The problem is that you’re trusting that any GM responding to a ticket actually knows what they’re talking about. There is frequent evidence that this is not the case.
1 Like
I agree with you on some level, because I have received GM replies telling me I absolutely don’t have access to certain content as F2P that I have been able to consistently replicate access to, BUT ALSO “this is intentional” carries a bit more weight as a statement than “we have received reports about this.”
I understand the desire to ride the ̶c̶o̶p̶e̶ hope train, but I think most of us know in our souls that they never intended us to have warbank, since we didn’t even have access to the quest and the skill to summon it.
Yeah we did. The quest to get the bank and the summoning toy was doable at level 20 without a sub because I did it at launch. The bank also cost 1000 gold for the first tab which is the gold cap for a non sub. Plus they fixed the bug that let you take out too much gold in the first week.
It was intentional for players to be able to access it. Now after half a year they decided to take that back with no warning after people got used to having it and left important items in there they can’t access now.
Just scummy behavior all around, but not surprising from this company.
5 Likes
Companies just get worse and worse every day. Not just Microsoft. It’s probably why the CEO’s are being hunted for sport nowadays.
1 Like
They don’t say it was intentional though, they say it was ‘disabled by developers’, which is true of any code change that results in functionality loss due to a bug. Developers recently disabled our ability to see the names of any caged pets in guild banks. Presumably this is also a bug.
Now I don’t think the GM is playing word games, I just think they’re cut and pasting language into a reply that may not be specific to this situation.
I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up either, but the way this change was introduced seems like it could very well be a bug.
I’m guessing you’re talking from a Veteran perspective? Pure Trial Accounts did not have the quest or the skill.
I did the quest too and paid the 1000g on my f2p account. This was on an entirely f2p, no vet status.
On the Starter Edition you will not have access to:
-
Most recent expansion content (quests, zones, allied characters, etc) -
Characters above level 20 -
Pet Battles -
Other chat channels and whispers to non-friends -
All guild-related functions -
Value added services (character transfers, faction changes, etc) -
Party formation -
Trade, mail, or the Auction House -
Real ID -
World of Warcraft voice chat. You can use Battle.net voice chat instead -
The Emote function in text chat -
Depositing or withdrawing from the Warband Bank
Guess text is in boxes today. Either way, this is certainly intentional.
7 Likes
Interesting. I never found the quest on my F2P. I only remember being able to purchase the tab one day.
Thank you for that. I know to not bother checking back now. Appreciate it.
I paid the 1000 gold on my regular account as I have plenty of gold. I even bought a second tab but hesitant at the cost of third. I also lost gold once when I misclicked withdraw instead of deposit gold. I put items in the bank so that I can take them out on my f2p account expecting that I can get them back into the warbank.
Now they take this away. Sigh.
What I hope is that someday they at least allow f2p warband accounts to use the warband bank if they have an active connected warband veteran account?
Good to see this official now.
I checked a few days ago when I saw these reports, but the article had not been updated to reflect this latest change.
One could argue about removing access for this to 100% trial accounts that never paid for the game at all. But to treat lapsed accounts that bought your expansions, game time, interacted with account wide system, unlocked tabs, stored items just the same way?!
This is 100% misleading.
Npc not a banker?!
you can not access it right now?!
i can think a world of reasons for this broken mess you know.
What a pr blunder. And the timing…
Literraly Jesus Christ.
How do you expect new players to the game to be exited about systems if they can’t interact with them at all? Put daily/weekly limitations on deposit/withdrawl of gold/items. At least put in some effort to make strings reflecting account status of this error everyone is getting.
The cat was out of the bag for 6 month and now instead of letting it go yall did 180 and shot the cat to the head at the middle of time square.
If some bright mind thinks that this whole thing going to make me pay you anything now - i suggest you think again. In fact from now on i will think 3 times before paying you or ms anything.
ilmao.
3 Likes
rly? 10char
It’s a long thread so I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this yet, so I will just toss it out here:
I dont think this has to do with trial accounts specifically, but I’m going to guess all of yall on trial accounts are using them as second accounts. Similar to pets, warbanks do not play well with two accounts.
You cannot access the warband bank while logged into two accounts at once. Additionally, if you have logged into two accounts at any point in that session, in my experience it will continue to block you until you log out of both and log back into just one in a new session.
TL;DR - World of Warcraft is an Endgame-focused MMO, the free trial doesn’t encourage actual new players to push for endgame, so why punish people who have paid in the past who enjoy playing the free trial?
As annoyed as I am about this whole warband bank thing, I don’t agree that F2P should be able to get Tokens. We already have access to a huge part of the game with no investment.
Allowing a F2P to gather enough gold for a Token without ever paying into the game will create a bot and gold seller problem like no tomorrow.
And there isn’t currently a botting issue on Classic, Classic Hardcore, and Retail? Let’s imagine a world where all they do is remove the gold cap: If an account is doing NOTHING but flying around the Dragon Isles [Assuming they can, as I can, but maybe that’s expansion-locked?] to farm satchel spawns for gold, the grind to 250k-300k gold would take so long that Blizzard could easily start spotting these accounts before they get to a WoW Token’s worth.
As it stands, we’ve learned Blizzard’s answer: ‘This feature has worked for months perfectly fine, BUT now we’re going to punish Free Players. Merry Christmas!’
For genuinely NEW players, the free trial is so lack-luster in how it attempts to entice you to purchase the game in full with a subscription. This isn’t an MMO where the story is important, you got to FF14 for that. World of Warcraft is an Endgame MMO, where the entire reason to play is raiding.
- Storytelling dropped off after Wrath, almost completely consistently.
