It really is simple, I paid $15 a month to play a finished/solved re-release of a game from my past. The game is finished - you aren’t actively developing wrath, you aren’t coding ToGC and ICC, so I assumed that $15 went to upkeep of the game and to deliver the best possible re-release of the game to us - the customers who pay you. This includes things like banning bots and gold buyers/sellers - you know, things explicitly against your very own ToS - the literal bare minimum you had to do, but apparently you weren’t making enough off of our $15 a month to do this and wanted a piece of the gold selling pie instead? Millions of dollars a month, again for a FINISHED GAME, wasn’t enough to pay to actually fix the problem and you just said fk it and drop sanctioned and official literal RMT on us. Luckily its just a video game and we are free to stop paying for goods and services we no longer deem worth the money.
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29 Likes
You had the chance to nip this in the bud early; permaban for gold buying, ban gdkps, develop more robust trade history tracing. Instead you said that the sellers were the only ones to blame and went after them, and even begged the community to police for bots for you.
I’m excited in that cataclysm is the first time that the actual wow team had a big miss, and your subscriber count will show that. I miss OG blizz… gameplay first and all that.
16 Likes
heavy as a feather I’m sure
that’s true for TBC and WoTLK as well…
how does a token address any of these? it can actually contribute in some cases
according to Blizzard, you rely heavily on player reports. that’s some dark ages stuff right there
for the outcomes we’re talking, I really hope this is handled by one engineer in his/her spare time
that’s the spirit
Obviously lip service. More likely that the people (like yourself) that actually work on the game knew what this would cause and actively fought against it, but have now lost to the executives who control your paycheck. But I guess we can’t know for sure.
oh, nvm. I guess we do know for sure
24 Likes
Unacceptable from a classic perspective. You claim to be banning about a half million accounts a month. Wow in its heyday had 12 million subscribers those numbers don’t near add up as your almost certainly not gaining a half million new subs a month. Your team isn’t doing their job properly if botting has become such an issue and you’re just letting the same actors create or steal thousands of accounts every day.
13 Likes
I’ll just quote my CC post:
Guess I was wrong, it was Kaivax they asked, not Aggrend.
and because of this, you should never even have thought about adding the WoW token on Classic ever, period.
No, they are telling you to permaban the gold buyers, not to “just ban the bots”.
You know what’s visible to us? The fact that you give a slap on the wrist to gold buyer when they get caught by giving them a very short temporary ban.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard to understand for Blizzard who’s been in this business for decades when it’s so obvious to everyone else… Bots exists because there is a demand for it. Remove or severely hurt that demand and there will be less of them. It’s not a hard concept to grasp. Make a public spectacle of gold buyers, permaban them and announce it for the world to see and I can guarantee you people will stop buying gold and without people buying gold, 99% of the bots will be gone.
Edit: Also, I know your post is a lie.
The real reason was executives wants money. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
63 Likes
A lot of hate in the comments.
I do, however, think it was for the good of the game.
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Hey maybe you can use some of this money to hire some actual customer service
6 Likes
This is meaningless. All it would have taken is perma-banning one buyer and announcing it. The bots and sellers have nothing to lose. Banning and removing them is a losing game of whack-a-mole.
Blizzard chose not to fix the problem.
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It is funny but the HC addon (and possibly the upcoming HC official server) totally defeat gold rmt.
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How was it good for the game when it was never in the game?
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I told you folks since prior to the rehost launch to put in the token. Why? Because we’ve been down this road before. In the original game I learned that gold trading needed an official option and kept telling you to create one. It took years for you to FINALLY do it. Now with classic you decided to unlearn what you have learned and took until halfway through game # 3 to relearn it. I remembered the lessons of the past. You folks apparently forgot most of them.
Why is the token important? It should have been in that giant wall of text, but it really isn’t. The reason the token is important is because it gets Blizzard the gold trading revenue instead of third parties which don’t contribute anything to the game except to fund more bots we’re trying to get rid of. I would argue that the OFFICIAL DEVELOPER OF THE GAME should have revenue that rightfully belongs to it, not a third party that seeks only to cheat and steal from players on it. I just explained it yet again, and didn’t need a wall of text with countless paragraphs to do so.
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Multi factor authentication can become a requirement to play, thus helping secure accounts as can IP and hardware history logs that trigger flags.
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Its just a matter of screening and understanding how bots act in their initial setup.
Unfortunately this isn’t about bots its just a money grab from the executives
6 Likes
I would fully support this, but look at how many people whined endlessly when it was made a requirement to post custom text in the group finder.
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Ok, so why Korea? They have no bots due to needing government ID along with a valid Korean phone number (also only available to Korean citizens and permanent residents) in order to get a bnet account. So what is the reasoning in ruining the game for those players with this?
16 Likes
bull. calling it for what it is and don’t care anymore.
You don’t ban bots often. You ban them in waves with a standard excuse used by other companies. You don’t learn things new about bots. Any human can look and see bots that have been on nearly 24/7 for MONTHS.
You don’t care about the economy of wow. Any argument about other means of gold gained for illicit means comes down to bots. How is that gold gained that is sold? Bought with stolen credit cards (which is another thing most companies say when dealing with this issue) ? Its bots farming 24/7. Flying. Hacking. Bots. Getting away with putting an infinite amount of raw gold into the game that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Why ban them though when you can do nothing and just add the token for more profit before this infested, plagued, rotten horse dies?
I don’t blaim you specifically Kaivax. It is clear that it is the higher ups pushing this. But it would be nice if more people with power would stand up for gaming and the industry and not just bobbies boats.
Grow a spine and stop killing things that people love. If the classic team / any members left had any love for classic, they wouldn’t stand for things like this to happen.
12 Likes
It’s not that we don’t believe you. Ok its exactly that, we don’t believe you.
Let me rephrase. We believe that your tools are ineffective, your efforts are insufficient, and your priorities are outside of scope. Just be honest with us for once, this is about money and more money and more money. The entire cash shop exists to exploit players rather than providing good customer service.
The only thing you seem to have gotten right is that you should communicate with your players more, not just say you are going to after you stealth add a pay to win feature to your monthly subscription 15 year old game.
We’ll see what Microsoft brings us, hopefully not more of the same.
14 Likes
