SOD Account Restrictions: how can Blizzard help new players who are affected?

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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I’m a new player, My parents got me playing with them and my account is unable to all of the sudden not use the AH, Trade or mail as of Saturday morning the 6th. It has been like this for 4 days with nothing but automated responses from blizzard and my account is fully authenticated, my bags are full of items that would be silly to vendor when they sell for 10x’s as much on the AH or more. So for right now my Character is dead in the water and they’re waiting on their toons for this to be resolved so we can resume questing.

How can this be an acceptable experience for blizzard to expect new players to experience this and return?

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How can this be an acceptable experience for blizzard to expect new players to experience this and return?

No new players are wanting to play Season of Discovery. New players play retail.

Botters are screaming really loud right now and I love it!

36

I think people misunderstand.

Your subscription is for access to Retail, WotLK, Classic(ERA), Classic (HC), Classic (Self-Found), and SoD. This implementation officially is to only apply to SoD only. Just because you have a 30 day limit to 1 of the game versions, doesn’t mean you cannot play the other editions.

In short, you can play WoW. You just cannot have full access to 1 subset of WoW.

37

Two words: bank alts. Unless you can’t mail stuff to yourself. Then gg.

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First of all, thanks to everyone for not turning this thread into a total flame war this time, I really appreciate it.

Yes Espan, that is one thing I hope that these threads can get across to Blizzard: there are plenty of new players who came for SOD and this is affecting us in a way that they may not have anticipated. It may yet be that a workaround that makes everyone happy is possible, but Blizzard didn’t know it was so important to find one.

To be fair Dredna, I think a lot of enfranchised players are probably feeling like “Blizzard finally did something to stop the bots, and now people are trying to make them roll it back!” That’s why I’m trying to say that this is really a separate issue: whatever the reality, new players have a problem right now, and we should be looking for a fix for that problem, even if the cause of that problem is itself fixing a bigger problem. I don’t see it as an either/or, it just needs some way to appeal.

And players need to know what is actually happening in the first place, because everyone is confused.

Manual verification might be difficult because the company is so big. So many people play this game, meanwhile everyone at Blizzard probably has to wear several hats. That said, plenty of websites use automated identity verification (adult entertainment sites that have to make sure everyone is over 18, for example). However, there are two problems with that:

  1. Orliya said most of these bot accounts are using fake credit cards, so they could probably also use fake IDs as well. while there seem to be ways to counteract this (adult sites have dealt with this too after all), it would be a new problem for Blizzard and they don’t necessarily have things in place to cope with it.
  2. players would have to give Blizzard their ID. do you want to do that? Blizzard is the corporate misconduct company, LOL! this company just got hit with a massive privacy lawsuit! i don’t want to do that!

one thing along those lines did come to mind though. my bank requires that i go through 2FA in order to sign into the site, and also make certain purchases. i am not sure how robust this is as means of preventing fraud, but if Blizzard required new accounts to 2FA with their bank before purchasing game time, or let affected players appeal in this way, maybe that would work as a method of verification?

I think you’re underestimating new players so much! The game itself has more respect for players than that; it puts the low-level gathering materials in low level zones, and profession trainers in the first town. And even the earliest nodes will drop rare, AH-able materials. It takes a few minutes to google ‘wow classic mining’ and realize you could help yourself in this manner.

Besides, new players will probably have played games before, just not this one. They probably understand that there is a player economy and want to participate in it. Or else they play with someone who is more experienced in this game who tells them about it. In our case, we had been keeping up to date with our professions in order to trade each other useful items that you couldn’t get any other way. Learning as we go. This was really fun and it’s a massive gut-punch to lose it. That’s why I’m on here complaining about it in the first place…

Plus, new players have to say goodbye to healthstones, mage water, and other useful things their class can do while levelling. Hell, what about that as a solution? Make some ‘permitted items’ that players can trade, like healthstones, mage water, etc., and allow use of the ‘item will not be traded’ slot for enchanting and unlocking. Things that will be useful for actual new players, but useless to bots.

I think you’re really overstating the case; a lot of people have never played a Blizzard game before. They make new people in this world every day, sosu.

In my case, I played WOW around Mists~, and I played Warcraft (hence username: Thrallr, lol), so I do have a Battle.net account. But to play with my friends on a US server I had to make a new account, since you can’t play on the US server with an EU account, so it still ended up affecting me.

If a new player is playing SOD instead of retail it’s for a reason. In my case: it’s what my friends play. It’s the same way for Iha who is playing with their parents. So we aren’t going to play another version of WOW; we either play this one, or stop playing WOW. That’s how it is for me. A lot of people are saying “that’s a tiny fraction of players, so who cares?” What I’m trying to say is: we do exist nonetheless, and this is an issue affecting us when it isn’t really aimed at us, so lets talk about how to fix it.

