Why is it that, back in the day we’d have active GMs that’d monitor and track activity. But now its 100% on US (the players) to be the ones that have to monitor and report things?
I rarely join the LFG channel because its just endless spam. However sometimes I do join just to report bots/gold farmers/ boosters, etc. Yes, its dumb, but imo this is the point of this post. SOMEONE has to do it and Blizz stopped having active GMs.
They only rely on the report system, which takes days/weeks to actually have any impact. I’ve reported… a hundred? 90? 150? idk for sure people that are selling boosting services. I’ve gotten like 4-5 Blizz replies saying essentially “ty for reporting this issue, we’re dealing with it”. Obviously not verbatim, but thats more or less what they say.
Why can’t we simply have a few GMs on each server to actively handle these issues? Most other MMOs/big games have active GMs that tackle these issues. WoW is bigger than most any other game and yet they refuse to have active GMs. Its on the player to report is their logic.
The thing is, without an addon like global ignore you can’t even ignore all the bots/gold sellers. You can report them all day long, and nothing comes from it. 1/5 maybe? Its infuriating. I’d love to actually be able to use this channel at some point. But the fact it requires me to constantly report people + use an addon is just… Dumb. Active GMs would fix this issue instantly. They’d see people post these things, kick/ban them, move on. Easy.
There are actually a few reasons for this. In descending order of importance:
Automation
First and most importantly: Over the years, Activision Blizzard has been all about maximizing profits which means increasing revenue where possible and decreasing costs where possible. Apparently the number of CS reps today is roughly the same as it was back in the day, but they're "shared" across Retail and Classic, and even across other games if I'm remembering correctly.
Instead of hiring more CS reps, which has a cost that scales linearly with the number of players, they've been focusing on automating away as much of the support process as possible. If players can "self-help", or perhaps moderation can be done automatically by a system, it means they can continue to serve increasing numbers of players with a static number of CS reps.
The best way to automate bot mitigation is to have software engineers who are actively researching which botting programs are being used and any other exploits they're using, and actively developing countermeasures, which leads us to the next point:
Understaffed and focusing on Retail
Next is the fact that Classic doesn't have its own dedicated team. There are some people designated only to Classic or to Retail, but the entire overarching WoW team itself simultaneously develops and maintains both games (see above, cutting/limiting costs).
We also know that Activision Blizzard gives Retail more priority. The most likely reasons I can think of are that 1. Classic players might be more likely to stick around when there are problems because they already know all the content that's in store for them, 2. Retail WoW is being actively developed, which means it probably requires a lot more resources than Classic, which mostly just needs to be maintained, 3. Retail brings in a lot more revenue per capita, so it's obviously where they're going to spare no expense, resource-wise.
Chaos in their offices
Brian Birmingham just quit his job at Blizzard. This must have thrown a wrench into things. It's not really a primary reason why botting is an issue right now, but it severely exacerbates the other problems above.
TLDR: Relying heavily on automation that needs to be updated regularly to be effective → The WoW team’s focus (especially technical engineers) was diverted to Dragonflight → No one to update/develop bot mitigation → Bots rejoice
Friend if you had bothered to read your “gotcha” images you would know they are explicitly stating that GMs were monitoring and tracking activity back then
Np, I simply misread what the OP was saying. That’s my bad.
They’ve always asked players to report and they still do. They do their investigations and tracking as they always have. I’m not saying they do a good job but basically, nothing has changed for over 15 years. They operate the same way, whether they have the same success rate or better only Blizzard actually knows. We can perceive the situation on the surface but really don’t have all the information to know how bad it actually is.
I always report the posts in lrg because they’re not supposed to advertise in lfg. That’s why it has a report for advertisement feature. As for trade chat I watch it sometimes. If someone posts 2 or 3 times within 5 to 10 seconds I report em for spam.
Exactly what you said is my primary issue. They may not be bots, but they are people who go against the ToS and continue to do so. The ONLY time they get removed is when us players report them. So they shifted the responsibility to the player, not themselves.
Yes, we can report people who post boosting services in LFG channel. Great! But also if a GM or two were live and tracking, they’d shut that down instantly. Just 1-2 GMs even on a mega server would handle it. But again, they put the responsibility entirely on the player.
“If you want a cleaner LFG channel with boosting services removed… Well here you go! We added a report feature! In a few weeks we may or may not ban them”. Thats more or less what we have atm.
Again my point is that it shouldn’t be on the player to deal with this. If they had a few active GMs to track these messages, they’d message that player and say “Hey, you can’t do that, first warning”. If they keep doing, THEY ban the player. Instead of relying entirely on the report system.
I’m on Faerlina, and after I made my post I hopped into the game, joined LFG channel. I’ve since reported 9 mages selling HoS boosting services. That took about… 5 minutes? To see that many mages boosting in LFG channel.
This is exactly my point. LFG should be for LOOKING FOR GROUP. Not for boosting. And Blizzard can EASILY take the responsibility on themselves, they just won’t, which is infuriating.
While it may seem like the player’s opinion is the majority, there are actually a lot of new active subscribers and it is no longer feasible for Blizzard to have active GMs monitoring and tracking activity as they did in the past
