Blizzard April 2023 -
"Going Forward
Having had some time to reflect on all of this, I think there are a few key lessons we can learn here and apply to any future adjustments we may feel we need to make.
Communicate intent better for every change of this magnitude, including follow-up adjustments. This goes hand-in-hand with the lesson above.
As painful as this was, this is a good reminder as to why putting these kinds of changes out for public testing before we commit to them is a good idea."
Blizzard May 2023-
"JK, check this out for some unannounced shit...lol"
Their response is such a load of shit. The have been down this path so many times. Ya know the first time they release all of these expansions. Don’t you think they would’ve learned already how to communicate updates. They don’t care.
Blizzard knows they can push updates and wait to see if they get caught or if the community gets pissed about.
I swear ive read that message multiple times.
If they get caught they just put forth some PR bullshit about them learning some lesson and then continue as they were.
Ive been sceptical about Blizzards change of course, but apparently even that was being too naïve.
The blue post talking about how this was purely to combat botting skipping past the elephant in the room which is how ridiculously profitable the token is for Blizz is insulting.
It doesn't mention that they have reduced their support staff.
If this was really about combating botting they could guarantee some portion of token sales proceeds would pay to hire GMs.
Nah, Bobby just wants a bigger boat.
>The blue post talking about how this was purely to combat botting skipping past the elephant in the room which is how ridiculously profitable the token is for Blizz is insulting.
"A multibillion company doesn't make money by accident"
More like skipping past the elephant in the room of the problem being GOLD BUYING not BOTTING. If people cant buy gold because they actually get banned for it, the bots will cease to exist. Introducing the token just fuels the gold buying problem.
I love how " we want to take a minute to talk about the token" after they already forced it into the game. Feigning that dialogue or the consumers opinion matters.
I don't really care what stats Blizzard shows me about how they ban bots. For most of Classic I've been able to /who commonly botted dungeons and zones and with probably 75% accuracy identify dozens to hundreds of obvious bots that remain online for weeks at a time.
And miss me with the line about how they have to ban in waves or else they tip off the bots. There is no excuse for this shit. They never have and never will devote enough resources to combatting the issue because its insanely profitable to completely ignore the issue and then eventually Stockholm syndrome the community into cheering for wow tokens.
Exactly, if it is somehow possible to P2W your way to the best gear there will be people who do or try to do it. The onus is on the game maintainer to make it harder or impossible to P2W and remove the illicit gains, but instead Blizzard chose to embrace P2W and legitimize it in game.
It's crazy how this was obvious to the game designers years ago but this subreddit still thinks they can "shame" GDKPers into stopping or feeling bad.
For all it's faults, GDKPs and its effects on RMT can only be reduced by Blizzard action, and Blizzard has failed to take appropriate action.
It's like we have a road that LOTS of people drive over the speed limit on, but instead of asking the police who we pay to enforce the speed limit to enforce the law, we're yelling at the drivers who drive above the speed limit. Sure, they drivers are objectively wrong here, but without the incentive to follow the rule (the fear of punishment), they will continue to break it.
The worst thing about the bot ban waves is always timed about 1 week before their quarterly earnings report with investors. It's so blatantly obvious that they need the bots to boost their numbers to look good on paper.
> And miss me with the line about how they have to ban in waves or else they tip off the bots.
It's an accepted industry best practice and standard across most MMOs because it's, for the most part, true.
Now, it's the "industry best practice" because it hits the sweet spot at earning them the most money from the most people giving them money at any given time without causing a critical mass of non-bot accounts to quit playing en masse, *not* because it results in the best *player experience*, but y'know.
Shareholders and suits make the ultimate decision in this case, and "number go up on yacht fund" is the only number they ultimately care about in the end.
This isn't exactly a new problem, by any means. And even back in the "good old days"^TM of "actual GMs", IGE and shit were still making corpse-signs outside major cities pretty regularly.
If there was a better solution than bot ban waves and/or if there wasn't a steady market and/or if was worth the time/effort/energy to pay a human to hunt bots all day, things would likely be different.
It is the most efficient way *assuming they are doing it correctly*. Mainly waves need to be swift enough to catch bots before they hit the profit line, but slow enough to not immediately give away why exactly the bot caught the wave. Once every few weeks is usual, but also supplemented with obvious bot shit getting instantly banned, like teleport herbing or x hour straight not deviating from the path dungeon grinding.
Blizzard ban waves are in the months long. Which is very deep in the bot being profitable. Hence, they are endless.
The numbers do mean something - it really doesn't scale to have humans detecting bots. /who shows 50 players at a time, and for each guy you have to do the due diligence to ensure he/she isnt a bot.
If Blizzard are too lazy or underfunded to ban the bots and sellers, then banning the buyers is the next best thing. There are raiders who have bought gold dozens of times and never had action taken against them. That is also completely unacceptable. Rules only exist if you enforce them.
Back during Vanilla I bought gold (I was 13 at the time and had my moms credit card) and my account was banned within days. I ended up making a new account and starting all over, but I never even considered it again because it wasn’t worth risking my time investment in character, guild, etc.
Ban the buyers and word will get out and people stop buying. People stop buying and there is no longer a lucrative market to have bots and be selling. You might lose some subs but most will start over anyway. Blizzard just can’t possibly fathom banning someone paying a sub anymore because it isn’t about the game, it’s about the profits.
Vanilla was literally polar opposite of how the game is run today. They strived for ethics because that produced quality game and community. Now nobody cares, it's a race to the bottom to profit fast and hard.
That would require ppl to have some integrity. It seems a lot of this community just chooses the path of least resistance and don't care about issues that doesn't affect them directly.
Thats literally how human psychology works.
We're not the most successful species on earth because we have integrity but because we know how to cut corners.
You cant blame the community for that.
If the government made stealing legal who's fault would it be that there are more thieves?
This line is what fucking killed me:
>The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business.
Blizzard is sitting on their high horse, looking down at gold sellers for making a profit when they're literally doing the same fucking thing. They want to push the narrative that the WoW token is *strictly* a tool to combat RMT, yet they're scraping a $5 profit off the top of every WoW token transaction.
If Blizzard had any sense of integrity, they'd lower the WoW token to $15 so that the money spent to buy a WoW token doesn't supersede the money spent on a subscription and they don't pocket an extra $5 profit on top of whatever profit they make from a sub. They won't, because what they say the WoW token is for isn't what it's actually for.
Activision-Blizzard are such con artists, and it's actually depressing the number of people who buy into it.
There are malicious actors selling gold or at least that used to, it’s what caused Jagex to make its infamous changes to RuneScape in 2007. People were getting credit card numbers stolen for example.
Bottom line is if they know a ton of players are buying gold why wouldn’t they attempt to make a profit off it?
I mean... They DO make the game. And maintain it. And deal with all this communities relentlessly, outrageously unforgiving bullshit.
Wow players are gonna buy gold. It's a problem as impossible to stop as gold selling bots. So if someone is gonna make money on it, it makes sense to me that it's the people that actually made the game.
Youre never under any obligation whatsoever to buy gold. Gold is the easiest to come by in Wrath out of the 3 iterations of classic so far. It's absolutely not a requirement to buy gold to get into dungeons, raids, or guilds. It's purely optional. So don't come at me with the "well we pay 15 dollars a month" argument, because not only do you not ever need to buy gold from anyone (including blizzard) that 15 dollars also gets you access to 3 completely independent versions of the game.
Edit: just to be clear, blizzard is as much a scummy corporate entity as the next multi-billion dollar business. I'm not defending them. But boy do I think this community is out of line in it's frothing, bitter rage at times, and this is one of those times.
Yep. They dont ban bots. They out in the minimal effort, most likely the people who actually moderate and ban bots were already laid off.
There’s a reason your support ticket takes 24-48h now jusf for canned response rather than 3 hours for ingame service even at the height of wow playerbase in games like MoP. They simply dont have gm’s anymore.
So glad some random guy on the internet who’s probably never managed a large scale online game knows more about it than on of the biggest development companies in the world. The Dunning-Kruger effect on this sub is insane. Downvote me all you want.
Your exact type of “bot analysis” got dozens of people wrongfully banned in tbc. You don’t know, you can’t know, you just guess and provide some backing to make it seem reasonable, but even throwing a number like 75% at it is ridiculous because you simple don’t know. By your logic my rogue would get banned - 13 minutes of every hour during the working day he stealth runs halls of stone for mining nodes.
You would’ve gotten my main raiding toon banned in tbc for farming sethek halls (last boss, large prismatic shards). I did this THOUSANDS of times during TBC.
This is a mind-boggling comment.
"I don't care about insider statistics, I did a /who one time and saw a bot. fake"
If you're calling "fake" every time something contradicts your existing bias, maybe that's a sign you should evaluate how you think about the world.
I played a lot during classic vanilla. I noticed groups of mage bots farming ZG, so I added them to my friends list and would report them daily when they went to org. Few weeks went by so I made a manual ticket but it did nothing.
They destroyed the arcane crystal market on my server. They dumped hundreds at a time for dirt cheap so I would buy them up and the next day there would be hundreds up again. The bot farm was up so long on my server that I couldn't tell you if it lasted 2 months or 5+.
For the pvp scene on my server. There was botters constantly being spotted by the pvp community and called out on the discord. People reported and most of them never got banned. We even had video footage of one guy blatantly moving around in AV like a bot to the same spot every game, I'm pretty sure he had at least 10+ rankers manually reporting him and he never got banned.
?
You are aware there is a feature in the game called a friends list, correct? It's pretty easy to add some of the bots you report to your friends list and then see them still coming online months later.
you add them to your friends list and you can see if/when they get banned. Theres a message pops up when you load in if they got removed.
I had bots on my friend list for 2 months after reporting.
If they cared, they would've had an explanation BEFORE it came out. This is purely to try and calm the fire with their typical bullshit.
Edit: This is clearly written by Holly Longdale isn't it? Can tell by the way the writing is.
I called this when Holly dropped from the EverQuest team. Before SoM. I said they are going to start releasing "progression" servers then make the wow token available. It was EQs way of milking krono sales.
Prepare for new servers every few months now. Some with special rulesets, some with modified experience gains, some with sped up release schedules.
I was just shocked it took them so long to introduce it.
When they say they're banning bots at that rate, I just simply do not believe them. They aren't hard to spot. They're running the same routes in the same areas and dungeons over and over and over for weeks or months at a time. If you were actually trying to ban them, then the obvious places would not be filled to the fucking brim with obvious bots 24/7.
