Banning bots does not mean losing cash anymore than banning bank robbers means the bank is safe.
Blizzard takes your cash. You bot. You get caught. You lose your account. Blizzard keeps cash. You go get another account and bot. Blizzard takes your cash…
Banning Bots does not in any way reduce the demand for bots.
Banning Bots actually makes Blizzard MORE money.
The problem is Blizzard is not currently paying attention to bots and banning them. Blizzards is saving money by NOT PAYING someone to monitor and ban bots.
This is VERY different.
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Maybe you should understand how global trade works. No foreign entity can control more then 50% of a company in China.
Even automakers in China such as BMW, General Motors etc only own 49.9% of their Chinese businesses.
In order for WOW to release in China it had to partner with a Chinese company.
Another example is Google did not pull out of China because of censorship as so many believe, it pulled out due to disagreements with its Chinese partner company
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If Blizzard started EFFICIENTLY banning bots it would become clear to the botters that they would no longer be profitable. You would see botters resubscribing at the start of this new attitude towards bots, but they would stop after some time.
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So what you’re saying is, people botting are NOT financially supporting blizzard. Others that do not bot are.
Thanks for the confirmation.
Either way blizz is going to lose money if they don’t fix the botting issue. Either they lose the botter accounts and keep the players or lose players from not wanting to deal with a wildwest version of wow which has no moderation.
NetEase might not be able to make big decisions depending on the rules of the contract, things like WoW tokens would have to have been permitted by Blizz. But NetEase does get to choose their own support levels, which is why they actually have support and do bot bans and Blizz doesn’t.
It’s frankly a bigger stain on Blizz that they are being utterly embarrassed by this companies ability to ban bots and their inaction.
Another thing since it came up- saying Activision and Blizzard are separate entities is only technically correct, in the same way I can say my left hand is independent of my right hand. It’s true- but at the end of the day one person decides the vision, goals and morality of what Actiblizz does, and one person decides what both your left and right hands do.
Thankfully at this point those are different people, until Kotick gets his hand on a mind control device.
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It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when netease is doing mass bot bans before Blizzard.
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They are making $1.6m / mth allowing the bots but I have personally unsubscribed. I am levelling a Paladin on retail until my sub ends in 9 days
Wow… That’s a lot of bots.
This is a contradictory narrative if you’re to believe that Blizzard doesn’t ban bots because they give them money. If that were true, Blizzard wouldn’t allow NetEase to ban MILLIONS of dollars worth of bots.
Unless for some extremely odd reason you think Blizzard doesn’t make revenue in China. They just let NetEase run WoW out of the generosity of their hearts. Next you people are going to say that NetEase has better morals and that’s why they ban those bots, refusing to obey Blizzard’s direct order to allow those bots to continue on their destructive path!
The truth is really hard to believe for some people, sad.
Nice, I’ll be unsubbing myself once Cyberpunk 2077 comes out in a few months
Neither of us know the stipulations in the contract between NetEase and Actiblizz- we just know that they’ve been mass banning bots and making it known they’re doing so, and there’s no indication that Actiblizz is doing the same in NA either from their communication or from the visible bots we see in game that continue untouched often months after being reported by players.
That alone is a clear indication that something is being done differently between NA and CN.
Again, if they’ve left support related decisions up to NE, perhaps NE considers the time/money it takes to identify and remove bots to be worthwhile and Blizz in NA hasn’t. This proves though that if NE can do it, Actiblizz absolutely can do it too and it’s not nearly as difficult or impossible to take out large chunks of the botting population as defenders of Acti make it out to be.
Nobody is ever going to say that companies aren’t primarily motivated by profit- both companies are. That said, some companies also take pride in their work and do try to be more than soulless scumbags. There’s multiple reasons NE may be doing this other than morality. They may believe it’s more profitable to keep their customers happy and make an effort of managing their game and removing bots/exploiters/gold sellers. Making/managing a good product is a profit driven strategy for some companies.
NE likely knows the CN market better- consider tokens, it’s quite possible that tokens simply are a better fit for that market, and perhaps CN players have higher expectations of service than NA players do.
Do I know for sure WHY there’s a difference? No, I can speculate, but I don’t know for certain their reasoning if it’s morality, profit, contract rules, etc…
But I do know NE has shown bots can be banned in massive amounts, and that completely negates the argument that Blizz can’t handle the bot issues in NA due to difficulty/time/money problems. That really only leaves it to greed- whether it’s because Blizz wants bot sub money, or they don’t want to pay people to handle it is irrelevant because it ultimately comes down to being a problem they can at least put a sizable dent in (nobody expects bots to be completely eradicated)- and are not doing so.
That makes the game worse for everyone, and it’s not being done because Blizz is greedy- that’s something that needs to be called out.
