welp they finally did it: WoW Token on Wrath Classic

[Kralljin]

I don't. I'm saying a company can't, in general, behave like this and just set money on fire.

You said they would go out of business.

Which implies that you believe this would take like what, ~2billions a year? Because that's much Blizzard makes each year.
Sorry but i'm taking at your word, if you want to say that this is not economically feasible for Blizzard, okay that's one thing, but you went for the extreme and said such measure would see them go out of business.

[munkeyinorbit]

I'm not angry about the token. I'm actually pro token. I've bought game time many times in the past. I'm angry about blizzards bullshit. Their bullshit about the changes they made and bullshit like "... RFD is out because we believe it goes against the classic theme and we don't want it to be like retail..." and then they add the two most retail like parts of wow. The cash shop and the token.

I want a public apology from blizzard for their blatant lies and RFD added to wotlk. The game is dead for alts without it.

[Relapses]

I'm not angry about the token. I'm actually pro token. I've bought game time many times in the past. I'm angry about blizzards bullshit. Their bullshit about the changes they made and bullshit like "... RFD is out because we believe it goes against the classic theme and we don't want it to be like retail..." and then they add the two most retail like parts of wow. The cash shop and the token.

I want a public apology from blizzard for their blatant lies and RFD added to wotlk. The game is dead for alts without it.

There's no bullshit. The RDF is contradictory to their vision of Classic and the token isn't. You don't have to agree with their position on this but that's the reality of the situation.

[Donald Hellscream]

Bobby Cocktick needs his 12th yacht.

[Dadwen]

I'm not angry about the token. I'm actually pro token. I've bought game time many times in the past. I'm angry about blizzards bullshit. Their bullshit about the changes they made and bullshit like "... RFD is out because we believe it goes against the classic theme and we don't want it to be like retail..." and then they add the two most retail like parts of wow. The cash shop and the token.

I want a public apology from blizzard for their blatant lies and RFD added to wotlk. The game is dead for alts without it.

The idea of a Heroic + is more a retail idea too, the idea they wanted to keep a Classic feel was total BS along with the whole pillars crap they spewed.

[munkeyinorbit]

There's no bullshit. The RDF is contradictory to their vision of Classic and the token isn't. You don't have to agree with their position on this but that's the reality of the situation.

The reality of the situation is that they may not technically lied as their "vision" for classic could include selling gear directly to players, a revamp if WoW Classic with the lost cata world, and allowing all of the mounts and accessories and toys to be shared between retail and classic.

But their bullshit starts when they say that LFD is a bridge too far and make out that the reason they are doing it is because it's "too retail like". Their bullshit starts when they actually pretend that they want to try and keep all of the retail bullshit out of Classic but they want to make content "more accessible". These are mighty high ideals and you can tell that the community grumbled a bit but sort of bought into this bullshit.

Now here we are. Blizzard didn't technically lie and they can do whatever they want with the game but they've definitely bullshit the community. The community acknowledges the need for and sort of agrees with the token but Blizzards bullshit about their vision for Classic has shown that they've engineered WotLk classic from the beginning to be anti classic. A LFD tool would at least help a lot of players to farm out gear to get to the point where GDKP were not needed. The community has never been about dungeoning. It's been about joining guilds and doing activities with them and you're a lot more likely to get into one of those if you're not some fresh 80 with blues.

[Garymorilix]

If people only played the game as much as they're trying to argue benign bullshit that doesn't affect them...

Like for real, some Classic Andies are spending half their day arguing about nothing with complete randos where neither side has any say in what gets implemented in the game.
If you love Classic so much then why are you only talking about it? Go and play it. Nobody forces you to buy tokens.

[Biomega]

You said they would go out of business.

I literally explained what I meant, in considerable detail.

How about you READ that instead of ignoring it and going off on some wild, incoherent tangent?

Oh wait... are you just pretending I didn't explain it because it completely undermines your entire point? That's it, isn't. Oh dear ;D

[Dadwen]

The reality of the situation is that they may not technically lied as their "vision" for classic could include selling gear directly to players, a revamp if WoW Classic with the lost cata world, and allowing all of the mounts and accessories and toys to be shared between retail and classic.

But their bullshit starts when they say that LFD is a bridge too far and make out that the reason they are doing it is because it's "too retail like". Their bullshit starts when they actually pretend that they want to try and keep all of the retail bullshit out of Classic but they want to make content "more accessible". These are mighty high ideals and you can tell that the community grumbled a bit but sort of bought into this bullshit.

