5-10g every 5 minutes? So if they do quests instead then they get 10-15g every 5 minutes... I still don't see the exploit. It's pure unadulterated anti-dwarfism.

@ Zhaoan

Don't think in terms of one or two quests, think hundreds if not thousands. These gold farmers are doing this thousands of times in a row. You cannot average a quest every five minutes repeatably. The travel time does not allow it. The more quests you do, the more this time increases. Darthregis is correct.

gold farmers farming chests? seriously? they steal people's accounts and rob them. this type of misinformation is why some people feel it's okay to buy from gold sellers. thinking you're buying gold that was farmed by a bot seems somehow more palatable than buying gold that was jacked off of someone's account that they worked for.

I thought you were limited to 5 instances an hour and then you're locked out. If so, quests still win out.

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tatsumasa Jun 5th 2009 6:08PM

gold farmers farming chests? seriously? they steal people's accounts and rob them.
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They do both. We've had 4 compromised accounts in our guild. 3 accounts appear to have been used to run bots / exploits in Shadow Labs. 1 account had multiple characters transferred to multiple other realms (with a ton of stuff in their mailbox). 2 of those 3 aforementioned accounts had characters that took their limit of guild bank items. 1 of those 3 accounts was reported for spamming gold ads. In all 4 cases, once the player had regained control of their account, characters had to be restored to include coin, gold, banks, etc. (although the mule account's characters had a lot of gold, lots of items in the mail, and their questing gear still equipped).

I remember when I first rolled a Horde alt and tried to run it through the instance in Ogrimmar, I totally sucked, and kept resetting the dungeon to start over. After the third or fourth time, however, it refused to reset, saying I'd done too many in a short time and would have to wait. So there's already mechanics in place to prevent abuse by farmers.

How are people getting their accounts compromised?
I see a couple of times a week whispers by people pretending to be from Blizzard, saying they're trialling upcoming mounts for free, just log into their phishing sites. But I sure hope nobody is stupid enough to do that. (Of course, if nobody was, they wouldn't bother trying, right? I sure hope everyone with younger or dumber relatives or friends reminds them never to believe something like that)

"But I sure hope nobody is stupid enough to do that."

Hahaha, you have far too much faith in humanity :P The people who do this sort of thing know very well that there are a lot of dumb people out there, otherwise they wouldn't waste their time.