First of all, thanks to everyone for not turning this thread into a total flame war this time, I really appreciate it.
Yes Espan, that is one thing I hope that these threads can get across to Blizzard: there are plenty of new players who came for SOD and this is affecting us in a way that they may not have anticipated. It may yet be that a workaround that makes everyone happy is possible, but Blizzard didn’t know it was so important to find one.
To be fair Dredna, I think a lot of enfranchised players are probably feeling like “Blizzard finally did something to stop the bots, and now people are trying to make them roll it back!” That’s why I’m trying to say that this is really a separate issue: whatever the reality, new players have a problem right now, and we should be looking for a fix for that problem, even if the cause of that problem is itself fixing a bigger problem. I don’t see it as an either/or, it just needs some way to appeal.
And players need to know what is actually happening in the first place, because everyone is confused.
Manual verification might be difficult because the company is so big. So many people play this game, meanwhile everyone at Blizzard probably has to wear several hats. That said, plenty of websites use automated identity verification (adult entertainment sites that have to make sure everyone is over 18, for example). However, there are two problems with that:
- Orliya said most of these bot accounts are using fake credit cards, so they could probably also use fake IDs as well. while there seem to be ways to counteract this (adult sites have dealt with this too after all), it would be a new problem for Blizzard and they don’t necessarily have things in place to cope with it.
- players would have to give Blizzard their ID. do you want to do that? Blizzard is the corporate misconduct company, LOL! this company just got hit with a massive privacy lawsuit! i don’t want to do that!
one thing along those lines did come to mind though. my bank requires that i go through 2FA in order to sign into the site, and also make certain purchases. i am not sure how robust this is as means of preventing fraud, but if Blizzard required new accounts to 2FA with their bank before purchasing game time, or let affected players appeal in this way, maybe that would work as a method of verification?
I think you’re underestimating new players so much! The game itself has more respect for players than that; it puts the low-level gathering materials in low level zones, and profession trainers in the first town. And even the earliest nodes will drop rare, AH-able materials. It takes a few minutes to google ‘wow classic mining’ and realize you could help yourself in this manner.
Besides, new players will probably have played games before, just not this one. They probably understand that there is a player economy and want to participate in it. Or else they play with someone who is more experienced in this game who tells them about it. In our case, we had been keeping up to date with our professions in order to trade each other useful items that you couldn’t get any other way. Learning as we go. This was really fun and it’s a massive gut-punch to lose it. That’s why I’m on here complaining about it in the first place…
Plus, new players have to say goodbye to healthstones, mage water, and other useful things their class can do while levelling. Hell, what about that as a solution? Make some ‘permitted items’ that players can trade, like healthstones, mage water, etc., and allow use of the ‘item will not be traded’ slot for enchanting and unlocking. Things that will be useful for actual new players, but useless to bots.
I think you’re really overstating the case; a lot of people have never played a Blizzard game before. They make new people in this world every day, sosu.
In my case, I played WOW around Mists~, and I played Warcraft (hence username: Thrallr, lol), so I do have a Battle.net account. But to play with my friends on a US server I had to make a new account, since you can’t play on the US server with an EU account, so it still ended up affecting me.
If a new player is playing SOD instead of retail it’s for a reason. In my case: it’s what my friends play. It’s the same way for Iha who is playing with their parents. So we aren’t going to play another version of WOW; we either play this one, or stop playing WOW. That’s how it is for me. A lot of people are saying “that’s a tiny fraction of players, so who cares?” What I’m trying to say is: we do exist nonetheless, and this is an issue affecting us when it isn’t really aimed at us, so lets talk about how to fix it.
Hey that’s a good idea for the bank space problem Shevanel. Not bad for a few hours after you started drinking, LOL. I’ll try that later…
Sorry for the really long post, thanks everyone for reading again.