I understand that and I am fully aware of what botters are. But in the larger picture, financially, I doubt $1500 would hurt them all that much. If they are professional farmers then they can earn tens of thousands of dollars regularly - getting what may be a one time hit like that will only be a blip for them - they will consider part of the price for doing their trade. Now, if Blizzard makes it regular in some way, that will start to hurt their bottom lines.
It will certainly hurt the smaller bot farmer, of course, assuming that they have one or more accounts that have never paid for a month’s sub since 2017.
Oh, I’m not denying it’s theoretical and conjecture to an extent, but if a very large bot farm that is already running a couple hundred active accounts at any given time has a large enough roster of accounts lying in wait, there’s bound to be accounts that slip past that cutoff date.
I’d have to imagine them picking 2017 is the start of a slow rollout where the window is gradually changed and/or a floating date. An example would be “If you haven’t purchased an expansion or paid for at least one month of gametime within the last three years, you cannot use your gold to purchase a token.”
The current date is likely far enough back that it isn’t going to hurt an active player when this goes active on Tuesday. The window is just a little under seven years if we assume the cutoff date is currently January 1st, 2017. As the haven’t specified an exact date, I’d have to imagine that any account that purchased a month of time at any point in 2017 is currently exempt. I could eventually see that window shrink to five or four years at this time next year.
And really at the end of the day, Blizzard are the ones with the data that we don’t have. I’d have to imagine they looked at the data and saw that 2017 isn’t going to impact the vast majority of folks. Meanwhile, any legitimate accounts that haven’t been active since before 2017 likely aren’t going to have the gold available for a token anyway, so it’ll be a moot point for them.
Once again, the accounts that’ll feel this the hardest are those that are intended to be used for botting. Assuming this eventually drops to something like a three year floating window, I don’t think expecting the actually active players to either purchase an expansion or a month of sub time once every three years or so is an unreasonable request.
My guess is the idea is to get them to use credit cards as a verification process. Naturally though this idea will only work if they don’t accept gift cards. Ban waves will be more sticky if they know who they banned. Easier to make it much more permanent.
This is not gonna affect majority of the bots. Majority of the bot accounts get banned every 6 months or a year and have to buy a new account once every 6 months or a year. There has never been a bot account that is active for the last 6 years.
The only portion of the bot accounts this might have effect are the bot accounts that are funded by the gold earned from different bot accounts. These account do not spend any real money and funded purely by wow gold. However, as these are bot accounts these account also get banned pretty frequently so this is a moot point.
This might have some effect on bot accounts but it will definitely hurt some legit accounts as well and in fact if they close the gap to say something like “spend real money once a year” kinda deal, Blizzard will lose quite a bit of players.
I’ve never bought tokens, used tokens, had anything to do with tokens. If they’re bought on the auction house with game gold, isn’t that essentially playing for free? How do these things work?
I pay a recurring 6-month sub and always will… just asking out of curiosity.
It is free for the player buying it with gold but it actually makes more money for Blizzard since that token was bought by a player who paid 20$. This means every person who subs with token makes blizzard 20$ instead of 15$.
There is also the fact that you can buy a token off the AH, put it onto your bnet account and then send a gift to another player. Apparently you can take those gifts and sell them through places like ebay for real money.
I’m rather surprised, if thats true (not able to check it myself) that Blizzard hasn’t put some sort of bar on that or changed how it can be used. Because its an obvious use by gold farmers to raise real world cash.
they likely had to use a subscription to start up the account and the likelihood that the account predates 2017 isn’t very high. i don’t see how this is going to affect bots farms.
What Blizzard are saying is, if you haven’t ever paid for a month’s sub via normal money since 2017, then this block comes into effect. They don’t actually say it refers to accounts opened before 2017. Im thinkings thats when tokens started. So you could open an account in 2018 and not ever pay for a month’s play in cash, and that would be affected by the block.
There are plenty of legit gold farmers who are just what are referred to as goblins, the sort who use TSM and have different types of farms, but I’ve always seen custom groups for boomies looking to hyperspawn to farm for gold and loot. When I was going to start playing for tokens rather than cash due to fixed income, I was doing some hyper spawn farming for skins to vendor some leatherworking thing I can’t even remember that was a huge profit over the mats. That’s why they bumped the mats up so much in Shadowlands. Luckily, in SL, you could do like emissaries on 3 toons a day and make enough for a token a month. Cause I’m on a quiet server where i can’t AH any of my xmog stuff.
Engagement and logins are important for them, as it gives them numbers to use with the suits. Though I’d wager they might be less important with Xbox in charge.
What people also don’t understand is that what ever they are doing for (bots) is causing them to lose money too. For all those players who believe that they aren’t supporting Blizzard by playing the game through gold are delusional. For every monthly subscription you buy with gold Blizzard gets $20 of profit instead of $15. So forcing accounts who haven’t paid with cash causes them to lose $5 per transaction on the people who actually become affected. So not a corporate greed issue. People gotta cough up $20 to sell a wow token, and those sellers only get your gold if you pay for it. So need 2 to make this transaction work, and since it works very well blizzard gets more profit out of it then if you were to just use real cash.
This is a completely absurd change! This effects me entirely, yet… no. I am not a bot. I am not a scammer. I am not a cheater. I am not a exploiter. Or whatever BS excuse one may use to try and justify this ridiculous change. I am a customer/player for 19 years.
Since the token was added… it was absolutely PERFECT for me. I earn tons of gold (without really going much out of my way to farm it), but prefer not to spend it to advance my characters instead of just putting in the time and work to do so. Legitimately trading my gold to other players for game time and occasionally battle net balance, not only works out perfect for me. It’s what keeps me playing this game at all!
This change needs to be canceled IMMEDIATELY!
Blizzard cant seem to stop stacking Ls and shooting themselves in the foot. It’s like they are actively trying to push away their players to other games. Why does this company hate their long time players so much? It’s insane!
It’s to curb the people who use bots, mods, addons and a slew of other quirks to corner gold markets.
Because the kind of person who’s only bought game time with Gold in the past 6 years is probably also doing a lot of other less than kosher things in game.