A Plea for Better Player Protection in Gold-Based Services

Community General Discussion
22

Great post, and I agree wholeheartedly.

I would however amend the above to say consumer rights.

I’ve railed about that for years, because our consumer rights are pretty awful. Blizzard are truly an American company to the bone in this aspect of their business.

The underlying problem is that you own nothing.

You don’t own your account. All the mounts and pets you’ve perhaps bought are not yours. The WoW Token you bought and the gold you sold it for – none of that is yours.

All you buy is the ability to lend the license of that particular thing, be it an account, a mount, gold, or whatever. But Blizzard owns all of it and reserves the right to withdraw it all without notice or reason.

The most absurd example is probably a TCG card like a Swift Spectral Tiger.
You own the card and you own the code, but if you use the code, then you exchange it for a license to have a Spectral Tiger in WoW that Blizzard formally owns.

Which is insane.

And it’s also where I think players get lulled into a false sense of security, because they believe that if something unfortunate happens to them in the game, then Blizzard are their friend and they will make things right again because they have spent all this money and been a loyal customer and fan, so surely Blizzard will come to their aid in times of need.

But that’s not the reality.

Months ago when those automated bans started rolling out and players just saw their long-standing accounts get permanently shut down, and afterward were met with silence upon appealing the bans, the reality should have dawned on everyone:
The players’ interests as consumers are not Blizzard’s as a business.

The guild banks that got wiped out? Tough luck.

Years past when players had their entire professions deleted? Sucked to be them.

And the pure wild west of player-driven services is also just going to be a constantly rolling snowball of incidents where players get frauded of virtual assets and subsequently discover that they have no rights or protections as victims of cybercrime. The consumer rights protections and basic criminal laws that exist in real life don’t translate to Azeroth.

There is no help to be had from Blizzard, because they are not obligated to provide any, and they will never ever go the extra mile or any mile, because doing so is an expense for them. And none of us are worth that to them. If we were, then they wouldn’t have sacked their entire Customer Support division.

Consumer rights in gaming are piss poor, and especially Live Service games and other games that rely heavily on microtransactions are absolutely terrible. From a European point of view the legislation and regulation of this industry with regards to consumer rights can not come too soon.

I have personally stopped throwing money at Blizzard beyond the bare minimum. Those wiped out guild banks and automated perma-bans were the wake-up call for me.
The account we’re all playing on and have invested years and years into, and which we all think is ours to the end of time and our precious digital legacy - nu uh. Don’t get too attached, and don’t spend money you’re not prepared to lose - be it directly or indirectly.

Blizzard are a pretty untrustworthy dealer, given all the money some of us are handing over to them.

6 Likes
23

as Jack sparrow once said

Take what you can, and give nothing back

24

We have consumer rights it’s just that it’s up to us to defend them.

25

:person_facepalming:

:person_facepalming: :person_facepalming:

The CORE issue of this is players scamming other players. NOTHING ELSE
People have been scammed by millions of gold in the past, PRE TOKEN :exclamation:
You would’ve been scammed the same way if you’d had earned the money solely ingame. YOU gave some strangers some REALLY STUPIDLY HIGH AMOUNTS OF GOLD completely naively for using a system that is known for being highly abused by sellers…
That you paid real money for that gold is on you, Blizzard did what they’ve always done: Take actions against the scammers.
Gold mostly NEVER got returned, in no scaming case, from vanilla up to today. It’s pretty rare to get gold returned, if at all.

26

I just have to ask. How do you “own” pixels in an online video game? My character, its collections, is purely dependant on Blizard’s servers…well existing. Even if I am not a doomsayer, I am not expecting WoW to be up online at my retirement age(early 30s atm). So if I would “own” a character. Then what happens if Blizzard goes bust or simply decides to shutdown their WoW servers. Would they send me a usb flash drive with character data on it? And even if thats the case, what use would it be if there is no Blizzard servers for me to use said character data on?

1 Like
27

I think their reason is that once a feature is officially supported to that degree, they can never take it out again without big backlash. They probably want the status quo, because they profit from the problem currently, but they wanna have the option to prohibit boosts, if they think it hurts the game too much. It’s very pragmatic how Blizzard is approaching this topic tbh.

They basically “quarantined” boosting inside the services channel, so it doesn’t hurt the game as much as it did before, and at the same time they let themselves the option open to take boosting out of the game fully, once it stops being worth it for them, because it does alienate a big chunk of genuine players, that also are important for the game being healthy. Even more so, as they usually play intrinsically for fun, not for boosting, etc. and we can all agree I think that nobody is gonna buy Boosting anymore, if there aren’t enough genuine players playing for fun, as the whole worth of anything in wow is relative and content is not just gonna be developped for boosting.

28

A lot of the consumer rights that pertain to physical products don’t pertain to digital ones in games, usually (as I described above) because you’re not actually buying a product but rather loaning a license under very unfavorable terms.

And Blizzard are definitely a game company that doesn’t put the customer in a favorable position at all. Remember, South Koreans had to take Blizzard to court to be allowed to refund their purchase of Diablo III.
Blizzard don’t part with their money or their power over their customers willingly, ever.

And you’re right that consumer rights have to be fought for, which is why it’s disappointing to read many of the above replies that place the fault of the incident with the victim rather than the company for not providing secure systems. That’s ridiculous and not a position anyone would take in real life (we’d expect our bank to refund our money if we get scammed, or a company to reimburse a faulty product, or similar). But sadly it’s a typical position of degenerate gamers to spite themselves to mock another. Idiots.

