It is not easy, but it is doable, you need to track the big transactions (sender and receiver) and investigate if those accounts have another suspect transactions.
They could search in those webpages, if you google it you will find a lot of gold sellers. Having GMs looking into those pages and pretending being a buyer in order to catch sellers. Investigating those sellers to catch gold buyers.
It wouldn’t catch a guy that bought gold once, cause it is hard to be sure about that based in one transaction, but if you find accounts sending a lot of gold everywhere constantly it is probably a seller, if someone receive big ammount of gold constantly he is probably a buyer.
It would need a dedicated team and further investigations but IMHO it worth trying cause the current state of the economy is horrible.
i wouldnt at all doubt if blizzard gets a portion of the money huge gold selling sites make…they only care about $$$…literally nothing else. If they wanted to, they could eliminate all gold selling nearly overnight and crack down on bots/buyers…keep in mind It’s a multi billion dollar company, the only reason for these things to exist is if blizzard LETS it exist, and the most likely reason for that is they get paid. Blizzard is a hollow corporate shell and gives zero forks about you, me, or entire guilds of passionate players. As long as it isn’t going to hurt their wallets…nothing will ever change.
so, buy gold is bad, which i mostly agree with although not completely, but multiboxing 40 accounts and getting 40 ekos at once while the normal fair player gets 1 eko for the same mob is not the same. great logic.
Better way would be to make there less incentive to buy gold. I have a thread about it that I’m trying to get some legs on. Would be cool if you checked it out man. We both want gold buying gone.
Whether you like it or not gold buying and selling has been around since wow first started. They tried hard to prevent it but it never worked. It’s just something you will probably have to accept just like the rest of us. Most of us don’t like it but tbh its part of the experience. Just kill every botter you see.
Doesn’t matter if it’s always been around or not, if something doesn’t work you try something else. Having in-game GM’s certainly worked better than using your customers as your bot detection system.
Banning gold buyers works like a champ on private servers.
As a player out in the classic world it is very easy to detect a bot. It really doesn’t even take very long to determine that what you’re seeing is a bot.
Surely they can come up with a system with a second layer to determine they’re actually a bot.
Hard to unban the couple of real players that get mistaken for bots when there is no support team though lol
It’s beyond mind-boggling that the same people who claim Blizzard lies about everything and they can’t be trusted, also want them to have a more authoritarian presence in-game.
Bots move in pre-determined paths that are set up already for them. Likely recorded by use of some addon. Then just left to go as long as their online. Maybe bliz could start watching people who play more than 8 hours constantly with no afk markings being added to their toons or account.
It’d also probably take less than 20 mins, to see if a person who is reported for botting, is actually botting. Just watch what they do, snoop their screens if ya must.
Nearly every bot i’ve seen, has been a dwarf hunter, with a bear pet, running in the method described above. Wouldn’t take much to spot them.
I think an “audit” of large transactions would be a good thing, just like the IRS would do if suddenly some box car hobo suddenly was buying Ferraris with cash. They could delete the buyers account(s) as well. If they made an example of a few people (who are all adults and should know better)that would put an end to it.
While solving the bot problem would be nice, banning gold buyers is more challenging that it might sound and in the end would cause Blizzard so many problems and would be so expensive that it just wouldn’t be worth the risk or hassle.
For example, what if someone was didn’t like you, and then went out and purchased $10-15 in gold and had it sent to you. Blizzard seeing this transaction, of course immediately bans your account. They then get to spend the next several weeks with you complaining and yelling at them and ranting on the boards about how you were unjustly banned, which of course if someone had sent you gold unknowingly you would have been.
The problem is that unlike catching bots, or people who are cheating and exploiting, they don’t have any real logs that can prove the person who got gold in the mail did anything. Since if you receive gold, does that mean you purchased it? Nope, they don’t have any real evidence that you did something to break the TOS, and if they did ban people for this, it would make it extremely easy for people to grief other people.
Of course your specific details are wrong. Limiting it to “gold-only transfers” is a fail. Anyone can sell a cheap item in the AH for a huge price, and get the money that way. No gold transfers.
A searchable spreadsheet with billions of transactions on it? Log every transacton, including the accounts of the buyer and seller? In a fantasy you can imagine that every server has unlimited CPU power, and is just sitting around half-idle. Sure, add unlimited work. No problem!
Your key suggestion is (1) identify EXACTLY which transactions are delivery of illegal gold: only those and NO other transactions. (2) log every one of those transactions (3) ban the accounts of the buyers