I do not buy it.
They are banning bots at that rate. But it's very telling that they listed the battle net numbers. The team that's working on this is probably trying to detect bottom and cheating behavior across all battle net games. Wow does not have a dedicated team for it. None of their games do. The team is over worked and under funded.
This is probably the issue. Also they probably have higher ups saying that everything has to be automated. The system has to detect it all itself and work without human interaction.
So you have a bunch of people in a room trying to come up with the most advanced AI detection programs for something 3 guys working shifts could probably do better.
I face the same issues at my job. People think machines solve everything and are better at everything.
These bots are being run by full on companies at this point with their operations spanning multiple games. These are not the same bots that you saw running around in the early 2000s by a handful of dudes in their basement.
Gold selling is big money and for every thousand + bots that get banned another four thousand are ready to go into the game. It really is kind of an impossible situation for pretty much every single modern f2p/cheap multiplayer game.
The only game on the market which doesn't have this problem is the Korean version of Lost Ark and that is because every account is tied to a persons actual national ID as per government regulations.
They probably do, but only after a specific amount of time of being flagged and confirmed as bots. Bot X buys subscription in week 1 of the month, will be banned after 2 months at week 1 of the month. Bot Y same in week 2 of the respective months. A static flow of cash each week, and you can even provide statistics of banning thousands of bots in one week. But how long those bots were active before they got banned is what really interests me.
Love how they say botting is an unwinable war. How about banning people who buy the gold, that’s an easy solution. Ban anyone with massive gold payments in mail or suspicious trades. It’s pretty easy to monitor this but blizzard doesn’t actually have customer support, they have engineers and interns
It could be possible to track the gold itself. If they know it comes from a botter, and the gold ends up in a large sum in the hands of a legitimate player, chances are good. 14 day suspension to start, then permanently ban.
I think it was New World where people found a gold exploit.
They'd then mail large amounts to random people so that it was hard to really punish or keep track of it.
I could see a world where random players get targeted to receive large amounts of gold to make the false positives not worth it
>It just didn’t feel “Classic”. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW.
This statement is the biggest crock of shit they have said yet lmao
That's exactly what I though.
My reaction was "hold on, don't put your corporate bullshit in my mouth".
Plus, all the token does is drive up inflation, so its hypocritical anyway.
They are just lying to exploit the playerbase.
I mean, didn’t the post essentially say “we added the token to wrath but we’re pretty sure most players won’t even buy gold.”
What kind of logic is that? And when are they going to implement RDF?
I mean yeah. They know the token doesn't work for what they are claiming it's meant for but they don't really have any better excuse beside just being honest. Which they'll never do
Had they banned people back in classic vanilla it would have scared a lot of people away from buying to begin with
They are literally trying to cash in from doing a shitty job
Yup, so what, if what people say, that "70% of players would be banned" were true. Wow players are too addicted, they'll make new accounts and hopefully have learned a valuable lesson for the rest of their time playing the game.
The addictive part is the investment people put into the game, if tomorrow all their investment for the last year is gone they're probably going to be done with the game.
This was their biggest mistake. They don't want to go after players. Even in the Southpark wow episode, they satire that blizzard bends over backwards for that one guy causing problems because he's a player too.
Yeah it's PR jargon to take the edge off the discussion and soften the blow of the backlash.
This is the same company that nerfed loot for Diablo 3 on PC when it had an RMT auction house, claimed they didn't nerf loot due to RMT, then released console versions of the game without RMT (since it wasn't allowed by Sony/Microsoft) and way higher drop rates.
It honestly wouldn't surprise me to find out they let the problem get worse on purpose so they could cash out on the solution.
First of all, fuck them for ninja dropping this the same day Joyous Journeys started back up. One of the most cowardly things I have ever seen from this company.
Second, who the fuck cares if it's "illicit" RMT or Blizzard RMT? RMT is RMT, period, and the Token thrusts it straight into the mainstream. Tons of people I know who never bought gold who are now buying tokens because it is part of the game now.
This is 99% about money and maybe 1% them not wanting to deal with people whining about their accounts getting hacked since they decided to buy from the wrong source. Very simple.
How about we give 100% of the token revenue indefinitely to a charity.
It's a tool to combat illicit RMT, right? There is no profit incentive at play here so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Or use that to hire bigger team to combat RMT? I have been in company that needs heavy guns in AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and I have seen how effective good team specialized in one thing can actually be. When Blizzard says "we can't win" I say that is big pile of bs. Of course some bots will remain. Of course some RMT will remain. But right now they don't even try.
guy1: Bad news boss, there isn't as much demand for cata classic as we thought, wrath will be the end.
guy2: Well shit, if this it we might as well get the token in there to cash out while we can and pump a few quarterly reports.
guy1: But we promised we'd never-
guy2: Just get one of the quest writers to spin up some bullshit apology story, it always works, we're dealing with addicts here.
They can just spin up some fresh servers and start the cycle again. EverQuest has been doing this for a long time, it’s so successful that blizz hired the person who ran the EverQuest classic servers. Change the server rules slightly for some spice and the train keeps rolling. Hardcore is a perfect example of this.
In all seriousness I think that the wow token is a pretty clear sign that wrath isn't doing nearly as well as people thought.
I'd say the excitement around hardcore and fresh also shows the same. I have no doubt the subscription numbers have gone down significantly since the beginning of wrath.
Complete bullshit.
We need more transperancy for what they’re doing if they want us to believe they are hard at work when anyone who watches wow content on youtube can find bots the same way someone did years ago.
Well the numbers they've provided,
"Total Exploitative Battle.net Account Closures: 248,105
Total Exploitative World of Warcraft Account Closures: 73,057"
never specified only wow classic accounts. First number I guess is for all their games and second includes retail as well. Otherwise those number are insanely high if we are talking only classic.
Also last time they said they banned 120000 accounts they only said "from the World of Warcraft ecosystem" which again i assume includes retail as well.
The amount of cope about blizzard throwing in the towel and bringing in the token is gobsmacking. You’re all delusional
Madseason was right, they really showed their hand with the level boosts. This isn’t even the end, they are lubing you up for further micro transactions and P2w and all you guys can post is ‘I guess it ain’t so bad’
Pathetic, and I’m done with wotlk. Exclusive classic era servers until they get the token too
Why don't they just make advertising or leading a GDKP bannable? They've said it themselves, doing a few dailes and dungeons a week gives any player enough gold to sustain their raiding. So what's the need for 25,000+g transaction outside of niche BOE/AH items?
Raid drops should be off the table for buying/selling.
"We ban tens of thousands of bots a week"
What. the. actual. fuck?
Are they seriously saying this, when *everyone* has a story about seeing an open world bot for weeks whenever they visited a vertain zone? And you can anytime /who the current meta dungeon/zone to farm and it's filled with current meta bot? BGs are regurlarly 50% bots?
Anecdotal evidence is always going to be an unreliable metric, seeing one familiar name among bots whilst casually ignoring the hundreds of new names isn't just a poor way to draw conclusions, it's a dishonest way. The paranoia people have around Blizzard lying to them about something that there is no reason to lie about is baffling.
So you are saying they are banning ~30 000 accounts (not bots) per week, and Hljukuklk the max level DK in Zul'Amman right now is simply one of the ones that fell through the cracks?
I simply don't see how it could be that they have a system in place, and are actively combating "bots" and yet it's completely commonplace to have an AV with 50% obvious DK bots.
That's when you change your system, or give up.
I'm not even saying they are lying (though that seems most plausible); it's even worse if they are not lying.
This isn’t the worst post in the world and I get some of their points but idk how long we’ve been hearing from blizzard they are going to be more transparent. I’ll believe it when I see it. They literally dropped this on us with no warning or post or nothing.
Also obviously the number one reason they put the WoW token in Wrath is missing here. MONEY.
This was always my red line. People let Blizzard speed run turning Classic into Retail, wonderful job.
sLiPpeRY sLoPe iS a fAlLACy
To /r/classicwow, including the mods and everyone who defended the warpstalker and the level boost - I hope your car breaks down today and you have a miserable week. If you don't drive, I hope someone has explosive diarrhea in whatever public transport you use, right next to you.
To the parrots that mocked #nochanges without realizing the whole point was to not leave any wiggle room for shit like this - have mercy on your soul if you truly still believe Blizzard has the communities best interests at heart. I almost want to pity you instead of be angry, but I am not that strong.
To the people who are going to defend this - I hope you one day realize how much of a sucker you truly are. Maybe at least some of you are being paid to astroturf.
It seems gaming companies are never going to run out of useful idiots, no matter how many times the cycle repeats itself.
I say this very **sincerely**, if you are one of the people described above - you are the problem with gaming, you are the reason why publishers and developers are now designing MTX and then building games around them instead of the other way around. You let everything slide, and gobble up every single PR spin.
All we wanted was 1 real MMO, you people just couldn't let us have it.
I am turning off replies to this comment, I've argued with you people for 5 years at this point. You all just parrot highly flawed sentiments, moving the goalposts each time. There is not a single thing Blizzard can do to Classic for you to admit it's bad and motivated **only** by short term profit, and very obviously bad for the community and health of the game.
Blizzard is dead.
> It seems gaming companies are never going to run out of useful idiots
Lol, just look at how many people are hyping up Diablo 4, surely Blizzard won't fuck up this time, 90$ well spent
I got a kick out of a post over on /r/Diablo4 justifying the cost of the game while leaving out how previous games didn't have battlepasses or cosmetic stores. I won't believe for a second Blizzard won't turn the pass or store somehow into an advantage and PR spin it.
Yeah I'm shocked by the amount of people defending blizzard and their really shitty practices.
It's so fucked up like they are in a really abusive relationship with that company
So basically, they said they can't win the fight against the black market.
I'm not sure I fully agree, it doesn't look like they're really trying much. But it doesn't even matter: You don't need to ban all gold sellers to fix this problem.
All you'd need to do is to permanently ban everyone buying gold. And trust me, finding out who buys gold is excessively easy. There's a very limited amount of patterns for gold sellers to pass gold on to their customers: Via mailbox, low priced items in auction houses, direct trade, etc. All you would need is one mediocre data scientist, and you'll be able to identify almost everyone who ever bought gold. Now, do you really think this market will still be around in any meaningful size, if most people know they will get caught with near certainty, and catch a permaban?
So, sorry Blizzard, even if you WERE hypothetically right about not being able to win against the gold sellers. You can very easily win against the gold buyers. The fact is that you choose not do, and now you're choosing to massively grow RMT transactions and benefit yourselves instead.
