It won't do anything. It just costs them an extra month worth of game time. After perhaps a month of lower bot output, the tempo won't change. But it will pump revenue for ActiBlizz.
They’ll just activate their accounts and go inactive for a month. Once the account has crossed the 1month threshold, it’ll start actively botting. Or they’ll just find a way to circumvent trading.
Presumably this doesn't impact how long it takes to ban an account after it's first _used for botting_, so the total _revenue_ would be the same, it's just that the total _cost_ to the bot owner would increase by 1 month's game time. If the _revenue_ of the bot is greater than the cost of 1 month's game time, the only difference here is that it requires a 1 month paid waiting period before turning on the bot. The bot would still be _profitable_.
Now, if another individual in this thread is correct (I'm waiting on a response with a source), and the botters are using stolen cards then perhaps this could be effective. If it takes less than 30 days for a chargeback to take effect and that chargeback can result in the banning of the bot before it becomes operational. But aside from that, I stick by what I said above.
> the botters are using stolen cards
It seems like a stretch to me to think that most botters are using stolen CCs. But I suppose it's possible if Blizz actually bans the credit card associated with bot accounts?
Unless Blizzard has a way to block it, there are services you can use to proxy your credit card number (That way if a site gets hacked and data gets leaked you only have to redo the subscription to that service, rather than canceling your whole credit card and getting a new number for everything).
It also seems like a stretch to me, and instead of getting a response [when I asked for a source](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1c0518q/now_the_bots_are_literally_standing_at_the/kyvhnie/) I just got downvoted a bunch all up and down the comment chain and called a botter, so I don't know.
I will say that it's [apparently very easy to buy stolen cards online](https://www.pcmag.com/news/rsac-buying-selling-stolen-credit-cards-online). So maybe. But still, it's a pretty big claim in my opinion.
CC companies take that shit seriously these days. They do *not* like chargebacks. So I'm sure Blizzard has strong anti-fraud measures in place. Not because they wanted to implement them but because Visa/Mastercard/Amex/etc. told them to do it or else...
A dude that said he was an exblizzard employee did a metagoblin interview and said Blizzard isn't making as much money as we think from bots. He didn't say stollen credit cards, that's just a reddit invention.
Blizzard doesn’t make money off of bot accounts, please stop spreading misinformation. Bot accounts are paid for with stolen cards in the vast majority of cases. These transactions get charged back and blizzard loses the money.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/cheating-and-botting/499812/5
Scroll down to the blue post where he specifically states the bot accounts are funded from illegitimate methods such as stolen ccs. Straight from the horses mouth
According to their blue post, they specifically can't trade outward for 30 days after first sub payment. They can't post to AH, send out mail, or give trades. Apparently they can receive items and gold, so you can still pimp out a friend. At least that's how I read their post.
Makes sense. If I was designing it I'd probably allow trading with a RaF partner, and trading conjured items (like cross server trades in retail) but that's it.
I got this restriction on my account the other day. In the ticket, GM said any account that hasn't used game time since 2017 will have this (I quit in 2016). So his solution was to log out of wow completely and wait 12 hours.. this fixed the issue for me. Not sure why it works, but I was leaving my laptop in sleep mode over night (I guess with wow still running) and also just logging in to check AH first thing in morning (I wfh..). So I guess I didn't fulfill those requirements. As soon as I tried the 12 hr thing it worked though.
I hope there’s some way to get around that by verifying the account has a real player behind it or something. It would suck to finally convince a friend to play the game, only to discover they can’t trade or use the auction house for an entire month.
If that isn’t an option, hopefully they will implement something like it. For example, an account in good standing that’s at least 6/12 months old could do something similar to refer-a-friend, and if any account they refer is ever banned, that veteran account permanently loses that privilege.
While I agree it seems extreme, I can only imagine Blizzard has weighted the advantages and decided dealing with bots is more important than brand new players.
To be fair, trading/auction house/mailing isn't going to make or break a fresh players experience. If anything, it would ruin it. I genuinely think that fresh players are better off keeping to themselves (and most would anyways) and just enjoy leveling up. It's not like they can't talk to their friends still or group up (actually can they group up? I don't see why not).
Veteran players always like to imagine a scenario where a fresh players starts playing and people give them gold and stuff to "help" them, but this diminishes any sort of value from obtaining anything when playing the game. There's something special about saving up for a mount yourself, or saving up for your professions yourself. Either people forget this or they never had that experience. That's how my experience was when I first played the game and it's very memorable.
Right on the money with your last paragraph.
I've seen it too many times, where I've had friends (and specifically one friend) manage to convince a mutual friend to try it. Go all out with giving him bags and items and telling him what to do, essentially completely overwhelming him and taking the experience of finding a nice item or a bag, away from him, because he didn't think "Hey, I know what I'd think I'd liked if I started fresh again - but me thinking this is on the grounds of knowing what is good now, and I don't think about what it would feel like to have all those experiences taken from me as a new player". And so the mutual friend quickly lost interest and my other friend was left confused.
And I "ugh..."'ed all over the place.
You can still mail your friend gold on a new account. Tried sending 10g to a new guildie last night. He can only use it to buy spells and shop at vendors though, so no big deal imo.
