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Recent Actions Against ToU Violations
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We’ve recently taken action against a number of accounts that were actively participating in and/or advertising the sale of in-game raid or dungeon clears in exchange for real-world currency. Such behavior is a clear violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use.

Additionally, we’ve issued smaller actions against players who were found to be sharing account details in order to gain a competitive advantage during raid progression. Account sharing of any kind is against the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, and will not be tolerated. While the penalties applied as part of these actions were relatively minor, we intend to apply much harsher penalties for such behavior in the future.

As a reminder, in order to ensure fair play and competitive integrity, we closely monitor these and other activities that violate the Terms of Use. This includes selling in-game services for real money, exchanging accounts or characters, and similar violations done with the intention of gaining a competitive advantage in raid progression (such as the purchase or transfer of geared characters or accounts between owners).

Note that while selling assistance with obtaining items, achievements, PvP rating, or other in-game benefits for real-world currency is against the Terms of Use, selling those things in exchange for in-game gold is perfectly legitimate. Players should not feel as though participating in a “gold run” is going to result in negative action taken against their account.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
EU Forums
I'm sorry that your event on Argent Dawn was overlooked. In the future, if you are hosting a very large roleplaying event that is being impacted by sharding (which, given the above changes, shouldn't happen very often anymore) I'd encourage you to bring it to the Community Team's attention by dropping an e-mail to CMTeamEU-WoW@blizzard.com with the details of the event.

In regards to the EU forums being ignored, I can accept that there's room for improvement but at the same time I think we have also come a long way over the past year or so.

In most cases Lore and Kaivax now mirror information onto the EU forum as soon as it gets posted on the NA forums rather than there being a delay of several hours. Yes, sometimes things fall the cracks or get missed and ideally we want to avoid this.

More recently (since Legion), the EU forums have had developers contributing in the Class Development forum and Watcher (Ion) has also posted several times on the EU forums in topics that were of interest to EU players but not necessarily to NA players.

When it comes to feedback, it isn't considered in a vacuum. We compile feedback from all the game regions (both EU and NA as well as ANZ, China etc.), this includes what players are saying on social media, fan sites, other forums, YouTube videos etc. We will drill down deeper if one region is resonating with something far more than others, to understand why that is the case and what (if any) action is appropriate.

There is also a 9 hour time difference between France (where the EU Community team is based) and California (where the developers are based). When we are in the office, the majority of the staff across the ocean are asleep or going to sleep. This means we don't have immediate access to get answers or information, so we send any requests or relevant details via email. More often than not, the feedback being raised by the EU player-base isn't that dissimilar to what is being raised by the NA player-base, so such matters become topics of discussion during office hours in California, this is often why information comes out during that time rather than during EU hours. Though there have been cases where information has been posted first on EU, which has lead to similar complaints from NA players about being ignored.

The information that we receive and post, in most cases, is a direct result of feedback relaying on a global level, not because one forum is preferred more than the other.

At the end of the day, our priority is to get any information we receive out into the community, it's not really a considered a problem whether that happens to be on the NA forum first, the EU forum first, or another platform entirely if it's more appropriate for the audience in question.

Sorry, did you just copy/paste a response from a Dev post on US forums in response to a complaint that Devs never respond to posts on EU forums? Did someone dare you for a laugh?
Yes I did, because it was information we received during the night that we were asked to share globally. Considering part of this thread was about the RP event in Europe that got missed I felt like it was the best place to put that information as it pertained specifically to the sharding topic. That being said, Community Managers aren't Developers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.3 Elemental Discussion
Catching up a bit on the newest changes people are starting to see on PTR, in particular:

"Static Overload: After using Stormkeeper, your next Chain Lightning causes Elemental Overload to trigger on every target."

Static Overload has been a sticking point throughout Legion (both in our eyes and based on feedback). Too much of the power of Chain Lightning was contained in an uncontrollable and very spiky proc. This is exacerbated by the fact that Chain Lightning is buffed tremendously in short windows by some effects--primarily, Stormkeeper and Lightning Rod.

