I was going to say this guy was full of crap but when I saw the picture.... Your for real man, and you are awesome.
Felt like posting a status update. I'm now past 20 level 85 accounts, and I've really started to squeak out some extra gold on each account while fixing some of the issues that got me a couple bans. To date I've had 6 (I think) bans on 4 accounts. Not one has stuck, since I'm pretty sure it was a automated flag that got the account closed. Thanks to the new BG Buddy, my bots are now no longer farming 100% of their time online. They're better geared than ever, and I've found BG Buddy makes a healing spec bot #1/2 in every BG by healing charts. Ranged DPS isn't too shabby on it either, although I've yet to see a melee bot do well in BGs (tried feral druid/ret pally with no success). I'll probably post another status update in another week or two, hopefully by that point I'll have been able to make some gold sales to begin making these bots profitable.
Good stuff man, best of luck with that That said, I've used BGBuddy while it was in testing phase, and it was hit and miss for me as melee (I bot strictly with Ret Paladins and DKs in all of my accounts). I'd imagine it had a lot to do with group make up, but I'd say 70% of the time I was first/second, 30% below that. Full Ruthless (only took two days of BGBuddy per toon). EDIT: I just noticed your name. <3 Kaio.
Ret Pally on one faction, DK on another, same server, was my original plan. That way each account could be responsible for selling on its own server, isolated from the others. Swap between the two with ARelog. Lately, I've just been sticking to one faction because I'm worried about getting banned after unloading 100k+ gold. The last thing I want is to get banned during HALF of a big sell (one faction done, not the other). I'm planning my first major sells under the assumption that Blizzard does a full IP-wide ban on all my accounts (well, not all, since each computer worth of bots is on its own VPN), so that first sell has to be able to pay for new CD keys before I risk it.
Hey Kaio. I appreciate you bestowing your knowledge and experiences in this thread. My real life friend and I are thinking about to start a gold selling business with a setup like yours. So have you decided to just do a massive sale to Chinese gold sellers? We live in a huge city and are thinking we'll network locally to private buyers as well. Might even attempt to post on craigslist and sell powerlevels among the gold. Keep us updated, pal!
Just tried that today. In 2 hrs I had 2 WoW errors that crashed the game. I had to turn it back off ;(
I'm working on my own website at the moment to hopefully build up private gold sales. I've had experience building custom shopping carts with PayPal/Google Checkout integration from scratch, so I'm feeling pretty confident on making it a smooth experience. This time around I hope to include Bitcoin, and really push that payment method since it is irreversible (I know payment fraud is a huge issue for gold/powerlevelign). Similarly, I hope to start offering powerleveling (I have a few unused licenses at the moment, and a spare computer that could run on its own VPN). My goal is to make a plugin similar to BuddyCenter, and have it post updates to the website every few minutes so people can check the status of their powerleveling constantly. However, I'm currently planning on the first sales just being to chinese gold sellers. Private selling is obviously more profitable, but right now each bot 85 bot pulls ~10k/day. It will take quite some time for my own website to be able to generate enough traffic to move that volume of gold daily (we're talking a quarter million gold per day across all the accounts).
I've been lurking for a while. I had to say Thanks, kaiousama. This is an awesome thread, and it's a rare thing to see someone so open and articulate about their experiences here. Really inspirational stuff, too. Saved that bullet-point post on the first page for future reading if I ever do squirrel enough away to get started on my own little empire, haha. Can I ask how old you are? Pushing 27 next month and expected I'd have my own set of rigs like yours and the room to run them, but that college degree hasn't been nearly as lucrative as I'd expected. Humanitieslol.
25, with an AAS in Business Administration, emphasis on Accounting. Been working in the accounting field for four and a half years now. I would have had my BS and possibly my CPA license by now, but the last year has been full of starting up businesses and seeing what sticks, so there wasn't enough time to fit in courses. Used video game store (mostly on eBay, but I made a custom website setup that integrated my inventory with eBay), bitcoin mining, currently operating the second largest bitcoin pool (BTC Guild), World of Warcraft bots, and preparing to launch a VPS hosting company in the next two months (thats why there are two PowerEdge servers in my picture).
Fuckin' A, man. Did the AAS work prepare you and pay off, or did it end up just being the necessary paperwork to get into accounting? Thinking of throwing the worthless English BA out the window and going back to learn something a little more marketable, but if I'm just trying to better monetize my time, I don't know that any more education in a classroom is going to help me do any of that. Aaaaand, sorry for derailing.
Go get an engineering degree. Tons of engineering jobs out there Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I997 using Tapatalk
I went to a private college, and I believe it was well worth it. The school has lifetime work placement assistance, so if you don't have a job they do all the resume submitting for you and you'll just get a call for an interview. They required the teachers to be actively working in the field they teach, so my accounting courses were taught by accountants and CPAs. It was very different from what my friends experienced at city/state colleges. I'd definitely say an English BA is one of the less marketable degrees. Specialized fields [Accounting, Engineering, Law, Medical fields] are a great way to make sure you can land a job with your degree. That doesn't mean an English BA is worthless, it's just that a specialized field is generally cut off to anybody without a degree in that field, limiting the pool of applicants.
This was a very interesting read. Thanks for providing this much information regarding your operation. Users are always looking for ways to expand, adapt, and adjust their current setups. Seeing a little of what everyone else does inspires me to find ways to be more efficient. I've just started to run my sessions on a VPN for security reasons. It's great. As far as monitoring goes, how have you found the screencap > load to webserver working? Never heard of anyone doing that before but it seems viable.
The screencap -> webserver upload works pretty well for passive monitoring while I'm at work. It's hard to run 3 teamviewer sessions at work, since I bot at 3840x1080 (I tile my bots 4 per 1920x1080 screen, so I can quickly glance at my setup and immediately know if a bot is stuck without squinting). The amount of bandwith that takes is pretty bad, especially since two of them are through a VPN. I'm probably going to play around with my setup in the next month, since I've now hit max level on all but 2 bots (I had to reroll because I stupidly forgot to check how active the server/faction was). I picked high population realms, but sometimes the faction imbalance is so high that one side is dead (I think a /who 85 hunter [most common class] only returned 12 results at 6 PM on one server). Pretty bad when you look on the AH and there isn't a single stack of elementium or obsidium listed!
All my bots currently operate on US servers. I'm thinking about adding EU accounts though. Once the bots hit 85, I don't need to keep the windows as large, and CPU usage is minimal on HonorBuddy with GatherBuddy/BGBuddy compared to Questing. I figure I could run a full set of additional EU accuonts on each machine.