Account bans for gold buying

[Cataclysmia-eranikus]

Good. Now do GDKPs.

[Bearhands-faerlina]

@Härland-grobbulus

I suspec this was the end goal the whole time, turn a blind eye to the gold selling / buying so that it becomes a problem they can “Solve” while in reality its just a way to get WoW token in so they can further ruin the game.

There’s a huge real estate company that has been refusing to rent out the property they own in our historic downtown district for anything approaching reasonable rates. As a result the whole area has become abandoned and run-down since they haven’t kept up their own buildings… so now they’ve convinced the city to allow them to side-step restrictions on bulldozing historic buildings so they can put up 100 story condos to “revitalize the area” that also make them infinitely more money. They created a problem so they could sell what they wanted to do all along as a solution.

Tangent but that’s pretty much exactly what you described here… Standard corporate procedure…

[Frosstfire-pagle]

@Cataclysmia-eranikus

Good. Now do GDKPs.

Yeah this would be nice also !

[Härland-grobbulus]

That is genuinely disgusting… So many disturbingly greedy companies out there.

[Linerider-malfurion]

@Delro-emerald-dream

No it makes perfect sense. Now they have a financial incentive to shutdown gold sellers and buyers so they can make it a priority.

How to make money 101
Step 1: Create a problem that you can solve
Step 2: Allow the problem adequate time to make your customers frustrated. Make half hearted attempts to “fix” the problem to appear legit.
Step 3: solve the “problem” but make sure to charge for it!
Step 4: Do a Scrooge McDuck and dive into your pile of coins.

[Feroid-whitemane]

@Bearhands-faerlina

I figured as much. It’s 2-fold for them… Not only are 3rd party sellers their competition, they also allow people to effectively buy subs for half the price they would pay going through blizzard.

That’s not how economics works, though.

The sale of cheap gold by third-parties benefits Blizzard financially.

Hopefully that catches people's attention.

I’ll explain. Blizzard only sells tokens for fiat currency. Every token that a player buys, whether directly through the shop, or with gold on the AH, was purchased with real-world money. If a player buys gold through a third party for cheap, and then uses that gold to buy a token on the AH, it’s the player who sold the token on the AH who got ripped off.

If numbers help:

1. Player A buys token from Blizzard for $15 USD
2. Player B buys 12k gold from shady third party for just $10
3. Player A sells token to Player B for 12k gold

Results:

• Blizzard got $15 for 30 days of played-time
• Player A got $10 worth of gold for $15
• Player B got 30 days played-time for $10
• (Gold seller injected 12k gold into the economy and got $10)

As you can see, Blizzard still got their bread. Gold sellers don’t cause them to lose money. And in fact, since the gold-buyers (Player B) have their subscription subsidized by the token-buyer (Player A), they’re more likely to stay subscribed.

[Bearhands-faerlina]

No I get it but thanks lol…

What you don’t get is… That token is sold whether I buy it or not. All my buying it does is take gold out of the economy and inflate the price of a token. But overall, my buying a token for gold has very little impact on the number of tokens that are bought from Blizzard because the price doesn’t fluctuate that much and Blizzard will eat any unsold tokens to ensure the price never drops too low.
They want the price of the token as high as possible so I’m more incentivized to pay for a sub vs buying one with gold and token buyers are more incentivized to buy a token since it’s a better value.

Their best case scenario is “Player A buys a token for $20. It is never bought and Blizzard eats the token. Player B isn’t able to buy gold from cheap 3rd party so they either farm gold for the token… or pay for a sub.” That’s clearly better for them than the alternative

[Feroid-whitemane]

I was more orienting that at the general audience, but yeah. So long as tokens are cheap, demand for illicit gold may actually increase as people buy gold, with which to buy tokens, in order to avoid paying for their subscription. A quick Google search will tell you that gold sufficient to purchase a token costs about half as much as a monthly sub.

