Or I just picked up the game for the first time, because my buddy wanted me to play it with him because he’s never played an MMO before, let alone WoW. I’VE never played WoW before, because I was never in a position to afford it.
Think what you want, man. I don’t really care. It’s just genuinely sad to see veterans not care at all about new players, or their experience.
Whatever. I’ve got my 90 days, and then I’ll never touch this garbage again. Have fun making other people miserable! 
Well, if that’s all true, then disregard everything I’m saying. I just don’t believe you. You’re the only one that knows the truth. I don’t, so I can’t take your word for it.
This isn’t your fault, it’s just knowing the financial incentive of botters and the length they go to to keep the gravy train rolling.
This has been done MULTIPLE times before in tons of other MMO’s. It is a provenly ineffective tactic, because all it does is over inflate the market on day 30. You want to see some wild stuff? Watch all the restricted farming bots dump EVERY kind of lowmat you can think of, on the market, buy up everything that’s reasonably priced, and then jack the rates through the roof.
Because if I WAS a bot farm, that’s EXACTLY how I would crash an economy and control the market, which is exactly what this kind of restriction sets the in-game economy for, AS WELL AS deterring new players, which is something that WoW DESPERATELY needs right now, whether it’s on Classic OR Retail.
But again, I’m not an actual noob, and I’ve never played another MMO before, so don’t bother listening to me.
Yet something like that is easily trackable and blizzard can ban/action the gold buyer as well.
I still don’t see why blizzard can’t just hire some GMs to manually log in, look at all the obvious bots (yes, they are obvious), ban them, and be done with it 
They cant afford that. They are a small multi dollar company.
This doesn’t work. I know games which do this, and it just makes the botters set up an automated system to replace whatever they lose randomly, and they are less obvious. The number of GMs you would need to hire to deal with it is not worth the return Blizzard would get. As a publicly traded company, they are beholden to make ALL the money, and not leave any on the table or their shareholders could literally sue them.
You purchased a license, and the terms of that license are rather explicit.
Alterations.
Alterations to the Agreement.
Blizzard’s Rights. Blizzard may create updated versions of this Agreement (each a “New Agreement”) as its business and the law evolve.New Agreements. This Agreement will terminate immediately upon the introduction of a New Agreement. New Agreements will not be applied retroactively and cannot alter the process for resolving a Dispute between us once you have notified Blizzard of a Dispute. If you do not wish to be bound by a New Agreement, you must immediately cease using, and uninstall, the Platform and all Games. Your continued use of your Account, the Platform, and/or the Games after Blizzard has published a New Agreement constitutes acceptance by you of the New Agreement.
Alterations to the Platform and Availability. Blizzard may change, modify, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Platform, Games, or Accounts at any time, including removing items, or revising the effectiveness of items in an effort to balance a Game. Blizzard may also impose limits on certain features or restrict your access to parts or all of the Platform, Games, or Accounts without notice or liability. Except as otherwise set forth herein, Blizzard does not guarantee that any particular Platform, Game, or Account, or any particular features or components thereof, will be available at all times, at any given time, or in all countries and/or geographic locations, or that Blizzard will continue to offer the Platform, Game, or Account, or all features or components thereof, for any particular length of time. Availability is subject to change at any time, although we will endeavor to use reasonable commercial efforts to provide you prior notice, unless the discontinuance arises from a matter that is beyond Blizzard’s control or causes the provision of such advance notice not to be possible or feasible.
Do your reading, life is easier that way.
highly doubt the shareholders will sue blizzard over hiring some GMs dude
and I refuse to believe that a team of GMs banning bots as a full time job wouldn’t be effective… it would be far more effective than banning gdkp.
This is a completely defeatist attitude. “It doesn’t work in some games (name them btw) so why bother trying in our game.” You could hire 10 people in India or Vietnam to do this work for $10/hr and it would be extremely effective. You can ban bots before bot makers can develop sophisticated networks that are undetectable. Why let them use obvious methods? Make them earn their botted gold.
Nope, you get nothing. None of your items belong to you. Your account can be closed at anytime. Your character can be deleted or locked at will.
That $15 is rent, you give it up for the privilege of entering their servers. It does not get you anything, you own nothing.
Its all in the fine print.
The point is that is isn’t going to provide enough value to be worth the value of having GMs paid to be looking for bots. Plus, imagine working that job, would that be fun to you? What if you banned someone who was legit on accident? Nightmare waiting to happen.
Also to your question of games which do this, - Dofus does this, it has not stopped bots from running rampant in both Dofus 2 and classic Dofus, and classic Dofus Also requires a subscription buy in to play the game. Still a great game though, shameless plug.
Other games which I know of which did this are shut down, dead and gone, so their irrelevant I suppose.