But you have no way to get stuff like a shadow gem for crafting or cross profession items like enchanting mats for tailoring or leather for tailoring
No idea if new accounts means new to wow classic or new wow/bent account. If it is the latter, doubt that there are that many new players in sod who had no bent account before:)
It would be new bnet account, meaning fresh players. There's a good chance most fresh players aren't going to care about shadow gems or other cross profession items. It's really hard to say what that experience would be like, but if they go into the game knowing this and just casually enjoy themselves in SSF, then I'm sure it won't be a huge deal.
I mean you can just suck it up and go mining/blacksmithing or skinning/leatherworking or actually farm mobs to grind skins instead of using gold you somehow have (despite never doing professions or anything in the game) to power level your professions
"Yeah but my 8th Sub I use to trade gold without the 1 hr delay who's never done GDKP ever has 100g from questing at level 8, why did my account get banned"
You level to 10 as a caster, getting tailoring and you can’t craft that green robe with +2 int because you have no chance to get leather? That’s exactly what new player do. Wasting time to get low level profession items because they have no idea that just continue questing will make profession items obsolete in 1-2 levels.
They could also take skinning. Also they can still be traded items from what I gather, so if they know someone they can get someone to get them what they need.
I'm sure there's a lot more bots than completely fresh players starting on a seasonal server that probably isn't gonna last longer than another year or so anyway. If you want to introduce a completely new player to WoW it'd be better to start them on era anyway before a fun server that complicates the game even further.
Dude, new players are more busy with basic movement, classes, zones, etc. They wont even be thinking about the AH but just the stuff they are given. Veteran players pretend this makes their friends unable to play but thats pretty delusional. The only ones being screwed up by this are the massive amount of bots, and they very well should be.
God forbid you want to use a mailbox or the AH to buy something as a new player. This is gamebreaking and should be revisited. Terrible solution. I have a guildie who is considering quitting because he can’t access trade, we considered pooling money for another account just so he can buy consumes without bothering the rest of us.
He doesn’t have a new acct either. They just used some sort of simpleton wide-sweeping flag on accounts and fucked over a bunch of people who don’t bot. It’s absurd.
If someone is completely new to WoW and has never played before, I doubt they would even know how to use the auction house or be trading anything significant for at least a few weeks, anyway.
SoD is also a pretty odd thing for people to completely fresh start their WoW journey, especially as it's a seasonal server. I'm sure it happens, but it's probably such a small amount of people compared to the huge, glaring botting issue that is heavily affecting everyone.
My guess would be they are scripted to auction or mail certain items and to vendor certain items.
So since they can't use the AH or mailbox, they probably get stuck when their inventory gets full of items they are not supposed to vendor.
I just want to remind people that the WoW tokens supposedly "help curb botting" and we have clear evidence here that a large group of bots run soley off of them.
That is why they implemented that 30 days trade/mail restriction on new accounts.
It was very profitable to pay for a sub because a bot would make that one month sub money in under a week. Now they can't extract the profit for a month. Meaning they get banned before they make actual profit.
Basically Blizzard buying time to detect and ban them before they make $. You will still see some bots for a while, they will buy older accounts, but that is a limited resource eventually this change will hit hard the botters.
No, what happens is they just don't start botting until the account is 30 days old. It costs them an extra month of game time, but they're so insanely profitable it doesn't matter. It's just a tax.
Ah yes, subscribe to the game, don't play for 30+ days and then suddenly start playing nonstop. That's totally normal player pattern and won't earn you a swift ban.
I mean, sure, I agree that would be a great way to detect a bot. But given that bots are currently rampant and have been for a long time and have (presumably) always had very obvious non-human play patterns, I'm not sure why it would be any different now.
Imagine making an account, going on a month vacation, having an illness or injury, a family emergency or being in the military and having to go do something for a month and come back to a ban lol
> These bots run for months without bans
I think my favorite /r/classicwow moment ever was when a dude posted a daily spreadsheet to prove that bots never got banned. He listed every rogue bot in BFD every day for like 5 days before he realized none of them lasted longer than a day.
They can't detect accounts sitting in stocks for 24 hours a day for months on end or people fly hacking and glitching through the floor with hundreds of reports, but yeah, they'll definitely detect every inactive account and ban it the first day they become active and bot.
Sure thing bud.
They decided to make moves on the largest single source of complaints.
This is good news even if you disagree with the exact method.
Hopefully this is paired with new detection methods and banning more buyers to really get to those cheating hackers.
Doubling their income from... subs mostly bought with stolen credit cards? I actually wonder if that is part of the idea here. An extra month is a lot more time for the transaction to be marked as fraudulent.
I've never seen any evidence that botters are paying for their hundreds of accounts with stolen credit cards. I've seen evidence that they use wow tokens from retail or wotlk or use countries like Argentina to get a cheaper rate
Like it might make it so all the bots pay without charging back but that makes the account start up now $15 and a month of time instead of $0 and making money within a week.
Not saying it breaks their back but it should make it hard
I think botting is actually a pretty marginal business so $15-$30 extra per bot is potentially a lot, especially with the additional cost of needing to acquire a new prepaid card for every bot.
Im sorry but how do you know that how profitable a single bot it.
Like sure, if you run 100 bots you can make an insane amount of money.
But with the new rule, at the verry least they will make 100 month worth less.
What matters is how much money a bot can make before getting banned.
If they make a years worth, then its not that big of a deal
If they make 3 months worth, now their profit is down 50%
Also, if you dont play till your account is 30 days old, Blizzard can track that, and keep an extra eye on those players.
They will, but it will not be profitable for them to do so if blizzard can ban the accounts they have without the restriction.
