Recent Asmon video about RMT got me thinking

Community General Discussion
1

For context, this is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv-M6dzhmmY It names a website openly so mods please let me know if this is breaking any rules or not, I’m happy to make the thread without linking the video.

So, it got me thinking that if Blizzard is really powerless against RMT. I understand that if Blizzard can’t do anything against hundreds of small scale websites, but this website is openly “defying” Blizzard and claiming that they make tens of millions per year by breaking Blizzard’s ToS and EULA. Now I’m not a lawyer but I’m inclined to think that if you make money by breaking another games agreements, it should be against the law, right? So why is Blizzard allowing them to operate freely to the point that they don’t have any issues with giving public speeches or making interviews for the video purposes?

By the wording of their letter in the video, I even think that this was a publicity stunt and they wanted for that video to happen; so all of these seem very crazy to me. As a regular citizen, even the thought of going against multibillion dollar company irks me, yet from what we can see there are no actual repercussions to these people.

So yeah, I’d be very happy to hear from you guys or especially from people that have expertise in this are if Blizzard is actually powerless against them or if they just don’t care whether their game goes to sh*t or not. Consumable prices on Classic skyrocketed and I actually quit the game because I couldn’t afford the raid consumables anymore, so it’s not a “victimless” crime.

2 Likes
2

Unfortunately no. Not by default anyway. If there’s stuff incorporated into the agreement that are actual laws in the real world; then there’s an overlap of sorts.

But the rules you agree to can only be enforced within the game; nowhere else.

If they’re engaging in anything illegal though; they should be held accountable.
It’s a shady world and there’s probably things going on that are not on the up-and-up.

3

they are not powerless.

just remove ability to trade and only allow to trade trough auctionhouse, flag high gold transfers for investigation and use some of our sub money to pay for a team that monitors these transfers instead of giving more to bobby.

the thing is that they don’t want becuase their employees are the ones running these rmt ‘‘companies’’.

1 Like
4

Isn’t it illegal to at least use another company’s copyrighted IP? They’re actually using WoW characters and stuff on their website, even what you say about RMT is true, I think they should at least be able to do something about that, no?

5

Actually can. Starting from farmbots which grind gold for selling - just making nodes personal so normal players who want farm some resources would see less “You can’t loot that item now blah-blah what a great idea it was to make things like this” or disappearing nodes just when you reach them.
With selling keys/raids - it’s a bit harder but still doable. While some guilds do that for gold(which is totally ok for me), there is nothing hard to track who doing that for RMT - enormous amount of raid/keys runs with stable team where only a very few ppl always different and that one always not performing - will be a trigger to doublecheck
It’s require some time, yes, but nothing “very very hard to catch”

6

Idk if that’s a tinfoil hat theory or if you have any actual proof but I really doubt that’s the case to be honest :smiley:

7

Should be yeah.

I didn’t watch the video because I don’t like Asmon’s persona and some of the ideology he’s representing.

If that’s what that website is doing; they could and should be held accountable at the very least for that.

8

Yeah they’re doing it, I won’t link the website but if you’re curious you can easily find it in the video to check yourself.

Don’t you think that a website that claims to have existed for 7 years(their words), have over a million visits per month and have more than 10 million revenue per year(their words) have no repercussions about using Blizzard’s IP at least show significant CBA attitude from Blizzard’s end? As a customer it’s pretty insulting to me to be honest to see Blizzard not even do the bare minimum.

9

its not like Blizzard haven’t done anything way worse.

and they wont be the first gaming comany filled with corruption.

if they want to they can stop it but they don’t stop it so thats more then enough proof.

10

So you think that they have the power to stop? I don’t know, from the looks of it, it seemed Blizzard is very powerless to me. All that talk about multibillion dollar company and you can’t even get your IP removed for years…

11

they have the power to stop rmt but they don’t have the willpower to remove inner corruption until they get caught.

12

Maybe, maybe not. It’s complicated.

However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is against the law in the US, and Blizzard could take the owner of this website to court and get it shut down. The one thing you can be 100% certain of is that the owner of this website is located in a country that has no reciprocal legal arrangement with the US, and the website is hosted in a country that will ignore any requests to shut it down.

13

I have not watched the video, and I’m not going to sit through it. I have no idea what part of RMT it is discussing.

RMT is against the rules and they can take action against accounts. We saw a huge amount of gold taken out of circulation when one of the big boosting discords was taken down and they were told to cease running.

They later revised the rules on boosting (for gold) and it had to be done by groups of friends or guilds. The remaining boosting discords had to change the way they operate to stay within the rules.

This is wholly different from those dodgy third party sites that offer boosts for real money. I am not a legal expert so I can’t claim to know the ins and outs of Blizz trying to pursue every single one of those services offered online or what if it’s even financially viable to pursue them.

1 Like
14

In the video it’s stated that their company is based in Cyprus, which is an EU member so I actually have no doubt if it’s illegal in the eyes of the law, the US/EU courts’ judgement will be enforceable.

So I guess it comes down to whether it’s illegal or not, or if Blizzard cares or not I guess.

1 Like
15

Blizzard is a joke on this front.

When they started writing how many accounts they were banning for botting every month, being a quarter million each month, my BS detector went off big time.

I then said they should change strategy to banning those who are buying instead because their accounts have value, but they seem unable to do that.

I then see a video exposing that Blizzard have 10 people who’s looking into this, and they’re not spending their full time on it anyway, and they have no decent audit log for gold transfers.

So… given that I don’t know how they’re catching 250,000 accounts a month, and I don’t know how any of that squares with players running bots into Stratholme non-stop. In order to even get to that point a bot has to be running for at least 2 weeks.

I mean it’s just… it defies incredulity.

And then they do the token. They’re just like “oh we can’t win anyway let’s just let them ruin the game”

Doesn’t sound like a company all about play fair and gameplay first to me.

Even now you can buy gold at like 40% off compared to the token on this realm from websites. If it isn’t getting punished, and honestly any punishment of gold buying on retail or WotLK now is nothing more than hypocrisy, then why wouldn’t people risk buying that instead? 40% off is a really great deal.

This action happened 3 years ago, and nothing has happened since far as I can tell.

Also, how in the world does it make sense to say you’re not allowed to do boosts for gold unless you’re a guild, meanwhile people are making PuG’s where they sell the loot for gold. It’s not a boost in the strictest definition, but like… it’s so overwhelmingly similar in spirit.

This gold economy and way the community was playing ruined Classic for me. I straight-up quit over it.

Bots are literally wall-hacking and clipping through the terrain in starting zones then and to this day. Great first player experience right there, huh?

I cannot take seriously any defence of the state of cheating, hacking, RMT, and botting in this game. At all. And I know you’re just trying to give information and context Puny, or explain what the rules are, but the rules are whatever the enforcement is, and the enforcement isn’t there. It’s the wild west; no matter how many times Blizzard says it isn’t so. It is so until Blizzard makes it not so.

16

https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/13rgbzi/i_am_a_botter_gold_seller_at_the_start_of_every/

17

Not really, if for example the website is hosted in China literally nothing will happen no matter what Blizzard does.

1 Like
18

I understand, but the specific company in the Asmon’s video is in Cyprus; so don’t you think that this shows just unwillingness of Blizzard to do anything?

19

Could just ban 'em. Properly.

20

Sure but Blizzard probably knows what the rest of us also do. If you take them down for using copyrighted stuff like wow characters they’ll just relocate to a place Blizzard can’t do anything and open up the website again.