Are Prenerf items bot-free?

From what i can say: Yes !

there was Bots farming Proph when Gold Crystaline swords dropped. there was a whole out post just full of bots i remember. but afaik these sold all the items just for platin because back then actually was worth something

i dont remember how the outpost was called but its like shiverpeak area

Yes. Bots have always dominated the more popular farm, and chest run spots.

Yeah bots back then we're just straight selling thats why I assume they nerfed player 1 white drops idk.

I'm not actually all that convinced that they are. Most of the botters used to be at places like Granite where you'd see tons of them following the same path out into Tascas. They were just farming gold and would sell the white/blues to merch and then sell the plat for $. If we look pre-factions they were farming trolls outside Droks or Ettins outside Beetle - at least from what I remember seeing. There certainly wasn't the type of botting that we're seeing now targeting things like Magmas Shields that the community as a whole was aware of. (With the exception of Colossal Scimitars if anyone remembers that trend....)

The juiciest drops just came from the Ascy ID1 collectors scalping Droks/LA/KC for the lucky few who had these items drop and the closely guarded strongbox secret early on in the games life. Things were a little different then as it wasn't all that hard to come across q8s in trade areas/gwg, there was always someone selling one. That does come with the odd exception of skins like Dead Bows and Sephis Axes which were insanely rare even back then. I imagine much of what we see today in these huge collections are from collectors of old like coldplay/herb/wasabi/carnage etc.

While certainly not bot free, not to the extent we see today. (IMO)

Quote from Crayon

(With the exception of Colossal Scimitars if anyone remembers that trend....)

LOL, I remember how excited I was when my first one dropped. It was like a mad rush in the guild I was in at the time for all the core players to get one.

I think I have half a dozen r9 ones now sitting in storage. I loved that skin for a long period of time.

Well there has been bots allways, sure there used be even alot more bots than now probably, i remember 55hp undead farm in kryta full of bots, then elona reach bots, ofc droks was a thing until loot scale nerf..

But after factions release when large part of q7/8 dropped, there were alot bots farming i think the most iconic that comes to my mind is jade brotherhood knights, Marketplace used be FULL of bots farming, and from those alot rare skinned q7/8 items dropped that werent sold only for platinum, then mantids outside nahpui had same thing..

Anyhow, for os item market i think from q7/8 majority is from the actual players.. keeping in mind there were 3-4 million active accounts in 2006..

Quote from ardunain

yea but most of them were playing game, not farming one spot.

I dont see why it would matter, considering q7/8 etc items used to drop everywhere so you didnt need to farm some specific location for one, but they dropped while you just normally played through the game

Quote from Pleikki

I dont see why it would matter, considering q7/8 etc items used to drop everywhere so you didnt need to farm some specific location for one, but they dropped while you just normally played through the game

^ This TBH.

My point above was that I don't think bots targeted q7/8s like OS items are targeted now. They wanted the gold to sell plat where I'm sure that any decent q7/8/9's they found along the way made its to the market (let's not forget perfect q9s were not cheap back then either).

I think Plekkis point is that there were literally millions of players back then and that it's far more likely these items dropped for players just normally playing the game which I agree with. Let's not also forget that while many bots did the boring/easy farms over and over again, many players did exactly the same farms as well.

Quote from ardunain

Yea what both of you said makes sense, especially with that drops being targeted. Today its diffrent case, botters seem to target rarest skins like goth, outcast and even magmas now.

My guess is volume trumped rarity then. It was easier to farm for plat since that more or less drove the economy outside of high end trades. The player base was huge then, now I'd guess there are less than 50k active players if that. Some of the items I buy today would have been merched then pay xx e for today. I always was more attracted to green items then than rare items back in the day.