Now, you introduce a title or mount that is rewarded to those who report and get a gold seller banned. This will result in players buying small amount of gold from websites, and reports everyone in hope of getting the reward.
How to ban gold sellers and botters:
Players pay their sub with something right? So, you flag their credit card, bank, real name, country etc - and forever ban them from purchasing anything on Battle.net.
Those who still wanna try their luck, well have fun going through the trouble of changing your name, bank, country, credit card etc…
This should be applied on the fresh WoTLK servers before its too late. Remove all gold collected over 1000g and start banning bots, because they already have 10’s of thousands of gold.
Cons: Blizzard will lose a lot of monthly subscription payers.
As you stated, they’d lose money on the bot subscriptions, and they’d lose money on having to hire people to do manual labor instead of the automatic approach they’ve taken sine a long time ago to cut costs.
I would love to live in the utopia you’re describing, but from a perspective up cutting costs and maximizing profits, you’re right - that’s never gonna happen.
Remove all the bots thus subs and get something for free to players ? crazy stuff, real madness.
Why report has not been added to the shop service yet ? … they would have to actually dealt with it
Make it a suspendable offense to buy gold. 3-7 days cannot login.
The ppl buying gold must be the most addicted wow-players, and a suspension for some days wont make them un-sub.
This way the botters/goldsellers wont have anyone to sell to.
I believe it already is.
When TBC started, I knew many people who bought gold for money. The joke was, that none of them was banned. But once, guildie ( cool guy, a bit slow, but fun to play with ) bought 1k gold, he got banned, if I remember correctly, for a week.
It’s not only goldsellers who are botting. I know legit players who bot while they are at work or while asleep. The machine keeps printing gold in dungeons where other players will not report them (not like if they could report them Blizzard would care).
I joined their bot discord. The chat is VERY active and with lots of support and updates. You wouldn’t imagine how many “normal” players are botting on a second account, made specifically for this reason.
Tbh, it such an easy fix to get rid of bots forever. The main reason why nothing happens is simply because they:
Generate money with their extra accounts
Make the statistics look good (nr of subscribers, nr of active players etc)
It’s a game and everything is logged. It would be so easy for a gamemaster to check who is running an unrealistic amount of dungeons of a certain type.
Follow that player and validate the node-pathfinding-robot-behaviour and permaban that account and also ban all accounts connected to that user’s credit card information etc. You can even go further and investigate ALL gold trades to perhaps a friend’s account etc. You target that account and clean everything; all achievements, items and gold.
Russian is known for their GDKP runs, bots and gold selling. For them it’s not a game, more of a business to actually survive in real-life.
Another MMORPG, TIbia, had the same problems with Polish (also Brasil, Mexican) players to a point where 80%+ of the online playerbase were using bots haha.
Another problem in both scenarios, is that no one knew English so it was a hell to communicate. So, naturally - they formed communities of X people.
crazy stuff, real madness.