On the other hand, the fact that tokens are currently worth so little tells us that there’s a supply glut, which means that buying tokens to sell for gold is popular.

[Rocco-faerlina]

Yeah, you are right… its about $10 for a token to turn into game time.

[Veganshrek-lightbringer]

Well sure, if you were in charge would you perma ban 80% of your subs? Lose 80% profit? No one would do that, you can claim morals all you want but you wouldn’t actually do that yourself if you were in charge, would you? It’s a business. They now offer the service of buying gold which ends most gold buying from other sites and let’s blizzard not have to ban 80% of gold buyers since those buyers can buy through blizz. It’s a business and the token was the best decision they could make otherwise classic players wouldn’t have anyone to play with on their server. This decision serves everyone and banning them would have collapsed classic and profits

[Ronstantine-faerlina]

Why would a token be needed for this?

I’m not getting how exactly its cleaner?

[Dredstan-atiesh]

@Veganshrek-lightbringer

This decision serves everyone and banning them would have collapsed classic and profits

The only real solution is to perma ban ALL buyers and sellers.
But they won’t for the reasons you gave. Blizzard has let this go on for so long that its part of the game now.
P2w wins out in the end. Too much profit there to not go that route.

[Antija-azralon]

Rmt is impossible to combat when the community decides as a whole that gdkp is healthy for the game. Since the content is easy any pug can do the content as a gdkp run.

[Dredstan-atiesh]

@Antija-azralon

Rmt is impossible to combat when the community decides as a whole that gdkp is healthy for the game

And blizzard adding tokens shows they too decided it’s good for the game.
They’re banning sellers (and supposedly buyers) and funneling p2w towards their coffers.

[Tiea-detheroc]

@Nazztor-arugal

It just shows that the response they made up was a complete lie. They could detect the accounts all along but claimed they couldn’t

To the surprise of no one.

[Veganshrek-lightbringer]

Yeah it would solve it but I am glad they don’t do that, that would be way too many players gone it would have a huge impact on our game even retail would feel the effect. But yeah, it would solve it for sure

[Miregrim-bloodsail-buccaneers]

@Veganshrek-lightbringer

They now offer the service of buying gold which ends most gold buying from other sites

Unless there’s some severe punishment for buying gold from gold sites, or a significant increase in the number of players selling gold or if blizzard artificially sets the amount of gold you get for $20 the token will have almost no affect on the amount of gold buying from gold sites. 6 or 7 k gold isn’t nearly competitive enough with the amount of gold you get from gold sites.

[Fíreföx-illidan]

@Bearhands-faerlina

There are sellers on “unnamed massive gold site” with hundreds of millions in gold listed for sale. Even if they had no other internal way to unequivocally flag an account as a seller, they could still buy from just one of those and find connections to probably hundreds of other buyers/sellers. Or just every time they ban a bot, run through their connections. Who did they get gold from, who did they send gold to, who did those people receive/send to so on and so forth… and they’d uncover literally hundreds of exploiters…
Fully combatting botters I believe could and probably is a technical limitation. But the buying/selling of gold should be easy to trace, they just choose not to

This is what bugged me when I got scammed back in the day (tbc). Got my account cleaned out, but found mail from an auction (7000 gold for a netherweave cloth - showed who I “bought it from”).

Forwarded the email to a GM saying this guy had to be the scammer and did this to funnel it without a direct paper trail. They said “it was no clear indicator”. Are you kidding me?

I know they’ll never get rid of all the bots and scammers, but I am certain they could do better.

[Caren-bloodsail-buccaneers]

Yeah, I’m with the others. As someone with a lot of db experience your math doesn’t add up. It’s more complicated, not less.

[Discster-whitemane]

Agreed, have a sql query where you now need to enter multiple exclusionary conditions doesnt improve the search it complicates it. It’s like they are saying there is a guarantee that if you buy a token you are now hidden from everything haha.