“I was a blizzard GM and supervisor for 12 years in France. The anti bot actions are done by a super small department of like 10 people and hunting bots is not even their main focus. GMs are ticket machines, following up on a bot report is working against your ticket per hour metrics, so most GMs would throw them away. I used to clean up the realm I was playing on every morning in classic WOW for fun and kept it clean for 2 years. But new bots would be up or even transfered over from other realms every day. Everyday there were about 10 teleport bots in ZG, 5-10 in Mara, 5-10 in Dire Maul. ~5 Fishing Bots around the world (usually Tanaris, Feralas, Wetlands), and about 10 groups of 5 multibox bots in various dungeons (leveling more flying bots). Blizzard wouldn’t be able to stop it now even if they wanted to, they had the chance to put a stop to it back in 2008-2012 but they grew too fast and had other priorities. Pressure from Activision made everything worse. And we know they won’t do it now because it would require hiring ~1000 or 2000 people to ONLY deal with bots and reports. There are so many things wrong with the gold system: no tracking, no proper logs, badly coded or non existant GM tools, limited access to existing tools, guild bank and auction house logs are a mess, mass actions are not really possible for GMs based on reports. The big ban waves are profiling based on account meta data and are made to have as few as possible false positives, so they catch only the most obvious blatant stupid bot setups (not the pros). There is so much more in criminal energy, stolen credit cards, actual paypal fraud etc. The only real way I see out of this would be to provide self government tools to the community and have a community based system to track and weed out bad elements like bots.”
If every player stopped buying their stuff they would get no income from it and go away. Players do have the power to clean up the game by simply not pulling out the plastic. We all know that and we all know the people who are purchasing everything with real money won’t stop while they have an account.
But here’s the catch that you either fail to see or blind yourself to.
Wow Classic Era players absolutely love RMT. Just look at the gold selling metrics its wild. These Dads cant be bothered to farm gold or clear some of the most brain dead raids in the entirety of WoW to get items. They have jobs so they just spend money on things to progress.
Thats what Classic Era has become. And its the Players’ choice.
The more a person watches others get away with something thats supposedly against the rules, the more they begin to subconsciously see it as only illegal on paper. Laws that arent enforced are basically just suggestions unless and until active enforcement begins.
When you see guys buying Gressil for 180-200k regularly and giving tongue-in-cheek implausible excuses for how they have that much gold and NEVER getting punished for it… it starts becoming apparent that gold buying is really only against the rules on paper.
When you play by a set of rules that nobody else plays by, they arent rules anymore. Theyre a handicap.
At the end of the day Blizzard are the only ones who were capable of preventing this, but they chose not to actively enforce the rules against botting or against RMT. Their banwaves are lipservice, public displays meant to give the appearance of active enforcement. But anyone thats done high end raiding sees the same guys show up week after week dumping 6 digit purses for permabBIS items and never getting so much as a slap on the wrist.
So really, why NOT buy gold.
And i say that as someone that despises GDKPs, RMT in general and botting.
2023 players are obsessed with meta. Most of those who illegally (or legally now) RMT have disposable income they want to burn to be the sweatiest of the sweats.
Blame the players for this nonsense. They’re the ones who keep RMT alive and well… so much so that blizzard is starting to cave and provide RMT services (“starting” is tongue-in-cheek since they started that in TBCC- with boosting).
It’s pretty clear blizzard doesn’t care because they make their money from the bots.
RMT is here to stay folks. As is GDKP.
This is 2023 not 2008. The 2023 whales pour way more money into the game than the normal player in 2008 ever did.
