They want to get botting accounts on the hook (even if fraudulent/stolen) with a real world payment method, to ban for future payments, and to see correlation of which institutions are lax at monitoring.
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Bot accounts only pay with gold. Every time they get banned and try to make a new account they can’t just start one up with gold again, they have to pay $15. This is a bot prevention/deterrent tactic.
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That makes sense.
Didn’t counterstrike try to do this and people just bought the game again? I thought that’s why Blizzard doesn’t permanently ban, but just did temp bans because they found folks were just buying new accounts and continued to cheat.
I don’t think this’ll deter bots. There are like… hundreds of them in Classic WotLK. 
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I 100% believe that before classic got its token, classic accounts were either using stolen/fraudulent payment or botted gold via tokens in retail.
Or if they wanted to be “legitimate” they’d pay their sub by claiming to be from Argentina when it was like 2 bucks/month.
People keep saying 15$ but I don’t see that option. You need to shell out 30$ to get game time for two months.
What is this for? This seems like a terrible way to try and fight botters. They will fork over whatever it takes because they make so much more money. It hurts innocent people who play purely on tokens. There are plenty of people. And blizz is even loosing money on this instead of getting 20$ for my month they get 15$…
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You are talking about two different bots. There are players that use bots to play the game for them in pvp or pvp, on a single account (sometimes 2 or 3 maybe) and get banned. Those players may buy a new account. Then there are gold farming accounts. Again, this does deter it by adding another layer to things. Like I said bot accounts (gold farmers) only pay via in game gold for monthly subs because they will get banned at some point. It does deter them or make it more costing to start up another account now, AND they can track payment methods etc to a point as well. Trust me, it does deter it. Does it solve it 100%? No.
You would be mistaken to think this is about the money. This is about tying your account to a bank account, which in turn is tied to a plethora of other marketing data points.
This is a Microsoft decision to provide them with additional tracking information on every player, not some kind of money grab.
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They aren’t losing money. It’s one month at sub price, people who are buying tokens still buy tokens. The people paying in game money for tokens aren’t the ones making them money. Bot accounts may “fork over whatever it takes” but they will also have to go through making sure they never use the same payment method etc.
They already buy a new license each time why would an extra 15$ inconvenience them?
Every person who pays for their sub with a token makes Blizzard and extra 5$ compared to those who who buy the sub one month at time and its even more money compared to people who use the 6 or 12month subs.
just means i can buy more tokens, lessons the prices
True to form, any change that Blizzard makes will attract some outrage, but equally perplexing, no matter what the change is or how bad it is, someone will be here shilling for them lol
I wish we could all just take a step back and have a think about things before getting mad or blindly defending them.
Reading the blurb on it seems like this is targeted at botters which will indeed help with the token market and the market in general. Given this will hit botters where it matters which is their pockets as they were able to bot the way were through the use of tokens. So now that it will be much more expensive for them to open all those bot accounts and mulit boxxing accounts now it should have a net positive impact overall on the game.
I’m not sure what they mean by “provide a better token market to players” means. Does it mean a better market for people who buy them to sell on the AH, or a better market for those who buy it from the AH to use for their sub or other purchases?
The only people who buy token off the AH are doing it because they have enough spare gold to do that. To me, there are 3 types of such people - those who do various types of content to gather enough gold to buy a token, those who earn significant amounts of gold doing such things as raid carries etc, and those who earn the gold illegally by various means.
It could be targetted mostly at the latter. I imagine those who bot, or hack players accounts who make the mistake of buying gold or handing over their gold and being defrauded, pay for multiple accounts and pay for their sub with gold earned, so they end up giving Blizzard very little.
Due to the rapid increase in the cost of AH tokens I haven’t been able to pay for a month’s play for most of DF. What tokens I have bought recently have put onto my bnet account saving up to prepurchase TWW.
What this brief blue post doesnt make clear is what sort of timeframe exists for that 30 days that you have to pay for. Does it mean you pay for a month and then can buy a token, and then have to pay for another month? Would be good if they could clarify that.
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Its a bot tax. It won’t remove bots, but now blizz gets like 15 bucks an account from them.
I have been using tokens for a long long time. I am probably in that category but I have been trying to bring down my bnet balance - I sure hope they don’t decide I should pay real money in order to use that…
Paying $15 every 7 years doesnt seem like greed to me.
Doubt it.
I’ve seen same bots around for days/weeks, shows me how much they care about bots.
This is about cash.
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Eval Kineval couldn’t even make that jump, Broseidon, king of the Brocean…
Bwahahaha bots existed before the token , so this won’t do anything
Rather than buy the token with gold , they just sell the gold via RTM and pay for the initial subs as it is first pay then gold for these guys.
What it will do is just inconvenience regular players
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Money and profits is a more complex situation than people give credit for.
When a person buys a WoW Token, they pay $20 to Blizzard. When a different person buys that WoW token with gold, then extends their sub, that action gains no additional revenue/profit.
So if someone has paid a WoW token back in June, it’s $20 that can be accounted on that quarter’s profits for the shareholder report. If you (or I) are now being asked to pay $15 today so that we can continue using WoW tokens, that’s an additional $15 that can be reported on THIS quarter’s profits, and pad the shareholder report. Which is itself valuable to Blizzard courting investors.
Then of course, there’s the other side which is asking people who may have no active credit card on file, or who have no active sub on file, to put one on. All the subscription services (Netflix, Disney, etc.) make money from people who get a sub, then forget to cancel, or forget to cancel in time for a billing period. THis is even why a lot of those services offer trials and discounts, so that people are asked to put their credit card, then will inevitably get charged more than they planned for because they didn’t cancel in time. It’s predatory behaviour, but is legally permissible, and will no doubt affect at least some of the people who are being asked to charge money on their credit cards now, where they didn’t have to before (and were potentially choosing not to for these kinds of reasons).
Then on top of that, there’s the deprecating of the 30-days of Game Time (which is separate from a WoW Subscription). Someone who is reliant on game time, and cannot sub for whatever reason, is required to use the now-minimum 60-days of Game Time option. Which is obviously, well, more money now …
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