Game was better before he was involved with it.
Just a coincidence it got worse under his leadership I suppose.
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back in my day if you wanted to be carried you had to have an obviously female voice on ventrillo. These days all these millenials have to do is give gold! Smh how society has fallen.
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Heâs getting golden parachuted after he figuratively cashed out on the IP goodwill and brand name. The sunk cost fallacyâd players have all lost trust and the pigeonholed methods of retaining players and keeping interest donât work anymore.
Theyâd need to swap to a proper player progression model that wasnât playing FOMO and/or timegate based on subscription duration. But we all know they wonât move off that as thatâs their easy button, even if it doesnât work anymore.
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Are you a bee? cuz everything you say is buzzwords.
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I dont think that creating a safe space for players to facilitate an exchange would necessarily define all exchanges as âsupported transactionsâ vs âunsupported transactionsâ, it would simply create a safer way for ANY given exchange to occur when there is a term of that exchange which may take time or energy to complete.
This used to be facilitated by Discord comms. Only blizz complained to Discord mods and got it all shutdown. Some still exist but nothing like what it was before. So now weâre back to just hoping we donât get scammed with zero recourse by blizz.
Thatâs what we call an âown goalâ.
Not saying it would be easy, but if the transactions are allowed than an in game escrow framework would be better than buyer beware.
Price to start key.
Price for one boss but less than completion.
Price for failed completion.
Price for timed completion.
Price per accepted piece of dropped gear thatâs accepted in a trade.
So everyone knows the terms and if something happens it will fit into one of those conditions. If there are scams or exploitation points, it will work itself out in the market with prices changing to reflect those risks for what ever condition they fall into.
I think paid carries are pretty gross. I know a lot of people do them, and more power to them, but they really leave a bad taste in my mouth. I donât like the idea of further legitimizing one of the grosser parts of the game culture.
I think youâll have a better shot at requesting they put the gear, achievements, and reward mounts in the store
For the most part sure. But I try to think of them like tennis lessons. You can go out and try and learn tennis by just playing with friends, or you can pay a pro to show you how itâs done.
Getting progress via IO and gear does stretch the analogy a bit but if I was forced to chose between a player thatâs never run more than a 9 or a player that paid for handful 16âs, all other things being equal Iâd rather take the player thatâs at least seen how itâs done.
Itâs ridiculous.
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I think if Blizzard is going to not only encourage paid carries, but actually profit from the entire player on player services driven economy, they need to either make the transactions a supported thing, or implement something like the OP discussed.
I canât imagine it would be too hard for some type of interface to be developed where both parties agree on a price and at what point the gold will be released (death of a boss, attainment of achievement, looting of a mount etc).
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It could work like OP said, they donât need a GM, they just need an NPC or LFG option where you all sign up with certain conditions set and the items and gold only transfer once the conditions are met, including failsafe conditions.
Like sure, sign up for an M16 timed for 100K all loot to the buyer, but have a failsafe that says untimed for 50K and nothing if someone leaves. Done problem solved, no one gets ripped off.
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Itâs almost like thereâs an clandestine revenue stream with RMT carries that someone at Activision is running as rogue employee group or a shell company and they took out their competition.
They put a lot more effort into that than the blatant RMT adds all over LFG.
Id like to point out that the major issue of these escrow carry groups was that they began paying people in gold/carry runs for advertising to the point that thousands of accounts were made solely for the purpose of spamming advertising - you could pay for the entire account from the gold earnt, just from advertising.
It created a circle that became a detriment to the game - when you couldnt find a m+ group inbetween hundreds of carry ads or couldnt even read various in game chats.
That and the amount of gold that ended up in rmt.
The only advertising Iâve ever seen in game, before and after, are the adds with blatant links to RMT sites.
With a little ebb and flow, and through all the added restrictions like needing leveled characters with authentication to post groups, the level of adds with un masked clear text links to RMT sites has been unchanged since BfA.
More than anything else, the outcome more closely matches a regulatory body thatâs been captured by the industry they regulate and has put in regulations that hurt competitors more by creating a barrier to entry.
So you never seen any of the advertising for the wts on behalf of escrow discords? It was 95% of trade chat and 80% of m+/raid finder groups. Those listing them never had a group it was 100% advertising with a discord link - i know players that hit a io rank and could earn more for being part of a carry run, they stopped doing the runs and just started advertising because it made them more gold.
This is why the trade services channel was addeed - to remove the constant spam from lfg/trade chat.
You can still use an escrow service - you cannot advertise it in game.
So I open up LFG tool and look at premade dungeons and see 5 WTS groups with links to an RMT sites. And no WTS adds for in game gold. Same as itâs been since I came back at the start of BfA. How many years is that?
Canât speak for the services channel. Iâm sure there are legit adds there since thatâs it purpose, but I donât have that channel turned on.
But lets be honest here. Probably over $100 million a year sitting on the table in RMT game services. Is it completely out of the realm of possibilities that Bobby might try and get his cut of that money?
Yep. You no longer see hundreds of adds for carries for ingame gold - any server. These rmt sites dont care about the ingame rules - right click and report for advertising so blizz can ban the tens of thousands created for this purpose.
What did change is max level players no longer actually doing any runs, they just got paid an advertising fee for connecting a buyer to a seller - this is against the tos.
Blizz already made their money when they sold a game account (wow still costs money right) even if that account was purchased with in game gold as someone paid cash for a token, sold it for gold and then a game was purchased with a token > bnet balance. Someone paid.
I donât think Blizzard should support carriers at all buyer beware.