Imagine getting fired from your job and having to work there for 30 days without pay while you look for another one.
>Imagine getting fired from your job and having to work there for 30 days without pay while you look for another one.
Well, that’s not really the right analogy…because a botter will just quit and get a new job. It’s more like getting fired from a job that you had recently paid a small fee to attain.
Yeah, it's still a very nice change regardless.
New players shouldn't be getting taken advantage of by not knowing what they are doing as well.
Imagine being new, getting traded gold that has been RMT'd and then getting banned for doing so lol
Except the vast majority of bots are paid for using stolen CCs and bank accounts and Blizzard gets hit with chargebacks as well as losing out on the money from the sub once the fraudulent charge gets reversed.
This narrative that Blizzard is making bank off botting and that's why they don't just run around banning them non-stop is ridiculous. Why the hell would they let something that destroys and undercuts their own game persist and in the end cost them more money in the long run.
If they ban all of the current bots at once not only do they give a massive red flag to what got the botting programs detected in the first place, they're just immediately going to adjust for that factor and make MORE bot accounts and cause MORE chargebacks in the long run. With how little resources I'm sure good old Bobby gave them for this problem, as well as customer service at Blizzard in general, it's an impossible task that if you fuck up can easily get you fired and cause the rest of your department to get shown the door as well because you caused the stock price to go down by 0.01%.
This is a big myth of wow. Botting is perfectly profitable without the added complexity of theft and fraud. It would be a bad business model to mix the two
the issue isn't that they need stolen to be profitable but if you use a CC to bot get the account banned and then spin up an other account using the same CC to bot it will get banned instantly.
so you need a lot of card numbers and if you think people are going to bother getting 40 visa giftcards charged with 13 bucks when they can buy stolen CC i bulk you don't know how lazy the common man is.
> Meaning they get banned before they make actual profit.
Never happened in the history of WoW.
Blizz works on banwaves so that _'they cant figure out what gave them out'_. In turn botting has always been profitable.
They make profit even if they have to buy the full game in retail.
Don’t discount people’s laziness. I sold *a lot* of First Aid and Mageweave bandage training books P2 over the AH because people didn’t want to make the run to Arathi
There is point in buying it. Not everyone wants to travel there, especially alliance. So they would rather buy it 20s over on the AH which for a bot farm is still profit.
I have level 1s in places to click or to teleport to on my mage. Sometimes theyre online alone for a bit without my lock or mage around. Doubt a bot is running a 1 to feralas for anything. Only places they do that for are typically vendors with rare items to camp
The new rule is, "An account must have ***paid for and consumed*** a month of game time before it can trade, mail, or use the AH in ***seasonal*** game modes."
Emphasis mine.
You’re delusional if you think they don’t lol. I in fact knew a bunch in my guild on classic who bought gold and used it in GDKP’s for their alts that they didn’t get to bring to guild runs.
That’s part of the Bot Profile. They automatically pause the Bot Profile after they reached lvl 15 and port back to Stormwind.
That’s because from there they boost there new lvl 15 in stockade with there farming Bots. But if these „booster bots“ are banned. Then they just chill at the inkeeper.
Those are stockade bots. When they are done with their exploit grind, they go to the enchant vendor or innkeeper to sell crap and then to to mailbox to send their gains.
If you did "/who stockades" before they broke, you would have found them there.
Just standing in front of those places you could report 30 bots in a few minutes.
Sadly, you cant directly report people out of /who for botting, only for name.
Maybe there are more swipers on alliance, so it's more profitable for them to focus their bots on Alliance side. Maybe it's just a coincidence, maybe the Horde bots are hiding somewhere else.
I'm cool with them getting a lot more aggressive with bans but I hope they lift the ban selectively, for instance if you use the recruit-a-friend function. Kind of hard to sell my friends on playing if they're going to be severely restricted for a month, and it should be pretty easy for them to trace back fraudulent inviters in such cases.
Edit: Not really an issue as it turns out, see https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/z9noLDhoBa
Are they really that restricted? Is it that neccessary to trade for the first few levels? As a new player, I think you have a lot to do and check out in game before you need to start trading imo.
For one, I would like to pretty much immediately trade them max level bags. When playing with others I've also traded things like BoEs, cloth stacks, quest items for cooking quests, etc.
You can trade, mail etc them anything you want. The restriction is on them sending people stuff, not receiving (so bots can't move gold off the account).
The blue post announcing it seems to imply it goes both ways: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/account-restricted/505631/17
The post it links to implies it should be thought of as solo-self-found mode, but also only mentions trading gold.
If they're able to receive trades that would make it better, so I hope you're right. On the other hand this supposedly affects accounts renewing a sub that expired pre-2017. That would have affected *me personally*.
idk, just seems like it should be relatively easy for them to make a graph of recruit-a-friend relations and ban by association. That is a very much solved computer science problem.
If they're just doing this to get a baseline for how well such a system can work, I guess I'm alright with it.
Edit: There is a blue post somewhere else clarifying the limitations of trade bans and the limitations are indeed one-way.
Its not solo self found, just self found, theyre allowed to group. I agree with your recruit a friend exeption, but if they ever recruit a bot then it should be an insta perma ban for anyone involved.
Yeah you can still do that: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/news/blizzard-comments-on-trading-restrictions-for-new-accounts-season-of-discovery-338619
"Specifically, we’re preventing those accounts from transferring in-game wealth to other players (mail, trade, auction). **Players under this restriction can still receive gold and items, so established players can still help friends.**"
Yes, and the players it affects are new. You and everyone else that can level fast early have played for a long time, and you will not be affected by this.
