fiscal trail to ban bots i like this , now bots linked to the accounts that payed with a cc or paypal will give blizzard more info about who is botting , bye bye anonymous bots , or better yet , people that bots on the good old latin american servers and bot everywhere are gonna cry.
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There are surprisingly a large amount of people on these forums and other WoW related social media who bot and make lots of real life money off of botting in WoW and selling carries and such.
Just keep that in mind that even though someone doesnât mention it, if theyâre really really mad about this change for seemingly no reason even though it quite literally only affects botters and such, itâs 100% because they are mad itâs going to be harder to make real money off of WoW.
ಠ~ŕ˛
think folks are overreacting on this subject.
it was updated.
and most likely will reduce the price considering bots probably takes advantage of this.
People canât read and genuinely do not know whatâs happening.
Juat look at the other thread wherein the OP eeks and ooks because they think theyâre being locked out of buying tokens due to never having bought one before.
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The panic token buying is real.
The price is still going up.
Just hit 305K.
Up from just 283K about 24 hours ago.
I was chatting with someone in discord who has already bought up a couple of years of sub time via tokens, and so if they try to buy time now with real money, that time wonât be applied to their account until the time that is already on the account gets used up, which is over two years from now. (And here I was worried about my sub not expiring until mid-December and being frozen out of the token system until mid-January.)
They also use gold to add to their battle.net balance, so they are worried they wonât be able to add more to their battle.net balance via tokens for over two more years. And they are not happy about that idea at all.
After reading that Blue Pose from the Taiwan forums, and also talking to someone else who could read the original instead of a translation, we arenât so sure that the whole âyouâll get grandfathered in because this is only for new burner accountsâ argument is accurate. Besides, if they are grandfathering in folks, then why would they say you had to have spent real money for 30 days after 2017 in the Blue Post?
Seems like a fair amount of ambiguity to be resolved one way or another. And sort of cheap for Blizzard to drop this bomb on a Friday night and have it take affect during a holiday week, as if that timing were intentional so that they could just ignore things and hope the inevitable uproar dies down until after the Turkey Day holiday week.
/moo 
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Iâm no businessman, but I assume itâs to stop bots, and gain more subscriptions [with real money].
I always âassumedâ that the real botters are selling the gold for real money outside of the game. Not sure how exactly this will affect them in any meaningful way, like others have pointed out botters existed long before wow tokens were a thing.
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Terrible take, some of us have been buying gametime using tokens since WoD, so now we have to pay extra to keep using the same service? Im sorry but what?
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Why this is being done:
Person makes account and uses it for botting
Bots make gold by doing bot stuff
Person uses that bot gold to fund multiple bot accounts
Some bots get reported and their account banned
Most gold is already spread to other accounts, botter is minimally impacted by bans
What the change does:
Person has to pay IRL money once to get bots going
Bots make gold doing bot stuff
Person canât use that gold to fund multiple accounts
Person can probably afford multiple accounts with IRL money, but
Their payment method is tracked and blocked after the first bot account is banned
All accounts using that payment method are banned
Person now has to acquire a new card for every bot account, or use physical game time cards
Itâs not impossible to keep a lot of bot accounts going, but it becomes a lot more difficult. The token essentially allowed you to bypass a major form of account verification, your payment method. This is whatâs being addressed.
Is a one time payment of $15 that back breaking?
Why doesnât someone from the taiwan region come give insight here?
Using google translate on some tw comments, some say they simply have to wait out a month after gifting an xpac to a new bnet for the 30 day time to click in and unlock token access, as if itâs simply a game time flag.
If blizzard can ban a bot account in under 30 days that means blizzard has won here.
I am confused about one thing though.
wouldnât they of had to of bought the game/game time for the bots to begin with?
Trial accounts canât trade or use the AH so itâs not like you can make a bunch of trial accounts and then trade gold from the main bot account to buy tokens and fund said bot account.
This is the bit that is confusing to me on this.
Yep, that is correct. New players or new botters will need a card with a name on it, and if a player gets an account ban, so does the name on the card. Soon they will run out of names and cards.
LOL @ 2017, they coulda said 1817, a new player hasnât bought a sub from the blizz store since that date either nor has a botter on a new account.
Iâm gonna hazard a guess and think that the reason is to prevent botting, again, a GUESS so donât crucify me on this.
I sent in a support ticket and was told battle.net balance being used for 60 day time shows up as counting towards the requirement.
Most likely some limitation with tracking how people spend their money internally with battle.net separate from WoW itself.
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Whats the change?
Nevermind, Gelyn has me covered.
The ambiguity would be in how the systems would be able to discern such.
In a perfect world itâd be going through battle.net transaction logs and checking for âvisaâ statements directly. Instead, I asked in a support ticket and they said the battle.net balance transactions counted on their end. Thus, it looks like some time check in game separate from pulling data from bnet.
tl;dr but my take is this is to fight gold farm bots. They can use extra gold to buy time and buy new accounts so they pay nothing while making cash from illegal sale of gold.
By requiring new account to buy time with cash, it forces them to use credit card or other mean of payment, and Blizzard could theoretically blacklist credit card associated with excessive account bans. WOW 60 days card costs $30 (if they are available) and it can be expensive if the bot accounts were caught and banned before it gets more than 1 month worth.
All other players, it should have a very minimal effect. If you have gone without using cash to pay for subscription for more than 7 years, suck it up and skip pizza or sushi for one month and get 1 month directly or 60 days card somewhere else then go back to using gold to buy tokens for subscription.
Do you think itâs aimed at slowing bot-farming accounts? That would be my guess. Forces them to put up a payment method and spend cash initially.