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

[Tojara]

I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing BTW. Obviously they make more money from doing this, but they potentially take risk adverse people who were buying gold into their ecosystem. It does have the unnecessary side effect of getting some people who never bought gold to begin with (because of risk) to actually buy it because it's legal. No numbers because there's no hard data and citing something would be stupid on my part. Things that were illegal before with risks that are suddenly made legal doesn't mean loads of people are suddenly going to buy gold.

It absolutely will cut into botting and people selling for RL money. How much? I have absolute zero clue. What it will do is push some bots and black market sales from happening as it won't be cost effective as it once was. Some will absolutely adapt and be forced to offer lower prices, or will adapt like they always do and find ways to circumvent ban waves or account closures like they always do.

For me I still won't buy gold with the token, and never have. It does offer me compensation for my time in WoTLK (I play retail and classic) when I decide I'm no longer having fun in WoTLK by purchasing subscription time. I fully expect GDKPs to be way less prevalent in Cata/MoP like they were originally if they decide to go forward with it post WoTLK, making gold pointless. 10/25 man having the same lockouts, having the same gear, 10 man being easier to organize and the game just being a bit more difficult (with every patch, even with solved content) points to gold not maintaining it's value like it does in currently WoTLK.

But again, that fixation on gold and purchasing power in WoTLK only really applies to players that participate in GDKPs to begin with. If you play classic the 'intended' way, you would just play in a guild and gold being absolutely useless.

[Dadwen]

Yeah well the idea that you and others had that somehow you would realistically be able to relive those classic moments and times in a vacuum was folly on yours and their parts. The QoL features and systems that have been iterated on over the years were more or less a natural evolution of the game. This whole #NOCHANGES BS was foolish in the first place. RMT and botters weren't going to automatically throw up their hands and say "you know what, the quality and integrity of the classic game needs to be maintained we are just going to back away and let you guys enjoy a pristine experience".

The systems and quality of life features were a necessity to keep the game growing and viable over the years. WoW would have been a much more niche' game had they kept things exactly what they were in classic. I myself wouldn't have stayed with it for almost 20 years now.

To address one of your concerns though I think Blizzard should have merged more severs together or at least linked them together from much earlier on so that way no one would feel like they are playing on a "crap server" devoid of life and activity..

My folly was thinking a Wrath Feature RDF would have been in wrath.. an then to have them not put it in due to some BS they vomited about pillars they now show they don't give two tosses about.

[dandan]

They are different things. legal RMT doesn't involve account theft and stolen credit cards, which creates a lot of behind the scenes work for Blizzard that you don't see.

lol, excuse me while I buy gold in the black market to buy the token XD

[Utrrabbit]

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.

They LITERALLY ban hundeds of thousands of bots a week.

[Bakis]

They LITERALLY ban hundeds of thousands of bots a week.

Thats more people than is playing the game. You sure you didnt add a zero too much? And we have to trust BLZ's word for it.
Offer lvl 55 DK at launch while knowing themselves perfectly well that would bring bots. Bots = subscription.

[Flame6]

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.

Is it just a resource issue? I've never seen a game that has tradable currency not have gold sellers, bots, and hackers. I've seen some games (Tarkov) go to EXTREME measures to combat it, and it just has huge negative impacts on the legit players.

[janeSmith]

[...]
[...] 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 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.

You say it's too hard for Blizzard to ban those people while telling everyone how OBVIOUS it is that people RMTed.



The real sad thing is:
I dont believe that Blizzard ever really tried hard. Because that would mean less account numbers to report to Bobby Kotick. And it would mean more hired people to observe the servers manually. Which would mean less profit. And for Bobby Kotick being able to buy another yacht, they will simply join in and get their share of money while people already pay a monthly fee. That will be a nice yacht.

[Flame6]

MMO-C forums: BIG GAME COMPANY BAD >
Blizzard: We're trying to disincentivize and devalue botting
MMO-C forums: MONEY HUNGRY
Blizzard: Botting and gold farming has been an issue not for only us but for the online gaming industry for years(this is a proven fact)
MMO-C forums: CORPORATE GREED!!

