Multi factor authentication can become a requirement to play, thus helping secure accounts as can IP and hardware history logs that trigger flags.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
You can’t say you’ll never beat bots if you’ve never tried adding a kernel anti-cheat and actually blocking things like RDP and KBM drivers to hide mouse/keyboard injection.
Couldve added RDF and actually made people happy.
Instead you add the token 
Just cancelled my sub. Sucks I’m going to miss official hardcore, but WoW token is just too much. I quit in retail when the WoW token came out and I’m quitting classic now for the same reason.
Go ahead and check my payment history if you don’t believe me. Peace!
Always makes you wonder what’s the point of gold, if you just made it so you couldn’t trade it to other players that would solve so many problems (and have an AH working like the black market AH)
Won’t happen, but clearly gold will always remain a currency that is pretty much only used to save time and use shortcuts to avoid grinding.
Things that don’t have the classic spirit:
RDF
Things that are in the spirit of classic:
Token
Heroic+
Heroic++
Increased Ilevel Ulduar gear
Moving gear from the previous raid tier to Heroics
Moving HM ulduar 10 to a vendor (to be fair it can still be had in ulduar 10 HM)
Changing how TOGC works for Normal and Hard
Huge doubt on this. These are small numbers if you’re counting ALL REGIONS and not just NA.
I’ve reported bots that hang around Scholozar for MONTHS and eventually get camped so hard by me and other gatherer friends of mine that their wranglers come by to pvp us or I get yelled at in Indonesian in whispers telling me to go away from their farm as I herb it up for 2 hours vs their 24h farm and account swapping buisness.
They are still in Scholozar rn, fyi. Still no bans. Good job.
True and Real. This. Blizzard needs to revert this change immediately and persecute gold buyers and RMT with full force. The Token does NOT belong in Classic.
That’s too much work. They can’t afford to pay employees to do that. Are you crazy?!
I would like to put out there that along with giving a weekly or monthly update on the amount of “Total Exploitative Account Closures” have taken place, Blizzard should provide public reports showing the amount of real world money and/or amount of WoW Tokens sold for classic servers. I also would like to request that the money made from those sales be used solely for the creation of NEW content for classic servers. these funds should be used in addition to what is are ready used.
This would at least help with showing that this move was not a “Cash Grab”, and is intended to build a better game experience for us.
This post has basically revealed that they will not add a kernel anti-cheat or block certain known methods botters are using, that those things are beyond them. ie, they’ve revealed that their “limit” to banning bots is server side detection with something like hidden bot achievements that bots unlock.
Sounds about right considering the AFK AV and Mage Tower Piloting banwaves fit that server side log sweep narrative, rather than actual client side a/c effort.
That was a long post just to say ‘we cant beat them so we joined them’
Na this has nothing to do with combating illicit gold selling at all. Nothing Blizzard says to us about why they did it will ever resonate with me. It’s predatory and is coming from a company who made Diablo Immortal.
could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just admitting that Bobby wants another Yacht. You’re a publicly traded company beholden to investors and you need to maximize your profit, so integrity of the game be damned, you’re going to milk your players for every dam cent you can get out of them.
I do not believe you.
Not one word.
Blizzard, and by extension you, have no integrity.
Enjoy the hole you helped dig.
How does a token that people can buy for real money stop gold from getting injected into the game? Aren’t you just sanctioning gold farming and making it an acceptable behavior?
Why have you not improved on your anti cheat/bot methods? Why not take a hard time on exploiters a s permaban people that buy gold.
Is there no way to authenticate people at the account level? I’d be happy to provide proof that I am a real person and not a gold farmer.
I’m not an expert on economies but you don’t fix inflation by giving people a process to instantly inject 20k gold in one click. Won’t this have the opposite effect and drive inflation up higher?
This all seems soo stupid. What’s that saying about heroes? You live long enough, you become the villain? Blizzard, you ARE the gold farmer now except that you don’t have to put any effort in, just magically create more gold at the click of a button.