The rest is obtained by bots that they run en masse which really mess up the game for everyone else. Back when I played wow, I could have sworn that there were

The rest is obtained by bots that they run en masse which really mess up the game for everyone else. Back when I played wow, I could have sworn that there were a few botters that would use something like Auctioneer to make money by buying things that were undervalued for resale. So I tested out my theory (this was just post-BC) I created several dummy characters on my account and loaded them up with spare boar meats that I had farmed. 2 boar meats for 100 gold, so 50 gold a pop. I would constantly send the meats to newly created characters and start putting them on the auction house, 50 gold each. What this did was over the period of a week and maybe 15 characters (I'm not sure the actual number), I artificially raised the perceived value of the meats, so when I started putting them up for 200 gold for each stack of 10, I literally couldn't farm enough of them to keep them in stock as they were always bought by the same couple of people (botters?). The botters aren't infallible, you can break them - but I do agree that it's hard to compete with a 24x7 player, especially when you only played 2 hours at night yourself.