Now here we are. Blizzard didn't technically lie and they can do whatever they want with the game but they've definitely bullshit the community. The community acknowledges the need for and sort of agrees with the token but Blizzards bullshit about their vision for Classic has shown that they've engineered WotLk classic from the beginning to be anti classic. A LFD tool would at least help a lot of players to farm out gear to get to the point where GDKP were not needed. The community has never been about dungeoning. It's been about joining guilds and doing activities with them and you're a lot more likely to get into one of those if you're not some fresh 80 with blues.

The World is the Main Character

The third and final design pillar of the Classic WoW team is: The World is the Main Character. We want you to maintain the feeling of being immersed in a living world (of Warcraft). We love your exploration and your player-driven stories and want to make sure you have a reason to visit various locations in the world over and over again. Gathering and crafting professions are important to that sense of world, and of its economy, where you are interacting with thousands of other players in a vibrant player community. This pillar means we need to preserve the world we have created from excessive changes. You should be able to collect the lost pages of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, to rescue the town of Darkshire from Stitches, or to return to Tempest Keep and face off against Prince Kael’thas one more time (and hope for rare mount drop). You should be able to tell your personally unique stories about your exploits, even as you follow along the epic stories of Azeroth’s most famous personalities.

Not sure how buying your way out of having to do gathering and crafting and earning that gold with other players fit this whole pillar...

[Maruka]

grabbed 20 off the ah this morning during a price drop, great move blizz!

[Kralljin]

Oh wait... are you just pretending I didn't explain it because it completely undermines your entire point? That's it, isn't. Oh dear ;D

Your statement are just completely hyperbolic and it frankly now comes across that you realize that your statement is completely blown out of proportion and now project that failure onto me.

I reiterate, arguing that isn't economically feasible is one thing, literally saying that

but a company can't act like that and stay in business.

is just dumb.

We're talking about something that is entirely digital here and you act as if a human needs to go over it with a fine tooth comb.
Data processing exists, streamlining exists, you don't need catch every single one but in a sphere where literally everything is under your control and you can look into everything, they can absolutely get a grip if they want to.

Crux is, they have (as shown) a financial incentive to a turn blind eye towards it.

[Relapses]

The reality of the situation is that they may not technically lied as their "vision" for classic could include selling gear directly to players, a revamp if WoW Classic with the lost cata world, and allowing all of the mounts and accessories and toys to be shared between retail and classic.

But their bullshit starts when they say that LFD is a bridge too far and make out that the reason they are doing it is because it's "too retail like". Their bullshit starts when they actually pretend that they want to try and keep all of the retail bullshit out of Classic but they want to make content "more accessible". These are mighty high ideals and you can tell that the community grumbled a bit but sort of bought into this bullshit.

Now here we are. Blizzard didn't technically lie and they can do whatever they want with the game but they've definitely bullshit the community. The community acknowledges the need for and sort of agrees with the token but Blizzards bullshit about their vision for Classic has shown that they've engineered WotLk classic from the beginning to be anti classic. A LFD tool would at least help a lot of players to farm out gear to get to the point where GDKP were not needed. The community has never been about dungeoning. It's been about joining guilds and doing activities with them and you're a lot more likely to get into one of those if you're not some fresh 80 with blues.

Just like the other guy I quoted, you're just conflating your personal desires with those of the community at large. This isn't bullshit, you just didn't get what you wanted. That's life, though.

[God Save The King]

And i specifically want to hammer on the fact that Blizzard never catches goldbuyers - they however often give them a lax punishment, so it's not like that they're unable to catch those people, it's that their punishment is that flaccid that it fails to be a deterrent.

It's similar to why we, as a society, tend to punish producers of illicit goods more than consumers. Consumers, by themselves, as individuals, are meaningless drops in the ocean of the problem. For every hundred or thousand buyers there is a single seller. Targetting the seller is far more efficient in terms of mitigating the problem. Blizzard also has the additional conflict of interest that, on the individual scale, gold buying is relatively harmless and they would rather retain subscribers with lighter punishments. It's why we don't send people to prison for life for smoking marijuana; its more effective to have them as a tax payer and contributing member of society than pay the cost of locking them away. If only 1 person bought gold, there'd be no issue. If a hundred people did it, still relatively minor. It's only on large scales full of whales buying large amounts that there is an impact in game.

