If I was a new player I would have no idea what to be trading and what to be selling on the AH. I wouldn’t know what I don’t have access to since I had never played before. This change wont hurt new players as much as you think it would. Might actually help new players focus on learning the game over trying to flip the ah for a few silvers.
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I would unironically do any of these options. Blizzard could learn something from financial institutions that figured out real ID and fraud prevention 30 years ago. Then again, they actually care about solving the problem and not just slapping Band-Aids on the issue.
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Of course if it dont accfect you it is a non-issue. But if it affect you it is a issue. If i am rich in real life and you are poor. It dont affect me and are a non-issue. What is a issue or not all depends what side of the barrel you stand!
So you need to wait 30 days to learn how to traid and send mail to you own alts? I am blocked from trading and send mail now. I just subbed again after a almost 2 months break! I got lvl 74 toon on Wotkl. I played Vanilla. I know how to use AH and send Mail. I am not confused by that. So your argument dont hold.
As a new player affected by this, you stumble upon access to the AH within like the first day of playing the game. The game drops those crates that you have to fill with goods. You ask yourself, “well how am I supposed to do this?” So you Google it and find out there’s this thing called the AH and it opens up like 50% of the game for you. Professions are also are a PITA without it and pretty important for new players. You have to vendor all your mats and greens for 1/10th their value just to keep bag space. It’s super painful.
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Eventually, Activision-Blizzard will have to come to the realization that the only solution is a range ban.
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Those loot boxes should be filled by you playing the game or vendored.
Day 1 of sod no ones first thought was to go check the ah, it was to gather and fill the order yourself.
The AH is not half the game you just make it seem that way since you are probably a veteran player who heavily relies on it to save time from gathering yourself. New players don’t really need the AH, especially if they get enough silver from the world to train and level up skills.
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Okay you’re just completely dismissing what I’m saying as unrealistic for some reason. I literally never played this game before 10 days ago but have been playing video games for 25 years. Yes, my first instinct is to Google some basic concepts about a massive game that’s been around for 20 years so I’m not stumbling around in the dark. I’ve also seen a few YT videos about which version of WoW I should try and they explain a lot of basic stuff in those too.
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If your account isn’t new and you are restricted like that, you should open a ticket. Most people should have a Battle.net account already so I fail to see the inconvience it causes as a serious problem.
Simply having a battle.net account doesn’t do anything. You have to have had a WoW sub for at least 30 days for the sanction to be lifted. This affects all new players and players that haven’t been subbed since 2017.
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Yeah but this is from the last 7 years without a sub, that’s reasonable. This is clearly targeted at bots.
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This is unironically a really good idea by Blizzard to combat botting that not one single person has ever mentioned on the forums. Put some respect on the Thinktank’s name.
Hmmm there would be some issue with putting this restriction on an account AFTER a customer purchased. You just have to decide if you want to wait the time and play or not. If you don’t, think about it. Pretty easy to get your money back.
And definitely, there would have to be a disclaimer on any new purchases, clearing stating this restriction. And if you are a recurring subscription, there are a lot of California laws that would come into play.
Really, you basically have to decide if you want to pay for a full month (in a seasonal game) and not really get to advance. I suppose you could just vendor all drops.
This move is quite unprecedented. Does it not ensure that a very very few number of new players will be coming to the game? Is this a way to kill the game off?
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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!
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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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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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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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