No one is talking about it but plenty of people have been banned for gold buying and it is explicitly stated in the ban email that they have been banned for gold buying. As punishment gold and items equivalent to the amount of gold purchased have been removed.
Sadly, a few guild mates that did not buy gold we’re targeted as collateral damage.
Why is no one praising blizzard for their amazing queen’s gambit on the week of the new phase release?
I’d like to see the stats on this ban wave and specific to confirmed gold buyers.
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Suurreee they didn’t.
How long are the bans? If it’s a month, then I’ll take it, anything less than a week is a joke, but I guess if it puts them behind in p2, then it’s better than nothing.
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Please ignore the Draenei with the blue and white block earmuffs…
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From the server discord, people had two week bans. Repeat offenders were set to 6 months or a permanent ban.
Great sarcasm but I’ve gamed with these people for years. We know which ones buy gold and which ones don’t. Sadly it’s only 2 that got to feel the unjust burn.
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cap, honestly based blizzard to ban gold buyers right before p2
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Haven’t seen anything in Crusader strike on this yet. If true I imagine the discord will light up like a christmas tree. When they wake up, that is.
Dude’s bringing back the saying “Don’t be a square” but literally.
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Another user weighed in on this. (I’m not sure is sharing names in a positive light is against the rules.)
Basically, Blizzard found that suspensions resulted in corrected behavior, but permabans resulted in those players buying whole accounts or characters, which resulted in significantly worse problems for Blizzard. This is somewhat corroborated by fairly recent research that shows the severity of a punishment is less of a deterrent than the certainty of it.
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Good, blizzard should be more aggressive at banning buyers, sellers, and bots.
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The people who were banned already know. As per usual with gold buyers they have multiple accounts and just don’t care. WoTLK GDKP gold bought wow tokens for so many accounts.
boo hoo cardswipers, enjoy your vacays
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”these 2 week slaps on the wrist are working”.
But also:
”gold buying is out of control we need to ban GDKPs”
Clearly the lenient sentences are not working. I’d argue if people thought they would get perma banned and lose their raid items, reputations, etc, a lot less people would buy gold.
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There likely is some generally optimal balance, but I have no idea what that would be, and I don’t have access to Blizzard’s data to see what they’ve done over time.
I also have no idea what the penalty schedule is for sure, but it seems to be a three day, followed either by a one or two week, followed by a two week or something, and no loss of items or gold.
The latter is probably the most important missed bit, but that’s entirely speculative.
I haven’t heard anything about any bans I guess that means my guild and friends are all clean.
Unlike:
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At level 25 a two week suspension is harsher than permaban since it takes far less than two weeks to buy a new account and level 1-25
At 60 a permaban is much more punishing than a two week suspension.
Hopefully the punishments scale with the phases.
Timing can also matter. Suspensions/ban waves going out right on top of the phase drop probably isn’t a coincidence.
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