In case you don’t know, Blizzard have imposed restrictions on new accounts who play Season of Discovery (click, click). Accounts which have consumed under 30 days of paid time cannot trade, send mail, or use the Auction House.
Orlyia from Customer Support says that topics about it should go here instead of in the customer support forum (click), so I’m making a thread for talking about it here.
I would like to get off on the right foot and try to keep the discussion productive. I’ll start by clarifying a few things based on my understanding:
- As of right now, we don’t know why this change has been made. Most people assume that it is to combat bots, which seems likely to me as well, but Blizzard is yet to release any kind of official statement about it.
EDIT: Blizzard have since made a statement on this very thread (click), go read it.
- The staff who reply on these forums, as well as the staff who answer support tickets, seem to know very little about the situation, so you should take whatever they say with a pinch of salt and don’t be shocked if they contradict each other (I appreciate that this has been very confusing, because you seemed to get a different answer wherever you went).
- Some accounts which should not be affected are being affected anyway, eg. accounts which have consumed more than 30 days of paid time, or accounts on regular WOW Classic or Hardcore rather than SOD. This is said to be a glitch.
- Blizzard are entitled to change the game based on their EULA (Blizzard has faced a lot of lawsuits for their conduct, but I think they’ll wriggle out of this one).
Personally, I really don’t want to talk about whether this is a good anti-botting measure or not. If that is why, then Blizzard decided it was good enough for them already. For all I know it’s a perfect one, it just also affects me! Losing out on trade and AH is a huge blow to a new player; it hurts cooperation, training professions and other things. And as Kutuzov said (click), it’s going to be hard to raid without buying consumables.
And while it’ll blow over for me and the friends I’m playing with in a few weeks (hopefully), it’s going to be difficult for us to invite our other friends to play with us, make a guild, &c. “Hey, would you like to play WOW with us… in 30 days?” ← not happpening. So this will never stop being an issue in SOD.
So is there anything Blizzard can do to stop this from hurting legitimate players? Have you ever heard of another game that implemented something similar? It’d be nice if you could email them and say “Hey, Blizz, I’m a real guy!” but I doubt they have the staff for that. But some other users mentioned a capatcha system as a possible alternative. I think some kind of appeal system that legitimate new players could initiate would really help here.
Thanks for reading
P.S. if anyone who knows is reading this, can I get some clarification on two questions:
- When Blizzard says “consumed at least 30 days of game time”, does that mean 30 days in real life since purchasing game time, or 720 hours /played? The wording of Article 358296 (click) makes it seem like the latter which is a little alarming!
- When we talk about adding game time, what payment methods does that include? If I purchased a reccuring subscription instead, would my AH access be restored?
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You should actually address the real reason why these restrictions are in place.
account that has not spent real money to purchase and consume at least 30 days of game time since 2017.
It’s not new accounts, it’s accounts that were either created and funded via tokens or people who haven’t spent a dime on the game in almost 7 full years.
Sounds a little sus doesn’t it?
These restrictions were also announced months ago, so it’s a you problem. They don’t owe you anything.
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The Article I linked does indeed say “real money”, which was confusing for us since we all did spend real money (my partner was linked to that page by Customer Support ingame). However, the error message is also not exactly the same either (our error message did not say anything about the account being “self-found”, as quoted in the article). Yryadorne’s post does not mention “real money” but rather says “if this is your first time adding game time on your WoW account (and if the game time was added recently), you will not be able to trade with other players [etc.]” which lines up more with our experience. But as I say in PS, it’s unclear to me if this would affect us if we bought a regular subscription instead of buying game time (I believe I purchased a month of game time although I’d have to double check).
Can you show me where it was announced? This is the first I’m hearing about it.
No, but I do think it warrants feedback and discussion. I’m sure everyone agrees that it would be better if new players weren’t restricted, even if they support the measure.
You expect the majority of the player base to support you when the measure is to directly counter act RMTers? If you honestly couldn’t afford a single direct payment for the sub fee within the last 7 years then you have a lot more to worry about in life then playing a game.
Purchasing a direct cost sub fee whether it be 1,3,6,12 month fees would clear you. You had to of purchased a token which is the reason this exists. To prevent boost accounts and bad behavior.
If you purchased a direct sub fee then you can submit a live ticket and have it removed. I was also given this restriction (along with guildies) and it was lifted within 24 hours because I have paid my fee directly since 05.