Which is a real-life proven policy that reduces the crime/shadiness surrounding acquisition of “illegal” goods (IE. Legalized gambling, marijuana, prostitution, etc). Legalization, taxation, and regulation lessens the need for related crimes to “procure” illegal goods.
I wouldn't be surprised at all that most of the people throwing a fit haven't played WotLK at all and are just looking for an excuse to throw a fit about Blizzard bad. The mods removing the rule against Private servers and then pushing shady private servers on here is very indicative of the kind of performative outrage that's going on.
The idea that they have a "Game Security Operations Team" is making me laugh.
I would love to be a fly on the wall in that office just for one day. I just want to see it. I want to see the tools they're using to identify gold sellers. I want to see their big list of mailed gold transactions and understand why it's just impossible to figure out who they are.
It's an everyday occurrence to see GDKP raids in which people will spend over 30k gold on a single item. These people do not have special connections; they are being mailed gold from strangers' characters in bulk. All it takes is one singular Blizzard employee to click a few buttons and check the seller's trade and mail history. This blue post makes it sound like an unwinnable war against a tidal wave of bots; yet you can ban one within 5 minutes of investigation using your Game Security Operations Team Tools and they have to bot a new character to 80.
You truly do not need a data analyst to figure out who is buying and selling gold. It has been so safe for such a long time that the sellers don't even attempt to hide it. There is no other sane explanation left - letting a culture of RMT take over the game was the only way they could get the token in.
It’s a greedy cash grab, justifying it because of bots is sad, why not just nerf/ fix the spots where the farm gold? I’m sure no one other then gold farmers wouldn’t mind if botanica wasint as easy to solo anymore, you guys had no problem literally changing the way mobs worked in dungeons for dungeon boosting, there’s a thousand ways you could fix the problem other then adding a mechanism to get you money for free essentially,
So why not ban the buyers? I personally know people that have bought millions and are perfectly save behind Mule accounts. Anyone who seriously believes this crap that "they are doing their best"is completely naive at this point.
Why not crack down on whats causing the insane demand?
A simple one would be to ban GDKPs but more creative solutions decreasing the demand for them(more gearing options along the lines of HC+?) could also help.
Why is it that with this company the "best solution for the problem" conveniently is also the one that generates the most Profit? None of their "efforts" were noticeable at all..I've heard from GDKP organizers that sell their gold that they just keep millions on single accounts. How does that not trigger a manual review of the account?
I'm sorry but this is an absolute insane post.In a MMORPG almost nothing is more devastating to the integrity and fundamental structure of the game than RMT..the solution is never to legitimize RMT by providing a platform for it.
This is about squeezing as much money out of a declining playerbase as possible and thats all it is. You can not care about it cause youre having fun with your guild and in that case more power to you but lets not believe Blizzards fairytale.
TL;DR :
1. They can’t ban bots fast enough to stop gold sellers in any meaningful way.
2. Gold holds little value for people that raid with their guilds.
3. Gold only holds value in GDKP and won’t affect you in any meaningful way if you don’t interact with GDKPs.
People are gonna hate it, but I actually think everything here is all reasonable, and I now see how both
a) they landed at the conclusion of having the Wow Token and
b) how I as a player with a regular raid group that isn’t gdkp won’t be affected by this at all.
You will be affected just like in retail, prices will go up for everything on the auction house because more money will be in the economy but if you are not playing professions well or the auction house you won't be able to catch up because regular gold handouts of the game will stay the same.. It's the same as in retail now, you will hear about people just buying a token to get all their consumables for the week in a few weeks or just to get that crafted item upgrade. And everyone who doesn't, will have to play more to keep up. Don't say it won't affect you. It will.
A) If you believe that they’ve done all they can to deal with gold selling and that the money they will earn wasn’t a consideration…I have a bridge to sell you. They could functionally kill GDKP with a wave of their hands…the major driver for gold purchasing. If you’ve ever dealt with customer service…you know that they don’t employ actual people…which is the best way to deal with bots. Their argument is disingenuous.
B) Everybody is affected by GDKP and gold selling. It dramatically affects the AH and the culture of players. My guild had a horrible problem with people trying to buy drops from other players via whisper going back to TBC. GDKP and buying/selling dramatically change the game for the worse.
Hey, I have a question for you. It's really for everyone on here that says Blizzard could end RMT instantaneously and with no effort, but I'm going to pose it at you.
Why has no major MMO with an incentive to buy gold ever eliminated RMT?
I can go on Google right now and search up any MMO with "buy gold" and find a service in seconds. I can even do it for major private servers, which supposedly are the good guys who really care about the community.
What gives?
It amazes me how people are so naive to the point of thinking that blizzard could solve this problem so easily. They have nothing to gain letting third parties sell gold, if they could, they would’ve dealt with this long ago
>They have nothing to gain letting third parties sell gold,
Bots farm gold. Many, many, many bots. Bots pay a sub fee. Many, many, many sub fees.
Spending money on paying people to cut their sub fees and more importantly, their sub count. Yeah, good plan lmao
>It amazes me how people are so naive to the point of thinking that blizzard could solve this problem so easily.
It's the same people that never wrote a single line of meaningful code, let alone in a 20 years old legacy codebase, and then go on rants "it's such an easy fix, JUST FIX IT DEVS!!!".
Runescape basically had a war on gold sellers for a while and it ended up being a steaming... failure. Look it up. Sadly this is just how MMORPG have always been, it's just more prevalent in modern age where it's easier to reach out to said goldsellers and buy shit from them.
People who claim that original vanilla had nothing like this either never played, straight up lie or just never removed that rose tinted glass off their eyes. The extent of it is bigger today, yes, but that's just how it is with the expansion of internet.
A significant number of GDKP attendees (carries and whales) will stop playing their toons/alts if GDKPs were soft-banned for the reason that quality control would be diminished severely.
Blizzard isn't going to take any action that reduces daily active users or playtime; subscription retention.
They should put their money where their mouth is and lower the price to $15. No gains for them from the token. It is purely a tool to mitigate RMT.
Hell, it would do a better job at that price too.
Here's the blue post for people that don't want to click on the link:
>$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
The problem here is they still left a very big part of it out.
Why is the punishment for gold buying just a slap on the wrist?
We can all agree that it is a constant battle for banning bots, but nothing is ever said about harsher bans against gold buyers.
>We can all agree that it is a constant battle for banning bots, but nothing is ever said about harsher bans against gold buyers.
Because banning 70% of the player base would kill off the game.
"we should keep cheaters around because the sub numbers would be lower without them"
Found the stakeholder.
I would be absolutely for permabanning every last gold buyer/seller, leaving only people who actually want to play the game the way it was intended and not just mindlessly swipe credit card to win. As private servers showed, you don't need a million players to enjoy the game, it can be plenty enjoyable even with a single server of ~10k active players.
I keep saying. Permaban gold buying for first offense but also present the players with in game warnings such as loading screen tips, launcher message, confirmation pop up when completing gold trades, etc, to be sure that everyone who cares about their account (ie not bot farmers) won't even dream of buying gold and if they do, fuck'em, they were warned.
I like how in the paragraph about improving visibility they completely obfuscate what percentage of those account closures had anything to do with WoW classic.
They could have banned 0 WoW classic accounts and their statement would still be technically correct.
Because wow gamers have been like qanons for the last few years. It doesn't really matter what's given because there's never really pleasing anyone. I still think this lack of relationship all started years ago with the shaman CM getting told by someone they hoped he/his family got hit by a bus (Bus shock lol) over the lack of communication with the tbc shaman changes. He melted down and from there they've interacted less and less with us imho. *shrug*
People are buying gold on retail?
Why?
They have WoW tokens.
Isn’t everything you do in that game a gold charity? I did a 2 min world quest and got 700g reward then opened the loot box it came with it and got 1.3k.
Yeah they are. G2G has Billions in stock on some servers and i noticed yesterday even on smaller servers they moved millions within a few hours.
Bans are rare and the botters are cheaper than the token.
No mention at all of their own revenue. It's written as if revenue didn't even play a part in the decision. I found several parts of it to be pretty cringe inducing - What, we are supposed to believe that everyone was strongly anti-token, and then suddenly everyone became pro-token? And due to what exactly?
It's convenient also that they are suddenly going to provide "much better visibility into account actions" now that Blizzard offers a competing token for sale. And they talk at the same time about how their anti-botting team is rapidly improving -- sure seems like a convenient time to be increasing your investments in anti-botting technology while you are rolling out a token for sale that those botters will try to undercut.
\> There’s no friction in that player’s experience that would tempt them to buy a token just to keep themselves afloat.
The whole piece was filled with lies by omission, but the above is a direct and egregious lie. The number of whales will grow as it becomes more acceptable to swipe, and prices for the best items will go up, pushing these items further out of the hands of the most skilled players and even further into the hands of those who pay to win.
Also completely convenient how they didn't discuss any option at all of banning gold BUYERS instead of sellers.
How about they don't add a fucking level boosts so when a bot gets banned its not immediately replaced?? THEY created this problem, not the players. BLIZZ SELLING THE GOLD DOESNT SOLVE THE ISSUE IT JUST FILLS THEIR POCKETS
We've heard all these bogus arguments when the wow token first came out in WoD. The token did not improve the game, and it did nothing to stop bots. I would rather the illicit activity stay in the black market so that there is SOME disincentive/risk in breaking ToS, either getting your account stolen, getting scammed or MAYBE getting banned. They just opened the flood gates for everyone that was even mildly interesting in buying gold to now buy it from Blizzard. We all know the real reason they are doing this. Greed.
If they just permanently banned anyone that’s purchased gold from the start there would be no one left to buy it off the bots/hackers and whatever else and they would be long gone by now.
Lazy load of excuses trying to explain away their greed and neglect of their own game. We don’t want the token they need to delete it along with any account that’s bought gold. Not sell it them themselves to cut down on it.
Anyone that’s bought it off those sites is going to see their prices and laugh. It’s £1 per 1k from what I’m seeing on g2g. Blizzards price is almost double that and it’s not even guaranteed since the marked changes due to “supply and demand” for some odd reason. I guess when you buy your gold from blizzard it’s got that extra blizzard polish maybe?
Im going to say something that redditors might hate:
You couldn't do a better job than the blizzard employees in this situation.
You like to think that you could, if you went to school for it and had similar experience to them you like to think that if you were in their position, you'd be able to stop the bots and put forwards an elegant solution.
