WoW: Professional Farmers

[Dawg]

What is your experience with professional farmers? How do you recognize them? Do you do anything when you recognize them?

On the Earthen Realm server there are a couple of guilds that are merely fronts for professional farmers. The other night we were on a quest in the Hinterlands to collect some bottles from a beach. The beach is infested with lvl 50 turtles. There is a guy (lvl 54 rogue) running around just killing turtles and looting/skinning. I noticed a large number of unlooted bodies around. We spend some time collecting our bottles and killing turtles along the way. As a skinner, I would get to skin our corpses as we did so. One time, this joker runs up and steals one of the skins. I barked at him - he didn't respond but he didn't do it again. We recognized the guild name as one that is known for farming (Alliance side, guild name is "King") and realized he was just farming the turtles for their scales and leather. As we were finishing up our quest, he was apparently getting frustrated with the competition. He ran up to one of us and just said, "GO". Like he's giving us an order. We continued on our quest and eventually left the area.

This morning I returned and he is still there killing turtles. I wanted to kill a turtle, loot it, then wait for him to run up to skin it and then I would begin skinning as he approached. I figured it would frustrate the heck outta him. But the turtle are 2 lvls higher and tend to gang up on you so I thought better of it. But... I'll be back in a level or so to give him a headache...

FYI - the professional farmers basically play the game just to generate gold. This gold is then sold on websites and on eBay for real money. They try to corner markets in the AH. They tend to be rude, discourteous and insidious (e.g. rushing in to steal skins or chests while you are fighting mobs around them).

Dawg

[Chalybos]

Aren't the items/corpses locked to the victor's group? :? If not, then hopefully, with enough people suggesting it (hint hint) on their forums, they might take that into consideration. Big problem, and it can sour people. If I find someone farming in that respect, you know, the "GO" thing, I'll add them to my ignore list. And do whatever I can to spoil their attempts. :D Guess the two games aren't really all that different. :roll:

[Chairman_Kaga]

More fun it to leave crappy items on the corpse so they can't skin them. If I'm a high enough level, I will kill everything I can in the area and leave them with items on them. Being a priest, there are not many times I can kill faster than someone else in the area though.

Looting is locked to the victor/group. Skinning the corpse is not.

[Dawg]

Blizzard made a big announcement regarding professional farmers. They suspended about 1000 accounts over the weekend! I didn't mention his name because I didn't want to label someone as a farmer without more proof, but the guy from my story above was named Wallia - and he is gone from Earthen Ring! :D

I am amused by the myriad of posts chastising Blizzard for being ineffective in stopping farmers (along with every other issue). People think that there is some sort of magical way of determing who is a farmer and who is just grinding to feed their occupations or help guildmates. There are patterns, but identifying individuals takes time. Software can identify suspicious accounts but someone has to make the final arbitration. That requires human examination of the data. Blizzard banned/suspended 1000 accounts. That is a helluvalotta work. Kudos to them. As players, the only thing we can do is report suspected farmers. One GM ticket reporting a suspected farmer will not do anything. But if hundreds pour in from different players, it will raise a flag. Blizz can check their logs to check the player activity and make their own determination.

Dawg

[Chalybos]

Excellent. Glad to see Blizzard is handling the situation. Oh, to have the powers of a GM.....

[ignus]

wow im surprised they did that. what do they care if some jub wants to shell out $15/month to kill-harvest for hours on end? the better business strategy is to keep them. farmers wont be complaining about lack of new patches and content :roll:

[RuperT]

Yeah, I'm not really sure what all the hoopla is about farmers. The main objection (other than the fact that they kill everything) seems to be that they will amass large amounts of gold, which is sold to some schmoe on Ebay who proceeds to pay too much for some item that would normally sell for less, thereby inflating the economy? I'm not really sure I see how this is effectively different from the hardcore grinding 'legitimate' players or guilds who make a lot of cheddar and then send it to their pals or buy these inflated items themselves... :?