Simply put - if they are inadequately able to enforce their current rules against RMT, how do they now expect to also enforce a ban on GDKPs at the same time? I expect it will take more scrutiny and resources to have an employee determine and prove for sure whether someone who is attempting to hide their activity is running a specific type of loot system or not unless there is some sort of obvious evidence like in game chat logs.
Sure, the rule by itself will work as a deterrent for a good amount of players and they can audit accounts or IPs, see who is trading/AH-ing/mailing/muling gold on one char and receiving items on another, use flagging systems, etc, but if they are actually capable of doing this type of enforcement for GDKPs then why haven’t they already been doing it for gold selling and buying? The majority of the solutions that I can think of to enforce the ban on GDKPs can also be applied to enforcing their existing rules against RMT and we all know how well that has been going over the past 4 years.
If the current enforcement isn’t working to stop RMT, why would it work to stop GDKPs? It seems that this new proposed rule is them attacking the symptom and not the root cause of the problem - that is gold buyers and sellers. Will this be them now focusing more towards curbing GDKPs and other ways that players spend RMT gold instead of policing the RMT itself?
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It’s not really about RMT. Blizzard said GDKP’s were “antithetical” to the socializations they want. The same crowd who didn’t want RDF in wrath classic didn’t want GDKP’s for “muh socializations” so blizzard gives them what they whine for.
I’m not sure if that crowd actually exist, a lot of people didn’t want RDF but did GDKPs.
It’s easy to enforce. You just ban people reported for hosting GDKPs. YOu can’t have GDKPs without hosts.
eats popcorn
Or was the rise of GDKP’s a natural consequence of no RDF? People can’t run the dungeons they want so they turn to boosters which RMT types take advantage of. The resultant increase of RMT’s leads to popularity of GDKP’s. Meaning the anti RDF crowd helped bring about GDKP’s in the 1st place. But the anti RDF crowd remembers that whining yields results so they whine to successfully ban the results of their own actions.
Blizzard has data for every copper generated and changing hands in this game. Blizzard is now Microsoft. Microsoft AI could sift through and spit out every GDKP leader in a matter of seconds based solely on their game habits and gold trades.
XBOX already makes extensive use of AI for game content moderation. Anyone who thinks that technology is not going to be extended to Blizzard games is living in a fantasy land.
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Blizzard’s current enforcement strategy since they don’t have enough GM’s and are actively firing even more is to rely on mass reports and automated actions. That works poorly against bots but works better with something more visible like GDKP’s.
They’re not combatting RMT. They’re combatting GDKPs that abuse RMT. They even stated it pretty explicitly in the presentation that their focus is GDKPs, not RMT.
They did say more details to come but remember, SoD is basically one big giant beta. Maybe they are implementing something new to be later added to games and you all are the testers.
They will never fully disclose everything, but I will say, this is getting good!
Thank you so much. I could have not said it better myself!
Blizzard has a massive amount of data on your accounts and your toons and what they do and where it came from, and Microsoft has the AI tools that can just churn through this in nothing flat.
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You can’t have GDKP raids without gold, so they should ban everyone who has any gold.
Better buy something quick when you’re at 99 silver boi or else.
If this were even remotely true they could also do the same for bots, and ban them quicker than every 3 months…but they don’t.
If they have all of this information, why was it so hard for them to ban the gold sellers and buyers? Players from other countries literally use this game as their full time job selling gold and don’t get banned. If their accounts and methods don’t trigger this system, why would players’ attempts to circumvent the GDKP ban trigger them?
Somewhat unrelated to your post specifically - I am indifferent to the banning of GDKPs and my post isn’t about why they are banning them, but focused on how they will enforce the new rules.
If they do in fact have the technology and/or resources at their disposal to police this new policy change then why haven’t they been using this to combat RMT all this time and why has their efforts to do so all of Classic been so seemingly ineffective?
It’s not that they can’t, they likely don’t want to. With the vast # of people who RMT, they would need to ban most of their playerbase. This would cause severe drop in actual high value sub costs. Banning you + 7 friends = potentially 120-170 US/CAD per month. Thats around 60-85 Argentina bots they’d need to gain in order to make up for the revenue lost. Also you buying games at $80 a pop, etc. means you are a more loyal customer who isn’t worth banning. If they decided to ban 250,000 REAL players for RMT, they’d be left with nothing but Argentina jajaja subs and lose millions of potential revenue as you’d be pissed and not rebuy anything blizzard again.
Because they were not Microsoft all this time.
Even though they DID have the data, they probably didn’t have the ability to effectively sift it all, and didn’t have the money to purchase or develop the systems needed to do so.
While I’m not entirely convinced atm that Microsoft is who should be given the credit for this apparent new enlightenment against the social structure structure of the game and anti RMT stance, I do hope they will take the integrity of their new IP a bit more seriously than the clowns at Acti-Blizz did under the old management - I would bet that they certainly had the resources available had they wanted to route them towards this issue and take it more seriously
Put it this way, with 250,000 bots banned, assume they spend 1 minute per bot, confirming each bot is a real bot, banning one by one, that’d require 250,000 minutes of time, or 4200 hours. Spread out over 1 month, that’d require 18 employees banning 1 bot per minute 8 hours a day for an entire month. Any false positives will cost $10-20 an hour in Customer service cost (the price of a sub, as you need to pay people by the hour to chat with you, which means 1 ticket per month nullifies 1 full value sub cost, and the jajajas only pay like $2 per sub, so they’d be lose like 5-10 subs in value to answer 1 ticket). They’d need to be DAMN sure when they do these banwaves they are confident in their data, as a level 16 rogue might be walking into Stockades for first time not knowing what it is, and could get caught up in the banwave against 16 rogues in stockades. And if they go back to the whole, verify each ban, then ur back to requiring 18 full time employees banning 1 bot a minute with no breaks for a full month just to clean up classic realms.
I think it’s likely they have access to more sophisticated technology than they have ever had before, and since there is no longer an ATVI stock price to worry about, less reluctance to hand out harsh penalties against activities that hurt the game.
One could hope, but
I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it