A fully-controllable redesign of Static Overload should significantly mitigate the randomness in hoping it comes up during the moments it would be most valuable. The version we're trying out on PTR always gives a Static Overload at a high-value moment. We expect that it is overall a net increase to the power of the effect.

Summing up where we are with Elemental after various small changes in this patch:
--Single-target damage is buffed, through a flat buff to all spells other than Chain Lightning, and a larger buff to Earth Shock. We'll continue to monitor overall balance as always.
--Mastery will continue being valuable in higher values, which eases gearing constraints, and also prevents overall scaling from tailing off as it's capped out.
--Burst AoE potential available through Stormkeeper is both higher and more reliable. Increasing Elemental's on-demand AoE burst wasn't a big priority, but it's fine for it to happen in the process of switching to an on-demand design for Static Overload.
--Sustained AoE damage is similar or higher due to a large buff to Earthquake, and the likelihood of Static Overload's total contribution being higher in situations where Stormkeeper is being used.

Well. The first half of this sentence (which to be fair is from my post) couldn't have been any more wrong. As it stands, our average potential per Stormkeeper will drop significantly. The larger the number of SKs you compare, the more painful the comparison becomes.

When comparing what we could expect in 5 Stormkeeper casts: https://gyazo.com/2589d5750139946f30a54692c3de18a8

The bell curve represents the average you'd expect on live, while the red highlight represents what we'll see on the ptr.

When you compare with say 11 Stormkeeper casts, it gets worse: https://gyazo.com/08913ba093027e863b121268bf011424

We might be talking past each other somehow, because as I try to interpret what you're saying, it doesn't sanity-check. Talking about averages--on live you get 0.3 procs per Stormkeeper cast; on PTR you get 1.0. Would need more explanation of which "average" you're saying is going down.

Your first graph, the distribution of proc count on live over 5 Stormkeepers, I'd expect to look more like this (With the "5" column highlighted in red, as you did) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Heroes of the Storm - August 8 Patch
Garrosh has made his way into the Nexus, along with other patch changes!





StarCrafts - Season 5 Ep 23: Fenix & Zagara Co-op Mission
Another episode of StarCrafts has been released!

This article was originally published in forum thread: Recent Actions Against ToU Violations, Blue Posts, HotS - Garrosh Patch, StarCrafts started by chaud View original post
Comments 52 Comments
  1. pandaman's Avatar
    Wait, so boosting for real money is bad, but boosting for gold is fine? However, you can buy gold for real money - obviously you can't convert gold into real money, but game-time for gold is almost as good as real money for players.

    What's the deal here?
  1. Hydrofluoric's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by pandaman View Post
    Wait, so boosting for real money is bad, but boosting for gold is fine? However, you can buy gold for real money - obviously you can't convert gold into real money, but game-time for gold is almost as good as real money for players.

    What's the deal here?
    Blizzard is the middle man and these real-money boosting services are cutting out the middle man.
  1. Ophenia's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by pandaman View Post
    Wait, so boosting for real money is bad, but boosting for gold is fine? However, you can buy gold for real money - obviously you can't convert gold into real money, but game-time for gold is almost as good as real money for players.

    What's the deal here?
    There is a difference between a transaction monitored within Blizzard's scope and a transaction monitored directly through Paypal that could lead to serious scam.

    Edit : not even mentioning that Paypal transaction don't benefit Blizzard at all. Unlike Token or Battlenet balance trading.
  1. Faustel's Avatar
    This TOU crap is so broken, there are about 5 guild member in my guild who got a 1 month ban for boosting for gold, because the system is fucking automated and people who see any boosting promotion of trade chat just instantly reports it, because they are quite moronic, had a few whisper almost every day i advertised boost for gold, and got messages like 'enjoy your ban scum bag' you are giving power to morons who don't understand that the difference between boost for gold and boost for IRL cash.