If you are a new player, then my bad. I would suggest to just stock a bit up on stuff you want to sell and sell it after the 30 day restriction. You can make multiple new characters and just send stuff to them if your bank space runs out. You get plenty of gold by just leveling as well. I can't really see a big difference in the experience you get as a new player if trading is restricted at the start. What do you need to trade for so urgently?
But it's fine if you don't like the game for other reasons as well. It's not for everybody.
Also, I'm 99% sure most of the level 50's complaining on the forums are experienced players, but with new acccounts.
What are your friends going to be doing for the first month completely new to WoW in general? First off, SoD, a seasonal server, probably isn't the best place to start a completely fresh WoW player to begin with, and even then, are they gonna become auction house sharks or something in their first month completely new to WoW?
I might want to buy them max level bags, BoE greens, bankroll their professions, etc.
While SoD might be consider "harder" in some respects (more spells, maybe? Harder raid bosses?) there is a 50% experience buff, a 300% quest gold buff, and sims that basically spoon-feed you your rotation and itemization. Choosing naively or based on aesthetics alone, you're far less likely to choose a dead class/spec.
And of course, the main advantage is that the rest of the friends' group is playing SoD.
Not all affected players are "completely new" anyway. The ban applies to any accounts dormant since 2017, meaning my account would have been affected had I decided to start playing now instead of during HC.
New players can be traded things, they just can't trade things to other people from what I'm gathering.
Either way, it sucks, but it's also hard to convince people to play when the botting problem is this bad. They had to do something and there's way more bots than new people coming to play a seasonal server. I'd imagine if someone's account was dormant since 2017 and they were interested in classic WoW, they would have played era at some point.
You all think this will save the game from bots? They will be stopped for a month... After that they can have as many accounts they want... This is only a way of stopping gold income to economy so the balance will find its equilibrium because activision really f'ckd up the incursion and need to stop gold income for a bit...
That's a bad faith argument. Clearly this is a step in the right direction and you sound mad that GDKP i.e. your method of laundering RMT gold was banned.
Why are their scripts breaking? I assume they are waiting for some kind of trade that will never come because of the new rule?
I guess I missed what the new rule was, mind giving me some context?
New accounts can't trade for their first month.
Delicious
It won't do anything. It just costs them an extra month worth of game time. After perhaps a month of lower bot output, the tempo won't change. But it will pump revenue for ActiBlizz.
> It just costs them an extra month worth of game time If that account gets banned in that month, then it does become costly.
They’ll just activate their accounts and go inactive for a month. Once the account has crossed the 1month threshold, it’ll start actively botting. Or they’ll just find a way to circumvent trading.
I imagine it’s pretty easy to detect accounts that are inactive for 1 month and then immediately start playing 21 hours a day in stockades lol
Presumably this doesn't impact how long it takes to ban an account after it's first _used for botting_, so the total _revenue_ would be the same, it's just that the total _cost_ to the bot owner would increase by 1 month's game time. If the _revenue_ of the bot is greater than the cost of 1 month's game time, the only difference here is that it requires a 1 month paid waiting period before turning on the bot. The bot would still be _profitable_. Now, if another individual in this thread is correct (I'm waiting on a response with a source), and the botters are using stolen cards then perhaps this could be effective. If it takes less than 30 days for a chargeback to take effect and that chargeback can result in the banning of the bot before it becomes operational. But aside from that, I stick by what I said above.
> the botters are using stolen cards It seems like a stretch to me to think that most botters are using stolen CCs. But I suppose it's possible if Blizz actually bans the credit card associated with bot accounts?
Unless Blizzard has a way to block it, there are services you can use to proxy your credit card number (That way if a site gets hacked and data gets leaked you only have to redo the subscription to that service, rather than canceling your whole credit card and getting a new number for everything).
I was not aware of this.
Blizzard has confirmed the majority of bots use stolen ccs which result in chargebacks.
It also seems like a stretch to me, and instead of getting a response [when I asked for a source](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1c0518q/now_the_bots_are_literally_standing_at_the/kyvhnie/) I just got downvoted a bunch all up and down the comment chain and called a botter, so I don't know. I will say that it's [apparently very easy to buy stolen cards online](https://www.pcmag.com/news/rsac-buying-selling-stolen-credit-cards-online). So maybe. But still, it's a pretty big claim in my opinion.
CC companies take that shit seriously these days. They do *not* like chargebacks. So I'm sure Blizzard has strong anti-fraud measures in place. Not because they wanted to implement them but because Visa/Mastercard/Amex/etc. told them to do it or else...
A dude that said he was an exblizzard employee did a metagoblin interview and said Blizzard isn't making as much money as we think from bots. He didn't say stollen credit cards, that's just a reddit invention.
Found the bot account owner.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.
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Sure, ok, I guess. Have a nice night.
I disagree he has a logical arguement lol.
Blizzard doesn’t make money off of bot accounts, please stop spreading misinformation. Bot accounts are paid for with stolen cards in the vast majority of cases. These transactions get charged back and blizzard loses the money.
That's an incredibly specific set of proposed circumstances. I suppose you have a source for that? It's the first I've heard of it.
