Do gold farmers really hurt the game?

[Fursphere]

Before the knee-jerk "omg" response come out, lets really take a look at this.

Gold Farmers - They mine / skin / gather up pretty much everything they can, then sell it for a profit, probably via the AH most of the time.

Over the last few days, I've been leveling up blacksmithing on my warrior from scratch.

At first, I decided to buy up stuff on the AH, then when I hit IRON, I'd go farm it with my hunter (375 miner).

I made a few runs while watching a movie, and in about an hour and a halfs time of straight farming, I had gathered up something like 40 ore. :shocked:

Considering it takes something like 600 iron ore to level up blacksmithing, it quickly became obvious that this was a futile effort. (iron and steel smelting).

So I go to the AH, and spend like 60 - 70g buying up iron bars. Maybe from legitmate players, maybe from farmer bots. Who knows. Who cares? I got what I wanted in the play time I had.

So.. 15hours of farming.. or 1 hour of grinding on outlands to make enough gold to buy the materials I need. I didn't buy gold, I earned it, then used it to buy mats. (and thats just for the iron portion of Blacksmithing.. we won't even bring up Mithril or Thorium here.. :undecided: )

If there was no farmers, would legitimate players honestly spend all their time farming?

I know the majority of this forum's community is 100% against farmers, but do they really hurt the game?

Or do they help it, but providing what the players need via the AH, because lets face it, raw farming for some things is just a horrible waste of time.

Just my $0.02.

[Stigg]

Hears the flaw in your otherwise awesome story.

What about the guy that went to a website, put in his CC info, bought 1k gold, bought all that iron, mithril, [insert name of high level ore] and got to 375 in less than 5 minutes?

[Tanitha]

Fursphere, what do you consider a "gold farmer"? Is that somebody who simply mines, skins or grinds their way to money and sells the product on the Auction House to gain gold for personal use? Or are you referring to the more sinister gold sellers?

[meikyo]

Well, there was a time I didn't think it hurt much. Figured some people just didn't have the time to spend and they wanted some fast gold for virtual uh...gratification.

Some months ago my two level 70 toons were stripped of all their equipment, everything was vendored and around 3k+ gold was mailed of to who knows where. From there I was banned for around a week shortly after submitting a gm ticket pending investigation for suspicious activity on my account. That's not gold farming you say? Maybe not but I can make a good guess where that gold went. So anyway, yeah that hurt a little, even though I did eventually get everything back I felt so violated!

Even if they are farming mats massively and placing them on the ah, people are buying gold because they exist and then pretty much raising the prices on everything else and please don't tell me it evens out.

If there was no farmers, would legitimate players honestly spend all their time farming?

Well yeah...if there were no farmers...there'd be stuff to farm. What's the point really farmer's aren't really considered contributing players so they're more like um..parastites, bacteria...aliens?

[Fursphere]

I dont' really have a good counter-argument there... He's compensating his (assumed) lack of play-time with money, that he earned in the real world instead of spending that same time in game farming materials?

Player A has the ability to play 16 hours a day.
Player B has the ability to play 1 hour a day.

Player A (assumably) has no job, just plays WoW all day.
Player B (assumably) has a job, and makes real money. He decides to trade that money for gold.

The only "hitch" I see here is when Player A spends 16 hours a day playing WoW AND buys gold... then he's really messing up the economy.

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But on the flipside, if you take gold famers out of the game entirely...

Now joe-shmoe (me!) wants to level blacksmithing up. There are no farmers feeding the AH, you have to farm the stuff yourself.

See you in 6 months.... maybe. In the mean time, that guy with 16 hours a day to play is rockin it up in raids or farming his butt off getting far superiour gear.

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All I'm saying is that there shoudl be some sort of balance between people who have restraints on game play, and those who don't. I'm not talking about a 50/50 split here. (the rested XP is nice, but means nothing at endgame, where most of WoW is played anyway).

But something.

[Aerath]

You again.

No. Just no.

Now stop pissing me off.