Like no matter what they say, you apes will always be mad, and when they don't say anything... forum posts like "No Dragonflight numbers from Blizzard means" are created. How do people live their life being this pessimistic. It has to be exhausting.

Another great example? They added the trading post. Free. Every time the trading post refreshes with new goods its "This crap stinks" or "Blizz is clearly stacking multiple good items in the same month to cause FOMO so we dont ever unsub"

[Bakis]

Total Exploitative World of Warcraft Account Closures: 73,057

Since the bluepost dont specify and it mention Warcraft accounts in general terms that is surely including Live WoW.
Numbers are great but there are two glaring issues as it has always been.
BLZ state the numbers, might be true might not be but I'm inclined to think true. But was it a cherry picked period? Probably.
Has BLZ tried seriously to combat bots at any time the last decade? No.
I guess seeing 99% rouges in BRD with random char names isn't enough, their automated system & "we need to investigate each case" approach bullshit doesnt fly.

It is a simple fact, bots bring BLZ better looking figures and revenue.

The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts

Well, what else would they say?

[Tojara]

You say it's too hard for Blizzard to ban those people while telling everyone how OBVIOUS it is that people RMTed.



The real sad thing is:
I dont believe that Blizzard ever really tried hard. Because that would mean less account numbers to report to Bobby Kotick. And it would mean more hired people to observe the servers manually. Which would mean less profit. And for Bobby Kotick being able to buy another yacht, they will simply join in and get their share of money while people already pay a monthly fee. That will be a nice yacht.

It's obvious because if you frequent any GDKP discord where they have a community discord to organize these things, you start to see certain behaviors. There are people who are incredibly transparent with ledgers that run GDKPs constantly because they love the game. They use the gold to fund their mains, alts and just play the game a lot. Then there are people who have a couple characters, show up for a week or two and just vanish.

Doing any kind of investigative work would reveal that this person hasn't accumulated nearly as much gold because they haven't really participated in that many GDKPs to physically acquire that much to begin with. A warlock I know just gears up his warlock(s) for main raids, has 3 of them and just fishes for items he needs in GDKPs before going back to his guild to speed run classic. Drops close to a million gold on two of his warlocks and just vanishes.

I never said it's too hard for Blizzard to ban these people, I said it's impossible for them to ban them all. It's a pipe dream so stop quoting your favorite streamer or upvoted comments on reddit. Back when Blizzard had "integrity" and not underneath the great savior "BOBBY", they still couldn't deal with bots farming in Vanilla WoW or creating hundreds of characters to suicide in capital cities directing players to gold buying websites. This is back when they physically had a lot of customer service as well, and while rare, you might spot a GM from time to time.

Popular to contrary belief, most of the GDKPs I've been to have fairly static groups with rotating people. There are absolutely whales and they're fairly easy to spot, but thinking that the frequency of them is abundant just isn't true. There's a reason why they're called whales to begin with and that's because they aren't super common.

Can more be done? Yeah of course, but that's a lot of copium if you think it's ever going to go away. Player attitude has also been a contributing factor to this as well as people realize that they can make a mass amount of money doing it. Lots of people get piloted to PvP ranks since TBC or just sold their accounts that have coveted items on them because they value the RL money more than pixels that become obsolete on the next patch/expansion launch.

Bots are probably a lot easier to target than people swiping their credit cards though. People buying bots or farming RAW GOLD are the problem, as things like GDKPs do nothing but exchange already created gold. Tracking down the people who physically bought gold is a bit more a task than tracking suspicious activities of people farming said raw gold.

There are certainly extreme measures you could take to nuke a lot of this, but most people probably aren't willing to give up more of their sensitive information to combat it, and I don't blame them. Do people not remember how fucking mad people were when REALID was introduced like a decade ago?

[rrayy]

Sure buddy

They don't no matter how many times you claim otherwise. Developers develop, higher up managers are looking at the entire company. They don't have time to waste telling game devs how to design their game.Understand how business works.

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Since the bluepost dont specify and it mention Warcraft accounts in general terms that is surely including Live WoW.
Numbers are great but there are two glaring issues as it has always been.
BLZ state the numbers, might be true might not be but I'm inclined to think true. But was it a cherry picked period? Probably.
Has BLZ tried seriously to combat bots at any time the last decade? No.
I guess seeing 99% rouges in BRD with random char names isn't enough, their automated system & "we need to investigate each case" approach bullshit doesnt fly.

