Simply put, it’s a method of creating a verification system. You purchase something with your credit card Blizzard can attach your account to an identity. There is a lot of uses for this from ensuring a person isn’t a bot, account security, and combating ban evasion.
Sucks for them.
I don’t like it when people cry “I have a disability”. I work with those with disabilities and disabled myself, They and I don’t use it as a crutch or excuse.
That is a personal choice,and those have consequences.
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I think this is a good point. It can serve as a pseudo KYC (know your customer) verification system. But i believe Blizz will still allow prepaid credit cards, which have no identity requirement.
February 6, 2017 is when tokens for battle.net balance began in the NA region, and on February 9, 2017 for Europe.
/moo 
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Here’s my question for everyone:
Who cares?
Likely 99.9% of us have all bought game time at least once since 2017 anyway.
So who cares why or what about it?
It’s not going to affect 99.9% of us anyway.
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What is this change I keep hearing about.
The only thing we hope for would be for the use of the Xbox gamepass, but as much as his ambition for Blizzard, as well as his freedom away from Activision, so I see that this wowtoken is responsible for that company and its requests.
At the end of the day nothing changes for any reason.
Of all people, Blizzard is making a mistake in trying to eliminate something that the damage has already been done.
That is likely true for now, but having the systems in place and started makes it easier to adapt it into a better system.
yeah i dont get it either sounds like a bot problem. i havent paid for game time with real money since the token came out i would have had to quit a long long time ago if it wasent for the token
It obviously is.
That would leave all current bots unaffected.
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So they get a slice of that sweet sweet money laundering through gold for cash revenue, cost of doing business! Oh Oh! I can’t wet my beak a little?!
They profit $5 for every token purchased for a WoW sub. They are losing a little money on this. It’s strictly to combat the bots. They are losing 1 month of $20 subscription versus $15
If someone has been botting since 2017 without being detected, then 30 days of real money isn’t going to solve the problem.
I think this change is aimed at a different group of players who have simply managed to play without paying for a long time and thus are not really of any value to the company. I suspect this is just sort of a soft poke to see if see if any of them just go away.
With how much gold the mission tables in the garrison and legion gave out I would not be surprised if there are quite a lot of people out there that have been paying for their sub off gold since then.
It’s to impact bot farms.
It is incredibly easy for botters to create a large number of accounts (hundreds even) that can farm gold endlessly (until they’re banned) and buy WoW tokens with said gold to keep them active.
It is not so easy to do that when you need to suddenly pay $15 per account (or higher depending on where the botter is playing from). For a regular player like you and me, a one off $15 payment isn’t a big deal. We buy 30 days of game time, then we can continue doing that if we want to or go back to buying game time with the WoW token. But when you’re got 100 accounts in your bot farm, that $15 turns into $1500
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As it currently stands, I really do think the intent is to curb bots, or at the very least hurt the bottom line of bot farms. Keep in mind that a free account cannot have more than 10 gold and can’t receive mail, so they are already incapable of getting started just by moving a bunch of gold around.
I posted this on my guild’s Discord server when the discussion came up:
Some folks are losing their minds over that token change, but it would seem that the key purpose in doing this is to try and hit any pre-existing bots/accounts that have flown under the radar for the last seven years.
Hell, the main purpose could even be to take a hammer to the accounts they’ve got lying in wait. Generally speaking, part of the reason why the fight against bots is such a pain in the a$$ is due to some of these farms having absolutely ludicrous numbers of bots and amounts of gold in reserve. Sure, you can snuff out one bot, but a new bot will be up and running again in no time. All it really takes is one gold capped character (at least back when the cap was a million anyway) on a dead account they have in reserve. At current gold prices, approximately 290K-320K pays for a month to get the account running again. Another 600K gold or so would get it upgraded to Dragonflight, and prior to the War Within digital pre-orders opening up, that would get you a level 60 boost.
For just under a million gold, a person running a bot farm can have an account they had sitting in reserve farming in under an hour.