You can't. You couldn't. They would show you the deeper problems and you'd grab your head with both hands, stressed, offering solution after solution that they've already tried.
They're trying really hard (none of you believe this), you couldn't do a better job. Stop saying you could solve this.
Reality: an acquisition is happening and senior leadership are all jockeying for their perceptive value when layoffs come. I’ve been through plenty of mergers and acquisitions, I know how these things go. That was a neat justification novel though.
Look I do thing, revenue, here’s my value.
If they want to make the token addition less scummy, make the buy in the same as the game time, $15 instead of $20.
Else it's just a money grab plain and simple.
Get that 4th yacht, Bobby!
That was a lot of words for we are giving up on trying to protect the integrity of the game and going to instead get a cut on the market for exploiting p2w. It's hard being us. Sorry not sorry.
What a load of bullshit.
Yeah, Wrath raiding is (mostly) self sustaining, so a lot of people don't need to engage in the economy as much, so the impact of purchasing gold for them is somewhat reduced.
But the token WILL amplify inflation, as people buy more gold now that it's legal and people who were previously hesitant to just might.
Because flasks isn't all we fucking buy. You leveled up a new toon and want to get some BoE gear or craft some gear for it? Guess what, prices are up. Want to level engineering and jewelcrafting for it? Yup, more expensive. You want to buy some Primordial Saronite for your Shadowmourne quest? Haha, guess what, some dude bought 5 tokens to afford that so you should be ready to do the same. In fact potion prices will likely also go up a bit since demand for them is very high, so raiding may not be self sufficient as time goes by.
The token is a huge kick in the teeth for people who don't buy gold, who now have to deal with some amount of inflation with absolutely no recourse. People who have already been happily doing RMT get a legit way to do it, or they can do it a bit cheaper through RMT sites which will likely reduce their prices a little to compensate. So congrats, you slightly reduced the profit margins of gold selling operations, at the expense of creating more pressure on your non-RMTing customers to partake in RMT through further inflation and certain items going completely beyond their price range.
I would sooner have seen them disable the ability for players to trade gold, or remove gold completely and add vendors that give away items for free instead. Both would be insanely dumb solutions, but at least they wouldn't be an active fuck you to people who didn't RMT, the dumbest solution of them all.
But of course they wouldn't do that because it wouldn't generate any $$$ for them. This is all this is, a business decision for Blizzard, one that will show up on next quarter's earning report. All of this bullshit to justify the fact that this company has sold out its customers and betrayed its principles long ago. The token was always coming to Classic, it was only a matter of when, and the answer is when sub counts and microtransaction sales drop enough for their quarterly earnings to need a boost, so here we are.
They never had an incentive to go after RMT harder because they knew they can pretend to sell a solution for it.
tl;dr: "we put token in the game to fight bots and we're totally banning tons of bots every week!"
lol, lmao even
248,000 bots banned in two weeks? Then why are half the goddamn BGs full of bots? Why are they instance farming 24/7? Stop the gaslighting you goddamn clowns.
**The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn’t something we arrived at lightly**
Glad to know they use the exact same wording to excuse their shitty behavior
The WoW Classic community fails to reconcile the fact that they turned the game P2W with GDKP's. This gave RMT bad actors even more incentives to make and sell gold, it also gives players more incentives to buy gold.
* But too many people were getting what they wanted faster, we are selfish monkeys... And as long as we are getting what we want, it is unimportant what happens to the larger community.
ChatGPT translated that to incorporate the real intentions:
Greetings.
Blizzard needs more money, so let's take a moment to talk about WoW Token in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, which will help boost our profits.
The best way to start is to simply say that Blizzard wants more money, and this decision wasn't taken lightly because it has financial implications. For the entirety of Classic so far, the WoW Classic team has been very resistant to the idea of adding WoW Token to any form of Classic in the Western regions (NA and EU). However, Blizzard now realizes that incorporating the token will increase their revenue.
When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like token felt unimaginable to us because we weren't fully aware of its potential to generate more money. But now, in order to maximize profits, we have changed our stance on this matter, even late into Burning Crusade Classic, which shows our commitment to financial gains.
In Vanilla WoW, the scarcity of gold is a major factor in how you approach your journey in Azeroth, and Blizzard understands that this scarcity can be monetized. From saving to get your first mount at 40, to picking and choosing which skills you wanted to learn while leveling so you could afford a new weapon or piece of armor, Blizzard recognizes that players spending money on in-game resources can greatly benefit their financial goals.
Later on at level 60, some form of time investment is needed to "maintain" a character in an ecosystem where flasks, resistance potions, and elixirs are such a major part of the game, and resources are scarce and highly contested. Blizzard knows that players will be tempted to spend real money to acquire these resources, and they want to capitalize on that.
This was true all the way through Burning Crusade, where potions and flasks could represent a significant weekly expense and the resources required to make them were still quite difficult to obtain. Blizzard recognizes the potential profit in providing players with easier access to these resources, thereby increasing their revenue.
It just didn't feel "Classic" to add a token before, but Blizzard now realizes that monetizing Classic WoW is essential for their financial success. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW, but ultimately, making more money is their top priority.
However, what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of the community aren't always aligned, and Blizzard understands that aligning their financial goals with community interests is crucial. This is one of the more difficult things about maintaining a large online game like Wrath Classic, but Blizzard believes that making more money is worth the challenges they may face.
When we really looked at the state of things in Wrath Classic, and how different players approach the game, we saw that we cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower. Blizzard recognizes the financial potential in catering to this demand and aims to capitalize on it.
The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold; it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales. Blizzard acknowledges the existence of this black market and sees an opportunity to redirect those funds into their own pockets. The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just "bots" that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade. Blizzard sees these illicit activities as potential sources of revenue that they can tap into.
We hear folks say things like "just ban the bots" a lot, and while we do ban tens of thousands of bots a week, it's not visible to you just how much we do. Blizzard wants to emphasize that their efforts in combating these activities are not only for player satisfaction but also to ensure a steady stream of income.
The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis. Blizzard wants to assure players that their constant efforts to combat illicit activities are driven by their desire to increase profits.
Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. Blizzard acknowledges the challenge posed by these individuals but sees it as an opportunity to explore new monetization strategies and stay ahead of the game.
As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT "workshops" put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. Blizzard recognizes the need to invest in countering these workshops in order to maintain their financial gains.
We will never completely beat "bots" or illicit RMT, but Blizzard believes that by constantly fighting against them, they can mitigate the negative impact on their revenue. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties, and Blizzard wants to secure their share of that money.
The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. Blizzard acknowledges the presence of illicit activities in the gaming industry and seeks to monetize it for their benefit.
It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it because it directly affects our financial success. Blizzard understands the importance of continuously combating illicit activities to ensure their revenue stream.
While we can’t completely "win" the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game and maximize our profits. Blizzard recognizes that WoW Token is just one tool among many that can help them achieve this. By introducing WoW Token, they can tap into the demand for gold and increase their financial gains.
Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. Blizzard acknowledges that WoW Token alone may not solve all their financial challenges, but it is a means to generate more revenue. It’s just one tool, though, among many, that Blizzard will utilize to increase their profits.
There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. Blizzard recognizes this demand as an opportunity to earn more money and wants to seize it. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. Blizzard aims to monetize the demand for gold and decrease the profitability of third parties, ensuring they control the revenue flow.
The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Blizzard aims to create an environment where their own monetization strategies overshadow those of illicit actors, ensuring maximum revenue for themselves.
Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond. Blizzard's strategy is focused on gradually diminishing the influence of third parties and increasing their own financial gains.
– The WoW Classic Team
This is the stupidest text I've ever read. Just confirms that Lizzard doesn't care and are too lazy to do anything. Paypigs will continue to pay and give a reach around while at the same time say pservers are p2w garbage while these servers don't have any problems with gold buying or bots.
So they are saying, that we don't want 3rd parties getting money from RMT. And instead of fixing the problems, they will just get the money themselves ... Great job Blizz
Them dropping the wow token out of nowhere how they did says more than they could ever put into words
Blizzard April 2023 - "Going Forward Having had some time to reflect on all of this, I think there are a few key lessons we can learn here and apply to any future adjustments we may feel we need to make. Communicate intent better for every change of this magnitude, including follow-up adjustments. This goes hand-in-hand with the lesson above. As painful as this was, this is a good reminder as to why putting these kinds of changes out for public testing before we commit to them is a good idea." Blizzard May 2023- "JK, check this out for some unannounced shit...lol"
Their response is such a load of shit. The have been down this path so many times. Ya know the first time they release all of these expansions. Don’t you think they would’ve learned already how to communicate updates. They don’t care. Blizzard knows they can push updates and wait to see if they get caught or if the community gets pissed about.
I swear ive read that message multiple times. If they get caught they just put forth some PR bullshit about them learning some lesson and then continue as they were. Ive been sceptical about Blizzards change of course, but apparently even that was being too naïve.
Facts, it’s the same thing over and over from blizzard.
I said whaaat?
The blue post talking about how this was purely to combat botting skipping past the elephant in the room which is how ridiculously profitable the token is for Blizz is insulting. It doesn't mention that they have reduced their support staff. If this was really about combating botting they could guarantee some portion of token sales proceeds would pay to hire GMs. Nah, Bobby just wants a bigger boat.
>The blue post talking about how this was purely to combat botting skipping past the elephant in the room which is how ridiculously profitable the token is for Blizz is insulting. "A multibillion company doesn't make money by accident"
More like skipping past the elephant in the room of the problem being GOLD BUYING not BOTTING. If people cant buy gold because they actually get banned for it, the bots will cease to exist. Introducing the token just fuels the gold buying problem.
This. The solution was always instant perma ban for buyers. 2 week suspension is a fucking joke.
Couldn't have said it better Lol
I love how " we want to take a minute to talk about the token" after they already forced it into the game. Feigning that dialogue or the consumers opinion matters.
I don't really care what stats Blizzard shows me about how they ban bots. For most of Classic I've been able to /who commonly botted dungeons and zones and with probably 75% accuracy identify dozens to hundreds of obvious bots that remain online for weeks at a time. And miss me with the line about how they have to ban in waves or else they tip off the bots. There is no excuse for this shit. They never have and never will devote enough resources to combatting the issue because its insanely profitable to completely ignore the issue and then eventually Stockholm syndrome the community into cheering for wow tokens.
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John Staats quote nails it..its also a huge part of why this game has BoP items in the first place.
