If we really pan out our perspective. Let’s think about the nominal bot account. Said Bot account currently over the 30 day restriction is operating normally. Bot accounts Under a 30 day restriction are still allowed to operate under the restriction just not post to the AH mail or trade. You could make 8 bot characters and max their bag space out only to flood the AH at the end of the 30 day restriction. These people that run the bot accounts don’t care.
However players who expect the product they paid for do care and will likely cancel their accounts and never return. I just don’t see how this is a measure with acceptable consequences from a decision making standpoint. If you’re a principled thinker and decision maker you would violate several principles executing this plan.
This is the equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Paul only to still owe Peter and Paul after you’ve robbed Peter or throwing the baby out with the bath water only to have the bath water refill the tub after thirty days.
The blue post from the Dev in another thread said they’re experimenting with measures. I feel like this is a measure you don’t experiment with. This will have serious in game economic consequences as a result of massive fluctuations of commodities hitting the AH and legitimate players being left excluded from the economy while they level to 50 and being held back massively. You’re essentially paying for 30 days of trial account. This not to mention was done in quiet, not known about for several days and applied to accounts who have already been playing legitimately for weeks.
I’m not personally effected by this on my account but my Kids accounts are and so are several other people who I invited to the play the game. There should be a mechanism in place to verify non bottling accounts to have this lifted. Nothing like this should happen without a relief valve for the legitimate customer who stands with the agreement of terms of service.
Imagine me in diapers at 20 years old, I can’t stand it , I’ve been playing this game for 4 days and it’s a nightmare, it’s been 2 days since my refund request and no response from Blizzard, I can’t imagine how they’ve been able to run the business so far, I see you I get it
The way bot accounts work in reality is much different. They are often stolen accounts with fake information. The payments are often rescinded and there’s a lot of other flags. it generally takes time to identify these accounts.
So what happens is the botters steal an account and try to reactivate it, or make a new fake account with fake information. They operate the bots but cannot extract the value from that account which would normally happen asap.
Either the payment gets flagged and the account gets banned before getting out of the restricted period, that bot made 0 money for the botters, they are now losing money. Success for Blizzard.
The botter gets flagged by detection methods during their 1 month probation and gets banned. 0 value extracted, botters lost money.
Well good news, you don’t have to because it’s not your decision to make! Meanwhile in sod it appears that the botting crisis is already taking hefty blows and this was JUST implemented.
This is a finctional concern. The reality is the market will be healthier without the influx of botting materials and your participation or lack of it will be minimal.
If they could have done this, they wouldn’t need this measure in the first place…
This is actually a really good idea honestly. I’m all for this. I can’t really see any way for bots to exploit something like this off the top of my head.
And this, I also agree with this.
In my general opinion I think they just rolled out blanket restrictions because it was just easier and quicker to code versus them actually having to make conditionals on sending/receiving mail etc.
They should have put much more development into this idea before pushing the changes.
If the bots can buy from the AH then they have no restriction basically. Means you just put up a piece of junk for 1000g and the bot buys it, bam got your bought gold right there.
That’s why they need to implement some sort of appeal or exception process. Go ahead and blanket ban all new accounts from trading and AH, but then you need to give legitimate players a path to have their account whitelisted. If you cannot implement an exception process, then you shouldn’t implement this blanket restriction. Unless you simply do not care about the new player experience and new player retention in SoD. Which to be fair, they actually might not care about it.
The whitelisting is playing the game for 30 days. I actually recently just got pulled into playing second life with my brother, and many of the modules in that game have account age restrictions as well, so I personally just can’t play with him for a couple weeks until my account is “old enough” to play. It sucks, but I understand the reasoning.
This restriction will make it much easier for Blizzard to have the time they need to ban the bots, and the bots will have to double their cost investment to get a return, I doubt it will be crippling enough to stop them, but its definitely going to hurt their pocketbook. The extra cost and procedures they will have to implement to make a profit will likely reduce the size of the operation they can conduct, which directly leads to less bots and a better play experience for current players.
This also gives Blizzard an entire month of data on any account before it can negatively impact the economy, which means the bots will be caught much more easily as well, further reducing their impact, and making it that much harder for them to make a profit. With how big an issue botting is, its literally been talked about every phase, every day, since launch, I think this is a reasonable step to help preserve the integrity of the game people have been harping on since day 1.
I’m sorry but this just isn’t right. We can’t have a conversation that finds any meaningful middle ground when you start from this position. We just fundamentally disagree that restricting legitimate new players to 60% of the same game you’re playing, simply because you played it before, is fine and acceptable.
Its simply one of those “This is why we can’t have nice things” issues. It sucks, yes. Should it be in the game? In a perfect world, no. Sadly WoW is the sweatiest MMO which has ever existed, and buying gold is like using steroids in sports. So to protect the integrity of the game, I for one, am ok with these restrictions.
In the long term this may hurt the game as the new player experience will be worse. But it can’t be any worse then trying to play retail as a new player, seeing things cost 100’s of thousands of gold, and knowing you either have to grind for months for basic things that you need to perform (your legendaries in shadowlands is the most recent example I personally can remember) Or you suck it up and buy gold from Blizzard.
I hear ya. I guess WoW veterans have just simply resigned themselves to accepting brute-force methods to deter botting at any cost. You guys know how unlikely (or impossible) it would be for Blizzard to hire 1-2 people (or 10 people from a developing country) to work purely on the botting problem. It just doesn’t make financial sense for Blizzard to do it, so they won’t. There is no long-term outlook in this community, just short-term gains and results. It is what it is I guess.
well to be fair i had a 90% chance of being right since i doubt many people who play SoD are really new to the game and dont already have accounts. soo… actually make that 95% chance. you on the otherhand, failed miserably not an npc
Do you have any data to back that claim up or do you just always pull stats and facts out of your rearend? It’s pretty sad how little faith WoW vets have that new people are playing their game. SoD is an experiment and fresh opportunity that a lot of outsiders are trying or wanting to try. I know just from sitting in these forums for the past three days and being one myself. Restricting these people will turn a lot of them off from the game forever. Which, I know, you don’t care about.
oh its all from my butt but lets face it. the ammount of actual new people is slim to none, most of us have been playing wow years before classic was even launched. just based off interactions across several servers. also i like this, really kills bot inititive. so good on them for fighting the bots!
As others have mentioned. Snipes like this make me doubt you are actually “new”. Not only that but if you started this like 10 days ago, and the issue popped up 6. It was like 4 days of playing. How are you that invested over $15. Maybe you are new but it just doesn’t smell right. Ultimately though it doesn’t matter if you are or are not new or affected by this, that does not change any of the arguments for or against.
It’s because I’m a 30 year old man that is familiar with Blizzard as a company and how big companies get roasted online for their shady practices. This isn’t some niche, insider turn-of-phrase that only WoW vets use.
I guess I’m a quick learner and I don’t like being scammed out any amount of money purely out of principle. It isn’t just my $15, it’s the $15 of every single person affected by this. Trust me though, I’m not losing sleep over this but it still deserves to be called out and discussed.
not an npc