Diablo 3 Botters and Gold Farmers are not what you think.

If we were to ask an honest gamer how he thinks the gold is farmed by professionals, they would imagine a group of Asian players grinding the game for 8 hours a day to make as much as possible for just a few dollars. This is the general impression running around the internet but the truth is much scarier.

In a recent article published on a pcgamesn.com, the operations of a gold farm have been revealed. Several picture show how this shady business is run by a single individual.
As it turns out there is no shirtless Asian player clicking like a mad man to earn gold. The images show a sophisticated setup of hundreds of computers lined up on racks running the game. They used automated farming bots to do all the work with little intervention from the supervisor. These machines have strong enough configurations to run at least 7 instances of the game.

In the picture, the poster counted at least 30 machines, totaling at least 210 boxed Diablo 3 sessions. According to some approximations, a well optimized bot can earn 500k gold per session. If we do the math, the 210 instances of the game would earn around 105 million gold per hour. Moving forward with the math, we estimate that the average price per million would be an even $1,4 meaning that these 30 computers generate $147 per hour or $3528 per day.

These bots can run 24/7 without stopping, they will never complain, ask for a raise or consume space. It is a carefully planned operation running on a serious investment. The desktops used must have required at least $10.000 but if we look back at the price of gold during the first weeks since the launch, the investment was recovered in one day. It is a serious business and unless Blizzard does something about it, it can ruin the game completely. We have seen the negative impact of all this gold being thrown into the game. Inflation caused the depreciation of gold. The botters brought this upon themselves as they are the only ones to be blamed for this depreciation.

To get a better understanding how serious this business really is, an individual running such an operation participated into an anonymous interview with a known YouTuber. The botter admitted that he is running around 100 sessions of the game, earning him 60 million gold per hour. According to him, with one account he can have two farming sessions as the Diablo 3 client allows him to run an instance for the Americas and one for Europe.

So far, Blizzard has approached this problem from the wrong angle. They nerfed drops, zones and any other element that could be farmed for decent amounts of gold. Blizzard never made public their possible intentions to improve their hack preventing system called Warden to stop these practices. Since there is no official communication of such an approach at the moment.

 

"hack preventing system called Warden to stop these practices"

All warden does it scan your processes for lines of code of KNOWN published bots. Many of these gold farmers (including the one in the video you was referring to) program their own bots, and don't share it with anyone.

Also, blizzard doesn't care to awful much about diablo post launch/reviews. They don't make any more money beyond that initial sale. Similar to how Jagex doesn't care about F2P runescape.

"They nerfed drops, zones and any other element that could be farmed for decent amounts of gold" No they didn't. They have only been increasing drop rates since launch. Wheres your source?

And to top it off, increasing drop rates is how blizzard is dealing with this. If you can farm your legendary in a few runs, you won't go buy gold to nab it off the AH.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/28/let-there-be-loot-diablo-3-increases-high-end-item-drop-rates/

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6214196/

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7528695/7528695#items

 

That's how they do it for all games really..

 

I ran 140 sorc garden bots from all dedi although investing in actual hardware is a lot more profitable in the long term.

I hope OP doesn't hate me with a fiery passion =D

 

Bitchin. See, the thing with me is that I have a garage full of computer parts that I can throw together for some botting machines.. The problem is I do not have scripts or bots and I do not play any games that people trade things on...




ALSO, apparently the Chinese people running that specific farm above have never heard of a KVM switch.. There's absolutely no need for that many monitors, keyboards, and mice...

 

I feel for the midgets who control the bottom ones. If there are no midgets, may got have mercy on their backs.

 

They probably buy them wholesale at really cheap prices. Then when they upgrade they sell the old hardware as "tested gaming machines" for a profit.

Honestly what the OP missed was the dangerous end of the gold farming practice. Many companies hack accounts, clean them, then bot them until they are banned. This is what hurts everyone. The player lose their account, contact customer support (costing the companies money), and in blizzards case, they hunt down where the gold went, delete it (harming the gold farmers who bought the "dirty" gold), then return it to the players.

And when i say hack, i mean hack. A lot of these Chinese goldfarmers hack fansites, steal their login databases, then hop over to diablo/wow to see which users were stupid enough to use the same email/password.

Since the OP left it out, ill post the videos where you learn about this. They are from a guy called Markeedragon, a great wow player.

Interview with a "professional" gold farmer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I

Interview with a diablo 3 botter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=8NUQTATy5dc&v=Y5AHWI8B97k

Interview with the people that try to cockblock bots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=PWvHcoqru7I&v=ouXSS_HKPs8

 

Exactly how RuneScape is dying.