So, why is it difficult to catch sellers? Well its not, really, there's just such a large market for it that by the time blizzard does catch them, they've already made enough money to justify buying a new license and doing it again. We're well past the days of manual gold farming by Chinese farms. It's largely automated clusters of servers that run hundreds of clients concurrently and bot in mass. When a ban wave comes out, they just buy a fresh round of accounts, fire up the leveling bots, and then swap to gold farm bots once capped. Botting/farming was a lot easier to manage when computers could only handle a few clients at a time, bot tech was a lot weaker, and players had less disposable income.

Why don't we just ban bots/sellers immediately? Simple. Once we ban them, it gives them information that they're detectable, so all botting ceases while they patch the bot and start again. Letting them run for 1-2 months allows Blizzard to cast a wide net and ban many, many bots at once. And bot patches are fast. Most bot ban waves are figured out and a new bot is out within a few days. It's very similar to anti-piracy protections. They're just a fun puzzle for programmers to solve, but the time it takes to make the protections are orders of magnitude higher than the time to break them. Any client side protections are easily found and defeated, so Blizzard can only really rely on server-side logic, aka Warden, to protect the game.

It's also rather tricky to catch a buyer. There are, generally, 5 ways people sell gold right now. Mail, Trade, Auction, Guild Bank, and CoD.

For mail, you could scan and check for any large amount of gold, but sellers get around this by sending in loads of small packages from different accounts, while attaching personalised notes and including items. You could scan for large influxes of gold to a single account, but again, define 'large', define the timescale, and it's still a problem. And how do you avoid false positives where people get paid out for boost runs, gdkps, and other legitimate activities?

Trade is easier as it's usually done in one large dump, which is why it's not a popular way to do it anymore. Scan for trades over a certain amount, then collect any context around it (e.g. buying a boost, a dungeon run, expensive items, etc).

Auction is very difficult as you just buyout some random item, post it for a bunch, and then the seller buys it. How do you detect that? You could build in a price tracker and flag any item sold for more than 50x its average value, but there's loads of AH scammers who post expensive items to raise the average cost of goods to get around AH detection. There's also goblins who will post items way above average value, set a very low bid price, and trick people into spending more than they expect.

Guild Bank is difficult too, as the seller just invites you to their guild and you withdraw gold from the bank. How do you prevent false positives of legitimate withdrawals? You could set a check for time in guild + threshold amount, but that again is mitigated by several smaller withdrawals and sitting in the guild for a few days.

CoD is essentially impossible, as you send an item with a CoD amount and the seller pays for it.

Even when you detect a buyer, you need to contextualise the transaction and check for legitimate cases, or else you'll end up banning every gold goblin, guild master/officer, highend crafter, booster, GDKP host, and more.

- - - Updated - - -

You're right but there's a bit of a slippery slope in that argument.

I don't think manpower alone would have stopped botting. But it could definitely inhibit it. At this point though, the damage to the economy caused by botting, is already long done. If they were even remotely interested in combating it in the first place they would have implemented (changes) back when Classic was still in Vanilla.

If they successfully cracked down on botting, they could do a gold 'reset'. Say when ICC/Cataclysm drops make an announcement that any account with over X gold will be reduced to X.

- - - Updated - - -

Existing systems fail on both counts. You're making the classic mistake of assuming "gold buying" is some simple, clearly evident offense. It isn't. There's a myriad utterly trivial ways to obfuscate transactions, requiring massive amounts of investigative manpower to find out if this really was a case of gold buying, or if some random idiot just bought a health potion for 50,000g on the AH for the lulz (or whatever other method they'd be employing).

Exactly. I swear some people think buying gold involves a lvl 1 walking up to you, saying 'hey did you buy 100k off this website?' you confirming, and then a trade happens. So many games struggle with RMT and botting, pretty much every conceivable defense has been beaten, and the only way to really detect gold buying is in excessive amounts followed up by a real investigation.

Little Johnny buying 20k a month on LK isn't going to really trigger anything. That's a good GDKP pot, a nice BoE or crafted piece, or other trivialities.

[Kralljin]

Targetting the seller is far more efficient in terms of mitigating the problem.

In a short term sense, yes but in the longterm the culling of sellers drives up the profit for the remaining sellers.

It's in a sense self defeating.
You ban (some) suppliers
Demand goes up
People join in because it's that lucrative

That's why im arguing that buyers are the root of the problem, they create demand, suppliers merely statisfy the demand.

For mail, you could scan and check for any large amount of gold, but sellers get around this by sending in loads of small packages from different accounts, while attaching personalised notes and including items.

