Let’s not just stop there, small trade/ah/mail/realm/account/weekly cap too.
There is a point where it becomes so inconvenient to juggle chars and accounts that people wont bother anymore and so botted gold demand is reduced instead of being practically infinite hence even more bots.
Meanwhile what you can farm in an hour yourself and just vendor/ah is pretty stable.
Would a token eventually deal with inflation by taking gold out of economy? Yes, but that’s not coming.
Would GMs taking 6 hour shifts for banning bots deal with inflation? Yes but that’s not coming either.
While this would impact all players, botters would just create additional accounts and automate it like they are doing now already with mass botted accounts. Nothing would change for them.
Of course, this is for the buyers you have to inconvenience them. Blizzard will not track gold and ban buyers, half of firemaw would be gone and the other half will wonder where did their gold disappear.
@gamma
There is, this is horrible optics for their investors if anyone would ask:
Why is 1/4-1/2 players of your classic product bots
Considering the above why aren’t you capitalising on it
I love the idea of lower gold caps. I would even go so far as to limit Auction House selling caps for items! Eg, copper ore max sell price 5 silver. That sort of thing and you can’t give other people more than 5g in a 24hr period.
Not sure how/if it would work but, it’s the season of discovery so let’s discover.
How about using real life identification for account verification?
If some people are opposed to it, then make optional realms for that, allowing them to avoid the bots.
Idk about South Korea and its laws, but there are too many countries who can play the game and blizzard unable to verify EVERY of them. Also, I don’t know any game company which uses real life authentification (outside of specific regions as you mentioned), it will scare off a lot of potential players.
afaik Korea requires your national ID, the one in your passport.
I’m not giving that to anyone and your passport office will tell you the same. If they can maintain a secure leak-free system inside just korea, good for them.
The logistics of it isn’t on us, this thread was a discussion to handle the issue of botting and gold sellers/buyers.
You raise a valid point of people being reluctant to attach their real identity to the account, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be made optional, where people who want a regulated experience playing the game, can be afforded a separate server.
Fairly sure the health of servers when compared between “bot-free” and “free bots”, will be quite overwhelmingly in favor of “bot-free”.
We have an electronic identification in Sweden called “bank-id”, which has really changed alot of services in Sweden and increased personal security for banking and purchases online which could atleast be used here.
If this isn’t available everywhere yet, it’s probably just a matter of time.
It’s available in other countries, however we are not 1 single country. The amount of paperwork and software infrastructure required for every single country is unfeasible.
At that point you need to consider a 3rd party identity verification service which would work globally but you still need to provide your national number (your bank does that too), passport id etc.
The service is not cheap and the whole identification process is long.
That just wont work.
Creating a reasonable demand for an objective improvement should not be dismissed easily.
A common thread about classic enjoyers (me included) is looking to the past, not the future.
But to make a better future we need ambition and goals to strive for.
Unless the work is started, it can never be finished.
If there was an ambition sparked here on this topic, perhaps in a year, 3 years or 5 years, this can root out the largest problem that Blizzard-games players are struggling with.
thats a lame excuse. the only real reason why they arent doing anything against bots/gold sellers is that blizzard is making money with the subs. not a single other reason. they could easily fix the issue if they actually wanted to.
but then again… as long as people keep buying gold, there is gonna be bots etc.
just like in the real world… people keep crying that the enviroment is going down and everything is worsening, yet they still keep making the same mistakes, buying from massive corporations, using mass media, buying plastic trash and behaving like sheep. nothing will change until its too late (went offtopic?! )
This right here, I’m sure I would pick the regulated server in a heartbeat, and bot infested realms would just die out sooner or later, which is like Firemaw now, a completely unplayable dumpster fire, and retail is not much different.
Anyway, in 2023 they should be able to detect and ban bots EASILY, if not (for some unknown reason), then at least ban them manually.
Also, making MFA a requirement would be a step in the right direction.
Yes ofc there is. They would have even more ppl consuming their product if there is less cheating in the game (bots are the largest cheaters in this game). And more ppl means more subscriptions/money for Blizzard.
This is the season of development. They are finally trying new things and tech, lets give it a go against botters too, limit that gold, dont care its seasonal, lets try something
(went offtopic?! 
)