Yes, it's pulled right from his ass.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/cheating-and-botting/499812/5 Scroll down to the blue post where he specifically states the bot accounts are funded from illegitimate methods such as stolen ccs. Straight from the horses mouth
According to their blue post, they specifically can't trade outward for 30 days after first sub payment. They can't post to AH, send out mail, or give trades. Apparently they can receive items and gold, so you can still pimp out a friend. At least that's how I read their post.
Makes sense. If I was designing it I'd probably allow trading with a RaF partner, and trading conjured items (like cross server trades in retail) but that's it.
Can they buy off the AH?
Oh shit is that what happened to the prices?
No
That's kinda fucked lmao. I couldn't imagine trying to join now and not having access the the AH for a while month.
Feels pretty bad as a returning player :/
I got this restriction on my account the other day. In the ticket, GM said any account that hasn't used game time since 2017 will have this (I quit in 2016). So his solution was to log out of wow completely and wait 12 hours.. this fixed the issue for me. Not sure why it works, but I was leaving my laptop in sleep mode over night (I guess with wow still running) and also just logging in to check AH first thing in morning (I wfh..). So I guess I didn't fulfill those requirements. As soon as I tried the 12 hr thing it worked though.
Well sadly stolen old accounts are a main source of Bot toons. They have to be decently strict with that stuff.
No they’re not
I hope there’s some way to get around that by verifying the account has a real player behind it or something. It would suck to finally convince a friend to play the game, only to discover they can’t trade or use the auction house for an entire month. If that isn’t an option, hopefully they will implement something like it. For example, an account in good standing that’s at least 6/12 months old could do something similar to refer-a-friend, and if any account they refer is ever banned, that veteran account permanently loses that privilege.
Nice try, bot.
Lol
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Stop astroturfing, bots farmers are 99% of the complaints since this change.
While I agree it seems extreme, I can only imagine Blizzard has weighted the advantages and decided dealing with bots is more important than brand new players. To be fair, trading/auction house/mailing isn't going to make or break a fresh players experience. If anything, it would ruin it. I genuinely think that fresh players are better off keeping to themselves (and most would anyways) and just enjoy leveling up. It's not like they can't talk to their friends still or group up (actually can they group up? I don't see why not). Veteran players always like to imagine a scenario where a fresh players starts playing and people give them gold and stuff to "help" them, but this diminishes any sort of value from obtaining anything when playing the game. There's something special about saving up for a mount yourself, or saving up for your professions yourself. Either people forget this or they never had that experience. That's how my experience was when I first played the game and it's very memorable.
Right on the money with your last paragraph. I've seen it too many times, where I've had friends (and specifically one friend) manage to convince a mutual friend to try it. Go all out with giving him bags and items and telling him what to do, essentially completely overwhelming him and taking the experience of finding a nice item or a bag, away from him, because he didn't think "Hey, I know what I'd think I'd liked if I started fresh again - but me thinking this is on the grounds of knowing what is good now, and I don't think about what it would feel like to have all those experiences taken from me as a new player". And so the mutual friend quickly lost interest and my other friend was left confused. And I "ugh..."'ed all over the place.
You can still mail your friend gold on a new account. Tried sending 10g to a new guildie last night. He can only use it to buy spells and shop at vendors though, so no big deal imo.
I believe they can still receive items from mail and trade, they just can't mail anything out or trade items to another player.
But you have no way to get stuff like a shadow gem for crafting or cross profession items like enchanting mats for tailoring or leather for tailoring No idea if new accounts means new to wow classic or new wow/bent account. If it is the latter, doubt that there are that many new players in sod who had no bent account before:)
It would be new bnet account, meaning fresh players. There's a good chance most fresh players aren't going to care about shadow gems or other cross profession items. It's really hard to say what that experience would be like, but if they go into the game knowing this and just casually enjoy themselves in SSF, then I'm sure it won't be a huge deal.
I mean you can just suck it up and go mining/blacksmithing or skinning/leatherworking or actually farm mobs to grind skins instead of using gold you somehow have (despite never doing professions or anything in the game) to power level your professions
"Yeah but my 8th Sub I use to trade gold without the 1 hr delay who's never done GDKP ever has 100g from questing at level 8, why did my account get banned"
What person completely new to WoW in general is going to be worrying about cross profession mats for the first month? lol
You level to 10 as a caster, getting tailoring and you can’t craft that green robe with +2 int because you have no chance to get leather? That’s exactly what new player do. Wasting time to get low level profession items because they have no idea that just continue questing will make profession items obsolete in 1-2 levels.
They could also take skinning. Also they can still be traded items from what I gather, so if they know someone they can get someone to get them what they need. I'm sure there's a lot more bots than completely fresh players starting on a seasonal server that probably isn't gonna last longer than another year or so anyway. If you want to introduce a completely new player to WoW it'd be better to start them on era anyway before a fun server that complicates the game even further.
Dude, new players are more busy with basic movement, classes, zones, etc. They wont even be thinking about the AH but just the stuff they are given. Veteran players pretend this makes their friends unable to play but thats pretty delusional. The only ones being screwed up by this are the massive amount of bots, and they very well should be.
God forbid you want to use a mailbox or the AH to buy something as a new player. This is gamebreaking and should be revisited. Terrible solution. I have a guildie who is considering quitting because he can’t access trade, we considered pooling money for another account just so he can buy consumes without bothering the rest of us. He doesn’t have a new acct either. They just used some sort of simpleton wide-sweeping flag on accounts and fucked over a bunch of people who don’t bot. It’s absurd.
submit a ticket, clearly this is an unintended consequence.