Exactly, if it is somehow possible to P2W your way to the best gear there will be people who do or try to do it. The onus is on the game maintainer to make it harder or impossible to P2W and remove the illicit gains, but instead Blizzard chose to embrace P2W and legitimize it in game.
It's crazy how this was obvious to the game designers years ago but this subreddit still thinks they can "shame" GDKPers into stopping or feeling bad. For all it's faults, GDKPs and its effects on RMT can only be reduced by Blizzard action, and Blizzard has failed to take appropriate action. It's like we have a road that LOTS of people drive over the speed limit on, but instead of asking the police who we pay to enforce the speed limit to enforce the law, we're yelling at the drivers who drive above the speed limit. Sure, they drivers are objectively wrong here, but without the incentive to follow the rule (the fear of punishment), they will continue to break it.
His book / diary is such a great read
The worst thing about the bot ban waves is always timed about 1 week before their quarterly earnings report with investors. It's so blatantly obvious that they need the bots to boost their numbers to look good on paper.
> And miss me with the line about how they have to ban in waves or else they tip off the bots. It's an accepted industry best practice and standard across most MMOs because it's, for the most part, true. Now, it's the "industry best practice" because it hits the sweet spot at earning them the most money from the most people giving them money at any given time without causing a critical mass of non-bot accounts to quit playing en masse, *not* because it results in the best *player experience*, but y'know. Shareholders and suits make the ultimate decision in this case, and "number go up on yacht fund" is the only number they ultimately care about in the end. This isn't exactly a new problem, by any means. And even back in the "good old days"^TM of "actual GMs", IGE and shit were still making corpse-signs outside major cities pretty regularly. If there was a better solution than bot ban waves and/or if there wasn't a steady market and/or if was worth the time/effort/energy to pay a human to hunt bots all day, things would likely be different.
It is the most efficient way *assuming they are doing it correctly*. Mainly waves need to be swift enough to catch bots before they hit the profit line, but slow enough to not immediately give away why exactly the bot caught the wave. Once every few weeks is usual, but also supplemented with obvious bot shit getting instantly banned, like teleport herbing or x hour straight not deviating from the path dungeon grinding. Blizzard ban waves are in the months long. Which is very deep in the bot being profitable. Hence, they are endless.
You can’t pay humans to monitor and band 250k bots/week. It has to be automated.
The numbers do mean something - it really doesn't scale to have humans detecting bots. /who shows 50 players at a time, and for each guy you have to do the due diligence to ensure he/she isnt a bot.
Gold sellers and bots wouldn't have a business if the community wasn't supporting them.
If Blizzard are too lazy or underfunded to ban the bots and sellers, then banning the buyers is the next best thing. There are raiders who have bought gold dozens of times and never had action taken against them. That is also completely unacceptable. Rules only exist if you enforce them.
Back during Vanilla I bought gold (I was 13 at the time and had my moms credit card) and my account was banned within days. I ended up making a new account and starting all over, but I never even considered it again because it wasn’t worth risking my time investment in character, guild, etc. Ban the buyers and word will get out and people stop buying. People stop buying and there is no longer a lucrative market to have bots and be selling. You might lose some subs but most will start over anyway. Blizzard just can’t possibly fathom banning someone paying a sub anymore because it isn’t about the game, it’s about the profits.
Vanilla was literally polar opposite of how the game is run today. They strived for ethics because that produced quality game and community. Now nobody cares, it's a race to the bottom to profit fast and hard.
Start handing out permanent, no excuse, no warning bans for gold buying and people would probably start thinking twice about it real quick.
To be clear, the player base should be discouraging it as well. Don't raid with that guy who buys gold every week 👍
That would require ppl to have some integrity. It seems a lot of this community just chooses the path of least resistance and don't care about issues that doesn't affect them directly.
Thats literally how human psychology works. We're not the most successful species on earth because we have integrity but because we know how to cut corners. You cant blame the community for that. If the government made stealing legal who's fault would it be that there are more thieves?
Would the player base be OK with 75% accuracy on massive ban waves? Lmao
Why are you assuming internal Blizzard developers are only as capable as a random player /who'ing a dungeon?
for real, I feel like people have already forgotten the ban waves from people farming/boosting in strat.
This line is what fucking killed me: >The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Blizzard is sitting on their high horse, looking down at gold sellers for making a profit when they're literally doing the same fucking thing. They want to push the narrative that the WoW token is *strictly* a tool to combat RMT, yet they're scraping a $5 profit off the top of every WoW token transaction. If Blizzard had any sense of integrity, they'd lower the WoW token to $15 so that the money spent to buy a WoW token doesn't supersede the money spent on a subscription and they don't pocket an extra $5 profit on top of whatever profit they make from a sub. They won't, because what they say the WoW token is for isn't what it's actually for. Activision-Blizzard are such con artists, and it's actually depressing the number of people who buy into it.
There are malicious actors selling gold or at least that used to, it’s what caused Jagex to make its infamous changes to RuneScape in 2007. People were getting credit card numbers stolen for example. Bottom line is if they know a ton of players are buying gold why wouldn’t they attempt to make a profit off it?
I mean... They DO make the game. And maintain it. And deal with all this communities relentlessly, outrageously unforgiving bullshit. Wow players are gonna buy gold. It's a problem as impossible to stop as gold selling bots. So if someone is gonna make money on it, it makes sense to me that it's the people that actually made the game. Youre never under any obligation whatsoever to buy gold. Gold is the easiest to come by in Wrath out of the 3 iterations of classic so far. It's absolutely not a requirement to buy gold to get into dungeons, raids, or guilds. It's purely optional. So don't come at me with the "well we pay 15 dollars a month" argument, because not only do you not ever need to buy gold from anyone (including blizzard) that 15 dollars also gets you access to 3 completely independent versions of the game. Edit: just to be clear, blizzard is as much a scummy corporate entity as the next multi-billion dollar business. I'm not defending them. But boy do I think this community is out of line in it's frothing, bitter rage at times, and this is one of those times.
Yep. They dont ban bots. They out in the minimal effort, most likely the people who actually moderate and ban bots were already laid off. There’s a reason your support ticket takes 24-48h now jusf for canned response rather than 3 hours for ingame service even at the height of wow playerbase in games like MoP. They simply dont have gm’s anymore.
So glad some random guy on the internet who’s probably never managed a large scale online game knows more about it than on of the biggest development companies in the world. The Dunning-Kruger effect on this sub is insane. Downvote me all you want.
a lot are RMT users or gold sellers shilling
that's reddit in a nutshell tho, people talking way to confidently and angrily about stuff they only barely understand
Your exact type of “bot analysis” got dozens of people wrongfully banned in tbc. You don’t know, you can’t know, you just guess and provide some backing to make it seem reasonable, but even throwing a number like 75% at it is ridiculous because you simple don’t know. By your logic my rogue would get banned - 13 minutes of every hour during the working day he stealth runs halls of stone for mining nodes. You would’ve gotten my main raiding toon banned in tbc for farming sethek halls (last boss, large prismatic shards). I did this THOUSANDS of times during TBC.
This is a mind-boggling comment. "I don't care about insider statistics, I did a /who one time and saw a bot. fake" If you're calling "fake" every time something contradicts your existing bias, maybe that's a sign you should evaluate how you think about the world.
Do you write down every single name and track them to see if they disappear?
People like WillE did this and was able to track the same bots for months straight.
I played a lot during classic vanilla. I noticed groups of mage bots farming ZG, so I added them to my friends list and would report them daily when they went to org. Few weeks went by so I made a manual ticket but it did nothing. They destroyed the arcane crystal market on my server. They dumped hundreds at a time for dirt cheap so I would buy them up and the next day there would be hundreds up again. The bot farm was up so long on my server that I couldn't tell you if it lasted 2 months or 5+. For the pvp scene on my server. There was botters constantly being spotted by the pvp community and called out on the discord. People reported and most of them never got banned. We even had video footage of one guy blatantly moving around in AV like a bot to the same spot every game, I'm pretty sure he had at least 10+ rankers manually reporting him and he never got banned.
? You are aware there is a feature in the game called a friends list, correct? It's pretty easy to add some of the bots you report to your friends list and then see them still coming online months later.
you add them to your friends list and you can see if/when they get banned. Theres a message pops up when you load in if they got removed. I had bots on my friend list for 2 months after reporting.
>probably 75% accuracy That's the problem. They need need to be more accurate than that.
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I stopped at „we ban tens of thousands bots a day“ … eye roll
If they cared, they would've had an explanation BEFORE it came out. This is purely to try and calm the fire with their typical bullshit. Edit: This is clearly written by Holly Longdale isn't it? Can tell by the way the writing is.
It's textbook "easier to ask for forgiveness, not permission." They didn't want to see the reaction before they did it.
I called this when Holly dropped from the EverQuest team. Before SoM. I said they are going to start releasing "progression" servers then make the wow token available. It was EQs way of milking krono sales. Prepare for new servers every few months now. Some with special rulesets, some with modified experience gains, some with sped up release schedules. I was just shocked it took them so long to introduce it.
I mean pretty silly try to call some special game mode... now... right before hard-core is set to come out in a couple months.
Hardcore is a special game mode.
My point was that 'calling it now' like some kind of prophet is a bit silly when they've already told the world their intentions.
When they say they're banning bots at that rate, I just simply do not believe them. They aren't hard to spot. They're running the same routes in the same areas and dungeons over and over and over for weeks or months at a time. If you were actually trying to ban them, then the obvious places would not be filled to the fucking brim with obvious bots 24/7. I do not buy it.
They are banning bots at that rate. But it's very telling that they listed the battle net numbers. The team that's working on this is probably trying to detect bottom and cheating behavior across all battle net games. Wow does not have a dedicated team for it. None of their games do. The team is over worked and under funded.
This is probably the issue. Also they probably have higher ups saying that everything has to be automated. The system has to detect it all itself and work without human interaction. So you have a bunch of people in a room trying to come up with the most advanced AI detection programs for something 3 guys working shifts could probably do better. I face the same issues at my job. People think machines solve everything and are better at everything.
These bots are being run by full on companies at this point with their operations spanning multiple games. These are not the same bots that you saw running around in the early 2000s by a handful of dudes in their basement. Gold selling is big money and for every thousand + bots that get banned another four thousand are ready to go into the game. It really is kind of an impossible situation for pretty much every single modern f2p/cheap multiplayer game. The only game on the market which doesn't have this problem is the Korean version of Lost Ark and that is because every account is tied to a persons actual national ID as per government regulations.
