At this point in the timeline of MMOs, goldfarming has come a long way. Most MMO's today share almost exact systems of currency and ways to get it and goldfarmers have turned their craft into a simple formula. This makes keeping them out a problem.
hmmm... quite right His Majesty The Daax (<---- demonstrates proper greeting for Daaxmeister to nOObs. pft!!)
To some extent I think this may be to HJ's advantage. If i'm not mistaken farming takes advantage of macroable repetitive task but i've yet to see anything via the articles indicating that in game characters can macro via the Hero Engine.
If they do allow macroing it should be seperated from the combat and harvesting systems and allowed only for say... the annimation system i.e. singing, dancing, brandishing weapons, katas, fun stuff like that. I see absolutely no usefull reason to allow players to macro the lewt, combat, and/or harvesting functions of their characters.
I've also not seen anything that indicates gold can be lewted from slaying, a silly feature imho anyways, what the heck is a fawn or boss villan doing with 20 gold LOL!!. They shop at the in town vendors to??
Hero Engine is brand spankin' new coded from the ground up trying, in my opinion, to add a graphical aspect for those used to RPing in text based games and it seems that they would've thought of the farming problem to some extent by not letting combat & targeting to be player scriptable that way.
Looking at the brochures - the game annimations can be scripted via Hero Script and allows for "per-character" macro substitution, but one has to be trained in Hero Script to use it properly and probably granted level access to it??? (
2006 & 07 Hero Engine Brochure -Annimation System)
If its available to people in game for targeting, harvesting, looting annimations etc. then there will be problems.
Other than that the only thing I can see that they would have to worry about is 'game sweatshops'. Masses of people (1-100 or more) who will run through quest gathering, leveling all for the loot to hand over to one or more accounts. HJ would then have to 'data mine' to track who transferred and into which account these massive amounts of items, Wry, and gold went to and take appropriate action.
Farming for rare Wry might be hampered by restricting them to RP rewards, player longevity, guild growth, belonging to a province or player created town, and to be handed out by GM's only? But that would drive the price insanely high for some eh?
I do think a lot of 'farming value' has been dealt with via the fact that you can wear what you want/find and socket them with Wyr to boost their stats, color etc.
Long story short: Get rid of macros for player toons and solve more than half the problem then data mine suspicious accounts.
*see what happens when you take a day off... you ramble*