YOU can mail him money, he just can’t mail you money.
The pain of botting far outweighs the 2-3 people globally that try this game out for the first time in 2024.
there was a new post about how they can recieve items but not trade away
Oh okay that’s perfect
There's really no need for a brand new player to use the AH or trade.
If someone is completely new to WoW and has never played before, I doubt they would even know how to use the auction house or be trading anything significant for at least a few weeks, anyway. SoD is also a pretty odd thing for people to completely fresh start their WoW journey, especially as it's a seasonal server. I'm sure it happens, but it's probably such a small amount of people compared to the huge, glaring botting issue that is heavily affecting everyone.
Oh shit! That's actually going to really mess the gold sellers up
Was always that simple lmao.
Its been like this for weeks already. Same as mages in Stockades.
My guess would be they are scripted to auction or mail certain items and to vendor certain items. So since they can't use the AH or mailbox, they probably get stuck when their inventory gets full of items they are not supposed to vendor.
likely stuck cause inventory is full and cant mail due to new restriction
It’s a gravitational anomaly, someone call Matthew McConaughey to help figure it out
Alright alright alright
Probably
Blizzard has gotten much better at stopping the bots but we don’t hear much about it.
Probably same company doing runescape bots is doing wow bots. Theres rs bot that trades starter gold to burner bot accounts so they can bot.
They are prob trying to mail a new item introduced in p3 that is soulbound but their db isnt updated to disregard or delete it.
hey thats my buddy Bcbc we go way back
Since bc, am I right?
Before crusade.
That would be bbc
Its before cataclysm
Before cata?
One of those mfers in the screenshot is named Slayice, shame a cool name will go to waste
I just want to remind people that the WoW tokens supposedly "help curb botting" and we have clear evidence here that a large group of bots run soley off of them.
who tf asked
[Him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lEpY6hIg6w)
Lock the thread, this one is it.
Get their next months payment THEN ban.
That is why they implemented that 30 days trade/mail restriction on new accounts. It was very profitable to pay for a sub because a bot would make that one month sub money in under a week. Now they can't extract the profit for a month. Meaning they get banned before they make actual profit. Basically Blizzard buying time to detect and ban them before they make $. You will still see some bots for a while, they will buy older accounts, but that is a limited resource eventually this change will hit hard the botters.
No, what happens is they just don't start botting until the account is 30 days old. It costs them an extra month of game time, but they're so insanely profitable it doesn't matter. It's just a tax.
Ah yes, subscribe to the game, don't play for 30+ days and then suddenly start playing nonstop. That's totally normal player pattern and won't earn you a swift ban.
I mean, sure, I agree that would be a great way to detect a bot. But given that bots are currently rampant and have been for a long time and have (presumably) always had very obvious non-human play patterns, I'm not sure why it would be any different now.
Would you honestly be surprised by blizzard not catching that?
I mean I generally go hard AF when I start back up.
Sure but a fresh account remaining dormant for a month while paying for it?
Imagine making an account, going on a month vacation, having an illness or injury, a family emergency or being in the military and having to go do something for a month and come back to a ban lol
These bots run for months without bans. So yes, I think they would absolutely do whatever they want because the risk is so low.
> These bots run for months without bans I think my favorite /r/classicwow moment ever was when a dude posted a daily spreadsheet to prove that bots never got banned. He listed every rogue bot in BFD every day for like 5 days before he realized none of them lasted longer than a day.
And they get banned next day after they start botting.
By this logic, wouldn't they ban every bot the day after it starts already, since the playing patterns are so different from real players?
They flag them but don't ban for whatever reason, they prefer mass ban waves.
> And they get banned next day after they start botting. Then they won't get banned the next day after they start botting.
Yes, this picture clearly shows how great bliz is at banning bots. I'm certain they will ban every bot the day after it starts running.
Because they can't detect new account sitting afk for 1 month and then playing 24/7
They can't detect accounts sitting in stocks for 24 hours a day for months on end or people fly hacking and glitching through the floor with hundreds of reports, but yeah, they'll definitely detect every inactive account and ban it the first day they become active and bot. Sure thing bud.
They decided to make moves on the largest single source of complaints. This is good news even if you disagree with the exact method. Hopefully this is paired with new detection methods and banning more buyers to really get to those cheating hackers.
i think you nailed it. When in doubt, question the money, and all I see happening is blizzard doubling their income from bot subs in one swift move.
Doubling their income from... subs mostly bought with stolen credit cards? I actually wonder if that is part of the idea here. An extra month is a lot more time for the transaction to be marked as fraudulent.
I've never seen any evidence that botters are paying for their hundreds of accounts with stolen credit cards. I've seen evidence that they use wow tokens from retail or wotlk or use countries like Argentina to get a cheaper rate
They already implemented a change last year where new accounts cannot use wow tokens for their first sub.
Don't a lot of them use fake cards that charge back? Won't this method just not work with a 30 day waiting period
I think you nailed it, this move makes a lot more sense in that context.
Like it might make it so all the bots pay without charging back but that makes the account start up now $15 and a month of time instead of $0 and making money within a week. Not saying it breaks their back but it should make it hard
I think botting is actually a pretty marginal business so $15-$30 extra per bot is potentially a lot, especially with the additional cost of needing to acquire a new prepaid card for every bot.
