared, but I was on my rouge trying to level my lockpicking. >:(

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Gold Farmers/Bots are EVERYWHERE, i see them ALL THE TIME! Like at the bank, grocery store, even at my job ... I think my cube-neighbor is a gold farmer too!

When i was driving to work today for example, a Chinese man was driving in the right lane on the highway, doing the SPEED LIMIT. I immediately called 911 and /reported them.

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