Thoughts on WoW Token in Wrath Classic

[Demetryan-proudmoore]

@Kaivax

wasn’t something we arrived at lightly

I’m sure you’ve done a lot of financial calculations

@Kaivax

what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of our pockets aren’t always aligned

That sentence had an error, I have already corrected it, you do not have to thank me.

@Kaivax

it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales

and of course you cannot be left out of that market, why fight them when it is more profitable to join them?

@Kaivax

We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Sure, but not before getting into the market and getting their hands full. Honestly, who do you think will buy this crap when they join the market?

@Kaivax

While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool.

To fill your pockets.

The reality of WoW token is that it does not solve anything at all and here is why:

• By joining the market, all they do is make it more competitive and therefore have better prices to buy gold.
• The number of gold buyers will increase, people who were victims of scams will buy from you and those who did not buy for fear of scams buy from you, people who already have a reliable supplier will only benefit from better prices.

What you intend with this is to enter the market and fight the competition to keep as much of the pie as possible, with this you do not become a solution to anything, you are only part of the problem.

Once again as a company they demonstrate a total lack of integrity when it comes to keeping your word, just as they did with OW2.

From the bottom of my heart I hope that the laws will eventually change so that you and all companies like you can be prosecuted for false advertising so blatantly lie to the market.

How the do you expect anyone to trust or get excited about anything they announce at Blizzcon (or whatever) after this week? You just lack credibility now.

[Meowkitty-wyrmrest-accord]

If bots are impossible to get rid off… how about… you know… BAN THE BUYERS PERMANENTLY?

What a stupid excuse of a company. So much words and the tldr here is nothing but ‘gives us money’

[Borkskin-area-52]

Then you should be able to hear the sounds of whispers coming in and turn on your UI to see. Also, a few hours fishing isn’t days straight of BRD. You folks are completely ignoring these facts that these bots literally ran 24 hours straight for multiple days, are guildless rogues, and have randomly generated names.

[Swirlbrain-sulfuras]

This is bad news

[Jokullbear-whitemane]

You guys need to work on your gaslighting lies and BS, or just realize that isn’t what you should try to do to cope. We are adults now, most of us have had at least one abusive psycho ex who has manipulated with these walls of texts that dance around and avoid the truth, we all see through your shenanigans blizz😂.

Yeah and good thing there is no dungeon finder to mess up the classic experience.
Going to love watching guildless people pay 1+ token per shadowmourne shard. It was already going to be alot in gdkps but now it’s even easier and with a direct dollar value to see in game lol. The bots will just keep inflating the gold so the token wont do anything to help like theyre pretending. I couldn’t imagine being proud to work at blizz. You might make more money though, congrats. That’s an unsub for me.

This sucks to see my favorite expansion of WoW just absolutely on. Goodluck everyone enduring this lol

[Chomancer-earthfury]

Why are WoW classic players paying a monthly subscription to even log in and play if the servers are unable to be effectively moderated by your team? There is nothing differentiating your servers from p2w private servers now.

Why is it okay to double dip on customers with a monthly fee AND a token for a game with no development pipeline for new content? You’ve effectively just said that the integrity of your servers cannot be maintained so what exactly are we paying for?

[Demetryan-proudmoore]

This will only (maybe) help those who buy game time for gold, hopefully the black market will allow them to buy game time for under $15

[Tuurik-grobbulus]

There’s a few things wrong with your post but the biggest one is gold from tokens come from other players. There is no gold created, only transferred.

[Demetryan-proudmoore]

@Chomancer-earthfury

There is nothing differentiating your servers from p2w private servers now.

Yes there is! private servers tend to be better, most private servers these days are WoW+ with new game systems, new content, etc.

[Meowkitty-wyrmrest-accord]

Hello I have been actively banning 2743293267 bots week by week

Source: trust me bro - 100% real

[Varlth-mankrik]

@Kaivax

However, what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of the community aren’t always aligned

yawn

If you want to prove this isnt anything more than just a cash grab make the WoW token cost $15 for Classic players and don’t profit off your inability to combat RMT.