It is a simple fact, bots bring BLZ better looking figures and revenue.



Well, what else would they say?

Ahh the "Blizzard is lying and I am telling the truth" post despite the fact they have the data and you have nothing.

Prove your claims.

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You say it's too hard for Blizzard to ban those people while telling everyone how OBVIOUS it is that people RMTed.



The real sad thing is:
I dont believe that Blizzard ever really tried hard. Because that would mean less account numbers to report to Bobby Kotick. And it would mean more hired people to observe the servers manually. Which would mean less profit. And for Bobby Kotick being able to buy another yacht, they will simply join in and get their share of money while people already pay a monthly fee. That will be a nice yacht.

You are completely stretching and using the same tired "Bobby as the boogeyman" tropes.

And you are beyond naive if you think mjore people observing serbers would stop botting. Bans don't work if you don't break the botting software.

ps Bobby gets paid the same amount of money regardless of how WoW does. SO let's stop with the Yacht BS.

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Thats more people than is playing the game. You sure you didnt add a zero too much? And we have to trust BLZ's word for it.
Offer lvl 55 DK at launch while knowing themselves perfectly well that would bring bots. Bots = subscription.

You are aware that a new account pops up to replaced the banned one right? Kind of humorous that people actually think that # of accounts are finite.

[anon5123]

Blizzard: We're trying to disincentivize and devalue botting

Token does neither of those things. Especially when you consider that botted gold is 3-4x cheaper than token gold

Blizzard: Botting and gold farming has been an issue not for only us but for the online gaming industry for years(this is a proven fact)

Yes, and "Solving" botting and gold farming by.....throwing their hands up and admitting defeat and openly endorsing swipe2win, no shit people are going to be angry

"No wow token" was one of the pillars of Classic, and now that has been completely demolished. Blizzard has shown that they don't give a flying fuck about the integrity of the game and only want to milk the playerbase for more easy cash before the end of WOTLK.

But go on, keep licking Blizzard's boots with your I AM SILLY strawmans.

[Skymercy]

Token or not. It will not effect my play time in the game. Karens gone bitch no matter if the token in the game or not. That is what Karens do.

You couldn't be more right.

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"No wow token" was one of the pillars of Classic, and now that has been completely demolished. Blizzard has shown that they don't give a flying fuck about the integrity of the game and only want to milk the playerbase for more easy cash before the end of WOTLK.

Forget about Blizzard and everything else and tell me how the hell did the token affect your game play? People who may now buy a token to exchange it for gold, used to go to 3rd-party websites 3 weeks ago and buy gold from there.

Bots are probably a lot easier to target than people swiping their credit cards though. People buying bots or farming RAW GOLD are the problem, as things like GDKPs do nothing but exchange already created gold. Tracking down the people who physically bought gold is a bit more a task than tracking suspicious activities of people farming said raw gold.

GDKPs are probably one of the things that is holding WotLK together. I have around 8 characters, 2 of these are in 2 separate guilds where the rest I either join a GDKP or I go on an SR run. It's safe to say that GDKPs are way better since players in the GDKP know that they won't get their cut at the end of the raid if they come up with a lame excuse to leave the raid early. I had been in many instances in SR runs that people would leave/fake dc after getting their loot or missing their loot due to lack of drops etc.

[Hexian]

You couldn't be more right.

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Forget about Blizzard and everything else and tell me how the hell did the token affect your game play? People who may now buy a token to exchange it for gold, used to go to 3rd-party websites 3 weeks ago and buy gold from there.



GDKPs are probably one of the things that is holding WotLK together. I have around 8 characters, 2 of these are in 2 separate guilds where the rest I either join a GDKP or I go on an SR run. It's safe to say that GDKPs are way better since players in the GDKP know that they won't get their cut at the end of the raid if they come up with a lame excuse to leave the raid early. I had been in many instances in SR runs that people would leave/fake dc after getting their loot or missing their loot due to lack of drops etc.

TLDR: I like GDKPs so I need to buy gold. The token lets me buy gold. I like p2w.

