Thoughts on WoW Token in Wrath Classic

[Pourrire-grobbulus]

Not to mention 0 work done to stop bad players from using AHK for PVP. Only 1 big banwave at the end of the season and these losers will be back in 2 months once again using AHK to cheat.

Looking at you Tortsen. Nice 99% cast shield reflect and no gcd stance swapping using AHK and caught live on twitch! You deserved that ban. Lol

[Rewr-moon-guard]

That would be detected with a kernel a/c immediately. One that sits in the kernel looking for injected inputs and any malicious drivers that try to scrub injected inputs.

It’s clear they will not add a kernel a/c, as per this post, despite WoW needing it badly.

[Pwnzer-atiesh]

you forgot character boosts too, gotta allow the bots to immediately level up again too, its the spirit of classic

[Zsinj-benediction]

Its kind of incredible to see the exact same response as when the token was first introduced.

99% of people aren’t affected. Your consume prices are gonna stay the same, AH prices are gonna stay the same. The only people who are gonna be affected are people who GDKP and see more whales who didn’t want to risk losing their account, and there might be more people who GDKP in general.

There will be an uptick of token selling when ToGC launches for some of the first week GDKPs, there will be an uptick for ICC as people are getting their saronite taken care of.

Otherwise it literally won’t affect you.

[Entomologist-eranikus]

Communicating is a thankless job. Thank you for putting the time into it. Even if people disagree, I hope they can at least respect the attempt to communicate your ideas. And personally? I totally agree with the logic. My only negative reaction to it was fearing it would appear in Era, but since that won’t happen, I think it’s a brilliant move.

[Rewr-moon-guard]

They say they’ve tried as much as they can, but I’ve yet to see them ask riot to license out their vanguard anti-cheat.

[Aeolz-thrall]

Well played, Roger Goodell of the forums.

Come here pedaling that horses*** instead of just admitting its about money.

Fortunately for you guys, Cata was mediocre on its best day so you can’t possibly make it (much) worse - but youll try!

[Delimicus-benediction]

@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).

You’re not going to convince many people you’re telling the truth here. Blizzard has allowed popular streamers to lie with impunity. They’ve told their communities that you lie, they’ve channeled misinformation and misinterpreted nearly everything about the report systems and cheating in WoW. You know this, and your company still bends the knee to these lowlife streamers.

You will never, ever convince people you’re telling the truth while you sit there and let content creators fuel the false narrative bonfire over and over again. Look at your “Community Council” members:

@Mispeled-benediction

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.

You think ignoring this stuff is going to convince people, Kaivax? They see your companies’ lack of pushback as an admission of guilt.

[Ripteye-blaumeux]

@Aeolz-thrall

, Cata was mediocre on its best day

This solidified my desire even more to not play Cata Classic. Did not plan to anyway. This makes it easier to say no.

[Rewr-moon-guard]

One can read it as the team has done as much as they can. Rather, it’s upper management saying no to further additions like a kernel a/c or more GMs.

Like an under budget IT department that has to beg the CEO for replacing decade old hardware.

[Alodar-faerlina]

You are so full of BS it’s not even funny. You lied to your community… no I’ll go one step further, you BETRAYED your community. The bigger insult is that you’re even suggesting for a MOMENT that we’re not smart enough to realize that you’re not just doing this for revenue.

Literally piss off. Proving once again that Blizzard doesn’t give a damn about their games or their players.

[Kerpz-moon-guard]

So when’s RDF getting added?

[Ôwns-proudmoore (Ôwns)]

That would atleast redeem them a little bit

[Seiba-pagle]

Launching the tokens without even a SLIGHT heads up, during a 30 minute patch, was absurd and you should know better by now.

Likewise, the SAME EXACT BOTS have been running in the SAME EXACT PLACES for entire expansions, so NO, we do not believe that you are “regularly fighting the good fight”.

A single person making minimum wage would be able to police a cluster of servers and take these accounts out, instead of letting them ruin the economy freely for months and months–if not YEARS.

You know what? I’d do it for free.

[Pwnzer-atiesh]

You’re free to provide actual commentary, rebuttals, opinions…etc instead of just calling people you disagree with names.

[Ryudinn-tichondrius]

[quote=“Kaivax, post:1, topic:1598255, full:true, username:Kaivax”]
The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn’t something we arrived at lightly.

But, something you felt the need to stealth drop in between announcements for the next raid tier and a 50% exp increase buff AFTER you had already hotfixed it into the game and people had noticed.

Deceptive beyond belief. You know this wouldn’t be popular, which is why you guys tried to hide it. Which is insane in and
of itself. The stupidity is off the charts.