@Kaivax

WoW Token feels like a tool we should deploy now

I’m going to reiterate this too: you dont get to pretend the WoW token is just a tool to combat RMT when you literally profit off of it.

[Timay-pagle]

Have you guys started to follow the gold? If not then this does nothing to combat RMT and gold selling.

I have a few friends who would use throw away accounts to purchase gold on, deposit it into a guild bank and withdraw it later on the main account. Yea, they might catch their alt accounts and give them a slap on the wrist (2 week suspension) but their main accounts never got caught and they would just use another throw away account to continue buying.

As long as they determine the return on investment from gold sellers is better than tokens, they won’t use them because your actions against buyers just seem to be non existent and when they do happen they are slaps on the wrist.

As far as botters go it feels you guys do nothing even if you do. When we report characters that are clearly botting because they are taking exact paths with 0 deviation on movements and pathing, and they are there for weeks on end before being banned it just feels like a slap in the face. By the time you ban these guys they have already injected thousands of raw gold into the economy.

[Robosucka-emerald-dream]

If any of this were true, you wouldn’t be selling them at a profit. Your words are meaningless to us all these days, because your actions are almost always at odds with the platitudes you attempt to appease with.

[Horsepower-eranikus]

Keep crying about tokens while I’m the most nurfed class in the history of wow in the most unfair ways. People are so elitist that my green overall parses that are mostly blue ilvl and a couple of purple ilvl parses at 4700 gs makes people deny me for heroic +. That’s how elitest this game is. It doesn’t matter if I can do 3.5k overall as deep prot or way more as fury. I can barely even get into a 5 man because you need 5k gs and exceptional parses to do anything on eranikus.

If you’re not the best you’re garbage.

Fury is currently the 17th DPS spec in logs. In real wotlk we were 3rd by toc because of scaling but guess what? We had the same nurfs that they did in icc since pre patch. That’s a 10 percent damage nurf, rage gen nurfs etc when we were never nurfed til toc and it was only 5 percent damage nurf.

Then they nurfed deep wounds and how it stacks under the guise of fiery weapon enchant proccing it and slightly outperforming berserking. The point wasn’t to nurf fiery weapon it was literally to change how deep wounds stacks under the table.

Blizzard despises fury warriors and they even buffed ret pallies because they were dogwater DPS for similar reasons.

You know what blizzard did to warriors? They nurfed us FURTHER INTO THE GROUND and changed how deep wounds stacks so they can nurf us under the table while we are basically the worst spec in the game.

I wasn’t even allowed to raid unless I got lucky sloppy seconds from people so desperate to fill they would take a dead body. You know what I did? I saved up 110k liquid and hoarded mats. I’m saving up to buy a shadows edge because no one will ever give fury a chance until we are fotm in icc.

So here you are, literally crying because blizzard is making the gold farmers hurt. These gold farmers are going to go out of business or be forced to move on to other games if they wanna feed their families but you want people to buy gold illegally online breaking tos to do so. Cause guess what? Gdkp on my server literally bid 80k-150k per hard mode bis item that drops. They are literally bidding $100+ of REAL money on these items. This has been the case since pre patch.

Tokens only hurt the farmers. The gdkp gold buyers will benefit at first until all the gold sellers offload all their gold. All that gold will be sold one way or another and the only thing you can do is make them stop farming but they still have millions of gold stashed to sell.

So token gold prices will first tank then creep up then skyrocket.

Gdkp bids that were $100 for 50-80k or whatever will be $100 for like 40k after the gold sellers have no more gold because they will move on to other games soon.

Do you like a random peacebloom fluctuating in price from 3 silver to over 1 gold?

Either way this is the most gatekeep elitist game I’ve ever seen in my life. Either you’re a gdkp bankroller that’s either a really good player with orange parses, gold buyer that pays to win or you’re garbage.

