He means suddenly appearing over a short period of time. If you’re gaming the AH then sure, it’ll take a more reasonable a amount of time. Also gold tracking would help understanding where the gold came from so you wouldn’t be flagged.
Hence my inclusion of:
Some of it might be from legitimate sources
In my original post.
Did you’re 200k gold suddenly appear in your bags one day, and on the day before you had only 5000 gold?
No? Then you wouldn’t be raising any red flags.
So if i buy something or someone buys something from me for large amounts, it will be flagged?
What kind of amounts we talking here.
We are talking suddenly appearing, because i like to trade.
Its not just trading 20k for an item, gold tracking will track where that 20k came from. Every transaction will have an ID which will be traceable back to where it came from. Quest rewards, drops, trades, AH, vendors. You wouldn’t track every copper, that would take a bit of insane computing, but you can throw things into heaps and do a bit of fuzzy math per character.
When you do get flagged for large gold trades, it wouldn’t straight up ban you, it’ll flag you for investigation. People in the background would then check what gold you got from where and if its been flagged for any other shady reason before.
Not the most accurate explanation, but I’m not going to get technical here.
Basically, if you’re doing legit trading you’ll be fine, even if who you end up trading with is a gold buyer/seller/shady.
No we’re saying it ‘should be flagged’, not ‘it will be flagged’. Blizzard currently don’t care and encourage gold buying and they flag nothing.
And even if they did make use of this they know very well when you’re legitimately trading with a real player and not buying from a third party botting site.
They already know who the botters are, they already know when illegal gold exchanges hands, they just choose to do nothing about it.
Yeah, I’m gonna need a few sources for that if you’d be so kind.
You won’t get any sources, because I pulled it out of my backside, but it wasn’t illogical.
Is it a huge stretch to assume that Blizzard have a pretty clear idea who the big botting operations are and which accounts are botting/gold-selling accounts?
Well no, it wouldn’t be unheard of. Just had an issue with you passing it on as fact rather than “I suspect/I’m pretty sure” or something to that nature.
Considering the nature of botting, I doubt they’re in on it, but I’ve no proof other than an educated guess based on what I’ve seen for about 20 years. Also if they were in on it with the botters, wouldn’t that classify as money laundering?
Not everyone drips saliva out of his mouth dude. Every single guy on these forums could identify a bot instantly just by watching him move around or asking him any question. 
i doubt that this is possible for blizzard.
Fair enough, perhaps I should have added the caveat ‘I’m pretty sure’ or some such.
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I thought you were supposed to ignore me rather than try to debate.
Also no, you can’t “instantly” tell who is a bot. That simply isn’t possible. You can suspect it, but you still have to confirm it. If you didn’t well… not much point to the whole system is there? Just ban people at random and claim they’re bots.
Not really. Just a bit of code and SQL queries. I know it might sound a bit utopic, but just try and make a flow chart of how the basic process would work and you’d get a better understanding for it. It helps if you can write code.
Kind of a grey area. I guess it’s technically money laundering but then again large corporations are not always guilty of impeccable moral fortitude.
If I ran a successful gaming business, had a rather unscrupulous world view and I was regularly netting hundreds of thousands of dollars from ‘grey area’ areas of business I suspect I’d be pretty slow to take direct action to stop the gravy train.
Sure I’d make a few high-profile bans and PR statements to that effect, so as to be seen to be making a token effort, but I’d think twice before shooting the golden goose entirely, given how generally opaque these transactions are and under no danger of any investigations or legal action from official bodies.
A large billion dollar corporation doing illegal activities? Get out of your fantasy land.
We live in a just society ran by decent folk, i’ll say.
Well I won’t try to deny bad business ethics, those do exist for numerous reasons, none of which excuse those practices.
I’m more for arguing the technical aspect. IF Blizzard wanted to fix the issue, it would be a rather difficult task. Not only from a technical side, the ethics and people in suits who have meetings would certainly have a part to play in the process.
The suits are always an issue since you have to show them numbers and say “looks this many people are leaving because of bots, we suspect this many more to leave. However, this many people would keep playing and this many would come back if the bots were dealt with”. That is a problem with a for-profit company. I guess not enough people have a problem with the bots and aren’t letting Blizzard know.
I wouldn’t call this kind of behavior flat-out greedy tho. I mean the point of a company is to turn a profit. If the can justify the business expense of my proposed full scale bot warfare I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t do it.
It is not ethically great, but it makes sense from a technical side. I personally am not going to fault the company for being a company. I’m satisfied with the service and thats why I continue to pay for it. I’d rather blame the userbase that continues to pay for what they don’t like.
I suppose you could blame Blizzard for not making the Classic sub separate from retail. Hard to vote with your wallet and just go on paying and play retail anyway. Then again retail also has the same botting issue so… if you play that you’re still not taking a stance against bots…
Also you see this?
Company makes profit, therefore they are evil and corrupt. How is this a fair mindset to have? Without even understanding the difficulties of being a large company, just declare them evil, because thats the popular stance to take. I’d call this very narrowminded.
A pertinent argument I think.
The notion of companies being ‘evil and corrupt’ merely on the grounds of making a profit is basically a meme. You could certainly make a moral argument for ‘excessive profits at the cost of customer wellbeing’, or ‘customer value’ or some such - but at that point we’d be going into the realm of epistemology which is far outside the scope of this conversation.
My perspective is generally going to be the legal, rather than technical one.
I’m on shaky ground because I have only a layman’s knowledge of US law, but certainly if a case for corporate mismanagement were to happen under UK law it would be a civil, rather than a crown proceeding. The bedrock here is that buying such a service from a website is not a criminal offense and the fact that doing so breaches the T&Cs of a specific organisation is largely irrelevant. No mention of ‘money laundering’ would enter the equation.
Any solicitor worth their salt would stop the entire legal ball rolling at this point and double down on that.
It would therefore be up to the plaintiff to argue that taking little or no action on third party transactions deliberately impinged upon the right of customer to fully make use of the service they had signed up for.
Honestly it could go either way.
you are clearly too stupid to have an actual conversation with if you think billion dollar companies like blizzard aren’t automatically corrupt.
Lick boots omg.
Yeah I don’t know enough about law to debate that aspect.
So unless theres any other points we could discuss I’m gonna say good talk 
That wasn’t even a good attempt. Try harder next time.
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good talk
They’re working on it one step at a time. You know that saying about boiling a frog?
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