[quote=“Kaivax, post:1, topic:1598255, full:true, username:Kaivax”]
For the entirety of Classic so far, the WoW Classic team has been very resistant to the idea of adding WoW Token to any form of Classic in the Western regions (NA and EU). When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like token felt unimaginable to us, and that continued to be true for us–even late into Burning Crusade Classic–for a few reasons:

Yet you guys were completely okay adding level boosts, which exacerbated the botting and RMT issues by a LARGE magnitude. You then removed player ability to boost pre 60-70 so they had to pay you to boost there and then could continue to pay players gold to boost the rest of the way. Completely undermining your supposed point. You started selling cosmetics and other things which were completely against the spirit of classic TBC. I don’t understand why you think your playerbase is this stupid.

@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, and this is one of the more difficult things about maintaining a large online game like Wrath Classic. When we really looked at the state of things in Wrath Classic, and how different players approach the game, we saw that we cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower. The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold; it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales.

A market that revolves entirely around GDKPs. All you had to do was make them against TOS, which many voiced to do early before they became a problem. Players also received little to no punishment for buying gold from the start. 3 days at most. Many got nothing, and often players that got a suspension still kept their gold. I know players that have bought 3m+ gold since classic launched and never received a ban. When it’s that safe to buy and the market gets flooded, your only option to compete is to do the same thing.

You could have banned bad actors, but you chose instead to keep taking their money. Stop acting like doing it this way wasn’t the most profitable thing for blizzard and why it was ultimately done in this manner. You COULD have done something. You CHOSE not to. Short term profits over long term every time with you guys. This is why your playerbase doesn’t trust or respect you.

@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.

You guys do ban waves once every 6 months to a year. The ban wave strategy is a joke and it lets RMTers and Botters make large profits before being banned. If you were banning them often enough to hit their bottom line to the point of no profit, we wouldn’t have RMT. We all know that classic is run on a skeleton crew of new hires that have no ability to do anything. In the 3-4 years of classic, I’ve literally never once had a ticket I sent in get resolved and fix the issue. Ever. I’m not even exaggerating. Dozens of tickets and the response was always for me to go F myself. If I pushed, I got threatened with a ban. I know dozens of other players that got the same response. Stop acting like you put any resources into classic. We know you don’t. The lies are this point are a joke.

@Kaivax

There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

Tbh, most companies that sell gold and accounts in video games have more credibility and customer support than blizzard does by leagues. You can actually get issues resolved within hours. This isn’t 2006 anymore where they steal your credit card info. These are legitimate companies that are running a business and I would rather support them than blizzard at this point. Because I know if I have an issue they’ll actually respond and fix it. And bobby doesn’t need a fifth yacht.

Wrath Design and the “Value” of Gold

@Kaivax

Circling back to what was mentioned earlier about why WoW Token feels like a tool we should deploy now, we have to look at the base design of Wrath of the Lich King. Ultimately, this is what convinced us to reconsider WoW Token after resisting and refusing this path for so long. 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.

So, you’re openly admitting that you’re adding in the ability to buy gold for GDKPs to essentially p2w your game. You’re just tired of not getting a cut of the profit.

Here’s the truth all along.

@Kaivax

All that being said, we need to post these things more, and that’s something that our team wants to be able to surface more often.

Thanks you for reading, and thank you for your feedback.

– The WoW Classic Team

Oh look, Blizzard’s 9,873,249,583,745 promise to communicate better. I’m sure they’ll totally do it this time.

What a joke. The mass exodus from this game the second wrath is over is going to be hilarious and justified. I know I won’t be spending another dollar on another blizzard product ever again after Wrath is over.

GG blizz, well played. You duped all the idiots again.

[Jirukon-earthfury]

@Kaivax

Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

Not at all true… you will never completely beat “bots” with your automated system, but you can beat them with a dedicated team of employees whose job it is to identify and get rid of them.

If a youtuber can do it and track that same bot all over Azeroth, you a multibillion-dollar company sure as hell can.

Your higher-ups just choose not to spend the money it would take to do that and choose to rely on automated systems that cost them less.

This Token proves just as much that they do not care they just want their piece of the pie. Nothing more, nothing less.

@Kaivax

As mentioned earlier, we need to improve the visibility around what we do.

You say that, but you have proved again, over and over that this will never be the case. Stop spouting lies or making promises you know you cannot and will not keep.

@Kaivax

but the malicious actors come right back with new and different methods every time.

No, they don’t. They come back and do the exact same thing if they are banned at all. At this point, I can’t trust anything coming from Blizzard at all.

[Aedd-faerlina]

Oh shut up, just say your q3 profits weren’t what’s expected so yall shoved it in. No need to lie about it.

[Psivij-thrall (Psivij)]

These numbers are meaningless. If you want credit for banning bots, you have to do the job well enough to make a difference we can feel. The fact that Blizzard’s enforcement team has been so bad at it for so many years is not an excuse, nor is the fact that other companies are bad at it too. Most other online games could only dream of the resources this team has available.

[Aedd-faerlina]

No one is talking to you.