Blizzard's Thoughts on the WoW Token in Wrath Classic, WoW Hotfixes - May 24, 2023

[Relapses]

SOURCE
I am not exactly sure how it works but it is for every game.
This is how it is so hard for example to play on Korea LoL servers and many people were mad at it a few years ago.
You can't just make an account without some of your IRL data connected to it.

I mean, that's just one guy on reddit... not really a source. 99% of the discourse on that topic is how the claim made by the OP isn't verifiable and how there's still an incredibly lucrative black/grey market on Korean servers since P2W shit is generally more acceptable in their society. It doesn't seem like this is the slam dunk you seem to think it is.

[VinceVega]

Utter bullshit.

They enabled this bs by not policing it.

The WoW token when it was originally added was also Blizzard throwing up their hands and giving up on moderating their game while also getting the benefit of more direct profits.

The straight up gaslighting of "everyone is doing it anyways" is such a ridiculous copium response I don't even know what to say. There used to be a day when people botting or buying gold would do so with the very real likelihood they'd get banned which meant most people would just avoid it anyways. If you stop moderating your game with the random posts of "yoU Don'T EveN knOw hoW MANy BOts wE aRE banNINg" and random mails about reports actually leading to actions which are generally proved to be patently false should speak to the type of company Blizzard is.

Next they're chasing the Destiny 2 model with Diablo 4. I'm excited to see how much of a dumpster fire the game will be within a week or 2 of their first season.

There NEVER was a day where people gave a shit about the consequences of buying gold. Never.
The chance of getting caught have been minuscle.
If people would not buy gold there would be no market for the bots. And there are a ton of bots.

OT: We had the same discussion with retail years back and *gasp* it had basically no effect on the game for the players. No inflation. People still cannot buy gear reliably because they would have to invest a few hundred dollar for ONE mythic BoE.
This won't change anything for the player but rip the feet away under the bots. I am happy.

- - - Updated - - -

SOURCE
I am not exactly sure how it works but it is for every game.
This is how it is so hard for example to play on Korea LoL servers and many people were mad at it a few years ago.
You can't just make an account without some of your IRL data connected to it.

In the same thread it is explained how the original post is 100% bullshit

[WowIsDead64]

It has always sounded like "If you can't beat it - lead it". If this market if very profitable, then it always better to try to grab part of this profit instead of trying to beat all botters.

There is always another way to beat this problem. WOD way. Just design game the way, that would allow players to play without gold investments. MMOs are literally designed to be played with 3rd parties' help. You can find friends, you can be "employed" by guild, but you can also just pay for help. It's natural. And it's inevitable, that some day devs will want to sell this help by themselves.

[Mendzia]

I mean, that's just one guy on reddit... not really a source.

It can be just 1 guy on reddit... but google it and check that this is true for all games not only WoW.
As i said it was a huge thing in LoL a few years ago (and still is) that you can't just VPN and play on their server.

99% of the discourse on that topic is how the claim made by the OP isn't verifiable and how there's still an incredibly lucrative black/grey market on Korean servers since P2W shit is generally more acceptable in their society. It doesn't seem like this is the slam dunk you seem to think it is.

... and now you just changed topic.
Of course it in Korea it is normal to P2W - all these shitty 'big titties waifus' MMos are that way... but this has nothing to my point.
Blizzard said 'it is another way to fight bots' which is CLEARLY not a case atleast in Korea.

In the same thread it is explained how the original post is 100% bullshit

???
What do you mean it is '100% BS'?

[Tojara]

Only thing I didn't like was them just throwing it out there with no warning.

You're pretty much insulated by the effects of selling gold/token if you live in your own bubble and play with a guild though, and this has always sort of been the case.

Ever since I can remember though (maybe not 2004-2006 era), there's been rampant botting in this game. I mean, low level characters didn't fall from the sky in capital cities spelling out fucking gold buying websites in vanilla onwards because Blizzard was 100% way more legitimate at fighting the problem back then. Can they do more, absolutely. But people in here citing that they have a solution and that it's easy, certainly have no idea what they're talking about. Tons of famous stories of people piloting gladiator accounts as early as TBC (and to this day), selling accounts with glaives, and people selling their body for an epic flying mount in TBC.

Again, Blizzard could absolutely take better steps to combating it, but you're delusional to think that it will never end, it won't. Player mindset has also moved from the early days realizing that they can sell services in game to people willing to pay. Whether that be gear, mounts or achievements.. it's been present for ages.