I used the Spectral Tiger in my initial reply, so I’ll just continue with that for the sake of illustration.

If I owned the digital product, then I should be able to extract the code from the game when I don’t want to use the tiger anymore - because it’s my code.
But I can’t do that, because I don’t own it. It merely unlocks the Spectral Tiger on the account I’m lending from Blizzard.
If I owned it, then I should be able to use it and also withdraw it and take it with me again when I’m done playing WoW.

The same holds true for Online Store purchases of mounts and pets. I don’t own those. I have paid to unlock them on the licensed account that I pay to borrow from Blizzard.
If I owned those mounts and pets that I’ve paid for, then I should be able to sell them or give them away to other players when I’m done playing WoW, because they’re my belongings and therefore mine to do with as I please.
I can do that with a book I buy in a bookstore. I can take it home, read it, put it on the shelf, and at any point I choose, I can decide to sell it or give it away to anyone I care to. Because I own it and therefore have the right to do so.
Digital purchases could easily be managed the same way. But that’s of course not desirable for game companies, so alas, here we are.

29

OP, let me tell you this right now… all those raid boosters you see spamming in chat? Do you honestly think they got an entire raid team idling by waiting to boost someone…?

They’re leading a pug unawares those people are being used to “boost” someone. There’s absolutely zero guarantee these boost runs are successful BECAUSE it’s riding on the back of a pug.

It’s all a scam…

30

If it’s all a scam, then Blizzard are immoral for allowing it in their game, and pervasive for promoting its presence in the game.

31

How exactly? All they offer is for you to buy some Gold. What you do with the gold is and remains your own responsibility. I don’t see how it ever can be seen different. Esp if you buy a service from another player…something hard to define, based on pure and utter trust.

32

Blizzard should of course guarantee the safety and security of all gold transactions in the game.

They can do that.

It would be a pure positive.

They choose not to.

33

What is wrong with you, seriously…not even your bloody real life bank offers you a damn refund if you manually transfer money to a wrong account in most cases…

34

Its ok if you arent smart enough to think wider fella. Maybe go post in the ‘whats the cutest battlepet’ thread, seems more your level.

35

Yet there are also rules which also pertain to private physical property but not digital ones.
When you own a physical object - say a book, a car, a house…whatever. Nobody can touch it with your express permision. A publisher may decide to recall a book for whatever reason but you can return the book on a voluntary basis or you can keep it. They wont invade your house and take the book by force. Your private property = nobody can touch it. Or with a car… even if the car brand/manufacter goes bust, you still get to keep the car(sure, might be more difficult to service it and find parts but nobody can take your car away).
Yet digital products work differently. Life service games change, develop. If for example you “owned” your priest, then Blizzard woulnt be allowed to bug fix it, change its talents, build new talents, specs…aka develop the class…unless you give them your express permission to change your property - your priest and that goes to every priest player on WoW.
Or you could sue Blizzard for shutting down servers, because your own property - priest, is no longer available to you.

So its easy to argue from 1 standpoint - you dont own your account. But that also gives the freedom for Blizz to develop and change the game freely to meet their vision. Video games after all are a form of art in a way.

36

:roll_eyes:

You guys just project your dislike towards the WoW token onto the real issues of why boosts, scams, goldsellers etc. exists, and try to force it onto the token, that’s all…

Everytime some rando comes around with a new way of grabbing magnitudes of players gold or prices start skyrocketing again you lot come around and wave the stupid token flag…

The token did neither make anything worse nor create anything that didn’t already exist! Blizzard cashing in on those buying gold for real money is not fueling anything that greedy players already try to push to the extreme anyway! They had too many customers before and continue to generate too many customers without the token beause they keep providing their crap in every spot they get their greasy, slimey fingers into! Those are the issue, and the ONLY reason why all of this crap can thrive! Because there will ALWAYS be those people who shove their gold into their faces! WITHOUT the stupid token!

37

The problem is that if they officially protect, recognise, and guarantee boosting sales, they are endorsing it as an official part of the game, and cannot really remove it again, because people will be buying tokens explicitly for this.

Don’t think they are ready to seal the door behind them.

38

Have you checked with others how much mythic raid carry cost? As it’s around 10x price of yours?!

39

In my opinion that would be Aura

3 Likes
40

The OP gets scammed of 2.5 million gold and Blizzard says: “Tough luck.”

That shows just how poor a position the WoW player, i.e the consumer, is in relative to Blizzard, i.e the seller.

And yeah, physical and digital products may not be entirely the same, and I haven’t said they aren’t, but that shouldn’t mean that it’s reasonable that Blizzard has zero obligations toward their consumers, or that the consumers have zero protections regarding their purchases.

Like I said earlier, there’s no shortage of examples of players getting screwed over in the game for no fault of their own, and Blizzard having no obligation to do anything, and consequently doing nothing.
That puts players in a crazy position given the value many of us attribute to our accounts and the money we spend on the game.

And that ain’t right.

1 Like
41

One small thing it is not almost a full year it is a full year of subscription even more then that.
Also there is something called responsibility. and we the players are responsible for our own money and need to make sure to at least do a little background check into a purchase and the people providing whatever service. This does not just apply to wow it applies to any online store we make a purchase at. If these people providing a service can not indentify themselves or are not willing to you should not go and purchase a gold service from them.

Thanks for reading

1 Like