It seems it was an intentional change as it says updated a few days ago.
You can check the Wayback Machine website for a snapshot of that page in November. It did not mention any restrictions for war bank trial accounts until a few days ago.
[Wayback Machine]
(https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/3226)
This. Seriously, sometimes Blizz just drops the hammer way too hard on fun things.
I posted about this situation on my server’s forum.
Honestly if the gold is an issue then just prohibit F2Ps from depositing or withdrawing gold from the bank since gold has little value to F2Ps what with the 1000 gold per toon limit and the ease with which this limit is reached. This is just another example of Blizzard using the stick instead of the carrot to try and get subs without realizing it’s not going to change things because there are those who F2P as a game challenge mode and they usually have one account as a F2P and one account subbed, and there are those who F2P because it’s literally the only way they can afford to participate in the franchise.
It would still allow for the hoarding of materials far beyond warbank slot counts. You could fully load 60*7 alts (or w/e the max character limit is per account these days and *7 for the unsubbed accounts tied to the same bnet) with the largest sized bags and store or use the space as swap space for market manipulation, all while only having to pay for a single master account license on the whole bnet account.
Keep in mind, bot operations are doing these things with hundreds to thousands of accounts at a time.
And if that’s the case, then there’s a very strong chance that it doesn’t actually apply to them anyways… If they’ve never had access to the AH or mailboxes, they aren’t missing out on anything. Trial accounts used to also have a 10g limit vs the 1000g limit today(it was raised in Shadowlands). Keep in mind that F2P 1-20 has been around since 2011 or 2012(you had to purchase the game+expansions, but didn’t need to pay for a sub for 1-20).
So a handful of months of being able to swap items/gold between characters in a warband is just a small blip in the timeline of the f2p abilities/limitations. People will get over it, but it’s for the better.
Oh and I highly doubt this was some knee-jerk bait and switch trick. It was likely just an oversight that they didn’t think of until they started watching the behaviours of bot farms and AH tycoons, or a deliberate trap to cast a wider dragnet on bot farming operations.
It’s gold and items, the two things aren’t allowed to move around since they can’t trade, use the AH, or mail. This just closed off a loophole that let F2P accounts gain the benefits of sending/receiving mail honestly.
The amount of asinine information that you are spewing is LARGELY incorrect. I will write not the mathematics of how wrong you are. You’re beating a dead horse with nothing new.
Good lord, according to you, there’s more bots than players in this game… like I’ve said… if F2P accounts are such a doorway for bots, just locking-freezing WoW2-8 once sub ends does the job.
Have you ever paid attention to their banwave posts on how many accounts get banned for botting and/or RMT? Yes, it’s 10s to 100s of thousands of accounts at a time and that happens multiple times per year usually.
They never really go away though because they just make or steal another wave of accounts to get right back into it again.
They still couldn’t send mail nor use the AH. All the Warbank did was let them trade with their alts and experience how different crafting professions help support each other. This had no affect at all on subbed players and just make the F2P experience both more informative and enjoyable.
It was a jerk move, no two ways about it.
Pretty much.
Then it had next to no effect on actual f2p players… Like I’ve said, most f2p players aren’t worrying about any of that in the first place.
It’s literally the same jerk move as mail&trade restrictions. They don’t let unsubbed accounts trade items and gold. All they did was update that restriction for the new system.
So basically it’s war they, Blizzard, are losing and are going to keep losing. Right, that’s not really new. It just stops for a bit and then goes into full swing again a day or two later.
Yes and it’s absolutely not unique to Blizzard. Every single other online game that has trading, in game currency that can be traded between players, items that can be traded between players or boosting that can be paid for with in game currency or items, all deal with this same issue. Also, any competitive games like counter-strike/call of duty/overwatch/valorant/league of legends/dota2/etc, also constantly have to combat cheating/botting/boosting/etc.
You don’t win a war against RMT, botting and cheating. You mitigate it, try to minimize it and try to stay a step or two ahead of things. It’s a game of chess, not checkers.
half, if not more, of the extracted resources go to auction from those who have 1 account paid for, and 3-7 guest accounts, although hardware multiboxing is prohibited, but 4 macros and window clicker are allowed, for collecting ore and grass, the most difficult, boring, quickly boring, but if you set a goal, it’s real.
they would have done it exactly the same way as with armor, the resources obtained by the guest players become squad items and cannot be auctioned, that’s the whole problem.
In other words, they would make everything that is mined using a guest account a squad account.
then only those who use the guest account for profit will be outraged.
but it’s much easier to ban than to do something (((
It had a huge affect on F2Ps. Suddenly you can have an enchanter and a leather worker and alchemist to support your main. It boosted the power of your F2P in PvP by having alts who could support you. The F2P twinks are very upset with this change. Just read the thread about it on XPoff.
This was a jerk move, pure and simple. Had Blizzard from the get go made the Warbanks not accessible to F2Ps then it would not have changed anything, but to give them this kind of boost only to yoink it away in the hopes they can squeeze a few more subscriptions out of the players playing F2P was a despicable action on Blizzard’s part.
F2Ps trading between their alts doesn’t effect the subbed players but F2Ps trading between their alts has a HUGE affect on the QoL for F2Ps.
And yet you still can’t understand how this new feature being accessible by trial accounts, and bypassing those restrictions, was an obvious oversight that was always going to be patched?
And you still can’t understand that since it has no negative affect on the subbed players and a pretty sizable positive impact on the F2Ps, giving them something and taking it away is a huge jerk-move.
There is no downside to allowing F2Ps to have the Warbank, if they’re worried about the accumulation of gold in the Warbank then don’t let the F2Ps deposit or withdraw gold. This is just Blizzard trying to force a few more subs out of the F2P community and it’s not going to work. All it is doing is creating ill will between Blizzard and a segment of their community.
F2P accounts cannot use any tools to exchange items either. No trading, no ah, no mailbox. Those are no more milking subs than this.
Also, it’s not free to play. It’s a free trial. There’s a big difference there.
Except that is is F2P. In the 2+ years I’ve been doing an anthropological study of this virtual community there is a sizable number of players using the trial-account simply because it is the only way they can afford to engage with the franchise. There are two types of players using the trial-account (three if you count people with an academic interest in studying virtual cultures, but I might be the only one studying F2Ps in WoW).
One type are the people who F2P as a challenge mode. Most of them also have a subbed account as well as their F2P account and for them it’s not that big a deal.
The other type are people who are from a socio-economic class that does not afford them the privilege of being able to spend $15 a month on a luxury item like video games. These are largely people from Central and South America and the poorer areas of North America. The Warbank was a huge deal for them because it normalized the game play. Even though they were still restricted in their interactions with other players having the Warbank access allowed them to form collectives with their alts to support their characters. Taking the Warbanks from them was a jerk move.