This is basically what’s described, but with it being tied to an account instead of a character. The only people this really benefits are FotM players that swap characters every patch/phase/raid tier, while penalizing people who don’t swap or run alts, especially if these “emblems” are reset or decay going into a new patch/phase/tier like DKP does in a lot of DKP guilds. (As to not have people stockpile DKP throughout one tier and hoard as much gear as possible at the start of a new tier; especially bad if someone plans to find a new raid group after doing so.)
Besides the fact that a lot of people are on a VPN essentially 24/7 these days, this even more shortsighted when you don’t consider the fact that, depending on where you live, you may not even have a static IP without paying extra for it. I know people in Canada and the UK who get a completely different IP address just by restarting their router.
This is brought up so much and it reeks so friggin’ heavily of either bad faith or absolute ignorance.
People running bot farms(hardly anyone is running just one bot at any given time when you can so easily run dozens of instances of a game like this on one PC) very, VERY rarely pay for them with their own money and personal information. They’re using compromised accounts and/or compromised financial information. Every time this happens, someone sees a fraudulent charge on their account, and get a chargeback through their credit card company, Blizzard has to not only reimburse the company for the chargeback they’ve given the customer, but there’s also a chargeback fee they have to pay - which, if it’s a flat fee, can end up being more than the subscription cost itself, if it’s paid for one month at a time. This has the potential to eat massively into profits for any business, and Visa, Mastercard, etc. can refuse to work with a business if they’re not on the ball with even attempting to cull fraudulent activity.
If Blizzard/ABK/Microsoft was that hung up on the subscription cost that they allowed all this fraudulent activity with absolutely zero intervention, they wouldn’t be afforded the ability to accept most forms of payment pretty quickly.