Seems pretty obvious to simply check the inflow of gold on an account rather than a hard amount in a single transaction.

Asking about specific numbers is also a bit silly because Blizzard likely already has set some numbers internally that sets specific flags, it's not a terrible leap to extrapolate timeframes from then on.

but again, define 'large', define the timescale, and it's still a problem. And how do you avoid false positives where people get paid out for boost runs, gdkps, and other legitimate activities?

The obvious thing is that you've obviously interacted via chat with the GDKP host at some level and joined their group.
Tracking the amount of bosskills that you've done with a given account is naturally possible, which makes it more of a hassle to replicate for goldsellers.

Let's be honest, if your system is fooled by a note that reads "thanks for helping me out" then that system is not terribly good.

Auction is very difficult as you just buyout some random item, post it for a bunch, and then the seller buys it. How do you detect that? You could build in a price tracker and flag any item sold for more than 50x its average value, but there's loads of AH scammers who post expensive items to raise the average cost of goods to get around AH detection.

May be slightly offtopic (but still kinda related): perhaps putting up items with the deliberate intent of fooling someone into buying them for huge amounts should either not be possible or also result in a penalty when repeated offense is happening.

Barring that you can also reverse engineer the whole thing, say they've managed to track a sellers account, what's stopping them from looking at all the accounts said account has mailed gold to?
If you received substantial gold from an account that was used to sell gold, then those accounts likely require an investigation.

[Biomega]

We're talking about something that is entirely digital here and you act as if a human needs to go over it with a fine tooth comb.

You don't need a lot of work individually, because it scales with numbers. No one is saying that each case is a 6-month investigation or anything - but simply having someone read through character activity logs, say, MULTIPLIED BY SEVERAL THOUSAND INCIDENTS is already a massive cost in manpower. And that's WITH a system that automatically pre-screens and flags for review. And each incident not only needs to be reviewed, but also recorded and cataloged, entered into various tracking tools, and so on.

You seriously underestimate how much work this is, and work costs money. And then you want to go even DEEPER and thoroughly screen any suspicious transaction looking for some hint that a gold sale was done somewhere? That's ridiculous amounts of resources.

in a sphere where literally everything is under your control and you can look into everything, they can absolutely get a grip if they want to.

And that's, again, where you're so very wrong.

Because "if they want to" is the classic argument made by players ignorant of economics. It's not about what they WANT, it's about what's ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE. Of course they COULD fix this problem in the way you describe, but it would cost inappropriate amounts of money, which you can't just burn willy-nilly just because it doesn't bankrupt you, like you are still arguing for some reason.

You have no idea how basic business economics work. You're out of your depth here, matey.

[God Save The King]

In a short term sense, yes but in the longterm the culling of sellers drives up the profit for the remaining sellers.

It's in a sense self defeating.
You ban (some) suppliers
Demand goes up
People join in because it's that lucrative

That's why im arguing that buyers are the root of the problem, they create demand, suppliers merely statisfy the demand.

Seems pretty obvious to simply check the inflow of gold on an account rather than a hard amount in a single transaction.

Asking about specific numbers is also a bit silly because Blizzard likely already has set some numbers internally that sets specific flags, it's not a terrible leap to extrapolate timeframes from then on.

The obvious thing is that you've obviously interacted via chat with the GDKP host at some level and joined their group.
Tracking the amount of bosskills that you've done with a given account is naturally possible, which makes it more of a hassle to replicate for goldsellers.

Let's be honest, if your system is fooled by a note that reads "thanks for helping me out" then that system is not terribly good.

May be slightly offtopic (but still kinda related): perhaps putting up items with the deliberate intent of fooling someone into buying them for huge amounts should either not be possible or also result in a penalty when repeated offense is happening.

Barring that you can also reverse engineer the whole thing, say they've managed to track a sellers account, what's stopping them from looking at all the accounts said account has mailed gold to?
If you received substantial gold from an account that was used to sell gold, then those accounts likely require an investigation.

Yeah so I gave simple examples to illustrate the point. The underlying issues are more or less the same just taken further. Any defense you could reasonably come up with, the sellers can too and invent solutions to the problem.

Basically any solution you, as an outsider with little knowledge or interest in the problem, could come up with was thought up and defeated 20 years ago. It's a technological arms race of a sorts, and the defenders can't win, only inhibit.

Again there's a reason it's such a massive issue in gaming across every platform. If there's any kind of positive social interactions, RMT will follow.

