Same, it’s a very disheartening problem. This is why I feel like we should have a 500 gold per account cap if we go into the TBC realms with our classic characters.
Removing a lot of questionable gold even if I got mine in a fair way is good for the game overall.
Well even with a gold cap it will be meaningless if Blizzard doesnt address the supply end of the problem. We will be in the same boat in a few months
The sooner blizzard and the delusional players who defend them realize that they have no control over the problem and decide to act instead of sitting on their hands the better
Boots on the ground is the answer. Legit soon as blizzard removed active in game GM’s the problems started to sneak in slowly because at first they didn’t know the GM’s were gone. Then once it was basically known blizzard doesn’t ban any more (roughly 6.1 WoD) the botting and cheating and hacking exploded into something I didn’t even think could exist… a game where bots outnumber players.
You’d think given that we pay a monthly sub that it would net actual employees managing servers. Why was that the case in the past but nowadays it’s so foreign?
There are free to play Pservers handling bots better than Blizzard is. They have to be better
Legit, they could probably get players to volunteer on a realm a couple hrs a day and you know they would do it just to make the same experience better.
Provided we pay for a subscription a few GM’s could savage the RMT in short of a month.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/herbalism-bots-plaguing-bfa/6981/28
These forums are hilariously out of touch with reality. In one breath they claim that right-click reports can automatically ban people, and in the next breath claim reports do nothing and Blizzard doesn’t ban bots.
Policing the buyers would require that Blizzard hire people to individually investigate each and every potential violation to make sure they don’t ban innocent people. And obviously Blizzard has done the cost/benefit analysis on that and decided that it would lose them money, so they’re not going to do it.
Obviously, the money they lose from people actually unsubbing due to the RMT/bot problem is not as large as the money they would lose from paying a bunch of GM’s to investigate and ban gold buyers.
People want to turn a blind eye and make excuses for blizzard for their complete failure regarding bots
They have dropped the ball. There’s no defending it when the same bots go flying across the skies month after month. Classic economy is dead, hoping the best for TBC
Can confirm, its even worse in Retail. I am sure Blizzard’s systems are churning away banning whatever its banning but how effective is it really?
Where do the compromised accounts come from? Are they the accounts of people who purchased gold in the past who went inactive due to the game being too much a snooze simply because they had nothing to do by the fact that they could have paid to win?
On the topic of flagrant bots and RMT and hacking, its obvious on some servers for sure, especially in retail where if they had a single GM just taking active reports and “Go See” they could ban hundreds, thousands of cheating scum very quickly.
IMO, they ought to require the authenticator for any one who’s account has been compromised in order to reactivate it. Place any account suspected to be compromised real account into suspension, and then to get your account out of impound you can get the authenticator. Before your account is reactivated its investigated to find out if you have purchased gold in the past; if you have purchased gold its straight up deleted, every last bit of your Blizzard account and online presence is DELETED FOREVER. This is just like the real world in some ways, we don’t really need more or better laws, we instead need to enforce the laws we have rather than try to always build a better mouse trap… Its proven time and time again you cannot win a war with air strikes, they simply cannot defeat an enemy in full. For that you need real boots on the ground, in the case of WoW in game GM’s.
Agreed. But say this costs Blizzard $1 million per year. But it doesn’t increase revenue by $1 million per year, not even close. Why then would they do it? Because it’s the right thing to do? For-profit companies don’t have a conscience, so there has to be a monetary incentive for them or they are just not going to do it, because doing so would risk them getting fired because they would be losing the company money.
I doubt it would be a direct measurable effect based on the present number of subscribers and there is the problem.
Bean counters only care about 1+2 = 3
What they fail to understand is 2+3 = 5
And if they really care to expand the present number of subscribers then they need to invest into the community by enforcing the existing rules. Doing so provides the existing players a positive experience that they would talk about with friends who may not yet play, but when a game’s quality of service is lacking however players don’t talk as fondly about those games, and they in turn don’t often do as well.
That same sort of investment into infrastructure can be seen in real life examples too. Like if there is always traffic in a certain area because the roads are bad, people will instead avoid that rout and go another way if its possible. As a result, the retail companies in that area tend to reach a point stagnation sooner than they really should because of that bottleneck in traffic. Kinda a crappy analogy, but maybe it makes sense.
I think a large, sophisticated company like Blizzard has probably looked at the intangible benefits of cleaning up their product and estimated those benefits in monetary numbers. And obviously they have concluded that the extra expenditure is just not worth it, unfortunately.
Likely the case, but I am a risk taker, I don’t mind taking risks if there is a possibility that I can win. Funny, I don’t gamble at casinos but am willing to risk investment money on things I can see as a potential winner, and I usually win.
Oh, it won’t matter.
I just spent a good hour going back and forth with Slicy about how she’s just making assumptions based on zero evidence and more of the same old, “Blizzard just doesn’t care and if you disagree than you’re a shill and you love bots.”
I don’t get it. Like the portrait tells me she’s a level 60 Rogue wearing several pieces of T3. She’s clearly dedicated and has probably spent more time playing her Rogue than I have my Druid and yet she acts like the money she’s spending is all being wasted.
I do not understand this at all.
Well, at least we’ve established there is a great deal of passion surrounding this issue.
How about a compromise. Since we can’t even seem to agree on the efficacy of Blizzard’s actions, or even there desire, to stop bots, what if the community took action.
If the community decided that gold buyers had no place in our community and shut them out, would that move the needle? G-kicking gold buyers. Not selling the Edgemaster’s Handguards for 5k gold to the fresh 60 with 20 hours played on their account. Stopping the GDKP runs which began as a good use of gold but have sadly been completely taken over by bought gold.
These aren’t easy measures and would be painful. They might not work. There are probably other ideas that are better. But it is important we as a community start talking about this and developing our own response because we are the ones who created this game in the first place. We made these guilds. We created these bonds that pull on us even 15 years later. And we are the only people that can stop the bots. Blizzard can provide us all the incentive in the world, but until we as a community stand up and say that we will not tolerate gold buying or those who do, the bots will continue to propagate like maggots in an open wound.
I agree that’s part of the solution. But how do you do that exactly when you’ve got billions in transactions happening daily.
Grass roots. Individual people talking about how awful gold buying is. Not just on the forums, but in their guilds. Individual people taking stands on what they believe in billions of times a day (although I think billions may be hyperbole.)
But none of that happens unless and until the community embraces it. This doesn’t work if it’s just a group of people from the forums. The only way this works is people who are passionate about it spreading that passion to others. Probably through multiple channels. Talking about the damages of gold buying. This only works if the community organizes itself and agrees on principles of what they will and won’t accept.
But that’s the power Blizzard doesn’t have. We know how much our friend’s and guildies play. We know when something smells rotten. We don’t have to police a million subscribers. We just have to control ourselves and know our friends. We just have to have the courage of our convictions to say “I will not group with this person, we all know they’re a gold buyer.” We do this every day against people who ruin our game with their other toxic behaviors (homophobia, racism, ninja looting, etc…) now the community needs to decide if we’re going to add gold buying to the list.
Or…balancing recipes or vending things bots are farming.
Btw an algorithm tracking botty behaviir isnt that tough, they just wont do it like other companies do.
Or unsub until Actiblizz holding company is finished tightening up their expenses for the Disney buyout, like I did (couple more weeks to go for me on here)
You have no idea what you’re talking about. It definitely is that tough. Thats why literally every MMO in the world has a serious bot problem. NO company has a handle on it