Not exactly. if they can prove that bots are causing people to quit the game, than that is a loss of revenue.
You could put the CEO right in front of these guys to tell them himself, and they will still claim it’s a lie
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I’d rather they enforce their own TOS instead of doing everything on the cheap. It’s their game, and they aren’t managing it. AT.ALL.
It’s not okay for them to make money off their customers in the name of solving a problem that solves nothing. A problem THEY refuse to address. Tokens simply diversify bots into other areas. Selling gold isn’t the only RMT in the game ffs.
…How in the heck would they do that? Especially with so many people actively buying gold, mats, and boosts from them? They’d also have to prove that those people left purely for the bots and no other reason, and that they had no other recourse available to them (including bans), etc.
You’ll never eliminate botters/boosters entirely. The aim of the game is reduction and mitigation, because zero is an unrealistic target. The token does that. I understand why it’s looked at with such disdain here though.
well we cant just let them flourish because “oh well mats are cheaper”. Im not a lawmaker or a lawyer or whatever, but surely there has to be a way to threaten legal action as they are taking a product, by using bots, to farm something (black lotus) to sell for gold, which they than return and sell back to players (the gold).
Only if they are in places that care about the US law. If they arent it doesnt do any good overall but sure looks good on paper.
I mean, they’ve been flourishing since Vanilla and its only grown.
As for proof of the Token’s impact, there was this article from Wowhead when the token was added to Chinese Classic. Short version is that the gold price crashed, causing the botters to migrate to NA and EU servers where botting would be more worth their while.
The main issue is going to be how people move assets around and how much easier it is to farm for gold in the live game than it is in classic or whatever iteration we get to eventually outside of WOD (assuming they ever take us that far). The reality of the situation really becomes the ability for people to farm (quite easily) on live to get tokens and just transfer that gold right into Classic. How do you stop it? your just turning that money into blizzard bucks.
IT wouldnt take much to earn enough to get a few tokens between raids and just add to that inflation.
You’ll never get rid of anything entirely from murder to littering. You don’t get to throw your hands up and say “oh well,” because some behavior can’t ever be totally extinguished.
There were some private servers that came down so hard and so swiftly on bots, exploiters, and gold sellers that the servers were virtually free of that nonsense. A handful of volunteers running on a shoestring budget managed to enforce their own rules. Imagine that.
It does not. There are as many RMT creeps running around retail as there ever were. The only thing the token does is let you be lazy and buy your gold. Oh, and make Activision money.
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They could easily put the brakes on the problem by putting eyes in the game. The same people have been using fly hacks for weeks and months after being reported. The same people have been sending gold selling spam in my mail for two weeks now after reporting them each time. The same botters are spotted and reported over and over and over. You can find evidence this is the case anywhere - here, reddit, youtube, twitter… the evidence is everywhere.
All it takes is a google search and you can bypass their POS Warden security which is what they rely on. That and a player report system that their meager staff may or may not do anything with. It’s ridiculous. It’s inadequate, redundant and a total failure.
In game GM’s, eyes in the game and a network of living, awake, human beings doing their job is all it would take to rid Classic of the bot/hack infested cesspool it’s become.
But then Bobby Kotick might have to cut back a little on his annual 30 million dollar salary.
It is to puke.
You do realize this analogy supports MY point? Look how much “murder and littering” happened during Prohibition, because there was no legitimate market for alcohol so people were driven to the black market. Look how failed the War on Drugs is today. The only way to effectively fight a black market is with light, because the demand isn’t going anywhere.
Are you joking? Private servers were rampant with gold sellers. You could buy gold on Warmane, Kronos, Dalaran, even Nostalrius back in the day. The only difference with Classic is that it’s more famous, which makes it an even juicier target. Some servers even had sellers colluding with the admins to get a cut.
Just as many lazy people in Classic my friend. Who do you think is funding all the GDKP runs?
I have no love for Kotick either. But the trouble with these “all they have to do” solutions is that they are universally pipe dreams.
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You will never, ever be able to talk sense to the tinfoil hat wearing forum trolls. Facts don’t matter to these people.
It doesn’t work because no one believes we should be putting people behind bars and labeling them criminals for smoking pot or drinking whiskey. No one cares if bots/hackers/exploiters get perma banned.
And NO ONE, not even you, believes we should decriminalize murder, or theft, or running around without your pants simply because, oh well, it happens.
I never played on Paymane or any of those other servers you mentioned. Just goes to show you, it all depends on who’s running it, doesn’t it?
It’s not a pipe dream, it’s simple logic. There’s also evidence that it DOES work. Warden and player reports DO NOT WORK, as everyone can see for themselves.
Bodicca, what exactly do you think happens when they “perma-ban” a gold-seller? Do you think their computer melts into slag and launches itself into the ocean? Do you think they throw up their hands and uninstall?
You’re right about one thing - it’s incomparable to those crimes you listed, because it is trivially easy to recover from and get right back to business. And as long as there is substantial profit in it due to a black market, they will neither go away nor reduce activity.
If your servers were completely free of it, which I highly doubt, it would only have been because they were so obscure that they weren’t worth the effort.
Well when they hire a slew of new in-game GMs to enforce your bot-free utopia, do let me know. I’ll be over here in the real world until then.
While these discussions can get frustrating, I don’t think they are trolling. Just… incredibly naive.