It’s definitely working. I only see a couple of WTS posts max now across all M+ Groups instead of dozens. It was never going to get rid of all of them since many are from legit accounts who have an Authenticator.
I don’t see why Blizz won’t just make a Sell/Carry section of the Group Finder though to completely filter them all out.
I don’t think there were anywhere close to 100k reports per day. They would have had to have taken this action much sooner if that were the case as that’s a massive resource drain you don’t let go ignored for 2 whole expansions…
At the rate of 100k per day, in 6months it would be like every player in the game had been reported 3 times over. . . if you have multiple people reporting a single posting for advertising in a day I can’t see how action is not taken (and all those reports collectively dealt with) had their policy been properly enforced. This continues even now post authenticator with ads still hanging out in LFG for days.
???
The silence system is clearly automated. Proven when it was first introduced and you had large streamers getting hit with penalties through mass reports.
The suspension and ban system for reports is probably manual.
But what investigation? You get a report, read the text of the listing and see that it’s clearly an ad, and action it. Each one should only take a minute at most to review.
I doubt there are multiple days worth of backlog at this point. Ads shouldn’t be hanging out in LFG for as long as they are, right now, if the policy was being enforced properly. It still is not.
I think the world will be better off not knowing you need “T H I C C B O I S O N L Y” for your +15.
You can still make groups.
But I think using your email is a reasonable option. Thumbs up to that.
Honestly, they should have made available an alternative to the mobile authenticator before they went live with these changes.
Let’s lowball the subscriber number to 2 million.
If even 5% of people across the entire game are filing reports against advertisements. That’s 100k per day.
That number increases as more people report. Either way, the number of reports coming in is quite large. Even if the number is only 10,000 per day, that’s still a lot of reports to investigate and act on. They’re not going to be able to instantly get to your report the moment you press the report button.
It’s not actually. The only part of the system that is automated is called the squelch. That’s a temporary silence that is put on your account until someone at Blizzard can investigate the reports. If they’re false flags, the staff member restores your ability to chat and no penalties are placed on your account. If they’re not, you get silenced, which attaches a permanent marker to your account and means the next time you get silenced the duration increases.
Yeah, and that requires an investigation. They have to make sure that the account is actually advertising and it isn’t a false flag by a vindictive player who wants to ban someone for saying something they don’t like. They can’t just automatically hit the ban button the moment a report crosses their desk, otherwise they could potentially be banning people who haven’t done anything wrong.
You sound like someone who wants instant results the moment you hit the report button. That isn’t going to happen. This is something Blizzard has been struggling with since they introduced the WoW token and cut the legs out from under the gold seller market (why do you think boosting services started popping up around that time? It’s the same people, they just changed tac to keep scamming folks). Before the WoW token it was the exact same deal with gold sellers. Constantly dealing with compromised accounts spamming their advertisements and not being able to make significant impact because they didn’t think to make the authenticator mandatory for typing in public channels and the group finder.
Then the example makes even less sense. In 60 days you’ve received 3x more reports than you have players in the game.
No way you wait a year++ to require authenticators if the volume of reports for advertising is eclipsing the population of your game multiple times over…
I’d appreciate if you’d stop acting like you have any sort of ballpark for what the number of reports they received on ads pre day was. Because what you are claiming to be true, is clearly nonsensical.
I want action taken within 24 hours. That isn’t a large ask. It’s not a complicated matter. You post an ad in the LFG. Your account gets actioned. That’s the policy. It’s incredibly simple and clear cut.
This doesn’t take hours worth of investigation per report.
The whole reason this problem exists in the first place is because they never properly enforced their policy against ads in the LFG. The same ads runners sat in LFG week after week, clearly with no action having been taken against them.
They then proceeded to blame compromised/throw away accounts as a reason their methods were ineffectual. (That was an excuse) And they still aren’t enforcing the policy. Ads are hanging out in LFG for days even with an Authenticator requirement, a considerably lower number of ads and consequentially fewer reports to “investigate”, and even with the high certainty these are not compromised accounts… still days and days go by without action for some ad listings.