I have gone WEEKS without getting into an ulduar 10 and my best parse is hm thorim 25 man with blue overall and 89 ilvl, all my other parses are green overall sole blue ilvl and a couple purple ilvl.

I might as well have entirely grey parses. I get laughed out of the room for trying to join a voa raid. You think that TOKENS are the problem?

[Jeeterz-sulfuras]

@Kaivax

The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold;

Yea so ban them! They’re using guild banks to transfer gold. Ban the buyers permanently! That would have at the very least made buyers pause but instead your little 10 day ban was laughed at.

From the onset this was handled badly. You keep telling us you have to watch these bots. Go into any AV and tell me what you see! Those 30 bots running the same script looking like multi boxers are bots. Ban them!

This wasn’t as hard as blizz has made it out to be. You needed a firm strong hand from the beginning but instead you kept “watching”.

@Kaivax

The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just “bots” that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade

Oh this tired old line again. Those compromised accounts have an authenticator tied to them? No? Guess what they most likely bought those accounts and didn’t change the password. So the seller logged in and changed their password.

How about making the authenticator mandatory? That would be the final nail in the coffin of account selling but nope. Add the token and let the bots continue making accounts to sell and steal back them to resell them again.

@Kaivax

The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Lol. Well i can tell you there’s plenty of players right now that bought accounts and they’re still playing. Take a look into accounts that don’t have authenticators tied to them. You’ll see what I’m talking about.

@Kaivax

• Total Exploitative Battle.net Account Closures: 248,105
• Total Exploitative World of Warcraft Account Closures: 73,057

Wipe the server and start fresh with some actual focus on stopping it then. Check which accounts have authenticator. Make it mandatory upon account creation.

Look at guild banks logs. That’s where they laundering the gold. Permabans on those buying and it will stop or at the very least be a fraction of what this mess is.

I know none of this will happen and you guys already know all of this. So I’m done with classic and I’m done with your other products because your CS and community game management leave much to be desired. Pserver scene is about to pop back off so good luck spending that extra money on high dollar lawyers for C&D letters.

You could have used that lawyer money to actually manage the game and you wouldn’t have this situation but hey. Short term profits over all else. Bobby needs his 4th yacht.

I’d ask if you were adding the wrath feature of RDf but idc. I won’t be here for it. Hopefully Microsoft comes in and cleans house of the bad management team you have in place. Good luck.

[Bromigo-illidan]

Imagine coming onto the internet and accusing someone of being incompetent and not even backing it up. I’m willing to bet you’re part of the GDKP problem. Cope and seethe.

[Horsepower-eranikus]

I can smell the bootlicker from here. You probably love deep state big government.

Only reason I have authenticator is because they forced me to for the ability to comment on my lfg que

[Bromigo-illidan]

Guy who uses the internet and willingly gives his information to the government calls others bootlickers and hates the “deep state big government” OMEGALUL

[Bloodythorns-whitemane]

@Kaivax

In Wrath Classic, your normal weekly activities are, for the most part, self-sustaining. Buying potions, flasks, reagents, and other normal necessities of endgame can be subsidized entirely by mostly just playing the game normally. Doing your usual weekly raid, a few dungeons, or a few dailies a week will net even the most fervent and well-prepared characters more gold than they would need to maintain themselves. Simply put, gold is more plentiful, and the base design of Wrath minimized the focus on needing to “farm” to support normal play.

Are you saying that since large amounts of gold aren’t needed, most people won’t buy tokens anyway, so that’s why you’re adding it in?

If you’re just going to be big fat hypocrites, when are you bringing back RDF?

[Bloodythorns-whitemane]

@Tuurik-grobbulus

There is no gold created, only transferred.

All gold is created. When a server is brought online there is no gold. Copper and silver are created when we kill the mobs. This is why botting is such a problem, normal humans can’t waste unnatural amounts of time farming trivial mobs for silver (hoping eventually to gather enough for gold).