It used to be that GM could be found fairly often; taking in game action personally (like sending people to the long unused prison) , talking to players, sometimes having fun in one way or another or creating a one time small event.
Now every move they have made since late BC when they removed faction locks from heroics and every subsequent handout for terrible players who are often also atrocious people hurt the real game, have decimated the community. These choices created a player base that they know they simply cannot communicate with in the same way.
Imagine a gm in game now. Heh. Wouldn’t happen both because they’d end up harassed and threatened but also because having real people in the game running events and interacting, or parsing to make sure that reports are legit and bans are fair, takes away from their profit and no other reasons, period.
And it’s sad. Traded community, role-playing, and so much more for… Money. Big deal. Disgusting. The only reason I play is that someone pays my sub for me. Period.
Lord of the rings online is much better when it comes to everything wow is missing. So is ff14, EVE ( most WOW players couldn’t understand that last once at all) , and ddo. Last decent holdouts from the MMO era that Blizzard ruined, followed by all of the companies who followed their lead, ruining promising games and the genre itself and bringing them to a stifled design and financial space in the end.
Fat chance of that. They’ve fired so many people and bot hunters were probably the first among them if they ever existed at all seeing as they would be actively shutting down subscriptions AKA reducing profits.
You may disagree with my assessment but the facts about their approach to the botting/RMT issues that have been ongoing in the game across many versions are right there on display for all to see and draw conclusions from.
This is big business, they are a publicly traded corporation. This altruistic take is just not reciprocated by the board heads at Microsoft (formerly Activision Blizzard).
Also this game won’t ever grow the way you assert, it’s far too long in the tooth.
The very reason bots exist - human greed. Greed breeds corruption, and humans are prone to easily being corrupted if the price is right. Bribes and fear functionally exist in every other facet of life. Why would this be any different? Similarly, what would you propose a reasonable wage would be for someone who’s sole employment purpose is to determine if a given report truly exemplifies a bot and then determine what action(s) to be taken? I can’t imagine it would be very high… what’s the incentive?
The fact of the matter is, Microsoft [not Blizzard - that’s dead - please stop calling it that…] gains a profit off every one of those bot accounts, via subscriptions. The falsely inflated profit looks great after each quarterly review, which makes shareholders happy. If you kill off the bots, the amount of purchasable gold also goes down, which means Krono purchases will also go down. Killing the bots is at least a triple hit: total subs (albeit false) go down; revenue from Krono and other store purchases goes down; overall net profit drop looks bad to shareholders, so stock prices drop as the perceived RoI also drops.
Even if the bots are killed off, the player base will just find something else to b!tch about next week.
Didn’t the chad runescape dev team go around banning bots live on stream? Everyone loved that, seems like a 100% win win situation. So blizzard will never do it, makes too much sense.
Blizzard does not want the bots gone. It’s amazing how many of you believe their lies about losing money on their bots and the necessity to let them run for months before banning them. It’s all lies.