You’re conveniently ignoring that not all of these reports have to be unique.
But hey, it’s clear to me at this point that you’re just ignoring basic facts and want to be argumentative, so I’m going to stop wasting my time on you.
if it takes 100k reports to squelch someone making ad groups then that is a pretty telling sign that there is a flaw in your design.
Also, there is no way there are 100k distinct groups in LFG tool. Not even remotely close. It shouldn’t be hard for them to write a query that can roll up the report count per group.
G1 - 2k reports
G2 - 5k reports
etc.
I still think your numbers are made up, but you get the idea.
Hitting the report button absolutely hides it from your queue. It does so for quite a while too.
I used to report in raid pretty religiously back in 9.0 when I was waiting to find a group. As a result, I seldom see any. In fact, 9.1.5 is the first time I’m starting to see WTS groups show back up in raid for the first time in months. Arena, is where I saw the most, because I usually didn’t spend any time in that queue, and thus never reported anyeone.
You seem to assume most accounts are compromised. That is not the case. Armory any one of those WTS groups and you will see they are advert toons. Almost 99% of the time. Level 60, only quest gear, next to no achievements, no raid clears on any difficulty, 0 rating, etc. etc. In fact I have only seen 1 that happened to have KSM from Legion (which could’ve been bought) and nothing else of note.
Just think about it logically. If you had a business out of boosting and advertisements in game, would you rely on a steady stream of compromised accounts that could be taken back at any point. How often do you think players are having their passwords stolen? It isn’t that easy for someone to get a keylogger onto your machine and if they did, they probably aren’t targeting the WoW population specifically and are looking for things that can net them more money.
What is it with these forums and people making foolish replies?
I never said 100k reports for a ‘single’ advertisement. How you managed to create that in your mind is honestly amazing, and not in a good way.
That’s 100k reports per day, across all servers, from all players who looked at the group finder.
And that’s great, but it isn’t relevant as the person I was replying to wants direct action from Blizzard, as in, they come in swinging and take actions against the account. But that’s not going to happen.
Blizzard’s own staff have literally stated that the majority of accounts that were advertising were compromised.
Read my reply again.
What matters is the number of distinct advertisment groups being formed. That is what needs to be investigated. The count of “reports” is just what highlights which of those groups needs to be looked at, and the priority order.
There is no way it is 100k. I would seriously question if 100k distinct groups are being created in a day (ad or not). Certainly not all of them are being reported as an advertisement. Unless people are just spamming the “report advertisement” option for funsies against real groups.
Depends what you measure. I bet a lot of the “reported” advertisement accounts, file a petition to try to get their account back/unbanned… because why wouldn’t they? It is free to them.
Go in GF right now and just armory those group creators. None of them look like real accounts to me.
Excuse me? I don’t understand what you mean.
100k reports are 100k reports. Unless Bob is reporting Joe 10 times over or something (literal duplicate reports?) and not Bob, Paul, and Mike are all reporting Joe (3 reports on Joe that are each unique)… I somehow understand the point you were previously attempting to make even less. And believe me, I’m trying to understand what your telling me.
And again, I never said that the 100k reports are all unique. Here’s a great example. Let’s say there are 10,000 level 60 players on Illidan, and let’s say 10% of them look at the group finder and see 4 advertisements. If they all report them, that’s 4000 reports, from 1000 people, about 4 advertisements.
Are you understanding yet? At no point did I argue that the 100k are all targetting unique advertisements, at no point did I argue that the 100k are all unique groups. I used an example of 5% of the playerbase actively reporting advertisements across the entire game, across all servers.
Stop being obtuse.
When Blizzard says the vast majority of advertisement accounts are compromised, then the vast majority of advertisement accounts are compromised. Anything else is conjecture.
To be fair, I have an authenticator on both of my accounts and I think the authenticator requirement is a good change, but it’s sort of like LEAN Problem Solving - they put all their eggs in that basket and I don’t think it can be the only solution.