Once that change goes into effect, if those reserve accounts haven’t outright paid for one measly month of gametime since 2017, that account is dead in the water. If said accounts are sitting on a significant amount of gold, that takes a fair amount of illicit gold out of circulation, and it forces bot farms to hurt their bottom line by spending real money to keep those accounts in the clear and able to reactivate via a token.
It’s actually genius on Blizzard’s part. They make it a complete pain in the a$$ to get those reserve accounts pre-dating 2017 up and running again, they potentially knock out large reserves of gold, and even if the bot farms do cave and pay for one month, it’s going to be a big financial hit for them to do so.
Also, they can’t rely on just buying DF for a reserve account now. Willing to bet a few of them are going to sink $30 on some of these accounts to get only DF before realizing there’s no boost anymore since Blizzard hasn’t been vocal on that aspect of the DF price change.
At that point, they either have to buy the boost outright, or get TWW to get a boost. Either way, they either take another direct financial hit by paying for them outright, or they use more gold to do so (which is both an indirect financial hit as they can’t sell that gold now, and a move to get the illicit gold out of their deep pockets)
The problem many folks tend to have when they say that the $15 isn’t a deterrent is the fact that they are thinking in singular terms. One account, maybe two. They aren’t thinking of the fact that many of these bot farms potentially have hundreds of accounts sitting in reserve, and if some of those accounts have sat dormant since before 2017, it’s going to get cost prohibitive very quickly (and time consuming) to keep them in the clear.
And another point I’ve just thought of: if Blizzard sees something questionable and shady, this could give them the means to do a pretty big ban wave. After all, it’s going to look rather suspicious if a ton of accounts that have been unsubbed since before 2017 are suddenly popping up online with active game time and very similar IP addresses.
Overall, will it be successful? Who knows. The people that run bots always eventually adapt, but I see this potentially taking a bite out of them in several ways:
-It cuts into their bottom line if they have to pay to keep the accounts in the clear
-Illicit gold is potentially coming out of their hands either directly (using it to keep the accounts running and up to date on expansions/level boosts) or indirectly (account gets banned)
-Many accounts can potentially get flagged if they see suspicious activity on a ton of dead accounts suddenly active all at once
As I noted in this post, it isn’t the just the accounts that somehow managed to fly under the radar for nearly seven years. It’s the massive number reserve accounts that many of these bot farms are sitting on that likely have just enough gold on them to get them rolling again via a couple of button presses. These accounts lie in wait and are put into action once another account is banned.
If they haven’t paid for a month since 2017, they’re suddenly dead accounts until the folks running the farms pay to get them running again. That’s going to be hundreds of not thousands of dollars for them, and if many of these accounts suddenly pop up as active again as opposed to slowly coming back one at a time, then Blizzard potentially gets the means to knock a bunch out all at once.
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Error in your logic.
Every gold token represents a $20 exchange, and that $20’s only gives the users $15’s. They literally profit from it. The tokens on the market are not put their artificially… Someone is selling them.
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The logic of that would only work if they had multiple accounts with large amounts of gold sitting doing nothing for something like 6 years. Even if they are purely gold storage accounts its likely they have been activated at least once or twice over the last 6 years; after all, they aren’t like bank accounts, they don’t earn interest. If they are there to store gold, then its probable they would have been drawn from at some stage. Probable, possible, whatever. It’s all very theoretical.
I don’t really know how gold sellers/farmers work so its difficult to judge. You could be right, and I think its more likely the reason for this than the reason they gave (which didn’t make much sense to me when I read it). I couldn’t see how creating a blip like that would benefit people selling tokens on the AH, and it certainly doesnt benefit people (like me, for example) buying them to help their real life expenditure by occasionally paying for a month’s sub. It seemed a bit contrived.
Bot farms are 100% a thing.
Botters will have hundreds of accounts ready to go, because it costs them next to nothing to get them running with the way the system currently works.
Introduce a mandatory $15 payment and that botfarm of 100 accounts suddenly has to pay $1500 to keep the bot farm going. And the more accounts in the farm, the higher the cost.
You ever run across an enemy camp that has hyperspawning enemies because there are dozens of players all standing in the one spot spamming AoEs? Yeah, that’s a bot farm.
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Surely thats just how Boomkins end-game ??
