Hey all, I had an idea that I suggested to Blizzard and I wanted to float out here to see what people think. Over the years the topic of in-game player to player services such as carries have grown exponentially as have people who have utilized these to scam others. Putting the discussion about carries and other services themselves aside, I had an idea to prevent scammers and to relieve Blizzard and support from chasing them down when someone gets robbed. As it currently stands, if someone does this Blizzard will take the money from them but will not give it back to the original owner. My idea is that they could create an NPC that would act as a sort of escrow banker. When two players make an agreement they could go to this NPC and the gold, items, or whatever else that are being used as currency could be held by the NPC until both parties agree that the terms have been met. They could create a save state for the toons so that any changes made to the toon would be removed if the agreed upon terms were not met and/or the gold would go back to the original owner. This would prevent abuse on both ends and would create a safe space for players to sell in-game services to one another. With the addition of this to the terms of service last year I believe it only makes sense for there to be a safe space to facilitate those exchanges, and I think the general concept could be applied to many games.
As I said, Iâve submitted via in-game suggestion already, but Iâm curious to hear other peopleâs opinions. What are peopleâs thoughts on this? Again, if we could leave the debate about whether people should be able to carry and receive carries aside, there are already plenty of posts and opinions on that.
5 Likes
I always wish they had in-game contracts that GMs could enforce. Yeah not with this Blizzard I guess D:
4 Likes
Nah, just find reputable players to give gold to. Also bump up the gold cap to 100m.
5 Likes
Yes, because these are unsupported transactions.
These are unsupported transactions. They arenât going to make an NPC for unsupported transactions.
6 Likes
That would be a lot of wasted time for both parties if something happened outside of their control, like if the buyer loses internet/power halfway through the carry.
I like the general idea of protecting players from scammers, but officially supported carries by Blizzard could be quite detrimental to smaller raiding guilds/servers.
3 Likes
thereâs just no way this can be done in a way that doesnât end with players expecting blizzard to arbitrate.
8 Likes
this ^^ if the made an escrow npc, they would be come by necessity supported transactions and blizz would own some responsibility for them. they donât want that, it wonât happen.
7 Likes
This is unlikely to happen. Sadly, unlike in EVE Online, no one Iâve noticed seems to be as trustworthy as one player named Chribba, who has facilitated cross-player trades of all values and sizes in EVE.
These will remain absolutely unsupported and considered âbuyer bewareâ.
GMs are overworked as it is.
2 Likes
Bobby needs his $500-million exit bonus.
Iâll point out here that blizz forcing the closure of the various carry discords went a long way to making the carry landscape worse for prospective buyers.
the starlights, huokans, phoenixâs etc⌠they all had some kind of quality controls built in. if your run failed, you got a new one. their sellers werenât going to scam you, etc.
I 500% agree they got too big for their britches, but itâs like the wild west now that itâs directly player to player.
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Iâm looking forward to when everything canât be blamed on him. I suppose it will be Gates now. 
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I miss when people just âplayed the game normallyâ without having to be carried just to reach the rewards at the end.
What the hell happened for carries to be so prevalent in this day and age?
And even the Blizzard president is advertising carries for gold⌠It just killed PvE for me, lol.
Back when WoW was peak, you never saw these, just PuG groups in their stead.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
people have been selling carries since vanilla.
it absolutely became more prevalent with the advent of m+, true. but raid carries have been going on since the beginning.
4 Likes
I never saw them advertised on a scale like this, lol.
If you replace every single one of these carry advertisers with people shouting out trying to fill PuG groups, itâd be like Wrath all over again.
A job board with a reward attached for successful completion?
The game would automatically control the reward disbursement by tracking the players subscribed to the job.
Itâs not like heâs the chief executive officer or the company or anything.
The fact that Blizzard doesnât support these types of things is frankly ridiculous.
You have a certain subset of the player base who sells tokens. Blizzard went ahead and created a âServices chatâ by doing that, theyâve supported it. Thatâs like in the Wire when the police set up a spot in the city for drug dealers to sell their drugs without enforcement. In the show they correctly realized they just legitimized the sale of drugs. But Blizzard doesnât realize that creating a space for sellers to sell runs doesnât count as supporting it?
Iâve been lucky enough to get boosted by the large communities (that got banned because some folks sold gold) and kept in contact with the boosters I trusted. Now they boost me.
But itâs asinine for Blizzard sell the gold, set up the chat channel for a deal to take place and then throw their hands in the air and say âWoah, we donât support thatâ (despite creating everything needed for that deal to get done).
Scammers need to be banned because every token buyer who loses gold is less likely to buy more tokens and thatâs less money in Blizzardâs pocket.
3 Likes
Itâs because playing the FOMO/timegate for gear isnât interactive or meaningful. People have been steered into pay to avoid playing like freemium games, as itâs not worth playing, but sunk cost fallacy is still driving a lot of player subs.
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Who probably barely knows GMs exist, let alone makes decisions about staffing individual departments.
It just gets a little silly when seemingly every complaint is met with another worn out âBobbyâs yachtâ or similar reply.
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