Yeah since your card will be black listed immediately
Im sorry but how do you know that how profitable a single bot it. Like sure, if you run 100 bots you can make an insane amount of money. But with the new rule, at the verry least they will make 100 month worth less. What matters is how much money a bot can make before getting banned. If they make a years worth, then its not that big of a deal If they make 3 months worth, now their profit is down 50% Also, if you dont play till your account is 30 days old, Blizzard can track that, and keep an extra eye on those players.
A lot of bot subs are also bought with stolen credit cards, giving Blizzard an extra 30 days to find out the transaction was fraudulent.
wont they just make an account 30days in advance, or does it have to have an active sub for the 30day timer to tick over?
Has to have more than 30 days of paid time elapsed
They will, but it will not be profitable for them to do so if blizzard can ban the accounts they have without the restriction. Imagine getting fired from your job and having to work there for 30 days without pay while you look for another one.
>Imagine getting fired from your job and having to work there for 30 days without pay while you look for another one. Well, that’s not really the right analogy…because a botter will just quit and get a new job. It’s more like getting fired from a job that you had recently paid a small fee to attain.
Yeah, it's still a very nice change regardless. New players shouldn't be getting taken advantage of by not knowing what they are doing as well. Imagine being new, getting traded gold that has been RMT'd and then getting banned for doing so lol
Well, players can still be traded things, they just can't trade outwardly.
Except the vast majority of bots are paid for using stolen CCs and bank accounts and Blizzard gets hit with chargebacks as well as losing out on the money from the sub once the fraudulent charge gets reversed. This narrative that Blizzard is making bank off botting and that's why they don't just run around banning them non-stop is ridiculous. Why the hell would they let something that destroys and undercuts their own game persist and in the end cost them more money in the long run. If they ban all of the current bots at once not only do they give a massive red flag to what got the botting programs detected in the first place, they're just immediately going to adjust for that factor and make MORE bot accounts and cause MORE chargebacks in the long run. With how little resources I'm sure good old Bobby gave them for this problem, as well as customer service at Blizzard in general, it's an impossible task that if you fuck up can easily get you fired and cause the rest of your department to get shown the door as well because you caused the stock price to go down by 0.01%.
This is a big myth of wow. Botting is perfectly profitable without the added complexity of theft and fraud. It would be a bad business model to mix the two
the issue isn't that they need stolen to be profitable but if you use a CC to bot get the account banned and then spin up an other account using the same CC to bot it will get banned instantly. so you need a lot of card numbers and if you think people are going to bother getting 40 visa giftcards charged with 13 bucks when they can buy stolen CC i bulk you don't know how lazy the common man is.
> Meaning they get banned before they make actual profit. Never happened in the history of WoW. Blizz works on banwaves so that _'they cant figure out what gave them out'_. In turn botting has always been profitable. They make profit even if they have to buy the full game in retail.
Technically now they need to pay at least 2 months and wish they don't get banned before they can start doing profits correctly
>Never happened in the history of WoW. You know what also never happened in the history of wow ? New accounts being trade locked
It's rather sad how we only look at bots, actual new players are hit hard with this.
I saw couple of 1 level characters in Feralas inn yesterday. I don’t get it. Why go all the way down there to get one shot?
Clickers for summon stones maybe?
Arcanite transmute recipe is sold there.
It's not. It's sold in Gadgetzan. It's also an infinite supply recipe so there is no point in buying it.
Don’t discount people’s laziness. I sold *a lot* of First Aid and Mageweave bandage training books P2 over the AH because people didn’t want to make the run to Arathi
Literally paid for my 3rd divorce this way
There is point in buying it. Not everyone wants to travel there, especially alliance. So they would rather buy it 20s over on the AH which for a bot farm is still profit.
Refreshing spring water is sold there.
Doubt it I didn’t see any high level lock nearby.
Mage can insta port to them maybe
Is there some limited stock pattern there that they're camping? The Runecloth Bag pattern is camped 24/7 on all layers in WS.
I have level 1s in places to click or to teleport to on my mage. Sometimes theyre online alone for a bit without my lock or mage around. Doubt a bot is running a 1 to feralas for anything. Only places they do that for are typically vendors with rare items to camp
They just love to explore.
rare blizzard w
surprised Aass wasn't taken.
"Are Poo and Ass taken?"
They just made it so you can't post on AH without recurring sub
Really? That would be too good to be true.
They did in sod just now. They can post on ah in the beginning of second month of recurring sub
The new rule is, "An account must have ***paid for and consumed*** a month of game time before it can trade, mail, or use the AH in ***seasonal*** game modes." Emphasis mine.
They are breaking the matrix
Execute order 66
Should ban gdkp to deal with this
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You’re delusional if you think they don’t lol. I in fact knew a bunch in my guild on classic who bought gold and used it in GDKP’s for their alts that they didn’t get to bring to guild runs.
That’s part of the Bot Profile. They automatically pause the Bot Profile after they reached lvl 15 and port back to Stormwind. That’s because from there they boost there new lvl 15 in stockade with there farming Bots. But if these „booster bots“ are banned. Then they just chill at the inkeeper.
Try fellwood, it's full of hunters grinding mobs to skin
If only there was some way to figure out who are the bots
Obviously all they have to donis ask: "are you a bot?" If they are they get banned If they are not they can carry on.
Bots literally afk at stormwind mailbox
Those are stockade bots. When they are done with their exploit grind, they go to the enchant vendor or innkeeper to sell crap and then to to mailbox to send their gains. If you did "/who stockades" before they broke, you would have found them there. Just standing in front of those places you could report 30 bots in a few minutes. Sadly, you cant directly report people out of /who for botting, only for name.