They do have to also act on the reports that they get, and I’ve been tracking the ads I see on a spreadsheet just to see if I could see trends and point to any action that was happening.
The ads that were up for six solid days are finally down, but that’s potentially just because of the weekly server resets because one of the longest-standing advertisers has their ad back up. So clearly, in over a week, people aren’t at the point where they’re penalized to the point of losing the social features of their account.
I’m afraid that I could see them making an assumption that all accounts advertising were stolen accounts and requiring an authenticator would stop it. And it hasn’t, even if it has significantly slowed it, so now the next step needs to be actually applying penalties to the accounts who are still breaking the rules. There’s really not an in-depth complicated “investigation” required, they should be able to see what someone was posting to Premade Group Finder. And there’s no need to hold it for a wave, because there’s obviously not any kind of technical hack happening. It’s just people doing what they’re not supposed to do with the regular game software.
Without that step, and just assuming that the per-session ignore function would make it look to people like something was happening when it’s not, is only undermining their argument that this step was necessary for people who are reluctant and skeptical about authenticators.
Rofl my man.
All you do is click a menu item that says "report advertisments. Those 4k reports all look identical with the exception of the “reporter name” assuming they even store that. So the only thing that needs to be investigated are the 4 advertisement groups they all roll up to. At most that is 4 investigations. The number of reporters is kind of irrelevant beyond whatever internal metric Blizzard uses that justifies an investigation … 1, 100, 1000, “reports” won’t matter if they all roll up to the same LFG group. You investigate the LFG group not each individual report.
And you continue to be obtuse.
I’m not entertaining your foolishness anymore.
Have a nice day.
Okay. I get what you mean by saying unique/non-unique.
But why does that distinction matter when discussing them actioning accounts that post ads in LFG?
The progression of the conversation has become quite strange. You made a point sayingthey have so many reports that it’s hard to deal with them all. And now you’ve dove into some distinction between unique/non unique when that doesn’t matter when the supposed problem that prevented them enforcing their policy effectively was the sheer volume of reports they had to “investigate”.
Though, much like Yonbi is trying to point out if you have multiple people reporting the same listing you only need to action it once to resolve that whole group of similar reports. The account doesn’t get actioned multiple times for the same violation based on the # that report it or something.
But that’s minutia. Talking too specifically about the process no one here actually knows the details of. At that point everyone here is just guessing at what the internal process for reports actually (visually) looks like for the GMs. We have no idea how reports are displayed internally or the specifics of what happens to reports still in the queue if an account has already been actioned for an ad.
We can make some educated guesses but arguing about any of that is just fruitless. Never going to reach a conclusion.
Ad spam really depends on the server. I noticed more ad spam on (Horde side) Area 52 than (Horde side) Wyrmrest Accord. Mind you, both realms are considered to be “High Pop” realms. The only difference between these two realms is that Wyemrest Accord is an RP server whereas Area 52 is not. I think not only does server type matter but so do server capacity levels.
Playing on high populated RP servers vs high populated non-RP servers. And, playing on higher populated realms vs lower populated realms.
That is actually interesting, considering grouping is cross-realm.
Did you check both around the same time? Same level (i.e. max level content)?
I only know of the trade chat spam, unfortunately 'cause I haven’t been max level, in ages. Just something I noticed while playing around on multiple servers. Trade Chat spam is pretty bad on Area 52 whereas Trade Chat, on Wyrmrest Accord, is not as bad.
CRZ on RP servers work differently. On a non-RP server, you’ll see more people in a major city, but they’re usually from different realms. Whereas, on an RP server, it may seem “less packed”, but I’m running into more people from the same RP server.
I can’t say, for sure, if the LFG Spam is the same as the Trade Chat spam, but I can imagine the traffic is probably the same. Especially since there’s no authenticator required nor level restriction to spam Trade Chat. Just need a non-squelched/non-silenced account lol