Ah yeah the the good old warden thats so good at detecting bots that it can’t even recognise if a character has been logged into the game for 72+ hours grinding SFK solo at lvl 17 without taking a break 
If you want to delude yourself into thinking the GDKP ban was only about RMT then by all means, go ahead. But the fact of the matter is that the phenomenon was degrading the overall experience. In my opinion RMT was the least harmful aspect of GDKP.
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You must have missed the part where I said updates, or missed what’s been going on in the tech world for the last 5 years.
It’s clear you just want to GDKP and are ignoring all points and information thrown at you. Mr the “numbers show”, lol ok.
We cant deny GDPK was 1 of the reasons for gold buying.
Tons of gold buyers got ban, lets hope will be more bans.
That’s now how demand works. Demand has nothing to do with the supply, but with the consumer, and the consumer alone. A bigger or smaller supply will not change demand, it will only affect prices.
What you are referring to is an issue exclusively related to supply. What you should have said is that Supply is lower because “it’s harder to obtain and farm”. And that would also not be true.
It could be, yes. But it could also be an increase in demand, which is likely the case, since quests at lvl 40 do give more average gold than quests at lvl 25 did, grey items vendor for more, materials sell higher on the AH, and so the logic is that the supply of Gold at level 40 should be higher than it was back in p1 with the level 25 cap. There seems to have been no major changes in bots being banned recently, which seems to indicate that their process did not, in fact, become “harder and/or more time consuming”.
So this points towards an increase in demand being the cause for the increase in the price of Gold, rather than what you’re suggesting here. And this increase in demand makes sense, if you consider an inflation value that is higher than it would naturally be with a phase change imposing all the changes that I mentioned (more gold from quests, grey items, etc).
This is a broad sentence. If you are referring to Blizzard taking a cut from the gold that is sold, I can agree, there is no evidence of it. But there is no denying they get income from the accounts that are actively farming, so what you are claiming to be “false information” is, in fact, true information, up to a certain point.
What is the logic behind this? The methods involved in buying/selling gold have nothing to do with the Gdkp system, a person can buy Gold and never do a Gdkp. We’re talking about Gold being moved from one account to another, and the ban on Gdkp’s does not change that method at all.
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/economics-101-and-the-current-state-of-rmt/494922
Check out that thread, you will learn a few things.
EDIT: adding that with an increase in the Supply of gold, if all things were considered equal, the price of Gold should drop, rather than increase. If we take natural inflation into account, then that drop should not be as high/non-existent/actually get a small increase. The price spiking actually tells us that something else besides natural inflation is playing a role in it, and that is most likely the ban on Gdkp’s. Which may seem like a good thing, and up to a certain point it definitely is.
But then there’s everything else. Because Gold is more available now (not just for purchase, but for all the playerbase), prices will naturally increase (inflation). But a hyper rise in inflation actually devalues your Gold to the point where, proportionally, you actually have smaller amounts of it now than you did in p1. Again, resulting from the ban in Gdkp’s.
So it’s fair to say there are both pros and cons to it, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows like you anti-crew want to make it sound.
Never done a GDKP in my whole time throughout classic, TBC, Wrath, SOM or SOD & sure won’t be starting it now or ever.
Yeah lots been going on in tech for the last 20 years, but Blizz still can’t manage to detect bots at any significant level. I wouldn’t get your hopes up that warden is going be the silver bullet that puts an end to botting. People have been banging on about warden since 2008, yet the people who design bots are always 2 steps ahead. You know that technology isn’t just exclusive to legitimate companies trying to combat stuff like hacking and botting right?
A ban is only as good as it’s enforcement, if it’s not enforced properly then people will do it.
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For sure I’m not denying that at all. I’m just pointing out that it didn’t have the desired effect everyone thought it would including myself. The doubling of how much gold costs since the GDKP ban announcement is a clear indicator that the demand is at an all time high. The world has more bots than ever supplying that demand.
I thought GDKP was the main driving force behind bots turns out I was wrong.
You lost me at the whole “blizzard benefit from all the accounts”.
I think probably the most prolific research done so far is that of MetaGoblin. If you have research or data to that level I’d be willing to take a look at it.
Other than that all I can do is point you in the direction of chargebacks, how they are used and how much money is lost globally by the likes of Blizzard and Barclays alone.
