I had message appear to contact or my account could be suspended for “Abuse of the Economy”.
I haven’t done anything wrong and play the same as I have for many years. I am 60 years old and usually only farm products. If I were cheating somehow I’d sure as heck have more than 1700 gold on Rhystia—my main player at 70!!!
We don’t message you before suspending you like this. What you encountered is called Phishing. It’s when a scammer pretends to be someone else in order to acquire information from you.
In this case, the message likely told you to go to a website where you would need to provide account information. This will then be used to steal your Blizzard account.
When you receive a message like this, right-click and report it for Spam. Then, please ignore it. Messages from Blizzard Game Masters will always be easy to identify in-game.
ty for the info
If you did go to the website they gave you, please consider changing your account password to be safe.
Would also scan for maleware and spyware and or keyloggers.
Can you explain what exactly “Abuse of the Economy” is?
In my last ticket Ticket Number: US80742380 when i was talking about Crashing The Market, Crashing Economy for months the Game Master for whatever reason was reframing that into simple “undercutting”
Recently i received following “notification” from a person pretending to be my competitor.
“I have 1 goal in my mind to destroy this ah for everyone period. I don’t care if your name is jesus christ all mighty if you are on this ah trying to make a gold listing under jesus i’ll destroy him too.”
“…I actualy do control other servers and will funel profits and mats to lower prices beyond your reach here and botters reach. i still make ton of gold. Its about removing trash bots and cancel scanners. Well your good days are done on this server.”
Can you please give an official answer if intentionally crashing the market and economy is legitimate?
People can do whatever they want with the AH. Some people want to keep prices high. Some people like to watch the world burn and tank everything. There really isn’t anything breaking the rules going to either extreme. If the AH UI allows for it, anyone can do what they want.
Just ignore them honestly. If prices are too low for something, hold onto that item and focus on something else until the market price creeps back up. If they want to sell for dirt cheap, they’re allowed to do that.
As a top 1% richest goblins i can survive. I am talking about the rest 99% players who can’t.
The AH isn’t necessary to play the game. Is it a great resource? Yup. But what you’re describing still isn’t breaking any rules. I have my AH add-on set up to undercut a copper. If I wanted to be a jerk, I could set it to undercut by 95% and just sit back, watch everything tank and then buy up something on the cheap to relist later at a massive mark up. I still wouldn’t be doing anything wrong or actionable.
Working through the AH, there is honestly not a single thing I can think of that would be sanctionable. So long as the AH allows it, or any add-ons you use are legit, no one is breaking any rules. There is no way to ‘hack’ the AH or anything of the sort. It may be morally wrong on some level, but what that person is doing isn’t sanctionable.
But what is “Abuse of the Economy” exactly? I’ve heard before players get banned for “Abuse of the Economy”. It definitely has to do with the auction.
It can be a broad definition, but it doesn’t mean anything done through the AH really. That’s more along the line of botting resources or gold selling/trading. Blizzard doesn’t really lay it out explicitly because everything is always changing and they’re constantly having to adapt to keep up with players and illegal botters always finding a new way to cheat the system. Most definitions are kept vague and fluid to keep up with the rapidly evolving cheaters.
Not usually. The AH is free-market. Someone could post everything for one silver if they wanted. Or max gold. There are no rules that say you can only post for certain prices. There are no rules for undercutting.
Any post I’ve seen on this had to do with RMT (illegal gold sellers delivering their product through the AH is one method used). It was not someone undercutting on the AH.
If they contact you again, put them on ignore. If that’s what they whispered to you it was about their ego, nothing else.
To me, tricks that gives an unfair advantage over the rest (like bringing things from other server and selling cheaper then local players can afford), hurts absolute majority players - should be interpreted as “Abuse of the Economy”.
Except that bringing items from one server to sell on another is the recommended way of transferring characters to get around the gold cap.
Undercutting, tanking/raising prices on the AH, and bringing items from one server to sell on another are all currently permitted.
If you’d like to see a change to this current policy for AH transactions/behaviour; you’ll want to post your suggestion in General and/or the in-game suggestion feature.
How else can you influence the economy if not through AH, when the AH is the only market in World of Warcraft?
What is not permitted is called violation. Didn’t You notice that in all cases of abuse we have something that is originally permitted? What turns it into abuse is using permitted things abusively.
Doing a world quest not forbidden. But finding a way to do it 500 times a day called abuse.
I’m sorry, but it feels like you’re to find a way to report someone for something that isn’t actionable. Folks, as it was stated, can undercut other people to the point of things becoming worthless to sell.
The bottom line is this: Anyone can post anything they want at any price they deem fit. Abuse of the economy often refer to using real one money to buy items in game directly: Giving someone $20 to get all the loot in a raid.
It feels like dodging the questions and beating around the bush has become the main policy in this community. I asked a simple question - which is also the name of this topic.
Plеase stop wasting time with talks about what "Abuse of the Economy” is not or what you don’t know. Are you now trying to say that "Abuse of the Economy” and RMT are the same things?
In my experience here, yes. That or purchasing gold from illicit sources.
Since there is no way to actually “abuse” the AH, it really doesn’t have anything to do with that unless the AH is involved in the transfer of illicit gold.
Just to back up what Perl is saying, every instance of “abuse of the economy” I have seen has been for real money trading, buying gold, etc. It does not refer to using the auction house. Auction house usage is not regulated by blizzard in any way outside of the functionality in the game. You can list items in any way imaginable and it is not against the rules.
It really isn’t a matter of trying to argue about how the term abuse of the economy should be interpreted. Blizzard is who defines that term. We are explaining how they use it. You’re essentially trying to argue that they are not understanding their own rules. What we’re doing is explaining to you what abuse of the economy means in blizzard’s eyes - if you feel that it should mean something else, then you should make a suggestion about what auction house behavior specifically should be prohibited.