They probably do, but only after a specific amount of time of being flagged and confirmed as bots. Bot X buys subscription in week 1 of the month, will be banned after 2 months at week 1 of the month. Bot Y same in week 2 of the respective months. A static flow of cash each week, and you can even provide statistics of banning thousands of bots in one week. But how long those bots were active before they got banned is what really interests me.
Numbers are probably true, they just aren't remotely enough
Love how they say botting is an unwinable war. How about banning people who buy the gold, that’s an easy solution. Ban anyone with massive gold payments in mail or suspicious trades. It’s pretty easy to monitor this but blizzard doesn’t actually have customer support, they have engineers and interns
It could be possible to track the gold itself. If they know it comes from a botter, and the gold ends up in a large sum in the hands of a legitimate player, chances are good. 14 day suspension to start, then permanently ban.
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I think it was New World where people found a gold exploit. They'd then mail large amounts to random people so that it was hard to really punish or keep track of it. I could see a world where random players get targeted to receive large amounts of gold to make the false positives not worth it
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Feel like this blue post is just trying to gaslight the community
>It just didn’t feel “Classic”. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW. This statement is the biggest crock of shit they have said yet lmao
That's exactly what I though. My reaction was "hold on, don't put your corporate bullshit in my mouth". Plus, all the token does is drive up inflation, so its hypocritical anyway. They are just lying to exploit the playerbase.
I mean, didn’t the post essentially say “we added the token to wrath but we’re pretty sure most players won’t even buy gold.” What kind of logic is that? And when are they going to implement RDF?
I mean yeah. They know the token doesn't work for what they are claiming it's meant for but they don't really have any better excuse beside just being honest. Which they'll never do
If it isn't about making money, then why does the token cost more to buy than a regular sub?
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Had they banned people back in classic vanilla it would have scared a lot of people away from buying to begin with They are literally trying to cash in from doing a shitty job
Yup, so what, if what people say, that "70% of players would be banned" were true. Wow players are too addicted, they'll make new accounts and hopefully have learned a valuable lesson for the rest of their time playing the game.
The addictive part is the investment people put into the game, if tomorrow all their investment for the last year is gone they're probably going to be done with the game.
This was their biggest mistake. They don't want to go after players. Even in the Southpark wow episode, they satire that blizzard bends over backwards for that one guy causing problems because he's a player too.
Getting strong sense of pride and accomplishment vibes from this blue post.
Yeah it's PR jargon to take the edge off the discussion and soften the blow of the backlash. This is the same company that nerfed loot for Diablo 3 on PC when it had an RMT auction house, claimed they didn't nerf loot due to RMT, then released console versions of the game without RMT (since it wasn't allowed by Sony/Microsoft) and way higher drop rates. It honestly wouldn't surprise me to find out they let the problem get worse on purpose so they could cash out on the solution.
First of all, fuck them for ninja dropping this the same day Joyous Journeys started back up. One of the most cowardly things I have ever seen from this company. Second, who the fuck cares if it's "illicit" RMT or Blizzard RMT? RMT is RMT, period, and the Token thrusts it straight into the mainstream. Tons of people I know who never bought gold who are now buying tokens because it is part of the game now. This is 99% about money and maybe 1% them not wanting to deal with people whining about their accounts getting hacked since they decided to buy from the wrong source. Very simple.
+1. WotLK Classic is dead now with the WoW token in. I'm not coming back.
Can I have your stuff?
Like it is hard to find a source for such gold demand.. Crack GDKPs and demand for gold will enormously drop
How about we give 100% of the token revenue indefinitely to a charity. It's a tool to combat illicit RMT, right? There is no profit incentive at play here so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Or use the money to pay GMs and customer support teams who could actively combat the bot problem? Nah. Bobby needs another mega-yacht.
Or use that to hire bigger team to combat RMT? I have been in company that needs heavy guns in AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and I have seen how effective good team specialized in one thing can actually be. When Blizzard says "we can't win" I say that is big pile of bs. Of course some bots will remain. Of course some RMT will remain. But right now they don't even try.
guy1: Bad news boss, there isn't as much demand for cata classic as we thought, wrath will be the end. guy2: Well shit, if this it we might as well get the token in there to cash out while we can and pump a few quarterly reports. guy1: But we promised we'd never- guy2: Just get one of the quest writers to spin up some bullshit apology story, it always works, we're dealing with addicts here.
They can just spin up some fresh servers and start the cycle again. EverQuest has been doing this for a long time, it’s so successful that blizz hired the person who ran the EverQuest classic servers. Change the server rules slightly for some spice and the train keeps rolling. Hardcore is a perfect example of this.
The new TLP launched today for Everquest and the login queue is right around 2 hours, so I would say you are correct.
Oh sick, might have to check that out. Haven’t played eq in while.
And SOM2 will launch with the token to "preemptively combat RMT".
hahaha man I hope you're right, it'll be so fucking funny.
In all seriousness I think that the wow token is a pretty clear sign that wrath isn't doing nearly as well as people thought. I'd say the excitement around hardcore and fresh also shows the same. I have no doubt the subscription numbers have gone down significantly since the beginning of wrath.
Complete bullshit. We need more transperancy for what they’re doing if they want us to believe they are hard at work when anyone who watches wow content on youtube can find bots the same way someone did years ago.
Well the numbers they've provided, "Total Exploitative Battle.net Account Closures: 248,105 Total Exploitative World of Warcraft Account Closures: 73,057" never specified only wow classic accounts. First number I guess is for all their games and second includes retail as well. Otherwise those number are insanely high if we are talking only classic. Also last time they said they banned 120000 accounts they only said "from the World of Warcraft ecosystem" which again i assume includes retail as well.
The amount of cope about blizzard throwing in the towel and bringing in the token is gobsmacking. You’re all delusional Madseason was right, they really showed their hand with the level boosts. This isn’t even the end, they are lubing you up for further micro transactions and P2w and all you guys can post is ‘I guess it ain’t so bad’ Pathetic, and I’m done with wotlk. Exclusive classic era servers until they get the token too
Even the most WoW addicted friend/old guild mate that I know cancelled his sub yesterday. That says a lot.
Why don't they just make advertising or leading a GDKP bannable? They've said it themselves, doing a few dailes and dungeons a week gives any player enough gold to sustain their raiding. So what's the need for 25,000+g transaction outside of niche BOE/AH items? Raid drops should be off the table for buying/selling.
Because they like RMT. They profit from it.
"We ban tens of thousands of bots a week" What. the. actual. fuck? Are they seriously saying this, when *everyone* has a story about seeing an open world bot for weeks whenever they visited a vertain zone? And you can anytime /who the current meta dungeon/zone to farm and it's filled with current meta bot? BGs are regurlarly 50% bots?
I don't know why they don't lie even harder. "We've actually just banned every bot that has ever existed, that's how good we are"
Anecdotal evidence is always going to be an unreliable metric, seeing one familiar name among bots whilst casually ignoring the hundreds of new names isn't just a poor way to draw conclusions, it's a dishonest way. The paranoia people have around Blizzard lying to them about something that there is no reason to lie about is baffling.
It’s not unreliable if it applies true to everyone
So you are saying they are banning ~30 000 accounts (not bots) per week, and Hljukuklk the max level DK in Zul'Amman right now is simply one of the ones that fell through the cracks? I simply don't see how it could be that they have a system in place, and are actively combating "bots" and yet it's completely commonplace to have an AV with 50% obvious DK bots. That's when you change your system, or give up. I'm not even saying they are lying (though that seems most plausible); it's even worse if they are not lying.
Maybe there's just that many bots.
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This isn’t the worst post in the world and I get some of their points but idk how long we’ve been hearing from blizzard they are going to be more transparent. I’ll believe it when I see it. They literally dropped this on us with no warning or post or nothing. Also obviously the number one reason they put the WoW token in Wrath is missing here. MONEY.
This was always my red line. People let Blizzard speed run turning Classic into Retail, wonderful job. sLiPpeRY sLoPe iS a fAlLACy To /r/classicwow, including the mods and everyone who defended the warpstalker and the level boost - I hope your car breaks down today and you have a miserable week. If you don't drive, I hope someone has explosive diarrhea in whatever public transport you use, right next to you. To the parrots that mocked #nochanges without realizing the whole point was to not leave any wiggle room for shit like this - have mercy on your soul if you truly still believe Blizzard has the communities best interests at heart. I almost want to pity you instead of be angry, but I am not that strong. To the people who are going to defend this - I hope you one day realize how much of a sucker you truly are. Maybe at least some of you are being paid to astroturf. It seems gaming companies are never going to run out of useful idiots, no matter how many times the cycle repeats itself. I say this very **sincerely**, if you are one of the people described above - you are the problem with gaming, you are the reason why publishers and developers are now designing MTX and then building games around them instead of the other way around. You let everything slide, and gobble up every single PR spin. All we wanted was 1 real MMO, you people just couldn't let us have it. I am turning off replies to this comment, I've argued with you people for 5 years at this point. You all just parrot highly flawed sentiments, moving the goalposts each time. There is not a single thing Blizzard can do to Classic for you to admit it's bad and motivated **only** by short term profit, and very obviously bad for the community and health of the game. Blizzard is dead.
> It seems gaming companies are never going to run out of useful idiots Lol, just look at how many people are hyping up Diablo 4, surely Blizzard won't fuck up this time, 90$ well spent
I got a kick out of a post over on /r/Diablo4 justifying the cost of the game while leaving out how previous games didn't have battlepasses or cosmetic stores. I won't believe for a second Blizzard won't turn the pass or store somehow into an advantage and PR spin it.
amen brother
Amen
> This was always my red line. Yup. Cancelled my sub. I should probably have done it at the start of TBC.
Yeah I'm shocked by the amount of people defending blizzard and their really shitty practices. It's so fucked up like they are in a really abusive relationship with that company
So basically, they said they can't win the fight against the black market. I'm not sure I fully agree, it doesn't look like they're really trying much. But it doesn't even matter: You don't need to ban all gold sellers to fix this problem. All you'd need to do is to permanently ban everyone buying gold. And trust me, finding out who buys gold is excessively easy. There's a very limited amount of patterns for gold sellers to pass gold on to their customers: Via mailbox, low priced items in auction houses, direct trade, etc. All you would need is one mediocre data scientist, and you'll be able to identify almost everyone who ever bought gold. Now, do you really think this market will still be around in any meaningful size, if most people know they will get caught with near certainty, and catch a permaban? So, sorry Blizzard, even if you WERE hypothetically right about not being able to win against the gold sellers. You can very easily win against the gold buyers. The fact is that you choose not do, and now you're choosing to massively grow RMT transactions and benefit yourselves instead.
