So I’m sure this idea has been suggested before, but it just popped in my head while playing.
I was considering that some percentage of the playerbase would be on board with having a few servers or a version of the game that would require ID verification. I don’t think it should be mandatory for everything, but having the option to do so for your account and having a server or two that is only joinable by people with that qualification would probably be received well by a decent population. Leave all of the other servers as is, but have one or two with that requirement, kind of how theres a hardcore server in classic, we could have an ID’d server. It wouldnt completely eliminate botting but it would make it much less of an issue, and when people are caught botting they wouldnt keep popping up like weeds. I know there is a financial benefit to retaining botters on standard servers, and Blizzard could keep their business by leaving other servers as they are.
I don’t expect this to be acted upon, but just a thought to stir up some discussion. As usual with any thread, this will inevitably turn into a hostile thread so I won’t be returning to reply, do with this topic as you wish and have a good day.
That’s equivalent to curing the disease by killing the patient. Legit players would overwhelming not accept that kind of inconvenience, and people would leave in droves. And dedicated botters would still find a way. Most bots are run by organized crime cartels, and they’re a mutl billion dollar per year business. That’s billion with a b. All they’d have to do is steal accounts that are already “verified”.
Or blizz could…you know…take an income hit and hire some in-game GM’s to patrol the servers. Like, just have actual blue robbed GM’s walk around regularly. Like an actual police force. Seems to work relatively well IRL.
You do understand that blizzard requires a Government issued id to get your account back if its hacked and or stolen right? So its not hard for them to add this feature they just dont want to.
they did this back in Classic it was great. The gms used to port bots to random places lol. Sometimes if you asked them they would port you to GM island to it was fun.
I am sure blizzard would be on the ball about spotting fake ID’s taken with a crappy webcam. From all 50 states, US territories, and foreign contries.
See I am prior military. Even with a book and experience when you hit up a bar out of state you rely on the bar’s staff to identitfy and accept the ID. It could be legit.
I was thinking to myself driving, as I do a lot in my job. Real life GMs aka police are out here making sure I didn’t run the red light, my car isn’t blocking the road, etc
Imagine if I had to call in a ticket. Wait 24 hours with everyone else because a stop light burned out. And we got a
There’s a huge difference in verifying someone’s identity before returning a stolen account to them, and trying to make me essentially dox myself before playing on a video game server. I hate bots as much as the next guy, but the cure can’t be worse than the disease. I don’t need to play WoW that badly that I need to give my life story up front or similar.
Also as another pointed out all they would need to do is steal “verified” accounts and they’re good. The only way to truly eliminate bots is to take away their incentive to bot and make it unprofitable to do so. That and making very public examples of some of the worst offenders like other games do couldn’t hurt either. And actually having the nads to go after the companies and sue them from existence.
Paladina, you have hit the proverbial nail on the head.
It’s what I’ve said all along. Bot farming works because it is profitable to farm something. Therefore the more you farm it, the more gold (and that into $$ often) you make.
Take away the things that make large amounts of gold and botting would pretty well disappear. There might still be a little farming for raw gold but that’s probably a lot easier to keep an eye on.
So it would mean removing the ability to collect (or limit in some way) and sell things like herbs, ore and leather. I wouldn’t be surprised if that had been considered at some point. Or might be in the future, if gold farming became a really serious problem for the game.
Oh absolutely. We don’t have that power or authority.
And I have no way for me to get in touch with the correct department.
But seriously, hiring people to patrol servers 24/7 seems reasonable. It worked great on our dedicated servers. We played with the players and didn’t abuse anything, but it was a full time job.
You’d think a billion dollar company has tools to handle this. They can afford to spend money on customer service. Give them broad powers. The tools. Ranks of mods. Smaller mods that send things up for further investigation
Not this template stuff that answers nothing. And gets closed. Any other RL job would let me speak to a manager.
Now, if I have an issue…then I just play something else because a human being hasn’t responded to a ticket since my days in Legion.
I have two tickets that were not just closed but erased from the record keeping. What’s up with that?
So how do you do that without ruining the experience for regular players? Thats always the catch 22 of a solution like that. Any effort to reduce the bots’ ability to make gold also reduces player’s ability to make gold
