The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is hyped, in my opinion overhyped, either way it has produced probably 1000+ videos on YouTube regarding how to min-max everything you could possibly think of.
It’s also the expansion where, as I remember, bots really starting to appear. I promise you that you will have bots such as: druids flying around gathering resource nodes, rogues farming Karazan and collecting resource nodes in the new dungeons by using stealth. This will, once again, for the good or bad, highly influence the market/economy.
Any intentions to do something about this? The result will be, as we have seen now in the previous Classic modes, a pay-to-win option; where players buy cheap gold. Now, for someone like myself, that has money but limited time, I would (if I wanted) spend a couple of 100 dollars to get what I want.
My initial solution would be to mark all resources in dungeons as not obtainable until first boss is killed. And any trash mob (not boss) in a dungeon or raid that is grey and killed will not drop any loot. This would atleast slow down the number of resources on the market… Perhaps not the most brilliant solution, but what I really trying to say…
WoTLK will be popular; many players equals a big market for botters/gold sellers.
What will you do prevent botters/gold sellers in WoTLK ?
The best solution I could think of, but probably not very popular, is a premium server where you pay £100 to join. On the server there are actually game masters like the good old days who swing the ban hammer at stuff like gold buying/selling, botting, gdkp etc.
Disclaimer: this is only the best solution because blizzard have shown they don’t do anything in the last 3 years. The REAL best solution would be to actually enforce their own rules on the current servers.
I mean, we have artifical intelligence that can learn to play chess at grandmaster level by itself after you simply teach it the basic rules.
Surely making one that can recognize bots with the same certainty as players do should be possible? The longer it does its job, the more accurate it gets. Any innocent player banned for botting can appeal (bots dont appeal, they just make a new one).
Once we get to the point that buying a new bot account is more expensive than the profit the bot brings before being banned, the botting stops.
Just like Casinos can/could (and did) stop BlackJack players from suceessfully counting cards. (Nowadays Casinos run Blackjack with so many decks and reshuffling early so card-counting becomes pointless).
Its just like Odd-betting-companies shut out winning players, “sorry, you can only play max 10 pounts on that bet/you cant play that bet at all”.
Its what they do, and no authority stops them.
Blizzards most certainly can stop bots and goldsellers if they want.
Botters have to pay subcscription, if they ban them enough times so they have to pay subscription again enough times the profits disappear and thus the will to do this.
A very very high percentage of wow players use one to two x VPN addresses. Botters use many many vpn-addresses. And VPN adresses are visible to Blizzard, and also the Blizz-ppl learnt to count in school.
One good gold sale would be far more than the cos6t of an account and the way Blizzard ban all they would need is two accounts, also, they could bot retail and gold buy tokens.
VPNs are against the rules, but Blizzard still allow people to use them. I think you are wrong about the amount of people who use VPNs too, as neither of us have proof of the amount of people who use them. The rule they break is about intercepting the data from the client to the server.
i can tell you how they’ ll deal with outdoor botting !
they’ll do the same way they did for tbc: they’ll let HUNDREDS of bots run everywhere, take their Sweet boost and sub money, and maybe ban some if we(players) have reported them
and if you report lots of bots, you’ll recieve that sweet automated ingame mail, saying “thanks honey for the reports, but we’ll let this ones run two more months until they renew their Sub atleast one time, before the ban”
as a spit in your face
If people want to buy gold, why not, more people raiding and BGs = good, i dont care where and how they get loot
No lifes 24/7 in games is not fair too
honestly Muppsy mentioning hi-tech AI will prolly be the best to get anywhere, considering the lack of competent GMs currently in the community that don’t even bother with putting in the effort to keep a servers economy stable.
There are things to consider when that AI ever happens, like patterns/routing/ability use and weird things like glitching through doors. But knowing blizzard they just care about money and thats why we will have scuffed economies from P1 wrath till P5.
about gdkps, honestly just ban em, its stupid, people legit just buy gold to be a buyer in a GDKP.
gold farming / botting will deflate materials and ensure that these are available at all times. You dont have to farm yourself
the influx of gold (through gold buying) will fuel GDKP raids which in turn will crowd casual people out of raids, i.e. unless you can buy your items, there will be a low chance to get it through legit casual play.
In my opinion 2. far outweighs 1. and given human nature, people will go ahead and spend 100EUR to be able to stay ahead of the curve, making it a P2W game