Professional Farmers

[kandrathe]

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Boycotting the AH is boycotting the medium, not the materials. Come up with a way to only buy from non-professional farmers if you want to hurt them.
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Well, I refuse to bite on your straw man. The internet, and e-mail is a tool misused. The parallel to what I was saying would be that I do not buy things from spammers, or internet porn purveyors. Both are true and in fact, in another parallel, I use legal means to identify and report TOS violators to ISP's who unknowingly house them. (see Spamhaus Project)

Back to WOW. I do buy from non-professionals, person to person or from people I know or who belong to a guild I know has integrity. Players tend to be guilded, they tend to have understandable character names rather than gibberish and they tend to sell a reasonable amount of materials at a time. If I see one account selling more items than a reasonable person would have at a time, I suspect them. I also look at the persons entire AH offerings. You can tell alot about where the person spent their time by looking at what they are selling. My suspicion is that many professional farmers are like the type Mirajj encountered. They stay non-stop in an area and return to the nearest mailbox once in awhile to funnel gold and goods to other accounts that manage the AH sales. And, the professional is willing to drop 20-30% off the normal price because they are dumping 10x more quantity onto the market. So, those AH deals that are too good to be true are probably making the professionals richer, screwing over the non-professionals who are offering a few items at the normal price, contribute to the inflation of unfarmed goods, and deflation of farmed goods.