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  1. #1

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

    Blizzard's Thoughts on the WoW Token in Wrath Classic
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    Greetings.

    We want to take a moment to talk about WoW Token in Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

    The best way to start is to simply say that this wasn’t something we arrived at lightly. For the entirety of Classic so far, the WoW Classic team has been very resistant to the idea of adding WoW Token to any form of Classic in the Western regions (NA and EU). When WoW Classic started in 2019, adding something like token felt unimaginable to us, and that continued to be true for us–even late into Burning Crusade Classic–for a few reasons:

    • In Vanilla WoW, the scarcity of gold is a major factor in how you approach your journey in Azeroth. From saving to get your first mount at 40, to picking and choosing which skills you wanted to learn while leveling so you could afford a new weapon or piece of armor. Later on at level 60, some form of time investment is needed to “maintain” a character in an ecosystem where flasks, resistance potions, and elixirs are such a major part of the game, and resources are scarce and highly contested. This was true all the way through Burning Crusade, where potions and flasks could represent a significant weekly expense and the resources required to make them were still quite difficult to obtain.
    • It just didn’t feel “Classic”. It felt jarring, out of place, and was antithetical to what most of us wanted to relive about those early years of WoW.

    However, what we want to do from a design perspective and what we need to do for the good of the community aren’t always aligned, and this is one of the more difficult things about maintaining a large online game like Wrath Classic. When we really looked at the state of things in Wrath Classic, and how different players approach the game, we saw that we cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower. The impact of illicit RMT is beyond just buying gold; it’s the entire black market that revolves around gold sales. The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just “bots” that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade.

    We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

    Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

    We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

    While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. It’s just one tool, though, among many. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

    Wrath Design and the “Value” of Gold

    Circling back to what was mentioned earlier about why WoW Token feels like a tool we should deploy now, we have to look at the base design of Wrath of the Lich King. Ultimately, this is what convinced us to reconsider WoW Token after resisting and refusing this path for so long. In Wrath Classic, your normal weekly activities are, for the most part, self-sustaining. Buying potions, flasks, reagents, and other normal necessities of endgame can be subsidized entirely by mostly just playing the game normally. Doing your usual weekly raid, a few dungeons, or a few dailies a week will net even the most fervent and well-prepared characters more gold than they would need to maintain themselves. Simply put, gold is more plentiful, and the base design of Wrath minimized the focus on needing to “farm” to support normal play.

    When we considered that, we realized that the introduction of token wouldn’t be a temptation for most regular players to buy to help support their usual everyday gameplay. It’s simply not impactful to the average player who logs in, raids a few days a week with their guild, does a few dungeons and dailies, and then plays other games in between those activities. There’s no friction in that player’s experience that would tempt them to buy a token just to keep themselves afloat.

    Better Visibility into Exploitative Account Actions

    As mentioned earlier, we need to improve the visibility around what we do. We posted some weeks ago that we banned over 120,000 malicious accounts in World of Warcraft alone in a large wave, but those large waves that we talk about are actually a very small portion of the overall actions we take on a week over week basis. Using just the past two weeks as an example, here are the actions our GSO team have taken:

    • Total Exploitative Battle.net Account Closures: 248,105
    • Total Exploitative World of Warcraft Account Closures: 73,057

    This is just the last two weeks, and this is what our efforts look like very regularly, week-in and week-out. It’s an enormous effort and it’s many, many individuals’ full-time jobs to do this. This is an issue of sheer, staggering scale. We have the tools, and those tools are effective, but the malicious actors come right back with new and different methods every time. All that being said, we need to post these things more, and that’s something that our team wants to be able to surface more often.

    Thanks you for reading, and thank you for your feedback.

    – The WoW Classic Team

    WoW Hotfixes - May 24, 2023
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    Characters

    • The niffen have noticed that player’s scent permeates through all their characters, as such, the Smelly title is now account-wide.

    Classes

    • Paladin
      • Fixed an issue where some cooldowns were not updating dynamically with Blessing of Dusk.
      • The cooldowns of Holy Prism and Light’s Hammer are now reduced by Blessing of Dusk when the class set is equipped.

    Items and Rewards

    • Firelands Timewalking Trinkets
      • The Hungerer - Haste reduced by 5%.
      • Matrix Restabilizer - All secondary stats reduced by 5%.
      • Necromantic Focus - Mastery reduced by 20%.
      • Vessel of Acceleration - Critical Strike reduced by 10%.