Not going to get into an economist debate, seems to be a lot of stay at home “economists” when GDKP comes up. I agree that the demand is increased because the players aren’t getting hold of gold so easily now, as in, bought and washed gold (GDKP). The botting businesses have massive stockpiles.
So, we agree. Ban GDKP → less gold in circulation → more people buy gold directly now → gold price has gone up as a reaction to this. It’s not a stock issue, not this early on.
And this is a negative thing? Now those gold buyers are much MUCH easier to see.
But like I said, willing to take on-board your research into the lucrative underworld of bot farming. Until then will rely on the research that has been done, botters interviewed, developers interviewed and Blizzard’s PR reaction.
You think Microsoft would be down with the one of their IP’s having their biggest streamers (advertisers) glorifying and laughing about RMT? And you think this leads to “net” profit for Blizzard? Interesting.
EDIT: My last point was in reference to “onlyfangs”, a guild made up of some of WoW’s biggest streamers who not only bought gold but laughed at it on stream. Needless to say a bit of a PR nightmare for the “family friendly” Microsoft in the long run no?
They know its time to clean house, technology allowing them to do so. Classic is here to stay, WoW is here to stay, Microsoft are here to stay. Its time to clean house, GDKP is the start.
P2 is also fresh what increases goldbuying anyways. let’s wait until the phase ends.
So what you’re saying then is that people who can’t get their illegal gold now by doing GDKP, are actually just buying it instead of because they have no option? I mean wasn’t one of the biggest arguments about GDKP that the majority of the players were legitimate and it was only a minority who bought gold? Pretty sure I seen that repeated multiple times in many threads.
So are you directly accusing all GDKP players of buying gold now and that’s what’s pushing the price up?
Not at all.
GDKP didn’t mix well with modern meta gaming. I’m not saying everyone who ran GDKP bought gold at all, for many of them, the fact that they ran GDKP’s meant they DIDN’T have to buy gold.
If it was technically and physically impossible to buy gold, say a perfect little world of unicorns and rainbows…there is no issue with GDKP, it’s actually a clever and optimal system. BUT…because gold buying is possible, GDKP becomes tainted.
It created an arms race amongst players, prices increasing. That affected everything including GDKP.
Like I said in my original post, banning of GDKP is to stop the ease of which gold is able to be “washed”. Mail was being sent from gold sellers as “here’s your GDKP” cut. Once the gold moves around it’s very hard to trace and/or police.
Again, like I said in my original reply. Banning GDKP is basically to clear the traffic, get the data a bit cleaner when it comes times to analyse and soon (very soon) it won’t be humans analysing it.
RMT in WoW has got so bad that it’s now practically public knowledge, that includes outside of the active playerbase. That’s when something becomes a problem…like I said above, when your main advertisers of the game (streamers) are glorifying it after a merger…you don’ think Microsoft have maybe asked a question or two? Maybe willing to provide extra resources to make this “public” problem go away?
Look, the internet has been a very dark place since its inception. In your lifetime you will remember two main technological leaps:
Before Internet / After Internet
Before AI / After AI
The internet underworld right now is like 1930’s America, the mob runs free. Technology came along after it became a such a problem that terms like “public enemies” were used in the newspapers. You can look at the internet pre-AI like 1930’s America.
Blizzard need two things. A test area coughSoDcough and clean data. Step one to clean data is banning GDKP. End of.
Not banning streamers like soda and the likes does not help the company’s image of upholding their ToS.
That, and the fact that the WoW token was the “best” response they came up with to combat RMT, doesn’t make for a good case for them. Fighting RMT with RMT isn’t exactly what the playerbase has in mind, I believe.
And my concern is almost exclusive towards the legit playerbase, hyper inflation affects all of us.
Chargebacks are irrelevant to the question of RMT’s? What’s the correlation here, I may be missing something.
I very much hope that this ends up being the case and RMT’s suffer in the near future. I highly doubt it, but I hope.
Them not banning those actions means that THEY think it leads to profits, not me. If they didn’t, they would ban them.
I mean a guild I was in people just openly talked about buying gold in chat and told other to just swipe. It’s such a common non issue now that it’s just accepted. Even just a few years ago that would be the kind of thing you would keep to yourself & you definitely wouldn’t have admitted to that back in the day for fear of getting kicked out or blacklisted.
You seem smart enough to probably be aware that there’s obviously a bit of politics there.
