What they do is screw blacksmiths and engineers who need the gems and arcane crystals. Rich thorium only spawns in a few zones, and it's permacamped by farmers.

R, can you tell me what you mean by "permacamped"? Does that mean a farmer staying right in the area, or doing the kind of thing that Copfe does?

Permacamped means that the so-called farmer is stratigically staying nearby an array of mining nodes. He/she knows when they will spawn since he was the one mining them last. Each node has a certain respawn time and as the farmer moves into a circle to increase efficency he can always hit them as they are just respawning to increase probability of success. Oftentimes you find several farmers belonging to one organization farming the same nods to make it look like several people are farming it instead of one group.

WoW doesn't have all that many things to do at the endgame. Once upon a time my smith would enjoy riding around Burning Steppes mining, and then making nice weapons. Then it got to the point that mining was futile since I couldn't compete with groups of farmers all doing laps around the zone 24/7. I had one less thing to do at the end game.

The train-vanish tick you describe is well known in the rogue forums, and it's refered to as a common farmer tool. I've had it done to me before as well, but, since I was a rogue too, I just returned the favor, knowing his vanish was gone.

Anyway, I'd vote it was intentional.

It would be interesting to break down your stats for farmer-specific data (ie assume anyone who is on for more than 50 hours a week is a farmer -- even if they're not a "real" farmer based in China, high school kids spending a long time on are de facto farmers)

- What classes do they prefer?
- What zones do they prefer?
- Do they ever run instances?

In response to Indigo above, here are things I've noticed on Gorgonnash:

- They prefer Rogue or Warrior classes. I've seen several Paladin farmers on Alliance side as well.

- They prefer to farm in Azshara and the E/W Plaguelands (specifically Hearthglen in WPL and Tyr's Hand). These are also some of the zones where rich thorium veins spawn.

- Yes, they will solo farm instances. There's a farmer guild on my server, and if you /who the guild name, you'll see that they are all in the aforementioned farming zones or Uldamann.

Aside from the Vanish trick, which I have little doubt was an attempt to drive you away, I think you were lucky with Nepili. She wasn't farming the quest objective mob(s) like so many others do.

For an anectodal example, I was on my alt helping a player on her primary character to finish the quest to kill Lord Shalzaru. He's in the back of a cave full of other Naga and when we arrived there was a 60 Mage using AoE to kill and loot many at once. This, as you suggested, made getting to the back of the cave quite easy. That was fine, but when we got to the Lord the Mage ran ahead of us and killed him.

Okay, just wait for respawn, right? Nope. This Mage wasn't budging even though there were plenty of respawns at the other end of the cave to AoE. I sent a polite /tell asking her to allow us to finish the quest. Her broken English response tranlsated, to the best of my understanding, to "who are you to tell me what to do?". I explained that we were on a quest and that once we got the kill we'd be out of her way. Silence (incomprehension?). She wasn't going to move and there's little chance of beating Mage AoE (instant) in a mob-tagging race. So I told her I would call a GM to settle it and she immediately got up and left.

Lesson learned. I can't remember how many quests I've dumped because one or more farmers dominated the spawn (lots). But now I know that the mention of "GM" will likely be understood and feared. Just need to politely ask them to do the right thing before actually calling a GM just in case it comes to that -- they look over the conversation log.

I've found myself frustrated with farmers to the point where I've given up hunting for a resource and reported them to a GM.

I'm very surprised to hear your experience Ted. Mentioning a GM to a few farmers who have 'griefed' me in the past has done very little. Perhaps they realise that the GM is going to take hours to respond?

Either way, I experienced a Warlock farmer (which is an unusual class for a farmer in itself) who kept banishing the Elementals I was killing. I politely asked why they were doing it and if they would please stop and eventually had a single line response which I could not decypher, but which appeared to be in a foreign language.

This farmer tried to offer me the item I was hunting for "15g" as well as attempting to group with me and duel me, both of which I ignored.

(I wonder now if they wanted to group because they thought I was after the kills for a nearby quest and they wanted me out of the way?)

I told them that I would report them to a GM and did so. It didn't seem to make any difference and I was already frustrated with the low drop-rate on the item I was after, so I left.

A GM did eventually let me know they were investigating (I'm glad they have chat logs) but I noticed that the farmer was in the same zone night after night and had not been banned.

Having played MMORPGs for a while, I can't say I've ever been as frustrated with non-communicating "resource campers" like I have in WoW. I really do wonder how many of them are selling their items for real $US.

