Many of you know that money is riding on in MMO games, but not everyone realizes how huge amounts of money ordinary players can earn.
In 2019, World Of Warcraft: Classic was launched — a game that completely turned my attitude towards MMOs and almost allowed me to earn enough for an apartment in Moscow. But let's talk first things first.
Who Are Pixel Sellers and How Do They Make Money on Games
In a narrow circle, we jokingly call ourselves suppliers of virtual values. In fact, we sell people pixels for a lot of money. The main clientele is foreign players. They can easily spend $100-$300 on in-game currency or some item.
These are one-day deals. There could be more or less of them:
We can provisionally divide people who make money in games into three groups:
Resellers are those who buy currency from gold farmers and sell it to buyers. I don't know exactly how much a reseller makes, but many people think they are worms in the RMT ecosystem. They live at the expense of us and get money by price speculating on exchanges.
Legitimate (or manual) farmers are players who sit for 12-16 hours a day and mine gold with their hands. One such farmer can earn $100 and over per day.
Bot farmers are people who have automated the farming process with their own or purchased software. A good and competent bot farmer can earn $50 000 a month.
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Now let's dive into this article...
How I Was a Bot Farmer in World of Warcraft
At first, I farmed with my hands with multi-boxing, and I earned about $3 000 a month. Now it seems to me that these are pennies, but at that time they already seemed like millions.
Multiboxing is playing with five characters at the same time. You press a key on one window, and it repeats to four others.
However, my main character was banned several times, and it was decided to look for some alternative. I no longer wanted to live on 30 000 rubles a month. At that time, my friend started testing the bot, and I got into this gamble.
My first "farm" looked like this and brought in about 3-4 thousand gold per day (at those prices, it was $90-120).
For the first little while I sold gold to resellers — they paid instantly, and there was no need to pay a fee to the exchange. It worked for me.
Gold was getting cheaper, and my revenues were falling. I started power-level characters with the help of bots: the main character farms the dungeon on the software, and I introduce and remove the power-level character.
After a month of such power-leveling, I realized that it takes too much time. It takes about 10 calendar days for one character. I level up only 3 characters per month and increase my income by $50-80 per day (gold falls in price).
Therefore, I bought a bot that automates power-leveling in the open world. In the photo on the left are the characters who farm the gold in the dungeon for sale, and on the right are the "babies" who have work to do when they are all leveled up.
Somewhere up to March 2021, I had about 15 bots that brought $250-300 per day (10-15 thousand gold at the rate of $20-25 per 1 000 units).
Here is my PayPal statement for January: at that time I was already selling gold on a special exchange.
Some money always remained there, since the confirmation takes three days, and there was no need to unnecessary withdraw them:
As early as March, I knew about server rental and decided that it was time to expand. Power-leveling in the open world, as before, did not work for me. The characters were reported by other players, and the lifetime was significantly reduced. Therefore, I leveled packs through bots in dungeons.
This saved time for power-leveling and increased the life of the characters, but the business is not easy and pleasant. You have to keep track of several packs at once and take them out after the character leveled up, and then introduce them back.
One person can follow 5-6 such packs at the same time (that's 20-24 ready-made characters) and not go cuckoo. Never tried again. In a month it was possible to make somewhere two sets of 5-6 packs.
In May, the Burning Crusade Classic Pre-Patch was released, after which all public and semi-public bots stopped working. Blizzard somehow contacted the developer of an unlocker (software that allows bots to work) and waged a finger. The developer off-handedly handed over the HWIDs and IPs of all his clients and drove off with our money into the sunset.
Banned characters, no bots, gold rises in price, panic, crisis, meltdown. However, I was lucky, and the Chinese reseller brought a semi-private (for EU servers) bot. In addition, Blizzard is introducing a boost up to level 58, which means that you don’t need to power-level anymore.
Since June 2021, this bot has brought me $1 000 or more every day. Essentially, everything was withdrawn to Payoneer, but something flew to PayPal and Webmoney.
For non-believers, here is a bank statement: the main peak of income was in June-October.
Citibank means transfers from Payoneer. Transfers are WMZ exchangers or withdrawals from a Payoneer to friends' cards.
There were up to 150 active bots on my farm — that's up to 30 remote computers.
About Bans and Losses
Income is good, but it is worth talking about bans. Bans waves began about six months ago. If earlier the average lifetime of a bot was 2-3 weeks, and the characters managed to make a profit, now a ban sign may appear on the second day:
Blizzard, like any other company, is not happy with the fact that there are a million (and there are really a lot) bots in the game. They irritate legitimate players, and the credibility of the company falls.
Some get banned so often that they are surprised when bots live more than 1 day.
Sometimes you can get a ban on a character that has never been launched on bots:
Notification of measures applied to the account
Bot farmers used to save money and did payments via Tinkoff or PayPal, but over the past six months, this has also become more difficult to do.
Spending on Сonsumables
Accounts, dedicated servers, bots, proxies — these are all consumables that flew away at a breakneck pace. For a long time, it turned out to return about 80% for accounts, until Blizzard managed to catch on.
- The price of one account: $50 for the character leveling up (one-time) and $10 for a one-month subscription;
- Dedicated servers from $7 per day, if bought per the day, or $67-$116 for a month;
- Bots cost from $20 per key for one window per month (I was lucky, my bot cost $20 for unlimited on one PC). But the average is $30-$40;
- Proxy — from $2 for one.
$1 500-$2 500 per month were spent on subscriptions, bots, and dedicated servers. It would be cheaper with own stuff. $8 300 were spent on buying boosts for accounts. I returned something through PayPal and Tinkoff.
I've never thrown away all my money on characters. I had a rule: I put two dedicated servers (10 characters), got my money back, and put some more. Thus, I minimized the chance of getting burned for $8 300 rubles and being left with nothing.
Conclusion
Is it possible to make money on World of Warcraft now? Someone is still gold farming, but it's really the groundhog day: you wake up, check accounts, and replace half of the banned characters. Many really run at a loss.
I still have a small farm of 10 windows, but this is more like fooling around before they get banned. It brings in $50 a day and takes up my time rather than providing a carefree life.
If you're wondering: is it worth rushing in now? No, it's not worth it. But somewhere in a year and a half, another update will be released and, perhaps, everything will be different.
In fact, you can make money in any popular MMO with automation. I know people who made several million on dupes in New World and we are talking about a couple of months. Lost Ark, which was released by Amazon from mail.ru, is still being forced. I can't tell the numbers, because I don’t communicate with farmers from there, and the game has just appeared only for the EU.