    P.S None of these guild member participated in boost for IRL , but they did for boost for gold, and they got banned for it.
  1. Ophenia's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Faustel View Post
    This TOU crap is so broken, there are about 5 guild member in my guild who got a 1 month ban for boosting for gold, because the system is fucking automated and people who see any boosting promotion of trade chat just instantly reports it, because they are quite moronic, had a few whisper almost every day i advertised boost for gold, and got messages like 'enjoy your ban scum bag' you are giving power to morons who don't understand that the difference between boost for gold and boost for IRL cash.

    P.S None of these guild member participated in boost for IRL , but they did for boost for gold, and they got banned for it.
    Yeah we know, everyone who suffers a ban is always innocent. The system is not automated or, at least, it is not automated based on the manual report system.

    Your mates lied to you. Nobody will ever admit they cheated, because pride y'know.
  1. Faustel's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ophenia View Post
    Yeah we know, everyone who suffers a ban is always innocent. The system is not automated or, at least, it is not automated based on the manual report system.

    Your mates lied to you. Nobody will ever admit they cheated, because pride y'know.
    Maybe you would be right, if only they were not un-banned after 14 hours(actually happened as I was typing this paragraph) because, they were associated with a pug groups who did runs for IRL cash, and so some people received bans for it, not my initial suspicion of this being another automated system, but more like try not to do any pug runs with anyone ever again, basically avoid people and let's go back to the garrison.
  1. mmocc90ca60fd1's Avatar
    IF that is true it really sucks but i highly doubt it, if it is you will get unbanned and get 1 month free gametime
    But honestly i dont know what i would do without BadBoy addon installed, the "boosting +15 for gold" spam is INSANE, its the cancer of the game currently, why do you even do it? Getting gold is as easy as beeing afk.
    *2.1k m+ score 6/9m so im not saying it because i suck*
  1. Faustel's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Spykel View Post
    IF that is true it really sucks but i highly doubt it, if it is you will get unbanned and get 1 month free gametime
    But honestly i dont know what i would do without BadBoy addon installed, the "boosting +15 for gold" spam is INSANE, its the cancer of the game currently, why do you even do it? Getting gold is as easy as beeing afk.
    *2.1k m+ score 6/9m so im not saying it because i suck*
    Because I can pay for my monthly sub that way, buy mount from the mount store, name changes (never done this though), it's mostly so I can play the game, I don't get 240k gold a month by standing afk I don't know how you get gold that way unless you are a somewhat entertaining steamer that gets gold donations.
  1. mmoc8557fc1bf9's Avatar
    "As a reminder, in order to ensure fair play and competitive integrity [...]"

    Its only fair play and competitive integrity as long as blizzard gets the money. Buying gold(where blizzard gets the money) and paying a guild (And they convert it to tokens)
    is nearly the same as giving the money directly, except that blizzard doesnt get a share. Soo... yes... sure... "fair play and competitive integrity"

    In other words, blizzards says: "Do the fuck you want, but we want your money."
  1. noladrew's Avatar
    You people don't realize how much some of these runs are netting for people lol. It would be stupid for the higher end guilds to accept gold only when they can charge and receive money worth far more than the gold will ever be. The gold has VERY limited applications, even when converted to BNet balance. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for RMT services, just suggesting to think outside of the box a bit. They aren't doing RMT services to fuck Blizzard, just as much as Blizzard aren't taking action against it because they aren't "getting a cut". On the player side, there is a far higher yield potential from doing RMT services, much higher than accepting only gold. Keep in mind that from Blizzard's perspective, they can't "police" these charges or protect people in terms of buyer protection, to ensure they either receive what they intended to purchase or get their money back. Making RMT services not allowed in the TOU/TOS helps cover Blizzard's ass from a legal perspective, among preventing some amount of headache from having to deal with people getting scammed.

