Blizzard Comments on Account Restrictions for New Players

[Lumy]

Season of Discovery - Account Restrictions for New Players

Blizzard Comments on Account Restrictions for New Players

Hi there, firstly, apologies for the radio silence on this change, it is targeting a group that that we specifically wanted to keep in the dark as long as possible. Let me now try and fill in some details for you!

We’ve been recently experimenting with a change to Classic Era and Season of Discovery that places restrictions on new accounts that have not yet purchased and consumed one month of gametime (i.e. one month has also passed since the purchased time). Specifically, we’re preventing those accounts from transferring in-game wealth to other players (mail, trade, auction). Players under this restriction can still receive gold and items, so established players can still help friends.

A very small number of you may have seen this restriction erroneously applied to your accounts periodically in the past week while we wrestled with some edges case, these have now been resolved. Once an account has passed this aging threshold, it will never see this restriction again.

Of course, we want this change to impact legitimate new players as little as possible. We understand that this level of restriction will impact gameplay, so we’re evaluating the effectiveness of this change very carefully. If we stick with it, we’ll consider adjusting the restrictions to further minimize negative impact to new players.

It’s our hope that this change will have significant effect against the Real Money Trade that is fueling multiple negative impactful behaviors in Classic Era and Seasonal, but we’re watching it closely.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to make World of Warcraft a fairer place for all.

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I’m sorry but this just isn’t the case. I paid for a friend to play the game for the first time, he’s now 1.5 months into his game time and has done every “solution” as suggested by a blue post or otherwise.

Relog
Stay logged out for 8 hours
Stay logged out for 12 hours

The only criteria that seems is supposed to matter is 30 days game time, well we’re at 43 days (paid 2/26) now and he still cannot interact with anything, including mailing to his own characters, since Phase 3 rolled out.

Sorry about that, if you log out and back in this should be resolved. Stupid February and its 28 days. This goes for anyone who’s only purchased month was February.

[PenguinChan]

I don't see how this really does anything but punish newer players. At worst this makes it so botters have to stockpile their subs and bots up and rifle through them as they get banned, and keep an upkeep of new accounts going like they already do. I guess this is a method to enforce more $15 a month payments to Blizzard and reduce the gold-seller's potential profit?

[imperialcruzer]

I don't see how this really does anything but punish newer players. At worst this makes it so botters have to stockpile their subs and bots up and rifle through them as they get banned, and keep an upkeep of new accounts going like they already do. I guess this is a method to enforce more $15 a month payments to Blizzard and reduce the gold-seller's potential profit?

I have two theories:

1. The bots are not actually paying. They are using fraudulent methods to subscribe. This gives Blizzard some time to catch the fraudulent payments.

2. The bots know they are going to be banned within a relatively quick amount of time and are taking actions that are more extreme than normal to obtain gold. This delay gives Blizzard time to catch them.

[Flame6]

Its very similar to how Twitch deals with bots. A lot of new accounts can't chat unless they phone verify or their accounts are over xyz days old. This lets Twitch have time to ban the accounts before they do bad things.

[Schintus]

Stupid February and its 28 days.

If only there was globalization libraries to help overcome the most tedious calendar calculations....