welp they finally did it: WoW Token on Wrath Classic

[Relapses]

1. Blizz doesn't want to stop bots. Something at simple as a capcha before battlegrounds etc would lower numbers. Blizz did nothing. Actually they did find bots and don't ban them until a "ban wave".

2. Blizz is in bed with bots. How hard would it to be to hire a bunch of Chinese slaves for 50 cents an hour to farm gold? Pretty easy considering Activision has a giant Chinese shareholder and China is known for treating their people like slaves to siphon money from the bloated wallets of westerners.
Gold selling is great for Activisions bottom line. Now, everything in the game can be bought with gold, including impossible to get items like the Warglaves. Combine that with the natural "slot machine" nature of loot drops and you now have a perfect casino. 100% income. 100% addictive.

3. WoW Token is just botting with taxes. Botting may be more profitable then the WoW Token but in the long run it's worth it. Now they can "pay" a "player" in wow time to be a gold farmer for them. A person will now trade X hours farming gold to get wow time that they will use to farm more gold. This is amazing for Activision. They now cut the 50 cents an hour Chinese slave out and have the consumer doing all the work. Best of all, they still get to sell gold, now to everyone instead of only cheaters, and have successfully monitized every thing in the game. Want that legendary item? Only 20 WoW Tokens. This is exactly how Diablo Immortal works.

Have fun.

Bots can bypass Captchas.

Gold selling will exist with or without the token and as long as capital remains at stake Blizzard is fighting a losing battle against botters since they will always be incentivized to escalate any measures they take. However many humans Blizzard hires to combat the issue, botters will hire just as many (if not more) to find new ways to waste their time. There's a point where it become less profitable to run the game than it does to fight bots and I have a feeling most people who comment negatively about the token would prefer for Blizzard to go out of business spending billions of dollars trying to fight a war they cannot win. The other alternatives would be for Blizzard to defang GDKP by forcing personal loot (which would just cause all the GDKP community to become boosting communities instead) or for Blizzard to rewrite the entirety of WoW's code from the ground up to prevent botting and disable the ability for add-ons to exist since most bots are coded with lua. (They'd still exist, though, because capital is at stake.) This would cost more than developing an entirely new MMO from the ground up so it's not financially feasible either. They could prevent players from trading with each other but I think this would be met with just as much ire as their current solution so I don't think that's plausible either.

The sad and unfortunate reality is that the only way for Blizzard to have any impact on RMT is to give players a way to do it from within the game itself. I think the timing is a bit shit and they should have waited til after WotLK wrapped to do this but it's possible with them currently banning 2 million accounts a year that it reached an internal tipping point within Blizzard where they felt they were spending too much of their resources trying to combat the losing battle of stopping botting. I don't excuse them for profiting from it but if we're being real here that ship sailed when Blizzard decided to monetize WoW with a subscription model decades ago.

All this is to say that I really encourage players to try to apply critical thinking to these situations. The WoW token sucks but Blizzard clearly didn't add it just out of pure malice and contempt for their playerbase. It sucks that so many people are interpreting it this way because the nature of this situation prevents a no-win scenario for the developers: They do nothing, botting gets worse and worse until they're spending insane amounts of resources trying to win a losing battle; they do something to ease RMT and the entire fucking playerbase interprets it as breeching one of the core pillars of their game design. Damned if they do. Damned if they don't. The worst part is that you cannot explain any of this to anybody who's already made up their mind about this. If you do, you're just shilling for Blizzard.

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Not keen on the whole, "I told you so" thing but.. I told you so. This was 100% bound to happen after people asked for Classic.

Not an ounce of surprise in that, my surprise is with the people who got outraged about it being added.

I think it was pretty obvious to anybody who pays any attention to how Blizzard operates that the token would be coming eventually. I openly wondered when it would be happening all the way back before TBC Classic had launched.

[Lochton]

Maybe because there are countless interviews of the devs saying they would never put it in.

I don't recall any interviews stating that the Token would never be used in Project Classic? Even if there was, they might've meant the first version, now we're at the 3rd.