[bbr]

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.

It's because they are forced to link their personal ID to all games they play online.
Unlike most other countries.

Anyone risking a ban, is not getting back in with alts or whatever. They get their personal data nailed to the cross.

[Flaks]

I love people doubling down on their terrible takes of "people never feared being banned".

Yes, they fucking did. Your circle of friends maybe didn't because everyone responding to me has a lot of time, money or both on their hands but a not insignificant portion of the player base has and still does fear losing their accounts. Too bad Blizzard has made it clear you'll never get more than a slap on the wrist for it for the better part of the past decade.

Also ITT, people who don't like hearing that WoW became officially endorsed P2W the day the token was official in retail.

[PenguinChan]

Blizzard has ways to completely eradicate the gold bot problem but they don't because they know their hands are tied (And also money is good). If they actually decide to ban GDKP, make gold obsolete and make everything personal and effort based - people will be whiny bitches they always gotta work for their progression at any step of the process.

They could also enforce no trading of gold through direct means and enforcing the cost of anything sold based upon its default values, with a supply and demand cap to ensure there is no hyper in/deflation. That's boring though and really rips away one part of an MMORPG and its currency having any kind of feeling behind it. It'd benefit the average player a whole ton, but people would try and rip Blizzard a new one for even attempting anything remotely like this.

Ultimately the Token is useless and just promotes official pathways to get carried. As it already existed in the past (Through $$$ or $ into gold into trading). I'm more surprised they haven't started to instead just... Provide raid tickets for sale and give benefits to guilds who fulfill the tickets.

[Biomega]

Blizzard has ways to completely eradicate the gold bot problem

Just to be clear, though, that was never the question. The question is do they have a PRACTICAL solution to stop gold-buying. Turning off gold in the game entirely or whatever is a solution, but it's not a practical one. Especially since quite evidently a lot of people WANT to buy gold - those are customers, too, whose voices and opinions aren't just irrelevant. For them, the ability to buy gold isn't a "problem", but an improvement to the game; and making it safer by making it legal improves their quality of life in the game.

The real issue IMO is when/where does it actually MATTER if someone bought gold? Sure you can buy yourself a Cutting Edge achievement or whatever but what's the relevance of that? That's what needs to be negotiated, but that's something for the community to do.

[Kallisto]

It's pretty simple really. Can blizzard stop the botting? Yes. Will they invest the time and money into it? No. Their automated systems are clearly not working which means this issue can most likely only be solved with more boots on the ground, so to speak. But they aren't gonna invest in more GMs.

No they can't, no one can. It happens in every online game. Not just wow but ffxiv, ffxi GW2, ESO, SWTOR all have issues. Also it's not just "herp dero hire more staff." because most bottlers do not give a flying fuck if they're banned.

They'll just make a new account and start over. It's so simple to do, you don't have to pay for a box set to get into classic, just a sub. Be smart about how long the sub is.

They ban 50k a week, there's 55k more bit accounts a week later. And don't give some "Just IP ban." anyone with the simplest knowledge of how computers work can get around it. Which includes every bitter. If you say ban the buyers, well you have to prove beyond doubt that person bought gold. Also trying to force ID checks on new accounts in gaming communities is asking to get shut down due to lack of players.

Also all games mentioned prior have means to legally by whatever the equivalent of gold is in their game, just because it isn't a token doesnt mean there isn't a way.

[Cosmic Janitor]

No they can't, no one can. It happens in every online game. Not just wow but ffxiv, ffxi GW2, ESO, SWTOR all have issues. Also it's not just "herp dero hire more staff." because most bottlers do not give a flying fuck if they're banned.

They'll just make a new account and start over. It's so simple to do, you don't have to pay for a box set to get into classic, just a sub. Be smart about how long the sub is.

There is a vast difference between not being able to weed out every bot in existence and not doing anything for weeks/months. First of all the whole ban-wave bullshit is just a giant invitation to botters to keep doing it again, because almost always make back their original investment and then some. There is also the laughably blatant bots that run for days and weeks, like the tar pit moonkin parade during SL or all the 24/7 static moonkin skinning bots. This shit is so blatant, a complete programming newbie could come up with ways to identify these in a matter of minutes.