- Cataclysm had the hardest - and arguably best - Heroic Dungeons in WoW, if not THE best then easily top 3 expansions, with one of the worst final raids of an expansion.
- Pandaria was overly hated because ‘OMG PANDAS!’ with some pretty nicely done stories made completely from what was once a meme hero, Chen Stormstout.
- Warlords had SOME interesting stories, but was heavily neutered by people despising both Garrisons - entirely fair - and timeline shenanigans. It did, however, have Blackrock Foundry… and an entire raid tier cut.
- Legion was the completely end to consistent stories, character development - for MOST characters - and Legiondaries. However, the raids and dungeons weren’t all that bad.
- Battle for Azeroth. We further butchered developed characters for the sake of…
- Shadowlands. Retconning. Almost. Everything.
Dragonflight was a pretty good return to form with a strong attempt at returning to good story. Just ignore ‘The power of friendship’ in Amirdrassil and it’s pretty decent… But WoW is about Raiding and Mythic+. Where, in ALL of the Free Trial, are you enticed to go for the end game? All the Free Trial does is throw you into BfA as ‘The Champion of the Horde/Alliance’ and if you’re entirely new to the game, what does it matter to you? This is how you’re introduced to the story? That just alienates you if you start on the Starting Island because you were some recruit maybe an hour ago.
Old Republic has a ‘Preferred’ status if you spent a bit of money on it, so why not at least mimic this? If we’ve subbed and let it lapse, why can’t we still use the Warband Bank? We’ve at least shown a degree of interest to play the game, so why not encourage existing players who enjoy the Free Trial to subscribe for more than just ‘hur dur something you had for 6 months is now gone’?
4 Likes
It’s unfortunate but likely they had no policy on it. Probably some grinch/grouch noticed and basically said “hey, we shouldn’t give people not giving us the moneys access to a nice feature like this, disable it” and no one had any kind of objection that corporate would find compelling.
Just another way WoW’s unlimited free trial is really, really limited compared to the competition. At the very least you’d think they could leave it enabled for veteran (formerly paid) accounts.
Most likely it was an oversight from the beginning but a rather silly one. Probably one of the more ‘no fun allowed’ types quashed it.
I’d rather they never enabled it in the first place. I put things in there from my lapsed alt account which I now cannot get out. At the very least they should have disabled it within the first month or something rather than waiting all this time.
Fact is I wouldn’t have sunk a million gold into buying the additional tabs IF I had known when spending my money that I couldn’t use it for my vet account. That’s a deceptive practice and bad. I even waited about a month after it came out to make that purchase as I was all but certain it was an unintended feature but for whatever reason Blizzard made no announcement about this being something they wanted to fix nor did they fix it.
On the positive side this makes my new year’s idea to quit WoW easier. I was entertaining staying around ‘just for RP’ and using the warband bank to make that a bit more tolerable but that plan is out and cold turkey looks more realistic.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard has not brought at all what players have hoped. $90 store mounts, store mount/appearance bundle exclusives available for a limited time for maximum FOMO before going into the Disn-- erm Blizzard vault to come back a mysterious amount of time perhaps 8+ months later on the trader’s cart. The dial has been perceptibly turned up on unfriendly practices.
There was always a justification for not allowing trial accounts to use the mail system and that was that gold-seller bots would use it to spam everyone among other abusive practices that were detrimental to the game. It’s the same reason trial accounts can’t use public chat channels as they were being used to spam goldselling and other nefarious things.
But the warband bank presented no greater threat to the WoW economy, it only allowed the person accessing the account to move items within their own account(s), didn’t allow moving to other players, didn’t allow moving between bnet accounts, didn’t allow unlimited economic exploitation. This is purely, transparently a move to turn the screws on people to encourage conversion to paying for accounts. I really doubt it will result in any meaningful amount of re-subs but it’s a punishment, not a preventative measure like the original trial restrictions were and that is a sad development.
5 Likes
Old Blizzard actually originally allowed trials to use chat, to use features like mail (or maybe it was trade or both, can’t recall) because they didn’t think it was necessarily to completely cripple trial accounts, they only implemented those restrictions because it was necessary to cut down on abusive actors hurting other players and the rest of the game as a reaction to that bad behavior.
This change is a very clear contrast from that way of thinking from OG Blizzard, it’s a change not made because of exploitation of any kind, not because of abuses that impact other players and their gameplay or the in-game economy or even the potential for them.
It was made purely to be punitive after someone realized they didn’t want players to have something they’d already given them which had no impact to others, had no exploit potential, purely as a way to degrade an already limited experience by taking away another crumb. Don’t give me nonsense about taking up bag slots they have to store on their servers. About 4 unpaid characters with 32 slot bags in all bank/bag slots will give you as much storage for as many things as the warband bank and the warband bank cost a lot, lot more. If anything the warband bank being accessible on trial accounts resulted in de-duplication potential. Why store x+y on all your alts since they’re all separate when you can just put some in the warband bank. If anything it had the potential to lessen the amount of things Blizzard’s servers had to keep track of.
Surprised? No. Disappointed? Yes. Part of me had really hoped Blizzard might be turning around in a positive way. But it’s just one piece of good news buoyed by one and a half bad ones. The class changes next patch, this, the constant assault of limited time FOMO grind events (Blunderstorm > MoP Remix > Pre-patch event > Anniversary > Blunderstorm 2, etc) for collectors that I only kept on top of thanks to my alt account and even then leave me breathless. It’s all so old.
4 Likes
It’s the same policy. Trial accounts can’t trade, use mail, or use the AH, things that enable them to move items to other characters. The warband bank allows them to move items to other characters.
This is just the age old lesson - money (subscription) solves all problems and opens all closed doors (or warband banks). 
1 Like