If it’s to curb bots, then forcing the first month of any new account to be funded by real money would make more sense.
The people who bought tokens since 2017 have been getting their sub paid for at a premium by someone buying the token with real money, so why would Blizz have an issue with this?
Blizz had figured out a way to receive a markup monthly sub from the subset of the population who, for whatever reason, cannot spend any real life money on a game. These people may never come back, and since Blizz could easily just make first month sub restriction the policy, I’m trying to figure out what their actual motivation for this is.
The problem is that – as you mention – they don’t discuss their reasons or things they considered. They just throw out the change and then lock the post.
That might be ok for patch notes, but this has just fueled (and will continue to fuel) more posts about what this really means, what counts as “real money”, why it’s happening, and how they intend it to work against bots. I mean, that it’s supposed to be anti-bot seems obvious, but we don’t actually know if that’s the case.
It’s likely be to much ado about nothing, but this is a bad way to share this information.
to put fear on people making them buy token with gold wich will increase in price making those who buy token with real money happy by getting more gold from the token they’ll buy. In the end of the day it’s just free money for blizzard.
Forcing people to buy 10 tokens right now with gold can’t be it. This would just lead to a reduced demand over the next 10 months. No extra tokens being sold. Gold being drained and a temporary surge in price has limited benefit for Blizz.
This approach would achieve the same goal without having any effect on any current players.
It seems so logical, so simple, and so effective, so will Blizzard do it this way and completely avoid all the uproar of their indirect and more convoluted approach?
I mean, effectively it is that for any new accounts created. Gotta get game time from somewhere, and any new account will obviously not have purchased game time since that date, so they’re automatically going to have to make their first purchase before they can go the gold route for game time.
Honestly the only theory i can come up with is that it’s some kind of regulation compliance issue that Microsoft is worried about. Like if people haven’t spent any real life money on a game after a certain amount of time, there is some legal consequence?
I would not implement this change if I was trying to target bots. If you saw two accounts, one of which spent $15 on a WoW subscription and the other spent $60 on Call of Duty, and you knew one of them was a WoW bot account, which one would you guess?
But they set a very specific date that would not impact botting accounts. So clearly the motivation is not exclusively in curbing bots, but also to force valid accounts to buy game time. Yet these legit accounts that havent been banned since 2017 and buying tokens with gold gives Blizz more money, and some of these accounts will never link a credit card to their account, so will be a lost sub. It’s a loss for Blizz, and if there’s an easier way to curb bots that wouldnt risk losing valid subs, why would Blizz take a roundabout approach?
I’m curious who these people are. My WoD gold dried up. I had to buy my subscription for real money for the 1st time(since tokens became a thing) this year, I got the annual pass thing. At the cost of tokens now, looks like it’ll be annual pass again lol
People from less fortuitous countries. 2 Have a disability which prevents them from working, but they spent ample amount of time in game for their gold. 3. Have something against credit cards.
2017’s an arbitrary date to us, because we don’t get to see why. Applying some critical thinking to it, that’s probably as far back as they’re able to track for one reason or another. Are there any bot accounts that’re that old? Almost certainly not, but if it helps it sit better, consider the date chosen to just be ‘the beginning’, and that once the policy goes into effect, all accounts will need to have paid for at least 30 days of game time in order to buy tokens with gold moving forward. Which mostly would affect bots, as of the accounts in the game, I think they’re the ones with the largest percentage that’ve never logged a cash purchase.
I believe 2017 is around the time that Blizzard started to allow WoW tokens to be converted to Battle.net balance, or so I have read. It makes sense in that case because it is theoretically possible to have never paid actual money for WoW in any capacity once that was implemented.
