I’d like to see a full open trade system return to Diablo at some point. I know this raises the question - “What do we do about bots/3rd party sites selling items and gold?”
More banwaves would be good to stop the bots, but as far as the shady websites, my response to that is - “Can’t Blizzard’s legal team do anything to shut those sites down?”
Can a blue post explain, or maybe MissC?
Is this a case of not having the legal power to do so, or is it more of the case of whack-a-mole - shut one down and 3 others pop up?
Simple, it has too many downsides. One such thing, rather major one, is that real money gets involved, one way or another. RMT must be eliminated completely, not just mitigated through banning of bots and such.
From what little I understand Blizzard was getting into some seriously dangerous waters with the Auction House that would have required extensive work to stay out of said waters. Rather than try and muck around with all the paperwork and whatever, Blizzard simply took the easier route in shutting down the AH.
The day that becomes possible, you might see a return to open trade. Right now, no game in existence, that I know of, has managed it.
Many of the websites that provide the third party platform for arranging deals, exist outside the reach of US law. So, no, they can’t prosecute them. Further, doing so costs a lot of money. Legal battles are not cheap. Kill one site, it pops up under a new name. Never ending battle.
Another issue that comes up related to those sites, is the theft of Blizz accounts so the bad guys can sell off items, and theft of player financial info if they use the site to facilitate transfer of funds for an item. Why does that matter to Blizz? They try to help players recover stolen accounts and items. That means paying people to do that. If the account is not stolen and the items are not taken, the player is happy and Blizz does not have to spend labor fixing it.
It is far easier, and more cost efficient, to simply stop the whole issue at the start. No open free trade and no way for those sites to function.
They can shut those down if you provide enough money for hiring lawsuits who work $100k or so per legal action.
Exactly. If you allow trade there’s no escape from third party sites. The only pre-caution to that would be setting a solid loot system where trading is restricted and supporting it with a good enclosed crafting system.
It is unfortunate that the amount of time and money required to do such a thing makes keeping open trade off the table. As MissCheetah mentioned, a lot of the sites can be outside of the United States Judicial system which makes it very difficult if not impossible to do anything about them.
It would just cost way too much time and resources chasing all the issues that opening up free trade would cause.
Wake up TardarSauce,
The world does what the world does.
When an opportunity arises, they come out of the wood work and provide for us.
The harder another entity tries to stop them, the worse it gets.
Which is why Blizzard make D3 BoA.
Very much still relevant. D3 is not a target anymore because you can’t easily make real money off it. No point in compromising our accounts anymore. If you remember though, D3 release the compromises were crazy bad. Fake beta sites, fake fan sites, fake news sites, phishing scams, malware to skim passwords, etc.
It is back to WoW being the major one the bad guys target. Yes, they do everything they can to help a player get back their account, gear, gold, etc.
If someone were hacked back in the day in D3 and had not played, they will certainly help them get the account back. It might take submitting a real ID, but they will help.
Blizz is really good about that. If anyone needs help with that, just ask me (friend me on Bnet), or post on the WoW CS forum. That only takes a free trial account with a level one char on it. Just ask for help getting a Battle.net account back, don’t specify the game. They can’t do it on the forums, but they will walk you through the process.
Mostly just pester me. I can direct you to the right channels.