The crux of the problem is fairly simple: how much to flag? Most solutions flag excessive amounts to limit false positives.

If you buy 50k a month on LK classic, I would be genuinely shocked if you ever got caught. You'd need to buy hundreds of thousands to weed out enough false positives to have a pool to investigate.

[Kralljin]

You don't need a lot of work individually, because it scales with numbers. No one is saying that each case is a 6-month investigation or anything - but simply having someone read through character activity logs, say, MULTIPLIED BY SEVERAL THOUSAND INCIDENTS is already a massive cost in manpower. And that's WITH a system that automatically pre-screens and flags for review. And each incident not only needs to be reviewed, but also recorded and cataloged, entered into various tracking tools, and so on.

Or you know, you could invest into systems and protocols that helps to weed out the gold buyers to streamline the process and make it more costefficient.

Because "if they want to" is the classic argument made by players ignorant of economics.

The big reason why i disregard this is because the massive profit incentive has from the WoW Token.
The WoW Token is not some zero sum game to Blizzard, gametime via WoW Token is far more profitable to Blizzard than a regular sub.

One month via sub is 13 bucks (disregarding any discount), it's 20 with the WoW Token.
So they earn around 50% more from the WoW token as opposed to regular game time.

And they could lower price, it would even make things more competitive for the actual RMT'ers who are still offering gold at lower rates.

Talking about economics but disregarding the massive bite Blizzard takes out of the WoW Token that has no benefit for the customer (they receive less gold for their money) which then also diminishes the effectiveness of the WoW Token when it comes to combating RMT reeks of hypocrisy.

That's my view of the WoW Token, it's less about combating botting or RMT, it's about Blizzard getting their share from that market.
Arguing on the one side that it's not economically feasible to stop certain behavior but turning around and making your solution far more profitable to you than your regular business model is very much a scumbag move.

The crux of the problem is fairly simple: how much to flag? Most solutions flag excessive amounts to limit false positives.

The better question would be: what else alongside that should flag?

If only apply a single filter on the most basic level, of course your pool of flags becomes unmanageable.

[Biomega]

Or you know, you could invest into systems and protocols that helps to weed out the gold buyers to streamline the process and make it more costefficient.

Which brings us back to the beginning: these Utopian nonsense statements have zero practical value, because "just make it work, duh!" is a painfully naïve notion.

In an ideal world, we'd just have systems that work perfectly and at minimal cost. Meanwhile in the REAL world we don't have those, and have to make compromises. Hence where we're at here now.

[God Save The King]

You don't need a lot of work individually, because it scales with numbers. No one is saying that each case is a 6-month investigation or anything - but simply having someone read through character activity logs, say, MULTIPLIED BY SEVERAL THOUSAND INCIDENTS is already a massive cost in manpower.

Conservatively, there are a few million active raiders across Classic, LK, and DF. Let's say 5% buy gold illegitimately each month. (Likely closer to 20% in reality).

That's over 100k purchases a month. And no system is going to detect all of them without false positives. If you build an aggressive system, you'll end up with only a tiny fraction of the 'flagged transactions' as against ToS, burning ridiculous amounts of manpower for no benefit. Conservative systems, which it seems most, if not all, games go with, return only a small portion of transactions, but a much higher percentage of true positives.

To catch the whales, that's not too hard. People already know not to go crazy with gold buying. It's catching the everyday buyers filling in for raid mats, enchants, a new pet or mount that cause the problem for detection and investigation.

This guy has no idea the scale of the problem of just detection, let alone enforcement and investigation...

- - - Updated - - -

Or you know, you could invest into systems and protocols that helps to weed out the gold buyers to streamline the process and make it more costefficient.

OK. How? Explain how, exactly, you can solve a problem no studio or developer has ever managed to solve.

It's so easy to say 'just do it'. Explain how to do it. Explain why it's so trivially easy.

[Kralljin]

Which brings us back to the beginning: these Utopian nonsense statements have zero practical value, because "just make it work, duh!" is a painfully naïve notion.

Again, you think that some perfect system that literally catches everyone is necessary, it's not.
No system ever can ever catch everyone and judging the value of any law (enforcement) is fundamentally dishonest.

But when you sit back, let the actual root of the problem get off the hook very easily, it of course grows.
And when you have a serious financial incentive to offer an alternative solution, companies sure as shit don't feel compelled to invest money.

If this about combating Botting and RMT, okay then please let's be reasonable and at very least offer the WoW Token at a price where RMT struggle to compete.