While outright banning these streamers who break the ToS feels “fair” (as it’s what would happen to a regular player like us) they obviously don’t for political/marketing purposes.
No different than a politician dodging a parking ticket, where you wouldn’t. That’s life I’m afraid.
Those accounts do get banned, those are the accounts that make up for most of Blizzard’s figures that gets posted. Blizzard do not benefit profit wise from those as much as people like to think. Just like botting there is a massive underworld of stolen cards, pop-up bank accounts. It’s been a while since I’ve seen data but Barclays deals with billions alone to charge backs. You think its harder to login to your bank account these days for …“reasons”? It’s costing them money.
I’m not sure where you are from but here in the UK credit agencies have to obey something known as “Section 75”. This basically makes the retailer(Blizzard) jointly responsible with the credit provider(barclays). What does that mean? It mean’s when a card is used to sign upto 20 odd WoW subs, that then gets banned, that then gets “charged” back both Blizzard AND barclays lose that money. Barclays continue to provide data on billions lost to chargebacks…and that’s one credit provider. Do you have data to provide proft…somehow…to the retailer?
In the modern world you’ll constantly hear “they dont care about us” and “they getting rich of us” in literally everything. I’m not a Blizzard white knight here, I get it, I fully understand its easy to say those things and point fingers at “the man”. All I’m saying is realistically, Blizzard (and now Microsoft) are at a wholeheartedly net lose to nefarious behaviour such a RMT, botting and all the underworld that comes with that.
Should they have done more over the last while? Sure, should have had more GM’s but if you look at systems that have been put in place across the internet, and are continuing to be put in place you can see where things are going. Microsoft themselves have just got rid of a lot of customer service divisions across activision/blizzard. Sony have just replaced their entire CS system with an integrated system that covers their entire scope. All of these things scream a foundation for AI to dropped in. You ever opened a website and get the “chatbot”, its systems like that. Right now it uses an API to basically plug into FAQ’s and use keywords from tags. That kind of system will soon have an AI running within it…not long from now you will soon have conversations with chatbots all too very human.
Anyway, bit of a long winded response. I’ll leave it with what I’ve been saying all along, they need a testing space and they need clean data. This is why GDKP had to be banned.
EDIT: Remember that WoW is part of the single largest gaming division on the planet, personally I couldn’t even begin the imagine the AI integration in god knows what systems over the next 5 years. Classic’s popularity has proven stalwart now possibly overtaking retail who knows. I’ve always personally felt that SoD is a glorified PTR, a test realm for what’s to come. Basically…classic+. SoD is again “data”, letting them see what sticks and what doesn’t. To cash in on the growing popularity of classic they probably realistically need a full release “classic+”. To use old school methods would require possibly 2 years or more of development time, let alone beta testing and public testing. What if they could get all that for free, and quickly. A glorified, phased…test. A large amount of data and feedback(players) from already subscribing players. I give you…Season of Discovery (we don’t need a PTR because it is one)…
So ask yourself this, if there was pure/true classic+ release (wow classic 2 basically) with all the marketing, hype, new and old players. Would Microsofts profits in the long run, be better with or without RMT running rife? Your answer is in there.
If blizzard do not benefit from boting, but losing money, then why they dont hire low paid GMs to police servers? No need IT pro for that job.
For EU SoD servers would be enough 1 GM ± 3 k € per month? Or what I don’t understand?
Exactly. You mentioned a good point: marketing. Spending millions on ads may seem counterintuitive, since companies are losing a lot of money upfront, but they do so because their research says they will make a profit in the long run. And not banning these streamers was a decision made after another similar internal research, hence why I said they believe it will be profitable for them. It’s not about the streamer himself, but all that comes attached, all the people that would see their favourite streamer stop playing the game, and lose interest and stop playing as a result. So this one streamer account isn’t really just one account, but several.
The bot accounts that get banned are also subject to internal research, but here the situation is much different. A legitimate player that gets banned is much less likely to create another account. A bot company not so much, since they have a much bigger incentive, in the form of RMT providing them with profit. So while getting accounts banned may set them back a bit, they too do their own research, and if they find potential for profit, they will just create another. And while Blizzard does not have methods that effectively diminish that potential to the point of those companies not finding it viable to continue, the cycle will go on.