[RoKPaNda]

I'm talking about how instead of believing an incredibly thorough, well-reasoned take from the developers themselves, we're taking the word of some guy who openly admits he 1.) intentionally destroys the gameplay experience of other players for his own profit, 2.) admits openly to tax evasion, and 3.) has a financial motivation to lie to everybody about the nature of botting and the impact of the WoW token. That seems a bit, uhh... what's the word? Oh yeah. Ironic.

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...my issue is mostly the part where he says that the token is good for his business and how he was "clearing up misinformation," by spreading wanton misinformation about what the WoW token represents.

Yeah that part of his post I disagree with, but everything else seems pretty spot on. I don't really expect a botter to openly say that a decision that is directly against their best interests is severely hurting them, because that would just encourage Blizzard.

[SinR]

Yep. And worst part - you'll never get your items "quick" in those GDKPs unless you buy gold pretty much. Leadership cut is like 20%(was like back in TBC at least lol) usually, so the main guy even if he's not selling gold or something is gonna be sitting on stacks over stacks.
Gold trading CD, or stuff like "if over X gold traded within 24h - guy gotta be on your friend list for a month or more"

20% cut? Jesus what server is this on? Atiesh I regularly run T7 GDKPs and the only time people don't get a cut is when they're pure buyers. Remaining gold is split even at the end between everyone left in the raid.

Also, people thinking that botting and gold buying will go away if Blizzard kills GDKPs makes me laugh

[Relapses]

Yeah that part of his post I disagree with, but everything else seems pretty spot on. I don't really expect a botter to openly say that a decision that is directly against their best interests is severely hurting them, because that would just encourage Blizzard.

The whole AMA read to me like a massive pump and dump; considering the dude admits he's paid almost entirely in crypto that isn't really surprising. Kinda annoyed the r/classicwow mods let that stay up but it is what it is.

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20% cut? Jesus what server is this on? Atiesh I regularly run T7 GDKPs and the only time people don't get a cut is when they're pure buyers. Remaining gold is split even at the end between everyone left in the raid.

Also, people thinking that botting and gold buying will go away if Blizzard kills GDKPs makes me laugh

GDKP leads frequently sell their gold cuts to gold selling websites.



Of note, I don't agree with everything in this video. But it is pretty well-researched.

[Biglog]

The consternation about this seems exaggerated. Blizz doing wow tokens doesn't eliminate gold farmers/sellers but it knocks it down significantly. It avoids players going to sketchy websites to work around the system to do it, and it reduces the exploitation of cheap labor in low labor-cost countries to farm the gold. And from Blizzard's standpoint, if gold buying is going to happen (and it's well-proven that many players will buy gold one way or another) it should be from them and not a third-party.

Apart from that, some of the tinfoil thoughts in this thread are kind of silly. Thinking Blizzard is using .50/hr labor in China to farm gold??? Blizzard doesn't need to do that, they can make as much gold as they want. No farming needed. They aren't "in bed" with the gold sellers, they're trying to put them out of business.

[GabrielKnight]

The whole AMA read to me like a massive pump and dump; considering the dude admits he's paid almost entirely in crypto that isn't really surprising. Kinda annoyed the r/classicwow mods let that stay up but it is what it is.

Considering the fact that they removed the rule that prevented posting about private servers, I think it's safe to say that their level of butthurt goes beyond anything imaginable. It's no surprise that they let this dude promote his garbage while people are praising him for it.

The whole situation is kinda confusing to me, to be honest. The guy goes "Hi, I'm one of the people responsible for this problem the game has that you're all complaining about!", and the players treat him like some kind of hero.

[Relapses]

Considering the fact that they removed the rule that prevented posting about private servers, I think it's safe to say that their level of butthurt goes beyond anything imaginable. It's no surprise that they let this dude promote his garbage while people are praising him for it.

The whole situation is kinda confusing to me, to be honest. The guy goes "Hi, I'm one of the people responsible for this problem the game has that you're all complaining about!", and the players treat him like some kind of hero.

It's a little bit of human psychology where we're naturally intrigued by the "bad guy's" perspective; but in that dude's specific case I think it's because he was reinforcing the narrative that Blizzard added the token purely out of greed and contempt for their players.