Future of Auction House in WoW

Before I start, just to mention, I am using  this video for two purposes, to show the GM who will hopefully watch this because I will put  the video link in the ticket and for my viewers to actually see that there is no point in doing  one of the best gold making methods which is auction house flipping. Things that I am about to  show you in this video will shock you for sure, and its more than enough to help our community  and many others with a little help of one good GM. But, let's start from beggining.

The original  idea of this video was to make a lvl 1 character, send him bags and 100k gold and show what items  to buy and resell to earn a good amount of gold within 24 hours of playing. But that didn't work  for me because I encountered several bots that do this 24/7. So, after 2 days of playing,  I managed to earn about 10k gold with 100k, which is almost nothing that these bots earn per  day.

So this video will probably never appear on this channel. I'm going to show you two different  bots, both bots actually work in the background of someone computer, and they monitoring the  progress of botting every few hours. To make it easier to explain, I will rename the bots so  that in the rest of the video the first bot will be called bot a and the second bot b.

And just  so you know, later when discovering bot b, I managed to communicate with a person who actually  admitted to me and explained what and how this whole disgusting process works. After the poor  results of my canceled Auction House Flip video, I was thinking. How to prove that they are bots. 

So, I bought some of the most needed materials and put ridiculously low prices on some of them just  to show you that most of the time it's always the same buyers, the bots. And my first suspect was  player Hairyhenryh who is always in Ironforge and infront of Auctioneer. I managed to sell him a few  gems and he was always the first to buy them and his character is basically AFK all the time.

If  we look at his statistics on the warmane armory, then we see that his purpose is to obviously  buy some list of items at cheap prices and after spending all the gold or after a person comes  to the computer to check the botting status, then he stops everything and sends the items by  mail to one of his characters. He bought more than 40k auctions which is nuts, and sent over 6k items  with mailbox. Pause the video and check Ironforge right now on Warmane Icecrown.

He is still here,  AFK, and doing the same shit again. Over and over… And when I recorded everything about bot a, I  saw 3 names buying my other stuff too. Always the same players, let's see what it's all about. 

And then I discovered a slightly more advanced bot b. This time it's actually one player, but  using 3 different characters, I'm guessing each of them buys a different list of items. For example,  one buys orbs, second one herbs, third minerals, etc.

But bot b didn't just buy and wait for the  player's interaction to take all mail in bags, and start the bot process again and again, it does  everything automatically. Even walked to the same place every time to pick up mail, and back again  to repost items and earn gold. I tried to talk to him, invite him into a group and no response at  all.

No matter how much auctions I post he buys it and repost every single time. But later in  the evening, on the same day, I saw him doing the same thing again and again. I tried to talk  to him again and he answered.

Finally, let's hear his explanation of what he does. At first I told  him to stop and that I would report him. Then he started with the story that he doesn't do anything  prohibited, and that the only thing he uses here is a button from his smart mouse that he has  that starts a macro with several macros ingame and modified TSM addon.

Since he was so open to me  from beginning, I started to act dumb and asking him more and more question just to find out every  single information I could. And he was opening to me like a book. Providing me links and guides how  to do the same thing like he does.

He says that he put a lot of effort into making this bot, and he  actualy seems like a good guy so If you wathing this, I’m sorry bro, for exposing you, but you  have to be banned, with all of your account and be gone forever from Warmane. He even gives me  5k probably think that this will keep me shush, but I am actually giving this 5k and adding  another 5k to 10k to first person to whisper me ingame with a message “imagine warmane without  bots one day”. So what to do to fix this.

Actually bot a and bot b can be easily banned along with  their IP connected accounts and with inspecting what mails and gold transfers, coins transfers  went to who and ban all together all included. I think I have enough footage in this video, even  a confession from bot b. If need all unedited footage, contact me on mail on youtube.

To prevent  other Auction House bots I have some ideas, but I’m not sure if Warmane staff will  implement any of that. One of them is to disable macros. Lot’s of this is actually done  with macros ingame, and if you enable them only for players with 3k achievment points or 5k  you would get rid of this low level bots.

90% of bots wouldn’t even be able to do anything  without macros. And bot players would need to use their main account for botting and would  potentially compromise their BIS characters. Once I catch them on their main account if they dare  to bot, they will be gone forever.

Another thing to prevent this is creating your own client which  can’t be modified. I’m also happy to hear what do you think what should Warmane GM’s do to remove  all Auction House bots. Ideas and suggestion in comment section below.

One more thing which can  be done is renaming auctioneers into some random names so bot macros couldn’t target them. And  not only once. Every few minutes, so you have to mouseover that npc auctioneer, and right click on  him so you can open up auction house.

In this way, macros for targeting and interracting with  auction house wouldn’t work like they work now, even from walls. I’m sure there is a way how to  handle this situation, with implementing new bot protections or just faster way of reporting them,  so you don’t need to wait few days for a response of a GM and in the meantime, bots already deleted  their low level characters and started to do this again on some fresh accounts and characters. Last  thing what I wanna say is please share this video with your friends.

Your guild, your friends ingame  or in real life who play World of Warcraft. So, more wow players can see this problem and maybe  come up with a best solution not just for Warmane, for every single private server, even  retail. I’m sure they are having the same problem.

And I’m still not done, there  are more and more players doing this botting, so if you care for your characters on Warmane,  delete your browsing history, because I’m coming for you. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and  see you again in some other IngameTips video.