Plenty of players are hesistant to buy gold from suspicious websites/players. This change would vastly increase the amount of players that are buying gold and have a huge impact on the overall gaming experience.
MMO’s have always had blackmarket gold/account sellers, but the majority of players usually were too sketched out to buy from these sources. Legitimizing the gold buying through blizzard would normalize this action and make it a MUCH more common practice. Blizzard will then find that they make more money from selling gold and other things on the online store than they make from the actual game, and this will now be Blizzard’s primary concern over any other aspects of the game. I saw it in ESO. The game has been so laggy for years on console after a patch and has been almost unplayable during the epic pvp battles the game is centered on, they have never been able to fix the lag and the game gets laggier and laggier after every expansion, but they are constantly coming out with new deals and items for you to buy on the store because that is the primary source of the games income.
So you think a minority of players are buting a majority ot the gold a month? Funny. You’d think their business would show signs of slowing down or cyclical sales.
Nah. We have armies of bots farming 24/7. Wonder what the minority are spending this bought gold on…
Obviously it’s more common than you’re trying to make it out to be. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be so many exploiting to make a quick buck.
Blizzard already knows this. Why they did tokens the way they did on retail is beyond me. They didn’t solve the RMT problem with the token. They legitimized it and shifted the money into “Blizzard Balance”.
That right there tells you they didn’t want to lose the RMT’ERS subs.
All this talk about how they’ve banned X amount of exploiters is leading up to them either selling gold or brokering gold sales with the token.
And you can thank everyone who bought gold in any game for that. The devs seen the extra money people are willing to spend. Mtx is baked right into today’s games because of it.
What are you even talking about. The bans targeted specifically bots, the 30 cap does not. That does not mean that bots are the SOLE reason for the cap. There is a reason they are separate threads.
A clue for you, boo: Bots are not the only ones harming the game, necessitating the cap. If blizzard were solely looking to thwart botters with the cap, why is it they are completely different threads/subjects?
I had five of my accounts banned today for “Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy”. I know everybody says the same thing, but I am absolutely innocent. Across my five main characters I probably have a total of 100 gold to my name. My gear is all self-quested/dropped. I barely even take part in the auction house except to sell tradeskill items.
I am altogether stumped and shocked. I’ve submitted an appeal request but from what I’m reading online I’m not confident that I’ll even get a response. I’d really just like to know what happened. I’ve never had any disciplinary action taken against any account from Blizzard or any other game I’ve played.
I don’t expect this post will resolve anything either but I guess it’s worth a shot.
You and me both, brother. When I tried to appeal and asked what exactly it was I did wrong I got a response from a Blizz GM saying if I ask again I would be permanent banned and was given a warning for breaking customer service ToS. Pretty sad.
The bitter irony for legitimate players banned in this wave is that blizzard is using automated third party software to ban people it thinks are using automated third party software.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the extreme amount of manpower and man-hours and it would take to manually investigate and action 110,000 bans and “manually review” as many appeals is prohibitive. Odds are they aren’t reviewing either and the entire process and all ticket responses are automated.
Yeah, this is annoying… But it’s not the real reason that forums are not accurate. Forums are a dorm of voluntary response. Only those who feel strongly one way or another really participate.
Half the folks that claim to be “legitimate players” here on the forums are entitled cheaters that willfully ignore the EULA. Good on Blizzard if they booted them.
How is a level 40 something only in Classic for a few weeks who just spent all their gold on buying a mount and has never run a program of any kind a target of this? My husband’s account has been suspended and an appeal just sits in some unread pile. Why is there no way to speak to a human being?! While I can understand (and even appreciate) Blizzard wanting to take all precautionary measures, you also have legitimate players left out there with slow responses and generic replies that don’t actually tell you anything. I have been reading endless forums of cases where people ran strange programs or traded excessive amounts of gold. I think between the two of us we have amassed a whole 150g combined! I don’t understand how innocent players get caught up in this?!
A lot of false positives even from our friends overseas.
These forums are a bit weird as it seems very pro-blizzard in terms they can do no wrong towards there consumer base.
Very cut and dry bland cookie cutter response from Random users who seem to work in tangent with one another.
Not exactly an ideal indicator of gold selling. I’ve sold the cloth for a very high amount per piece before just because I know there are noobs and misclickers that will mistakenly click it!