Yeah. You need it for skills, mounts, funding alts, buy materials to raise professions, buy pets, buy gear
In the past you actually had to PLAY THE GAME to do theese things.
Dont Blizzard see the major dumbness of just handing it over for real life money. You can do all theese things Without playing the game? Now people buy all theese things to just log in an buy them without playing. And then to buy gear in GDK runs…
As little effort as possible… and then what?
All those things contributed to a “living and breating” world full of activity back in classic. That WAS classic.
Classic now is just a pathetic shadow of its former self. Shame.
Some people like this “playstyle” . And they have retail for that. Why cant they just keep a few servers the way it was. NO CHANGE for those of us (and we are many) that wants to play the game, not pay to win.
Yep it was especially back in OG WOTLK, gold selling still was a thing but nothing like today, now its so bad that Blizzard just decided to give up it seem.
Botter can make money off their bot characters in like 1-2 days, they would need to ban them every 1-2 days to 100% kill botting and they obviously are not willing to do that, some bots only get ban after 90 days.
No. Banning bots isn’t going to do jack diddly squat. It’s the buyers that need to catch permabans. Ban the buyers and the bots will go back to Runescape.
The buyers are the root cause of this entire issue. The bots are a symptom.
Bruh lets not rewrite history. There’s an article from the Washington post about how Steve bannon left Wallstreet to run IGN’s gold farm because wow alone was taking in $5 million a month in gold sales. More than all other mmo’s combined at the time.
It went on to talk about how he approached blizz to allow the gold sales. Allegedly they turned him down but after that is when blizz got tight lipped with sub numbers, transparency on banning bots, and seemed to start truly ignoring the playerbase.
I’d post it but it’s behind s paywall. This marks the point when the suits took over this entire industry.
That’s just 1 company. Ole Susan and her crew were probably making even more. Hell they even wanted to buy gold from players. Even though they were paying the Chinese like .25 an hour to farm.
This is when they were hand farming because botting software was no where near as advanced as it is now.
This is also when they were setting farms up in entire buildings. Now a single botter can run multiple instances of wow.
Blizz have up a long time so when they figured it. They were spending money to lose money. So instead of banning buyers like they should have from the start. They just let the problem snowball and came up with a way to get paid off both sides.
The token allows them to ignore the bot problem. Allows them to keep the sub money from bots and buyers. Also allows them the profit from the token. Only ones who lose are the players who don’t want to swipe to win.
Seems to me that meeting with Steve went a different way than the version we were given…
There’s even more on how they used video games to further political agendas. Everyone wonders why people spent hours upon hours in trade chat discussing politics.
It was all part of the political cults propaganda machine.
Yeah. When buying gold was only available through third-party RMT, there was a risk factor to it that may well have prevented some people from doing it. I suppose the reverse could be true now; that removing the risk factor by providing it as an in-game service may cause some people who buy gold to stop!
On the other hand, now people who want to play the game and not pay a monthly sub are able to do so while focusing on Wrath Classic!
Wrath Classic isn’t about integrity or authenticity. It’s about milking peoples nostalgia for as much money as they can so Bobby’s Yacht Club can get more Wagyu helicoptered to them.
Not a paywall actually, you just have to enter any email (dont even have to verify.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html
And it’s interesting actually. The article goes on to say that they Blizzard basically bankrupted IGE shortly after by cracking down on gold sellers/buyers.
IGE and its suppliers suffered a “huge loss” after the crackdown, according to a notice that was posted on IGE’s website in China and captured by the Web archive Wayback Machine. Many of the shuttered accounts had accumulated vast virtual stockpiles that vanished when the accounts were closed.
By January 2007, IGE’s virtual-currency business was in free fall, losing more than $500,000 a month, according to [a lawsuit filed later by co-founder Alan Debonneville in a dispute over compensation.
The turmoil convinced IGE to abandon its core business.
So it’s not like they don’t know what they need to do. They’re just not inclined to do it. Go after the buyers, start closing seller accounts, and the whole thing crumbles. But they wont… because reasons.
The playerbase are the ones who buy gold. The token (and similar systems in other games) aren’t designed to sell you gold. They aren’t designed for the company to profit. That is simply a side benefit. They are created, and sold, because they are the ONLY thing that has ever had any significant impact on bots, cheaters and 3rd party gold sellers.
Classic playerbase doesn’t want that? Maybe they shouldn’t have been buying millions of gold for the last few years.
