30 Day restriction on returning accounts is unacceptable

[Greaterfade-stormrage]

Keep buying gold nerd

[Dredna-wild-growth]

Can’t buy gold in SoD, nerd. Also genuinely just been trying to play the game for the first time but now I’m playing Hardcore mode apparently.

[Hwanwok-ysera (Hwanwok)]

@Voidarcane-whisperwind

This is the devs solution.

This is a double edged sword solution though.

One edge combats the botters to an extent, though they will just buy or hack accounts to get around this.

One edge comes at a cost to new players who are looking to try SoD out and when they play SoD and they found out that they can’t use the AH to make some money or trade/mail items and or gold to their friend.

There are other solutions out there that doesn’t come at a cost to player experience, such as…

• Increase suspension on those caught in RMT activity from 2 weeks to 6 months (or permanent). 2 week suspension is not enough to deter people away from buying gold, since its not enough, it allows gold sellers to be more profitable and thus more bots to keep up with the demand. Having a lengthy and strict punishment towards gold buying will deter people away from it.

• Ramp up the ban waves.

• Send a GM or a couple of em to look at popular farming spots that bots go to.

This is just what I think of for solutions to combat botting that don’t impact player experience.

[Dredna-wild-growth]

+1: hire 1-2 people to verify genuine accounts/players. Like, I can prove I’m a real person playing the game normally. Does Blizzard not care about losing new business? Have they really resorted to only trying to keep existing customers?

[Schäden-proudmoore]

Steam/Counter-Strike had (possibly still does) this policy a long time ago. Lots of restrictions on new accounts and hurdles to jump through, especially to trade skins and whatnot. It was annoying but somehow players managed to survive. You will too.

[Ioopsmypants-defias-pillager]

This is the greatest thing I’ve heard all day.

Thank you Blizzard. 99% of new accounts are botters. The OP is probably a bot.

[Whoamiy-wild-growth]

cant buy Greater Magic Wand for my rune quest

[Rattlefist-altar-of-storms]

My understanding is its for new accounts, to which i have no sympathy. SoD is not for new players. Kill the bots.

[Kaeliaela-echo-isles]

What Poli said. I presented many such ‘easy ways’ to combat bots in suggestions and on the Blizzard/wow facebook page. Hell, just do a /who for dire maul north at 3 am. 150 toons, 2/3rds of them survival hunters, the rest a split of mages and warlocks. Geee can’t imagine why!?
I regularly submit tickets with ‘dumpers’ on auction house who are dumping 10000 pieces of runecloth, 2000-3000 argent dawn bones, thousands of zg coins/tokens - PER DAY. Obviously either bots, toon farms or boost-farms mining gold to sell online.
You can search AH for overpriced items - grey items selling for thousands of gold, greens for 10000, etc. (which is generally gold transfers between gold seller accounts which are less traceable over ah since blizzard bots have been long tracking gold transfers by mail)
There are toons that sit from morning to night spamming trade buying arcanite or mooncloth cds - all day and night long. Yeah sure, some person is so bored with wow, they play non-stop buying cds and never actually leave stormwind or level past level 5!

It’s not hard to find evidence of bots, and bots are being reported with regularity. They used this policy because it’s cheap. They don’t have to hire anyone to do it.

[Arbitor-atiesh]

If its ‘new players’ you are worried about then 30days with no trading or AH is not really a hardship. My only question is this anything more than a 30 day pause for the commited botter? Does this work In conjunction with anything else to make it more of a hurdle?

[Myrkr-undermine]

microsoft say no.

[Morphtato-crusader-strike]

SOD Account Restrictions: how can Blizzard help new players who are affected?

Hi there, firstly, apologies for the radio silence on this change, it is targeting a group that that we specifically wanted to keep in the dark as long as possible. Let me now try and fill in some details for you! We’ve been recently experimenting with a change to Classic Era and Season of Discovery that places restrictions on new accounts that have not yet purchased and consumed one month of gametime (i.e. one month has also passed since the purchased time). Specifically, we’re preventing thos…

[Voidarcane-whisperwind]

@Arbitor-atiesh

My only question is this anything more than a 30 day pause for the commited botter?

Issue is majority of bots use fraudulent and/or stolen credit/debit cards (which Blizzard loses the money of the sub) which is usually detected in 7 days which the account is perma banned after.

This means all potential new bot accounts need a valid credit/debit card that will be charged at minimum $7 USD a month (because of regional pricing in low income countries) for 2 months ($14 total) BEFORE they can start moving gold and items.

This means RMT’ers are going to be crippled severely needing to wait 31 days before they can begin making money off an account.

I would expect them to be more focused on hacking into existing players accounts now more than ever. So make sure you have 2-factor loggin for WoW.

[Hellspecter-wild-growth]

Then talk to Bliizard support aswell, tell them that you are okey with their new methods, but they should refund afected new accounts that pay sub, sub that most sure would not have paid if they had post the new article 3 weeks ago, real people lose money, not only botters with fraudulent payments, those people that did their payments and start to play an uncompleted game without the knowledge of it, can be take like an scam by Blizzard side isn’t? Every person that i know that suffer this restriction tried to ask refund, even the very first day of it, and blizzard answer the same to all of them, NO.

[Ronarion-lone-wolf]

@Saltheart-lone-wolf

We can’t get a few intern GMs instead?

The issue is that a few GMs won’t stop botters. In fact as soon as botters get wind of active GMs they’ll start opening tickets and having people make forum posts etc to make it look terrible too.
GM wrongly banned me!

My company is trying to stop fraud by not giving out somewhat innocuous account info without authentication. Scammers were using it to fake being us and scamming customers. We got an email sent to our CEO that:

@Morphtato-crusader-strike

this was a shady practice

yet fraud reports are going down.

@Arbitor-atiesh

My only question is this anything more than a 30 day pause for the commited botter? Does this work In conjunction with anything else to make it more of a hurdle?

Bots have a really high turn over rate. A bot running for 30 days can generate a ton of gold and mats. Also fraud and charge backs are found sooner than 30 days usually.

[Constine-destromath]

This is Blizzard admitting they can’t catch someone botting in under 30 days. What a disgrace.

[Aleriara-stormreaver]

Instead of trying to crack down on like maybe 1 to 5 % of people abusing the game, just ban them… trying to micro manage every little exploit and botting issue blizzard is making the game un enjoyable for the majority of it’s player base… all to punish the minority, they keep trying to fix and focus on the botters… instead of making the game enjoyable and fun… they need to stop punishing the larger player base, because come on… thats what is happening. And it makes people not want to play.

[Sacrolina-wild-growth]

I cant even buy a wand.

[Neomi-arathor]

This is just too restrictive to normal players! I can’t even send mail to my alts! That definitely shouldn’t be restricted! Also I can’t give my friends the linen bags my tailor finally made for all of them since everyone knows bags are lifeblood in early classic. Can’t there be a value limit on what is mailed or traded instead of a full ban?

[Irrick-stormrage]

Ya, i agree 100%.

This is just the worst change i have ever witnessed.