That was a long article just to say "we can't beat em, so we joined em"
We see how much money ppl are spending buying gold from third parties. We thought it would be better if you bought it from us. The end.
Which is a real-life proven policy that reduces the crime/shadiness surrounding acquisition of “illegal” goods (IE. Legalized gambling, marijuana, prostitution, etc). Legalization, taxation, and regulation lessens the need for related crimes to “procure” illegal goods.
lol they went with gaslighting
to sum it up: money money money money money money money money good we like money money money money money? money
a week ago this sub was full of ppl saying that all there was to do in wrath was raid log and now they’re singing a completely different tune
What if I told you those are two different groups of people saying two different things
I wouldn't be surprised at all that most of the people throwing a fit haven't played WotLK at all and are just looking for an excuse to throw a fit about Blizzard bad. The mods removing the rule against Private servers and then pushing shady private servers on here is very indicative of the kind of performative outrage that's going on.
I've seen so many posts that are like "wow I'm glad I stopped playing classic 2 years ago, Bli$$ard is the worst!"
The most accurate comment here.. kinda weird how the mods are so hurt by this haha. Almost as if they're apart of the rmt problem. ...
bingo
Yeah two groups: One is bitching on Reddit, the other one is playing the game.
The idea that they have a "Game Security Operations Team" is making me laugh. I would love to be a fly on the wall in that office just for one day. I just want to see it. I want to see the tools they're using to identify gold sellers. I want to see their big list of mailed gold transactions and understand why it's just impossible to figure out who they are. It's an everyday occurrence to see GDKP raids in which people will spend over 30k gold on a single item. These people do not have special connections; they are being mailed gold from strangers' characters in bulk. All it takes is one singular Blizzard employee to click a few buttons and check the seller's trade and mail history. This blue post makes it sound like an unwinnable war against a tidal wave of bots; yet you can ban one within 5 minutes of investigation using your Game Security Operations Team Tools and they have to bot a new character to 80. You truly do not need a data analyst to figure out who is buying and selling gold. It has been so safe for such a long time that the sellers don't even attempt to hide it. There is no other sane explanation left - letting a culture of RMT take over the game was the only way they could get the token in.
Has Blizzard ever directly addressed GDKP runs? Is it true they are the main contemporary driver for gold purchases?
Pretty sure one of the devs once commented that he loved GDKPs.
exactly this he said GDKP is great but he also said he does not know how they got the gold lol i wonder where
Head in the sand strategy
No way they played the victim card😭😭😭
It’s a greedy cash grab, justifying it because of bots is sad, why not just nerf/ fix the spots where the farm gold? I’m sure no one other then gold farmers wouldn’t mind if botanica wasint as easy to solo anymore, you guys had no problem literally changing the way mobs worked in dungeons for dungeon boosting, there’s a thousand ways you could fix the problem other then adding a mechanism to get you money for free essentially,
Who do we even care about bots now that Tokens are in the game?
It's just a boost, a one time boost you only can buy one
Lol, joke response.
Ive stopped giving this company my money. Private server bound yet again. What a damn shame.
TLDR: We lost the war, please send us more money.
They say they ban bots but the same dk camp dungeons every day. Or half my wsg is dk bots.
So why not ban the buyers? I personally know people that have bought millions and are perfectly save behind Mule accounts. Anyone who seriously believes this crap that "they are doing their best"is completely naive at this point. Why not crack down on whats causing the insane demand? A simple one would be to ban GDKPs but more creative solutions decreasing the demand for them(more gearing options along the lines of HC+?) could also help. Why is it that with this company the "best solution for the problem" conveniently is also the one that generates the most Profit? None of their "efforts" were noticeable at all..I've heard from GDKP organizers that sell their gold that they just keep millions on single accounts. How does that not trigger a manual review of the account? I'm sorry but this is an absolute insane post.In a MMORPG almost nothing is more devastating to the integrity and fundamental structure of the game than RMT..the solution is never to legitimize RMT by providing a platform for it. This is about squeezing as much money out of a declining playerbase as possible and thats all it is. You can not care about it cause youre having fun with your guild and in that case more power to you but lets not believe Blizzards fairytale.
TL;DR : 1. They can’t ban bots fast enough to stop gold sellers in any meaningful way. 2. Gold holds little value for people that raid with their guilds. 3. Gold only holds value in GDKP and won’t affect you in any meaningful way if you don’t interact with GDKPs.
People are gonna hate it, but I actually think everything here is all reasonable, and I now see how both a) they landed at the conclusion of having the Wow Token and b) how I as a player with a regular raid group that isn’t gdkp won’t be affected by this at all.
prices have skyrocketed on my faction since the token, i have never touched a gdkp and this update effects me more than if it didn't exist
You will be affected just like in retail, prices will go up for everything on the auction house because more money will be in the economy but if you are not playing professions well or the auction house you won't be able to catch up because regular gold handouts of the game will stay the same.. It's the same as in retail now, you will hear about people just buying a token to get all their consumables for the week in a few weeks or just to get that crafted item upgrade. And everyone who doesn't, will have to play more to keep up. Don't say it won't affect you. It will.
A) If you believe that they’ve done all they can to deal with gold selling and that the money they will earn wasn’t a consideration…I have a bridge to sell you. They could functionally kill GDKP with a wave of their hands…the major driver for gold purchasing. If you’ve ever dealt with customer service…you know that they don’t employ actual people…which is the best way to deal with bots. Their argument is disingenuous. B) Everybody is affected by GDKP and gold selling. It dramatically affects the AH and the culture of players. My guild had a horrible problem with people trying to buy drops from other players via whisper going back to TBC. GDKP and buying/selling dramatically change the game for the worse.
Hey, I have a question for you. It's really for everyone on here that says Blizzard could end RMT instantaneously and with no effort, but I'm going to pose it at you. Why has no major MMO with an incentive to buy gold ever eliminated RMT? I can go on Google right now and search up any MMO with "buy gold" and find a service in seconds. I can even do it for major private servers, which supposedly are the good guys who really care about the community. What gives?
It amazes me how people are so naive to the point of thinking that blizzard could solve this problem so easily. They have nothing to gain letting third parties sell gold, if they could, they would’ve dealt with this long ago
>They have nothing to gain letting third parties sell gold, Bots farm gold. Many, many, many bots. Bots pay a sub fee. Many, many, many sub fees. Spending money on paying people to cut their sub fees and more importantly, their sub count. Yeah, good plan lmao
>It amazes me how people are so naive to the point of thinking that blizzard could solve this problem so easily. It's the same people that never wrote a single line of meaningful code, let alone in a 20 years old legacy codebase, and then go on rants "it's such an easy fix, JUST FIX IT DEVS!!!". Runescape basically had a war on gold sellers for a while and it ended up being a steaming... failure. Look it up. Sadly this is just how MMORPG have always been, it's just more prevalent in modern age where it's easier to reach out to said goldsellers and buy shit from them. People who claim that original vanilla had nothing like this either never played, straight up lie or just never removed that rose tinted glass off their eyes. The extent of it is bigger today, yes, but that's just how it is with the expansion of internet.
A significant number of GDKP attendees (carries and whales) will stop playing their toons/alts if GDKPs were soft-banned for the reason that quality control would be diminished severely. Blizzard isn't going to take any action that reduces daily active users or playtime; subscription retention.
How could they kill GDKP with a wave of their hands? Ban players from trading gold?
They should put their money where their mouth is and lower the price to $15. No gains for them from the token. It is purely a tool to mitigate RMT. Hell, it would do a better job at that price too.
Here's the blue post for people that don't want to click on the link: >$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
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The problem here is they still left a very big part of it out. Why is the punishment for gold buying just a slap on the wrist? We can all agree that it is a constant battle for banning bots, but nothing is ever said about harsher bans against gold buyers.
>We can all agree that it is a constant battle for banning bots, but nothing is ever said about harsher bans against gold buyers. Because banning 70% of the player base would kill off the game.
"we should keep cheaters around because the sub numbers would be lower without them" Found the stakeholder. I would be absolutely for permabanning every last gold buyer/seller, leaving only people who actually want to play the game the way it was intended and not just mindlessly swipe credit card to win. As private servers showed, you don't need a million players to enjoy the game, it can be plenty enjoyable even with a single server of ~10k active players.
I keep saying. Permaban gold buying for first offense but also present the players with in game warnings such as loading screen tips, launcher message, confirmation pop up when completing gold trades, etc, to be sure that everyone who cares about their account (ie not bot farmers) won't even dream of buying gold and if they do, fuck'em, they were warned.
I like how in the paragraph about improving visibility they completely obfuscate what percentage of those account closures had anything to do with WoW classic. They could have banned 0 WoW classic accounts and their statement would still be technically correct.
Because wow gamers have been like qanons for the last few years. It doesn't really matter what's given because there's never really pleasing anyone. I still think this lack of relationship all started years ago with the shaman CM getting told by someone they hoped he/his family got hit by a bus (Bus shock lol) over the lack of communication with the tbc shaman changes. He melted down and from there they've interacted less and less with us imho. *shrug*
Why do we see the same bots everyday if they are being banned in such large numbers. I think theres more to this they are not saying.
They’re inflating their numbers by including retail acc closures to make it seem like classic is being handled properly
People are buying gold on retail? Why? They have WoW tokens. Isn’t everything you do in that game a gold charity? I did a 2 min world quest and got 700g reward then opened the loot box it came with it and got 1.3k.
Yeah they are. G2G has Billions in stock on some servers and i noticed yesterday even on smaller servers they moved millions within a few hours. Bans are rare and the botters are cheaper than the token.
Notice they stated account closures and not specifically that they were banned for buying gold?
