You don’t even need an active monthly sub.
You just have to paid real money for game time ONCE in the last 5 years
My question would be, if I purchase and consume 30 days of game time with real money, how long after that can I start purchasing tokens off the AH to turn into game time?
I’ve not paid for game time with real money but perhaps ONCE (I’d have to check my transaction history) since the token became a thing.
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Yeah, they’re so greedy that they’re going to require people to buy game time for $15 instead of buying tokens for $20. 
It doesn’t have to be currently active. You just have to have been subscribed for real money at some point (in the last 5 years).
Real players that have been paying only through tokens for all that time will have to subscribe for one month, that’s all. After that they can go back to tokens only for the indefinite future.
But botters who make new accounts all the time and send them stolen gold to get tokens will have to pay $15 per account now, which will hopefully make them less common.
For players concerned by this, What they’re more likely to do is they need to add enough bnet balance to purchase a game time card for 60days… if that even counts… lot of gold about to be burned up.
Tokens are now sold out
This is so dumb.
The thing about bots is a lot of their accounts are just stolen accounts so this might not impact the problem as much as people would hope.
Incoming token price spike. They should’ve just put in the restriction first before saying a word.
Sounds like you need to quit being cheap and put up $15.00 bucks.
It’s bots
20>15, it’s not about money.
I wonder if it has to specifically be a gametime purchase, since I’ve not paid for a sub in years, but have laid down real money for other services like most recently the wrath classic boost bundle earlier this year.
As subs drop, and people don’t continue to embrace “the thing” it needs adjusting.
I purchase my boyfriend’s game time when we aren’t using our gold to buy tokens. Since I gift him time that I bought with real money will that count?
The big question is whether this is going to be a rolling date (i.e. next year we’ll need to have paid since 2018) or if 2017 is just the date that will always apply going forward.
The timing is so bad. We were about to hit new lows on the gold value and now its going to spike back up. Also because its Friday night, nobody from Blizzard will answer questions we have about this.
But I guess that would happen no matter what since Blues absolutely hate talking to the community about anything on their own forums.
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People need to get off the conspiracy train. This is bot prevention. Bot accounts ONLY pay for subs with gold.
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Huh, they don’t mention any other restrictions aside from this one so I’m guessing it’s just a one-off? I wonder if it absolutely has to be directly purchased game time as well, or whether something that attaches game time to another product (like the current preorder for TWW) will count as well? And I wonder how many non-bot accounts will be affected by this? 
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This will hurt botters though.
Not the most powerful, but the minnows.
it makes blizzard less money if people buy gametime with dollars than with tokens. I know corporate greed is the hot button topic but you’re just factually wrong about motives here.
In layman’s terms:
- You can still purchase token in the shop and sell them on the AH.
- You cannot start playing, farm gold, then buy tokens off the AH to play free indefinately.
Good move.
These folks need to pay $15. That’s the goal. You can still use gold for the WoWtoken in the future, but pay us real money every few months.
I too don’t see the point of this. The bots are buying WoW tokens, which folks are paying $20 for. So Blizzard is still making money.
Maybe token sales are down? Who knows.
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