I thought you were joking but this is a real game apparently. I’m gonna go ahead assume you can’t compare Doofus to WoW in any meaningful way when it comes to botting complexity, but maybe I’m wrong. But yea, that’s a pretty short list of examples.
RuneScape, for example, has a botting problem to this day. Most of those bots are still completely obvious though. The issue with RS is how quickly new bots can be spun-up for free. WoW requires a sub, so it has that advantage over RS. Also Jagex has much less money at their disposal, so they have another disadvantage there.
To your other point, idk I think plenty of people would be okay working that job if they didn’t have any better alternatives. We’re talking 200k/year total to employ 10 people in a developing country to potentially completely fix the botting problem. Worth it? Maybe not to Blizzard, sure. I don’t know what bots cost them but obviously they do and it’s a very simple math problem at that point. Also, you can have a process for fixing false-positives. That’s not an impossible hurdle to overcome.
Yeah its a real game lol. Its a French company so the name isn’t strange to them. Its about as old as WoW, and had a similar model, just vastly less popular then WoW. There is a ton of similarities to what they do and what WoW does in terms of the things its offering with their subscription, I dare say they did their own version of a “season of discovery” long before WoW got on that bus lol.
Its combat is turn-based as a pose to action-tab target though, so its probably much harder to tell the difference between a bot and an actual player. Gear can be traded freely though and the game is massively more grindy and based completely around a player driven economy through professions and the enemies and bosses mostly drop materials, not outright gear. The gear has random stat values within brackets, and another profession can improve those stats up to a certain point, but its extreme RNG. So good gear takes years to obtain in the game. You can see how extremely detrimental botting would be in that kind of environment.
Yet they couldn’t stop it even with GMs working around the clock banning them. I literally saw GM’s in game banning bots, they make a show of it sometimes.
So, with that in mind, and the fact that almost no MMO’s use the tactic of using GM’s to ban bots, It leads me to believe that it simply isn’t cost effective, nor is it actually effective against bots.
Best way to show anger with these changes would be to BUY GOLD from the bots blizzard is trying to disrupt while affecting new players. After all why grind for hours (wasting your time) (blizzard is wasting yours) when you can buy 100g for $9 or 200g for $14? Not that I know btw.
I think getting a charge back would be easily done.
They do both actually.
No, quite the opposite. They don’t steal active accounts as much anymore, they often tend to get inactive accounts. What happens is they use account lists and password spray attacks, hoping to get into a bnet account for someone that quit a while ago (hence targeting accounts that haven’t paid since a certain year). They then use fake payment information. Both those get stopped by this new effort. I am sure there’s a lot more to it as well, we don’t have their internal logging.
Those accounts will almost certainly get banned. The longer they are active, the more chance, and they will eventually filter out.
Citation heavily needed here.
except they do care. They are caring about their existing players. And it comes at a cost to the small subset of returning players in this targeted group. Unfortunate but a net positive in my opinion. And sure, I am not affected by the block, but I AM affected by the botters, and I can tell you this has already made a MASSIVE difference.
You’re wrong. It’s already majorly affected the active botters, and we ALSO are seeing the return of a system that we thought dead. The fake Blizzard action whispers. There are now characters named “Blizzaard” and stuff like that whispering people in the low level zones with fake account action messages. They haven’t done this for YEARS and it shows how they are getting affected by this change. They now have to target the existing accounts. It’s objectively having an impact that we can see now.
If you don’t like it, cancel your sub and leave. I for one fully support this change.
At this point in time I doubt there are truly any new WoW players. Just people reactivating old accounts.
Any new accounts are 99% certain to be botters, RMT mules, or ban evaders or the ilk. In other words undesirables.
So if the restriction was only for these new accounts and not returning/reactivating accounts I think there would be less issues.
What is unacceptable though is for Blizzard to roll out such a policy without doing enough testing to make sure people who shouldn’t be affected were not inconvenienced. For example people who paid for feburary but still got locked out.
While that mixup did not directly affect me. As someone who uses the AH extensively to get more then vendor price for all the stuff I pick up. A drop in number of people using the Ah means a drop in how many of my items sell. So I wasn’t happy with Blizzards SNAFU
At the end of the day though I think we can all agree we all want the best world of warcraft there can be. Even if we have different visions of what exactly that means.
if veteran players were experiencing this complete lock out of everything needed for 30 days theyd be less than forgiving and alot more understanding to the concerns. The fact that they assume players arent returning after years of not wanting to since retail became hot garbage is crazy. Blizzard is alienating new players, the bots will still do what they have done for decades and thrive, the auction house economy is absolutely fukt, people will not renew after 30 days, new players that come after will have to re-experience this nonsense and not want to play , you can already see the playerbase dwindling. They tanked d4, and wow hasnt been interesting until season of discovery and now this is just more nonsense. someone said “its working, because now botters are scamming EXISTING players with active accounts” . Like really? Thats a win for you guys? lmao