    A point to add, is that the community as a whole is terrible. No punishments go out, GET THE PITCHFORKS! BLIZZARD DOESNT CARE ABOUT INTEGRITY! Guilds/players finally get punished, GET THE PITCHFORKS! BLIZZARD IS PISSED THAT THEY ARENT GETTING THEIR CUT OF THE SALES! Its basically lose/lose for Blizzard, but they are actually promoting some amount of integrity for the game, at least giving that perception. End of the day, Blizzard IS A BUSINESS and they are there to make a profit, but they arent trying to fuck people 100% of the time, get your heads out of your asses. They still have to protect themselves as a company, and their players, to some extent.
  1. mmoc14d85b5354's Avatar
    So its still fine to clear hero/mythic for 2 wow tokens a run.

    Weee! O_o
  1. GSN's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zzyxzz View Post
    "As a reminder, in order to ensure fair play and competitive integrity [...]"

    Its only fair play and competitive integrity as long as blizzard gets the money. Buying gold(where blizzard gets the money) and paying a guild (And they convert it to tokens)
    is nearly the same as giving the money directly, except that blizzard doesnt get a share. Soo... yes... sure... "fair play and competitive integrity"

    In other words, blizzards says: "Do the fuck you want, but we want your money."
    It's Blizzard's product, if they don't want you to earn money by playing the game for other people, they're allowed to punish you if you do that, since it's what you agreed on when you started playing.

    There are lots of other things you can do to get easy irl cash if you don't like it.
  1. Low Hanging Fruit's Avatar
    Let me guess a bunch of US people get banned for account sharing and selling runs meanwhile in open admission EU guys saying they flat brought friends rogues in will go free and their sells will be over looked. Nothing to see here.
  1. mmoc2b606a4969's Avatar
    I guess alot of bans inc when they plan of making another moose mount that only drops on Heroic in 7.3.
  1. babyback's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Zzyxzz View Post
    "As a reminder, in order to ensure fair play and competitive integrity [...]"

    Its only fair play and competitive integrity as long as blizzard gets the money. Buying gold(where blizzard gets the money) and paying a guild (And they convert it to tokens)
    is nearly the same as giving the money directly, except that blizzard doesnt get a share. Soo... yes... sure... "fair play and competitive integrity"

    In other words, blizzards says: "Do the fuck you want, but we want your money."
    Blizzard is still a corporation and rely on income to go around. Ofcourse they want the money to stay within the company and not see it go to a 3rd party.
  1. DesoPL's Avatar
    This is obvious as fuck, that they ignoring EU playerbase because Asian and US gives more money. And it is nothing new, that Arthylea just do copy paste messages.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    WoW will be losing its monthly fee in the not too distant future, the game is still amazing but it seems like it hets boring quicker and quicker each expansion.
  1. Eleccybubb's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    WoW will be losing its monthly fee in the not too distant future, the game is still amazing but it seems like it hets boring quicker and quicker each expansion.
    Yeah no it won't. There are games that have proven they can survive on less than a million subs.

    Also if it's getting boring each expansion then that is on you. Try taking a break or playing a different game.
  1. jdbond592's Avatar
    Someone DDOsed them?
  1. guardian_titan's Avatar
    If you buy a carry with real money but get cheated, Blizzard can't help you get that money back. You're screwed. You could be out a fair chunk of money, too. Best you can do is file a police report or dispute it with your bank, but not likely you'll see that money back.

    If you buy a carry with gold but get cheated, Blizzard can look back at logs and return your gold. Yes, you can buy gold with real money due to tokens, but it's all monitored by Blizzard. At any point if you get scammed, they can help you.

    Some carries for real money were legitimate and didn't scam you, but there are also many that are out to scam you. It's like if someone wanted to get some plastic surgery. Sure, they can go through their local doctor and pay a premium while also having a support system like friends, police, lawyers, and even social media to back them up if something goes wrong ... or they can go to a less developed country and get far cheaper service but risk it being botched and having little recourse beyond going home and having it redone properly meaning you're out more money than if you had just gone to your local doctor to begin with. If you use real money carries, you risk losing your money and getting nothing for it outside of being laughed at for your stupidity.

    Besides, it's also Blizzard's game. They can enforce the rules however they want. They could decide next week that being "nude" in game is a bannable offense due to impressionable children playing the game.

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