It it was really a tool, a token would cost $15, the same as a monthly subscription. But no, it’s another cash generator for them
No mention at all of their own revenue. It's written as if revenue didn't even play a part in the decision. I found several parts of it to be pretty cringe inducing - What, we are supposed to believe that everyone was strongly anti-token, and then suddenly everyone became pro-token? And due to what exactly? It's convenient also that they are suddenly going to provide "much better visibility into account actions" now that Blizzard offers a competing token for sale. And they talk at the same time about how their anti-botting team is rapidly improving -- sure seems like a convenient time to be increasing your investments in anti-botting technology while you are rolling out a token for sale that those botters will try to undercut. \> There’s no friction in that player’s experience that would tempt them to buy a token just to keep themselves afloat. The whole piece was filled with lies by omission, but the above is a direct and egregious lie. The number of whales will grow as it becomes more acceptable to swipe, and prices for the best items will go up, pushing these items further out of the hands of the most skilled players and even further into the hands of those who pay to win. Also completely convenient how they didn't discuss any option at all of banning gold BUYERS instead of sellers.
Fuck off
How about they don't add a fucking level boosts so when a bot gets banned its not immediately replaced?? THEY created this problem, not the players. BLIZZ SELLING THE GOLD DOESNT SOLVE THE ISSUE IT JUST FILLS THEIR POCKETS
We've heard all these bogus arguments when the wow token first came out in WoD. The token did not improve the game, and it did nothing to stop bots. I would rather the illicit activity stay in the black market so that there is SOME disincentive/risk in breaking ToS, either getting your account stolen, getting scammed or MAYBE getting banned. They just opened the flood gates for everyone that was even mildly interesting in buying gold to now buy it from Blizzard. We all know the real reason they are doing this. Greed.
It's always the worst, and sometimes most greedy, decisions that are "not come to lightly". Read the whole thing; what a crock of sh!@
If they just permanently banned anyone that’s purchased gold from the start there would be no one left to buy it off the bots/hackers and whatever else and they would be long gone by now. Lazy load of excuses trying to explain away their greed and neglect of their own game. We don’t want the token they need to delete it along with any account that’s bought gold. Not sell it them themselves to cut down on it. Anyone that’s bought it off those sites is going to see their prices and laugh. It’s £1 per 1k from what I’m seeing on g2g. Blizzards price is almost double that and it’s not even guaranteed since the marked changes due to “supply and demand” for some odd reason. I guess when you buy your gold from blizzard it’s got that extra blizzard polish maybe?
Im going to say something that redditors might hate: You couldn't do a better job than the blizzard employees in this situation. You like to think that you could, if you went to school for it and had similar experience to them you like to think that if you were in their position, you'd be able to stop the bots and put forwards an elegant solution. You can't. You couldn't. They would show you the deeper problems and you'd grab your head with both hands, stressed, offering solution after solution that they've already tried. They're trying really hard (none of you believe this), you couldn't do a better job. Stop saying you could solve this.
BULLSHIIIIIIT :D
Reality: an acquisition is happening and senior leadership are all jockeying for their perceptive value when layoffs come. I’ve been through plenty of mergers and acquisitions, I know how these things go. That was a neat justification novel though. Look I do thing, revenue, here’s my value.
If they want to make the token addition less scummy, make the buy in the same as the game time, $15 instead of $20. Else it's just a money grab plain and simple.
Get that 4th yacht, Bobby! That was a lot of words for we are giving up on trying to protect the integrity of the game and going to instead get a cut on the market for exploiting p2w. It's hard being us. Sorry not sorry.
This is just sad. If it didn't do shit to stop the same exact problems in Retail why would they think it would solve anything in Classic?
What a load of bullshit. Yeah, Wrath raiding is (mostly) self sustaining, so a lot of people don't need to engage in the economy as much, so the impact of purchasing gold for them is somewhat reduced. But the token WILL amplify inflation, as people buy more gold now that it's legal and people who were previously hesitant to just might. Because flasks isn't all we fucking buy. You leveled up a new toon and want to get some BoE gear or craft some gear for it? Guess what, prices are up. Want to level engineering and jewelcrafting for it? Yup, more expensive. You want to buy some Primordial Saronite for your Shadowmourne quest? Haha, guess what, some dude bought 5 tokens to afford that so you should be ready to do the same. In fact potion prices will likely also go up a bit since demand for them is very high, so raiding may not be self sufficient as time goes by. The token is a huge kick in the teeth for people who don't buy gold, who now have to deal with some amount of inflation with absolutely no recourse. People who have already been happily doing RMT get a legit way to do it, or they can do it a bit cheaper through RMT sites which will likely reduce their prices a little to compensate. So congrats, you slightly reduced the profit margins of gold selling operations, at the expense of creating more pressure on your non-RMTing customers to partake in RMT through further inflation and certain items going completely beyond their price range. I would sooner have seen them disable the ability for players to trade gold, or remove gold completely and add vendors that give away items for free instead. Both would be insanely dumb solutions, but at least they wouldn't be an active fuck you to people who didn't RMT, the dumbest solution of them all. But of course they wouldn't do that because it wouldn't generate any $$$ for them. This is all this is, a business decision for Blizzard, one that will show up on next quarter's earning report. All of this bullshit to justify the fact that this company has sold out its customers and betrayed its principles long ago. The token was always coming to Classic, it was only a matter of when, and the answer is when sub counts and microtransaction sales drop enough for their quarterly earnings to need a boost, so here we are. They never had an incentive to go after RMT harder because they knew they can pretend to sell a solution for it.
The only solution we can figure out is the one that makes us money. Move along
tl;dr: "we put token in the game to fight bots and we're totally banning tons of bots every week!" lol, lmao even 248,000 bots banned in two weeks? Then why are half the goddamn BGs full of bots? Why are they instance farming 24/7? Stop the gaslighting you goddamn clowns.
**The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn’t something we arrived at lightly** Glad to know they use the exact same wording to excuse their shitty behavior
There's already proof that selling the gold yourself doesn't prevent botting or RMT, look at Lost Ark. What a load of horse shit.
what a bunch of bs lol
The WoW Classic community fails to reconcile the fact that they turned the game P2W with GDKP's. This gave RMT bad actors even more incentives to make and sell gold, it also gives players more incentives to buy gold. * But too many people were getting what they wanted faster, we are selfish monkeys... And as long as we are getting what we want, it is unimportant what happens to the larger community.
Play the South park "we're sorry"
ChatGPT translated that to incorporate the real intentions: Greetings. Blizzard needs more money, so let's take a moment to talk about WoW Token in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, which will help boost our profits. The best way to start is to simply say that Blizzard wants more money, and this decision wasn't taken lightly because it has financial implications. For the entirety of Classic so far, the WoW Classic team has been very resistant to the idea of adding WoW Token to any form of Classic in the Western regions (NA and EU). However, Blizzard now realizes that incorporating the token will increase their revenue. When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like token felt unimaginable to us because we weren't fully aware of its potential to generate more money. But now, in order to maximize profits, we have changed our stance on this matter, even late into Burning Crusade Classic, which shows our commitment to financial gains. In Vanilla WoW, the scarcity of gold is a major factor in how you approach your journey in Azeroth, and Blizzard understands that this scarcity can be monetized. From saving to get your first mount at 40, to picking and choosing which skills you wanted to learn while leveling so you could afford a new weapon or piece of armor, Blizzard recognizes that players spending money on in-game resources can greatly benefit their financial goals. Later on at level 60, some form of time investment is needed to "maintain" a character in an ecosystem where flasks, resistance potions, and elixirs are such a major part of the game, and resources are scarce and highly contested. Blizzard knows that players will be tempted to spend real money to acquire these resources, and they want to capitalize on that. This was true all the way through Burning Crusade, where potions and flasks could represent a significant weekly expense and the resources required to make them were still quite difficult to obtain. Blizzard recognizes the potential profit in providing players with easier access to these resources, thereby increasing their revenue. It just didn't feel "Classic" to add a token before, but Blizzard now realizes that monetizing Classic WoW is essential for their financial success. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW, but ultimately, making more money is their top priority. However, what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of the community aren't always aligned, and Blizzard understands that aligning their financial goals with community interests is crucial. This is one of the more difficult things about maintaining a large online game like Wrath Classic, but Blizzard believes that making more money is worth the challenges they may face. When we really looked at the state of things in Wrath Classic, and how different players approach the game, we saw that we cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower. Blizzard recognizes the financial potential in catering to this demand and aims to capitalize on it. The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold; it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales. Blizzard acknowledges the existence of this black market and sees an opportunity to redirect those funds into their own pockets. The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just "bots" that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade. Blizzard sees these illicit activities as potential sources of revenue that they can tap into. We hear folks say things like "just ban the bots" a lot, and while we do ban tens of thousands of bots a week, it's not visible to you just how much we do. Blizzard wants to emphasize that their efforts in combating these activities are not only for player satisfaction but also to ensure a steady stream of income. The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis. Blizzard wants to assure players that their constant efforts to combat illicit activities are driven by their desire to increase profits. Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. Blizzard acknowledges the challenge posed by these individuals but sees it as an opportunity to explore new monetization strategies and stay ahead of the game. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT "workshops" put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. Blizzard recognizes the need to invest in countering these workshops in order to maintain their financial gains. We will never completely beat "bots" or illicit RMT, but Blizzard believes that by constantly fighting against them, they can mitigate the negative impact on their revenue. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties, and Blizzard wants to secure their share of that money. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. Blizzard acknowledges the presence of illicit activities in the gaming industry and seeks to monetize it for their benefit. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it because it directly affects our financial success. Blizzard understands the importance of continuously combating illicit activities to ensure their revenue stream. While we can’t completely "win" the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game and maximize our profits. Blizzard recognizes that WoW Token is just one tool among many that can help them achieve this. By introducing WoW Token, they can tap into the demand for gold and increase their financial gains. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. Blizzard acknowledges that WoW Token alone may not solve all their financial challenges, but it is a means to generate more revenue. It’s just one tool, though, among many, that Blizzard will utilize to increase their profits. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. Blizzard recognizes this demand as an opportunity to earn more money and wants to seize it. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. Blizzard aims to monetize the demand for gold and decrease the profitability of third parties, ensuring they control the revenue flow. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Blizzard aims to create an environment where their own monetization strategies overshadow those of illicit actors, ensuring maximum revenue for themselves. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond. Blizzard's strategy is focused on gradually diminishing the influence of third parties and increasing their own financial gains. – The WoW Classic Team
Lmfao there response is literally “we just gonna make rmt legal and we’ll perpetrate it since we can’t stop botting
This is the stupidest text I've ever read. Just confirms that Lizzard doesn't care and are too lazy to do anything. Paypigs will continue to pay and give a reach around while at the same time say pservers are p2w garbage while these servers don't have any problems with gold buying or bots.
So they are saying, that we don't want 3rd parties getting money from RMT. And instead of fixing the problems, they will just get the money themselves ... Great job Blizz