I play two characters in GDKPs (I don't want to go through the trouble of making a 25 man guild), and it's obvious when you look at the servers discord history or look at how many characters people play who whales in the game. There are tons of organizers that organize under legitimacy because they love the game and play a lot, and this is their way of getting gear they want for the burden of organization. Then there are others who organize, and play half a dozen of the same character like it's a job with the intent to sell the gold off to third parties. There are also plenty of 'consumers' in the middle who show up to GDKP that don't do many GDKPs and drop 500-700k over a couple weeks while barely participating in them.

I don't think the token changes much. Consumable prices aren't going to skyrocket and while this might entice more people to buy gold that otherwise wouldn't, I highly doubt the uptick is going to be as big as people are suggesting. The people that bought gold before are still going to do it, but perhaps they might use the WoW token option instead of account being risked. From my vantage it's only going to really change people who are already participating in GDKPs. You might see a few more whales, but that's about it. The thing is, those already existed.

It is essentially them giving up to a degree though, all the while cutting into some black market sales by equalizing prices and taking their own cut.

Some solutions like requiring more authentication to logon, etc come with their own risks. Historically most people that game don't necessarily like giving out all their personal data to more people than they have to, especially when it comes to something that's suppose to be a hobby like gaming.

[Relapses]

It can be just 1 guy on reddit... but google it and check that this is true for all games not only WoW.
As i said it was a huge thing in LoL a few years ago (and still is) that you can't just VPN and play on their server.



... and now you just changed topic.
Of course it in Korea it is normal to P2W - all these shitty 'big titties waifus' MMos are that way... but this has nothing to my point.
Blizzard said 'it is another way to fight bots' which is CLEARLY not a case atleast in Korea.

You: ::makes baseless claim::
Me: Source?
You: ::provides source that's one guy on a forum, debunked in the thread linked::
Me: Uh, your source kinda sucks.
You: Why are you changing topics?!?

Yeah. Okay.

[VinceVega]

It can be just 1 guy on reddit... but google it and check that this is true for all games not only WoW.
As i said it was a huge thing in LoL a few years ago (and still is) that you can't just VPN and play on their server.



... and now you just changed topic.
Of course it in Korea it is normal to P2W - all these shitty 'big titties waifus' MMos are that way... but this has nothing to my point.
Blizzard said 'it is another way to fight bots' which is CLEARLY not a case atleast in Korea.



???
What do you mean it is '100% BS'?

I mean the fact that in the thread a few people explain WHY they actually have tons of bots and shows screenshots.
Meanwhile the OP of the thread just says "trust me bro" and that is it.

[Mhyroth]

That's a lot of blue text to basically say nothing.

[ablib]

I would be more inclined to believe Blizzard is doing this for the good of the game or the players, if they were not profiting $5 off every transaction.

This is what gets me. It's hard to believe this is isn't another cash grab. They retail-ized Classic...yet again, for a fucking cash grab.

They could keep the price of the token at $15 and still reap the benefits it gives.

If their intention for this was 100% for the good of the game, and to reduce malicious behavior, I could get behind it.

[Relapses]

I would be more inclined to believe Blizzard is doing this for the good of the game or the players, if they were not profiting $5 off every transaction.

This is what gets me. It's hard to believe this is isn't another cash grab. They retail-ized Classic...yet again, for a fucking cash grab.

They could keep the price of the token at $15 and still reap the benefits it gives.

If their intention for this was 100% for the good of the game, and to reduce malicious behavior, I could get behind it.

If they made it $15 in Classic people would demand they make the same change in retail. That'd cut into their profit margins.

[WowIsDead64]

Tokens are great invention. They're almost flawless. Because they're P2W, but hidden behind fact, that it isn't sold directly by developers - it's sold by other players. "Helpers" are still needed to complete content. So, at the end token is presented as just exchange mean, not some sort of dirty microtransaction.

[Biomega]

I would be more inclined to believe Blizzard is doing this for the good of the game or the players, if they were not profiting $5 off every transaction.

This is what gets me. It's hard to believe this is isn't another cash grab. They retail-ized Classic...yet again, for a fucking cash grab.

They could keep the price of the token at $15 and still reap the benefits it gives.

If their intention for this was 100% for the good of the game, and to reduce malicious behavior, I could get behind it.

Both can be true.

Surely you wouldn't argue that them just allowing bots and scammy shady gold sellers would be better?

Of course in an IDEAL world they'd just find a way to stop all the gold selling, but that's not reality. You can't really blame them for that, it's an impossible thing to realistically police because the demand is so great. Players WANT to buy gold. This isn't just some criminal enterprise pushing the service into poor and innocent players - THEY WANT IT.

It's not exactly corporate greed if Blizzard says sorry we can't hire 500 people to sift through activity logs 24/7 hoping to find out if someone is actually buying gold or just engaging in weird trades. That's an unreasonable demand.