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The botters are just people so it’s hard to come up with something that doesn’t just turn into them frauding the system.
What they need to do is pay me 5$ an hour as a GM and I will do nothing but look for people running in the same exact trajectory and then ban them. It’s not hard, literally just go to Alterac Mountains at 2am. You will see 5 Horde hunters all running along the same exact path in perfect sync with each other, they’re completely shameless and all use the same bot software.
Kulz, neither I nor my friends used a token. The problem is that we are new players. I think you and your guild mates were affected by the bug (see my original post, point 3), but I’m pretty sure I am supposed to be restricted as my account is under 30 days old. This account is about two weeks old.
I guess that’s true. But they’re very busy people, right…? They’re running thousands of accounts at once. Maybe there is something that is reasonable for one person to do, but not for one person to do 100 times?
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My account is not even a week old and I have this issue. Why is almost EVERY answer some guy saying “Gold trading/RMT” when the people who are complaining new.
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I think a lot of people are confused about this issue Kimbo because there hasn’t been an official statement about what’s actually happening.
People playing SOD who are “brand new” is such a minor number… This is basically a non-issue.
However, new accounts being played by botters and hackers… is way higher.
This change is a good change… and will cut down on botters and RMT drastically…
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It is however an issue for those of us who exist, and that is the issue this thread is trying to address.
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My idea, that I just literally just came up with while going to grab a beer:
Let the new account add a friend as a Trustee and they may only trade with that Trustee. This allows them to utilize trade and AH, but it would have to be through a Trustee. It’s better than nothing at all.
Trustee would need to be a recurring account as well, couldn’t be fresh obviously.
Bad idea…
So botters/RMT use trustee accounts to move money around funneling to alt accounts.
A small fraction of players are inconvenienced for a small amount of time … sorry for that, but it is for the greater good.
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Yeah you can tell I put zero thought into that.
Like I said, it’s hard to implement anything without people going fraud mode on it. Literally just get better code, coders, AI, etc, etc. Start using modern 2024 security that can detect anomalies in code, use Anti Cheat software, hire GMs, hire coders. It needs to be a multi pronged attack. There is no one size fits all, one step solution.
Well whatever the best method is, Blizzard decided to implement restrictions on accounts under 30 days. Talking about better anti-botting measures isn’t going to address the issue this thread is about, which is that this anti-bot measure is hurting new players, and how to deal with that.
w/r/t the Trustees idea, you could have something similar where some trusted community members are given a sort of ‘verified’ status & can give people referral codes. Then if the issue happens to you, you can contact that person & have a chat with them, and they could give you a referral code if they decide you aren’t botting. Sounds like a headache though.
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What do you expect me to talk about when people shoot my solutions downs swfitly without offering discourse of their own?
You’re asking more of us than we’re capable of, we’re not professionals.
I didn’t mean to act like you weren’t contributing anything valuable Shevanel, I appreciate your input. I just want to keep this thread on topic because the other ones turned into flame wars.
I did respond to you about the trustees ideas in the post above.
I mean, first you need to understand that it wasn’t just people who bought tokens for their playtime were effected. I still don’t even know what the wow token is tbh. Me and everyone else asking questions bought the subscription normally and were locked out. Sending bug reports and live tickets haven’t seemed to do anything so we are sitting here wondering if they really intend for us to play 720 hours of WoW before we can trade and use the auction house lol.
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But I feel like SoD is the best of all the versions for new players to try out. If new players like me and Thrall are basically told we can’t really play the game for the first month, it becomes really difficult to justify renewing the subscription. Consistent new players is what keeps a game alive and while I understand botting is an issue, it doesn’t seem like a worthy trade off to ruin the game for new players.
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This is such a non-constructive and poisonous mindset to have in general about a game you play and supposedly care about. Your game is effectively dead once you stop caring about the new player experience and write them off as irrelevant. All of you oldheads will eventually die or quit and there won’t be any new players to keep the game alive.
All we want is a way to manually verify we’re a real person now that our accounts are automatically sanctioned by this. Is that really impossible or unrealistic to ask of a multi-billion dollar company?
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Why not change it with and ID check. Send a picture of your driver licens or Blizzard make a phone call to you. So they can confirm you are a bot or not! It is possible open a bank account online but not a WoW account. Blizzards are totaly helpless.