Hey that’s a good idea for the bank space problem Shevanel. Not bad for a few hours after you started drinking, LOL. I’ll try that later…

Sorry for the really long post, thanks everyone for reading again.

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39

Hi there, firstly, apologies for the radio silence on this change, it is targeting a group that that we specifically wanted to keep in the dark as long as possible. Let me now try and fill in some details for you!

We’ve been recently experimenting with a change to Classic Era and Season of Discovery that places restrictions on new accounts that have not yet purchased and consumed one month of gametime (i.e. one month has also passed since the purchased time). Specifically, we’re preventing those accounts from transferring in-game wealth to other players (mail, trade, auction). Players under this restriction can still receive gold and items, so established players can still help friends.

A very small number of you may have seen this restriction erroneously applied to your accounts periodically in the past week while we wrestled with some edges case, these have now been resolved. Once an account has passed this aging threshold, it will never see this restriction again.

Of course, we want this change to impact legitimate new players as little as possible. We understand that this level of restriction will impact gameplay, so we’re evaluating the effectiveness of this change very carefully. If we stick with it, we’ll consider adjusting the restrictions to further minimize negative impact to new players.

It’s our hope that this change will have significant effect against the Real Money Trade that is fueling multiple negative impactful behaviors in Classic Era and Seasonal, but we’re watching it closely.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to make World of Warcraft a fairer place for all.

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40

thank you for the update. i think this might work on getting some of the illicit activity that people have been concerned about. This update provide us with evidence of the important work blizzards Security Team is doing to combat things such as botting. Thanks.

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42

I just hope people remember that you are always working to combat RMT and botting and that sometimes silence is part of the strategy.

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43

This is simply NOT TRUE. My account is over 1 year old and more than 30 days of paid gametime in the past, yet I am restricted on Hardcore. Please explain this. I can buy wow Tokens on retail. Logged off for 24 hours and still have the restriction.

Customer service has been ZERO help. I do urge you to look at my account to verify that this issue has NOT been resolved.

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44

What a weird thing to hope for.

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45

Outside of Blizzard and gaming, there’s been a lot of fraud going around lately. My industry gets people calling up pretending to be the provider then tricking customers into buying gift cards due to a “promotion”.

We’ve had to clamp down what information we’ve given to customers who haven’t authenticated and this gets us flack from customers too.

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47

Thanks. Can you also remove mass reporting?

48

So, if our account is >30 days old, and we’ve done the log out for 12+ hours, and we’re still effected, we’re just…screwed?

Feels bad.

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49

There are legit GDKP lovers who try to deny that Blizzard is actively combating RMT. They say, “we want Blizz to punish the botters/gold sellers” when we know they already do. They actively ignore that it’s an ongoing issue that can’t be just resolved in a minute. They want more GMs in game or other unrealistic requests. Instead of just accepting the fact that GDKP is largely driven by RMT/botting.

Oh and the ridiculous notion that the AH isn’t actually policed. While Blizzard is slow to ban clearly illegitimate auctions, there’s a reason why your sale takes 1hr to arrive in the mailbox.

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Yep. It’s all BS. “the fringe cases have been resolved” is a total lie. My account is over 1 year old, paid with a debit card in 2023, yet I have this restriction.

Blizzard CS wont help. “submit a bug report.”

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51

Is there any way to make it so that mail can be sent between alts on the same account? This is the only practical way to do high level professions or Enchanting at all.

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52

There will be collateral damage as they said. In times of war these things happen.

I am impressed they are taking a more aggressive approach.

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53

Lol. I’m sure you would be posting this if your account was wrong restricted from trade. Get a grip. Do no harm; if they want to catch bots, fine, but dont hurt or impede regular players in the process.

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54

Are you willing to refund ingame time left to those new players that pay their subscription without the knowledge of the restriction? i mean, with this movement you screw the first time experience of some new players that maybe have not any old friend playing that give him some bags, mount, armor, weapon, consums for raid, you guys are making it so hard to new ppl, this isn’t the right movement to attack RMT players/gold farmers, all the ppl that bought an suscription in the past 2 weeks should be eligible to ask and receive a refund of the rest of their subscription, because they are playing with an restriction that wasn’t advice in first place, they were not warned before they wasted they money to buy an playtime in a game with restricted actions the first month, you should think about them, you are scaming them due you should apply the changes after the “Article ID: 358296” was posted, not before, i know that sounds aweosome the term “ninja movement” but you should know that is an scam to all new players, no matter if they ill become on bots or if they ill become true endgame players, this is a bad faith move agains all current new players.

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55

What about adding a cell/authenticator to bypass this?

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