More thoughts:

"Farmers" as they are referred to here, (AKA resource hogs who grief other players and do not communicate) tend to play classes that solo well or are very survivable.

On my server they are mainly Rogues but you do see Paladins and the odd Hunter or even some other class.

On another note, I don't care less what race somebody is but doesn't it anger you folks that people play on an English-based realm who cannot write a word of English?

There are many foreign language servers available. It leads me to the conclusion that they are on the server for another purpose other than playing with English-speaking players. Most probably for "gold selling" and no other purpose.

And by way of an update, I just had a more recent, far less pleasant encounter with a pair of farmers. As part of the Linken quest chain, I was trying to get the drops off some Toxic Horrors in Felwood. There were two level 60 dwarf hunters there, along with their pets. Frankly, there are not that many spawn locations for the Toxic Horrors, and the combination of hunter tracking, a pet (they could station the pet at one spawn, and themselves at another), and much greater familiarity with when and where the mobs were likely to spawn, meant that they were able to deny me access to even a single mob for 20 minutes. If they had been other players, the competition would have been similar, but they would have gotten their items and moved on.

Frustrating.

Dave, it's true that I may have encountered an exception. Other farmers may realize that they have little to fear from a GM report. I think it's still worth a try.

Eric, yes it's frustrating. It's a return to the horrid EQ camp fight mentality. Blizzard did very well in designing most of the game so that resource (mob) competition is minimal. But towards the end-game they apparently couldn't find an alternative method of making resources scarce and slowing down acquisition of needed drops.

Those were probably not the IGE type of farmers. More likely they were normal players trying to get Essence of Water, which has a relatively high drop rate from Toxic Horrors, either for their own use or for AH profits. You'll see the same behavior at other resource choke-points like the fire elemental spawns. In the latter locations I've seen and heard of "uber" guilds dominating the spawn so they can get the ingredient for greater fire protection potions -- pretty much must-have for Onyxia, MC, and BWL.

(By the way, you must have meant a different quest. The Linken quest series needs the heart from one of the walking trees, not anything from the Toxic Horrors. But I know there's another quest for those elementals.)

Felwood is especially bad. So bad that, other than Linken's quest and Timbermaw faction, I skipped the whole zone altogether with my most recent alt. Even that little bit was frustrating: It took five camp visits over a period of three weeks (I had to "recharge" my tolerance after each attempt) to get enough Timbermaw faction to go through to the next zones safely. Level 60s were crawling all over the Furbolg camps wiping them clean because the faction gained allows for high-level crafting recipes. One time I even had a Hunter tag a bunch of mobs, run to me, and feign death so they'd switch to attacking me.

There has to be a better way to design resource scarcity without creating EQ-like camp fighting behavior.

Ted: (Yes, you're right. I was doing the Linken quest and needed to travel from Winterspring to Tanaris. Since my hearthstone was set to Gadgetzan but had 15 minutes until it was usable, I decided to do the side quest that involves Toxic Horrors.)

Actually, I'm pretty sure at least one was the IGE type. The only communication I received from him was a sentence of Chinese (probably Mandarin).

We're in complete agreement about how to generate appropriate scarcity.

I don't quite understand how you guys distressed by farmers running at you and vanishing. Farmers training mobs onto people that are in the way is well known, and spans across all manner of MMORPG (lineage + lineage 2 esp) .

But fortunately Blizzard has made sure that a mob will return to its spawn point, as long as you have no generated hate towards it, and it only has an aggro range when stationary at its spawn.

So the only way a train could work in WoW was if you run up and AoE / strike the mobs, or heal the rogue who is about to vanish.

Basically the farmers have no power other than to get to mobs/nodes before you, or spam you with chatter that is ignorable ingame.

Tim, that doesn't seem to match my very limited experience, nor the consensus of others I've talked to. I certainly understand that mobs which have abandoned a chase frequently "evade" while returning to their spawn. Is it possible that if the rogue draws them close without pulling them from their regular wandering range, that the technique works?

Can some reader address this more definitively?

As a shaman, all it takes is a single heal on myself, within aggro range of any of those mobs, and i will generate hate. So essentially, as soon as i heal myself, the hunter/rogue and vanish/feign death and i will have a nice big train of mobs on me.

After further thought, I believe that a mob switches to evade when (1) no one is on it's hate list, and (2) it's out of its normal wandering area. So a rogue can pull a mob to the edge of his normal area and vanish, or can wait until someone is doing something to generate agro, like healing or bandaging, and vanish/feign even outside the normal wandering area.