What’ll be interesting to see is if anything changes in the game in the coming months. Like others have commented on my previous posts, there are other bots besides Glider, including many private ones. Additionally, many of the characters who are doing the “botting” are physically controlled by Asian farmers, who some argue constitute much of the “botter” community.

Will we see a rise in prices of WoW commodities on the auction house as a result of this ban? Were Gliders really producing a lot of the commonly-traded goods, and the economy is seeing a contraction of supply as a result of their termination? Not likely. World of Warcraft has upwards of 12 million players worldwide, and I doubt that there are enough people affected by this decision to make a noticeable impact on the game economy.

If anyone has any accurate data on the prices of major WoW trade goods across multiple servers, please let me know. I’m considering writing a script that will pull data from WoWEcon.com and show a graph of price changes along with major WoW-community events (bots getting shut down, WoW patches, etc.). Would anyone be interested in seeing something like this?

While no official statistics could be found, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of botters use Glider. After all, it’s the most widely used bot that has sold a few hundred thousand copies (according to information that came up in court). On the other hand, many of the gold farming operations in Asia do everything by hand with extremely cheap labor (see this preview of an interesting documentary). So, if Glider has been deemed to be infringing upon Blizzard’s copyright whenever it’s in use, does this give Blizzard a right to shut down the sale of Glider? If so, would this drive supply of gold down and shoot prices up? Or will the hard-working Chinese prevail and keep prices down for us lazy players?