I did farm a lot on WOW back during cataclysm in the honorbuddy days. An account cost about 100 bucks (I'd buy already leveled ones cause the expansions and all cost me about $100 and I could get a max level shit character for $110 or even $100) and would make me $100 bucks back in a week. Used gatherbuddy with all protection paladins, decked out in resilience pvp gear, with a pvp fighting routine. They would farm 24/7 in premade waypoint paths in like ungoro crater for herbs and ore. I would spread across a few servers, few different farm areas. Gatherbuddy was great, you could have it log off after x time for y amount of time and repeat, it would hearth and mail things when bags were full. The best was when players would attack me, if you couldnt kill a full protection paladin stacked in resilience you'd be dead, and it happened a lot lmao and this was a fucking bot owning you.
Anyway yeah it would hearth on full bags, mail everything to my mule alt, then depending on how lazy I was feeling you could turn the ore into jewelcrafting and herbs into potions but most of the time i bulk listed it in the auction house and/or i found private buyers that I could just spam COD mails to. Youd then put all that gold into a guild bank, and buy a vanilla account (no expansions) and setup a buy with an asian buyer. Regular players didnt buy the amount of gold I made so I had to sell to asians at a little loss but they took it all. I'd invite my vanilla character to the guild, promote him to guild master and leave, then youd invite the asian and he'd take it out of the bank, and pay me. You'd end up getting banned on the vanilla, and depending how much gold they might trace it back to a farmer or two.
By the end of my farming I was up to 20 accounts making 2k a week. I forget the gold to usd ratio but I remember I would routinely move more than a million gold a week and that was a HUGE flag and it wasnt abnormal to lose a farmer or two cause of it but the money was worth it and you could just go back to playerauctions buy a new character and get on with life. I used to also play 3v3 and 5v5 arena and would use that gold to buy all my team mates the darkmoon cards and best BOE's. Eventually I showed a RL friend how to do this and he worked his way up to 15 accounts, and we got lazy and decided to use one vanilla account (instead of two separate one for me one for him diff IPS) for both of our sales and that ended up getting us wiped out, banned everything. As for how much time it took? I'd say it took me about 2 hours a day to clean out my mailbox, move materials into gold and stock it up. Then I had asian farmers on aol instant messenger (hehe) that would always ask me if I had more to sell and would be ready at moments notice, so selling took 10 minutes.
I did use VPNs which was hilarious because a few times I got banned I'd call up saying I dont know what happened, and they'd tell me a known hacker VPN accessed my account and hijacked it for gold farming, then they unbanned it. I got an account unbanned 7 times. I could never get any of my main pvp accounts unbanned once but DAMN 7 times on a farmer account.
So yeah I think that lasted me a few months of farming, after that they started cracking down on accounts that played more than 24 hours, they also seemed to track pathing, and even though I made my own paths not the public ones, they'd still hit me, so I wondered if it was the amount of ore or herb per hour I was farming so I lowered that as well but they kept nailing us. One time I activated a vanilla account that I was going to use to sell gold, and I went to bed so I could do the sale in the morning, and when I woke up the account was banned and the email said associated to exploitive activities. I was like huh? I never logged in the account, just activated on the website, it was on a diff IP and hadnt even made a character, I felt robbed.
The coolest part about that is someone made a relogger program, that would automatically relog in your character if it got disconnected and start the bot again. It would also do the initial account loads, lets say all your accounts were off, you hit one button it'd load all the wows, log them in and start the bot on the last played profile.
Honorbuddy/gatherbuddy was amazing though. I'd have it run battlegrounds for me and people would think I'm a regular person. I had it run looking for dungeon groups, as a HEALER or a TANK and just leave it going all day and never got any nasty tells or signs that people thought I was a bot. I never used it in raids but I knew people that did, you could turn off pathing and just have it run a combat routine while you control movement.
They also had a demonbuddy version which I used to farm diablo 3 during the RMAH days, that was great. I didnt make as much I got up to about 10 accounts which would run the same dungeon over and over, I forget which but at the time these were the best gph routes. Diablo 3 had to of been the best cause youd have your own private game each time no risk of being reported, but again WOW/blizzard monitored statistics. But whatever each time I got a rare ass mempo hat it was $200 made my day! I think I only made a few thousand on that game. The RMAH was a crazy idea, I quit when they got rid of it but dang I remember someone posting a screenshot of their setup and they had 100 accounts farming diablo 3. Some people went HAM. Same with WOW some people had 200 accounts farming gatherbuddy/honorbuddy.
The craziest RMT I saw was, back then there was that refer a friend where you refer someone and they activate, you get a free month. That was exploited huge. For those that played back then you knew you could buy a month for ingame gold or for $10. How did they do this? I made bff's with one of the top sellers who ended up being a 16 year old asian girl who explained to me that these chinese people had a WOW RAF key generator and were selling codes via ALIpay to her for 50 cents a code, and she was turning around selling them for $10 bucks. All you had to do was send your account's RAF code and she'd link it up. Of course the system would catch this a week later but your account would keep the free month anyway and the new "friend" account would be closed. I couldnt get into it because the sellers spoke chinese only on QQ chat and you had to pay in alipay which is a chinese paypal that required a chinese bank account. She was making thousands a day, top RAF month seller on ownedcore//mmowned. I remember one time she showed me a paypal with $20k in it that paypal froze, and she was like well time to make a new paypal, didnt phase her. I also used her cause buying bulk RAF months I got her down to $6 each so my monthly subs were only $6 each account.
On EQ ragefire I ended with about 30 characters, mostly mages with phinigel water staves and full planar. When I went over to phinigel, I sold all those accounts for $200-300 each. Was a good investment that I didnt see coming, just wanted to have the most decked out box team on the server, and a lot of boxers farmed phinigel autotropos for the water staff so youd regularly see 24 boxers dps racing each other, so I had to increase to 30 and get more gear and haste/damage focuses etc for that edge, he didnt drop the staff everytime and I needed probably 27 of them and he respawned every 5 hoursish so it sucked to lose. Was fun times back when water pets werent nerfed yet and tanked as good as earth and MOTM didnt exist.
I posted this photo before but they had free transfers from ragefire to lockjaw, which facilitated the plat exploit, but I used to bypass the name filter and renamed a mage Asshole and got a serverwide on phinigel. I got that char banned 5 minutes later. Well worth it.