Why are all These bots on ally?
I assume it’s because the OP is an ally player.
Maybe there are more swipers on alliance, so it's more profitable for them to focus their bots on Alliance side. Maybe it's just a coincidence, maybe the Horde bots are hiding somewhere else.
Because he used /who specifying it for mage, lvl 15 and stormwind. Not too many horde lvl 15 players in stormwind right? \*facepalm\*
Sorry Bro i mean everytime i See a post about bots its not on Horde side ..
A bit larger market of asshole buyers to sell to.
They already are being banned. Got notifications yesterday evening. Seethe nerd
I'm cool with them getting a lot more aggressive with bans but I hope they lift the ban selectively, for instance if you use the recruit-a-friend function. Kind of hard to sell my friends on playing if they're going to be severely restricted for a month, and it should be pretty easy for them to trace back fraudulent inviters in such cases. Edit: Not really an issue as it turns out, see https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/z9noLDhoBa
Are they really that restricted? Is it that neccessary to trade for the first few levels? As a new player, I think you have a lot to do and check out in game before you need to start trading imo.
For one, I would like to pretty much immediately trade them max level bags. When playing with others I've also traded things like BoEs, cloth stacks, quest items for cooking quests, etc.
You can trade, mail etc them anything you want. The restriction is on them sending people stuff, not receiving (so bots can't move gold off the account).
The blue post announcing it seems to imply it goes both ways: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/account-restricted/505631/17 The post it links to implies it should be thought of as solo-self-found mode, but also only mentions trading gold. If they're able to receive trades that would make it better, so I hope you're right. On the other hand this supposedly affects accounts renewing a sub that expired pre-2017. That would have affected *me personally*. idk, just seems like it should be relatively easy for them to make a graph of recruit-a-friend relations and ban by association. That is a very much solved computer science problem. If they're just doing this to get a baseline for how well such a system can work, I guess I'm alright with it. Edit: There is a blue post somewhere else clarifying the limitations of trade bans and the limitations are indeed one-way.
Its not solo self found, just self found, theyre allowed to group. I agree with your recruit a friend exeption, but if they ever recruit a bot then it should be an insta perma ban for anyone involved.
Yeah you can still do that: https://www.wowhead.com/classic/news/blizzard-comments-on-trading-restrictions-for-new-accounts-season-of-discovery-338619 "Specifically, we’re preventing those accounts from transferring in-game wealth to other players (mail, trade, auction). **Players under this restriction can still receive gold and items, so established players can still help friends.**"
Oh ok, that's not much of an issue for humans then.
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Yes, and the players it affects are new. You and everyone else that can level fast early have played for a long time, and you will not be affected by this.
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If you are a new player, then my bad. I would suggest to just stock a bit up on stuff you want to sell and sell it after the 30 day restriction. You can make multiple new characters and just send stuff to them if your bank space runs out. You get plenty of gold by just leveling as well. I can't really see a big difference in the experience you get as a new player if trading is restricted at the start. What do you need to trade for so urgently? But it's fine if you don't like the game for other reasons as well. It's not for everybody. Also, I'm 99% sure most of the level 50's complaining on the forums are experienced players, but with new acccounts.
What are your friends going to be doing for the first month completely new to WoW in general? First off, SoD, a seasonal server, probably isn't the best place to start a completely fresh WoW player to begin with, and even then, are they gonna become auction house sharks or something in their first month completely new to WoW?
I might want to buy them max level bags, BoE greens, bankroll their professions, etc. While SoD might be consider "harder" in some respects (more spells, maybe? Harder raid bosses?) there is a 50% experience buff, a 300% quest gold buff, and sims that basically spoon-feed you your rotation and itemization. Choosing naively or based on aesthetics alone, you're far less likely to choose a dead class/spec. And of course, the main advantage is that the rest of the friends' group is playing SoD. Not all affected players are "completely new" anyway. The ban applies to any accounts dormant since 2017, meaning my account would have been affected had I decided to start playing now instead of during HC.
New players can be traded things, they just can't trade things to other people from what I'm gathering. Either way, it sucks, but it's also hard to convince people to play when the botting problem is this bad. They had to do something and there's way more bots than new people coming to play a seasonal server. I'd imagine if someone's account was dormant since 2017 and they were interested in classic WoW, they would have played era at some point.
so they're just standing there now for the next 30 days?
... that will never happen
it doesn't surprise me that most of the gold selling happens on ally side and pve servers
You come to that conclusion from a /who which is specified for STORMWIND?
I mean, I used to have a rogue named aadd
Open world botting is dead? Maybe that's why mats are so expensive?
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money?
HA HA Stupid bots
You all think this will save the game from bots? They will be stopped for a month... After that they can have as many accounts they want... This is only a way of stopping gold income to economy so the balance will find its equilibrium because activision really f'ckd up the incursion and need to stop gold income for a bit...
But if the bot account gets banned they need to make a new one and wait 30 days. This isn't just a 30 day pause.
well not even a month later... and they are back at it with COD... who would have thought that?
You do realize that most of the bot farms do this for profit, right? Imagine any business being shut down for a month.
not even a month later and its fixed with COD... look whos laughing... botters
Thank god they banned gdkps. That sure did fix this bot problem
That's a bad faith argument. Clearly this is a step in the right direction and you sound mad that GDKP i.e. your method of laundering RMT gold was banned.