In a perverse sense, Blizzard actually has little incentive to actually develop those tools, however, unless their gains from doing so outweigh the losses of doing it. Years and years have passed since this issue started, and those tools are not yet in place. It’s either because they’re really hard to come up with, or because their math tells them it’s more profitable to play a double agent: claiming to be fighting it so the legitimate playerbase maintains interest, while not putting those tools into play, maintaing the income from those bot companies as well.
Again, I would like to believe this is not the case, but they’re not making it convincing enough for me to believe it.
Any company that isn’t profitable can only hold for so long before they are forced to close business. The fact that Blizzard has shown record profits year after year indicates that they’re managing, even through all the chargebacks and whatnot.
The proof is actually shown by them on their own reports.
This is what I believe was going through their minds when they came up with the WoW token.
They kinda said it themselves when they announced SoD, when they indicated it would have no PTR. I’m actually totally fine with that and to be honest, I like it a lot, having the whole guide to the game content before the game is even out is like playing a game with cheats, the sensation of, well, discovery, isn’t there.
Yep, that’s why I say in the thread that I linked here, that the idea of banning Gdkp’s should be given a chance.
I don’t have the data to make that kind of assessment, and doing it would be taking a very wild guess. There are way too many factors involved around the question of RMT relating to plus/minus profit: how many players would not join classic+ if RMT was still a thing? (and perhaps even more of a thing than it is now) How many players would not join if it was not? How many RMT-related accounts are there, and how many would be there if the anti-RMT systems were better? How would RMT companies react to new anti-RMT tools? Would they push through and develop their own new tools to work around them? And how much would it cost them? Would it still be profitable?
Personally, I would like to believe a WoW without RMT would provide them with bigger profits, as it would make the game healthier for me, you, and the rest of the (legit) playerbase. But these last (quite a) few years have not helped to that belief.
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Oh god here we go again, GDKP is against the spirit of classic. Oh boy
Good points and I agree with some but understand the rest.
I will say that overall profit doesn’t just equate to “everything’s fine” as I’m sure you are more than aware. BMW could post record profits for 2024 as a whole, doesn’t mean the tenders for their tyre providers aren’t being looked at and that division being singled out for things being x,y and not z.
I think realistically (and this was sort of my point when mentioning it was a public problem) we can look at it as it hasn’t affected them “enough” yet, but it is getting worse and therefor will effect them more as times progresses. This problem is talked about more than ever, we are seeing bots more than ever and that should tell us something. If we see it, streamers see it, if they see it youtube sees it, if youtube sees it potential players see it. … can see where I’m going I hope.
As much as we would like to think or make out that Blizzard are a bunch of bumbling idiots they most definitely have teams analysing internal models. I think if anything, we can at least look at the very potential that one of those models has reached a point that requires a reaction. Their legal, financial and marketing team now report back to the parent company too. So, Step 1…is?
In laymens - they “dgaf” before because it wasn’t a big issue. Now everyone is talking about it, laughing about it and openly acknowledging it…or outright taking part in it, its become part of the game. Microsoft have just bought them out, there’s potential for more profits and therefor investments including future version of the game. Time to clean house.
There’s also bot farmers on record stating that the process is becoming harder. Recently, an entire farm of bots found themselves teleported into the middle of the ocean in desolace. These were Z axis “flying” bots which are historically known to evade Warden. I don’ think a human was sat there teleporting them as non of their staff are dedicated to that. Possibly testing something tho??
Believe me when I say it, AI is coming into customer service fast and hard. The landscape is going to change massively.
Also, I’m not trying to pretend I’m in the know with any of this. You could ask anyone remotely involved with Systems (outside of AI) how you would begin to tackle such an issue:
- Fresh Test Environment (SoD phase 2)
- Large amount of data to create a somewhat matrix of data (SoD playerbase)
- Clean data - so in this instance the movement of botted gold (Ban GDKP)
Think about it, why did they ban GDKP at the start of the phase and not outright on the spot one day? Highest amount of players, highest demand for gold,items etc etc. Day 0 fresh as a daisy data.
Data, data, data.
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You just made my hopes go up with what you said there. Yes, I definitely agree they do research into the future as well, they have to do it, and I very hopefully wish you are right that they are (at least now!) attempting to effectively put an end to it, due to concerns that their profits may be very much affected by it soon enough.
Here’s wishing for a shiny sun day in a (not so long) future =)