    Player versus Player

    • Classes
      • Hunter
        • Sentinel now resets to 5 stacks or seconds available when Arenas and Battlegrounds start.
    • Items and Rewards
      • Ashkandur, Fall of the Brotherhood damage reduced by 60% in PvP Combat.
      • Bile-Stained Crawg Tusks damage reduced by 60% in PvP Combat.
      • Forgestorm damage reduced by 60% in PvP Combat.

  2. #2
    Poor Kaivax. God rest his soul. o7

  3. #3
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  4. #4
    I think they made their case pretty solid. We can't beat the bots & gold sellers, so we're just going to cut out the middleman. Sounds fair to me.

  5. #5
    So, their explanation to not include LFD into wotlk classic was "to keep it as close as possible to original".
    And now they add gear vendor?
    wow token?
    "improved HC dungeons"?

    (not to mention the fact that LFD WAS introduced in WOTLK).

    FU.

  6. #6
    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.
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  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Flame6 View Post
    I think they made their case pretty solid. We can't beat the bots & gold sellers, so we're just going to cut out the middleman. Sounds fair to me.
    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.

  8. #8
    Here's the thing. Yes, gold selling was present in Wrath Classic. Illegal gold selling, that carries risk. If you wanted to engage in buying gold, it was your risk to do so. You could be banned or have your account stolen.

    The risk was a deterrent. Adding the token is just their way of taking a cut of that market. It won't cut out the middleman, as some love to say, they'll just lower their prices below the token's value and run more bots.

    All they're doing is creating legitimate means of delegitimizing Classic Wrath, means which conveniently generate them revenue for nothing.

  9. #9
    why can't they just say "the execs want more money"?

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Soimu View Post
    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.
    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.

    Personally, I think it's likely Blizzard gave up a bit early in this particular situation given that we're midway through an expansion but it would have come to this eventually anyway. If Blizzard were actually interested in preventing the situation we're in currently from occurring they would have implemented changes back in Vanilla Classic.

  11. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by Soimu View Post
    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.
    "It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties."

  12. #12
    Blizzard is always four steps behind on any exploits, spambots, and botting gold farmers it seems.

    This is their way of offering a "legit" alternative so that they try to reduce the foothold these users have on their population.
    It is by no means a fix.
    And having the CEO earn more money is an added bonus.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by bbr View Post
    Blizzard is always four steps behind on any exploits, spambots, and botting gold farmers it seems.
    According to who?

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    According to who?
    Play the game, look around and see.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by bbr View Post
    Play the game, look around and see.
    If they're banning around 70,000 accounts every two weeks that's almost two million accounts a year. That doesn't seem like inaction on Blizzard's part to me.

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    According to who?
    Take a second or two to think about it logically, which action comes first: exploits, bots and spambots or the fight against them?

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Twdft View Post
    Take a second or two to think about it logically, which action comes first: exploits, bots and spambots or the fight against them?
    The observation is obviously anecdotal which is why I asked that question. I think it's kinda dismissive to make obvious statements about the nature of the problem when the entire point of this article was to explain some of the reasoning behind the token's implementation from a developer viewpoint.

  18. #18
    "We ban thousand of bots each week"
    All good but it is clearly not enough. There are dozens of EASY ways to make it much better:
    - waste as much time as possible of marked account to make it not worth doing it again in the future by for example shadowban
    - hire 1-2 people (yes Blizzard, you got enough money to do it) to manually check every single reported person - a few seconds is enough to be 99.9% sure X is a bot
    - stop fucking using these ban waves and do it all the time - these fuckers are now taught that they are much less in risk after big wave

    Also... stop saying 'WotLK gold is much less valuable' - this whole situation is clearly proof this statement is completely wrong...

    "It is a good way to help remove bots"
    True... but also partially a lie as Blizzard also introduced Token to Korea where are 0 bots so it is clearly for money move.
    Additionally - retail is filled with 'AI friends' too and Token is here for a few years now.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Mendzia View Post
    True... but also partially a lie as Blizzard also introduced Token to Korea where are 0 bots so it is clearly for money move.
    You got any data to back up this claim? Seems like you just made it up on the spot.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Relapses View Post
    You got any data to back up this claim? Seems like you just made it up on the spot.
    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.

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