[aeuhe4yxzhds]

Do people ever get banned for buying gold? i've reported multiple people before the token who spoke openly about buying gold yet they're never been banned

[Sinaa]

"There’s no friction in that player’s experience that would tempt them to buy a token just to keep themselves afloat."

Because that sure stopped them before xd

[Mendzia]

You: ::makes baseless claim::
Me: Source?
You: ::provides source that's one guy on a forum, debunked in the thread linked::
Me: Uh, your source kinda sucks.
You: Why are you changing topics?!?

Yeah. Okay.

I admire your unwillingness to just googling it yourself and keep typing irrelevant stuff.
Yeah... my replies end here.

I mean the fact that in the thread a few people explain WHY they actually have tons of bots and shows screenshots.
Meanwhile the OP of the thread just says "trust me bro" and that is it.

Of course thye have bots but you don't understand that they can't just make a new account easily when Blizzard finds it out.
It is not worth for botters to bother with it.

[Relapses]

Of course thye have bots but you don't understand that they can't just make a new account easily when Blizzard finds it out.
It is not worth for botters to bother with it.

You four posts ago: "KR has zero bots."

Brother, if you're going to argue in bad faith at least try not to be so obvious. Also, I'd highly recommend actually reading some of the posts in that thread you linked lol.

[Rageonit]

Blizzard: "We've banned 73,057 account during last two weeks".
Players:

They enabled this bs by not policing it.

Reading comprehension at its finest.

There used to be a day when people botting or buying gold would do so with the very real likelihood they'd get banned which meant most people would just avoid it anyways.

There was no such day, I'd know, I play since release. If anything, people may have been scared of being banned, because they had to invest their whole allowance money to even play the damn game, so loosing account was a big no no for them.
For everyone else with cash to spare, it was NEVER a problem.

And guess what. Nowadays people have a lot more cash to spare (esp. considering WoW's average player age probably went up).

[Firgus]

If they wanted the WoW token to eliminate illicit third parties then they wouldn't take a 5$ cut on the sale of WoW tokens. When gold buyers can get more gold per dollar spent by buying directly from a gold seller, then there's still going to be a third party market.
Blizzard should change the price of the token to 15$ and give 15$ credit to the gold seller. The 15$ is still going to end up in Blizzard's pockets, it's not like there's a real cost to someone using that balance for Hearthstone packs or WoW game time. It would show they really are trying to make illicit third parties irrelevant.

[sam86]

They can beat them and ban gold sellers and bots but that would mean they need to invest money to hire people to do just that so from a business perspective it's better to make money out of it rather than invest money to combat it and it's a typical move from a scumbag company. All those that defend token selling are just dumb and naive.

exactly, this is like legalizing crime since police can't stop it and defunding it, which - pikachu meme face - made crime even higher than before
gold selling still exist and very well and even cheaper than ever

why can't they just say "the execs want more money"?

because no one wants to go out flat out admit how shit greedy he is, bobby kodick was (smartly) banned from media after he said he denies his own grandchildren from video games and how he wants to increase gaming prices and few gems of interview in late 2000s, half of those quotes would destroyed activision blizzard if internet was active as it was now (all of them are pre-merge i think, u can find them still easily they just not famous)

At what point is it okay for a company to waive the white flag? It's written in plain English in the article: It was an arms race between Blizzard and the gold sellers. The gold sellers would simply out-maneuver every action they tried. Because capital was at stake, there was a financial motivation for the gold sellers to do so. As an example, if Blizzard hired 1,000 people whose sole job it was to detect and ban bots, the gold sellers would simply hire 1,000 more people to defraud, manipulate and circumvent whatever measures Blizzard implemented to get rid of them.

"crimes happen since 7000bc so we should just stop fighting it and defund all legal laws"
we can also save money by remove court and judge, u know what just give everyone a gun and let them solve their problems

[rNadom]

Do we really believe these excuses?

If bots and RMT was the sole reason they added wow tokens, they would have allowed tokens exchanged for b.net balance.

They are suffering hard from exiting the China market, and finding any way possible to recoup lost revenue.
They have 1/2 a year left on their fiscal year, and they need to meet monetary performance to their investors.
Their management made some poor choices, and on their last straw to avoid getting fired by the board.

So screw the player base that supported the company through all these years, stab them in the back, well its not the first time; as long as I get to look good in front of board/investors, and I get my millions of dollars in bonuses.

I can foresee tokens to be able to exchange for b.net balance 6 months after D4 launch, when they haven't meet their D4 sales target.
They would just done that and delay launching the token 6 months altogether, if they weren't scrambling to gain alternative revenue today.