Preach Reads Blizzard's Response to WoW Token Controversy

[@Lasagnaisprettycool]

"This wasn't something we arrived at lightly. It cost us months of strategizing, market research and consumer psychology efforts to effectively implement this token without risking damage to our income stream until we felt confident the remaining players would make up financially for the exodus of players this action cost us"

[@rociosilverroot2261]

To quote Dolly Parton: "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

[@ryanpower1291]

I mean they could lose half their players and if the rest of the players left buy 1 token every month they would make more money. I'm sure they expected some player loss but for every 4 subs lost they only need 3 tokens to make up the cost.

[@ThePolarpop]

​@@ryanpower1291 do we have any way to have the info on how its turned out for em tho

[@ryanpower1291]

@Polarpop only thing we can use is their quarterly earnings reports but they do not disclose subscriber numbers and don't disclose what specific microtransactions have been earning them unfortunately. I was just saying that even if they lose a lot of subscribers the cost can still be made up for via the wow token. I'd imagine they thought that they would not lose enough subscribers to lose out on the money that can be made via wow token

[@Drak976]

@@ryanpower1291 I don't think you're thinking big enough picture. Sure they can squeeze whales more but the regular players quit and once they're all gone the whales have noone to lord over anymore and it's a dead game. Having played WoW at it's height and Eve now even with shards and 1000s of servers there's a vast difference to 10 million + active players and at best 40,000 people online in one server.

[@LordMidichlorian]

We didn't take this decision lightly - "Don't get angry, we didn't decide to fuck you over on a quickly improvised idea, we carefully planned to screw you over." It wasn't an accident, it was on purpose".

[@GamingDualities]

to be fair now player can spend ingame gold to buy subscription. makes gold sink

[@TimeFunHappy]

I hate being lied to like we're idiots. The idea that his is done for the good of the game, and not simply so Blizzard can make more money, is a joke and it says a lot about a company that they feed this crap to us. Not surprised though. At all.

[@neruneri]

It's more complicated than that. It's a fact that the wow token has disincentivized the bot problem in retail to an extent. It isn't strictly a bad thing to have it. It has downsides, many in fact, but it is not *only* downsides. Of course this is beneficial to them and that is something they care about, but that's not the *only* thing this is about.

[@Knives7777]

why do you keep supporting a company that keeps fucking you over and over? After 14 or so years have you not gotten it yet. At this point any yall get you get i don't feel sorry for any consumer that continues to get screwed by this company.

[@willo1345]

​@@neruneriLast time I played there were still hotspots full of bots in retail. I don't believe you for a second lol.

[@Sobepome]

@@neruneri No, it's a fact that Blizzard has told you the wow token has disincentivized the bot problem in retail. They don't post any numbers for it because it's basically impossible to tell how much botting and RMT is going on, even from their end. Do we also have to explain to people here why you shouldn't immediately trust someone who is assuring you the thing they are making buckets of money on is good, actually, just trust them?

[@cci9459]

Aah yes, better to buy gold from the 100k+ bots, right? How old are you? Jesus christ...

[@Maria_Erias]

Plot twist: gold sellers bought out the WoW tokens on Wrath classic to give themselves more gold and to drive more people to buy from them.

[@Reldan]

Almost certainly the case - no different than scalpers buying out all the good seats the moment they "release" to the public. The 11k gold or whatever the current price is per token is nothing to them.

[@Azzaciel]

I mean, if they can actually undercut the gold/Cash ratio of the token, it makes sense for them to buy the tokens, so they get 20$ worth for gold that is worth 6$ for them. In that case, they'd make 14$ profit per month per bot they're keeping running. So basically Lizzard is going around and making the players subsidize the botters, so long as they get a cut.

[@Reldan]

@@Azzaciel It'd be worth it even to buy the tokens at a loss, just because that forces players to turn to them and become their customers rather than going to Blizzard directly. And getting customers in the proverbial door means a good chance at repeat business. It makes no real sense that Blizzard can "run out" of WoW tokens - they simply are setting an arbitrary number on the backend, and selling out undercuts their stated purpose of combating third-party RMT because, as you say, it's just subsidizing the bots at that point so they can get a cut of the profits.

[@therabbits69]

that doesnt' work since the wow tokens are based on what blizzard puts the price at AND the wow token does not have a limited supply it is always on their. It can NOT be bought out.

[@therabbits69]

@@c.krueger9530 You can't buy out the token it doesn't have a limit on the AH it is always on their.

[@DarkZergkill]

Blizzards "actions" about the bots remind me of the story from a ex-employee who worked on Warcraft 3 back in the day and how the report feature in the game actually never had a back end. So you would report a problematic player, even write your little message to explain why and how, but that wasn't actually send anywhere. It was just there to make players feel better about "reporting" people, but once you hit send, the window would just close. Blizzard really puts the Ehh in effort!

[@SalvLav]

Is there an interview of this ex-employee saying this? That would be a great watch

[@allanturmaine5496]

​@@SalvLav I agree. Pics or it didn't happen.

[@KelpyJesus]

even if he did say it, it was 21 years ago...

[@adamblyth9972]

@@KelpyJesus It's pretty easy to believe of 2002 era online gaming

[@OWnIshiiTrolling]

It's pretty obvious that blizz isn't doing much, and that the numbers of banned accounts are made up. The "tens of thousands" of bans per week would bring in over a million dollars per month in sub fees. With that money, they could hire over 200 people (or over 300 at blizz wages) to manually remove botting. Blizzard numbers are only believable if they are publicized to the almighty shareholder. Everything else is a lie from the pr department.

[@theperfectbeing]

This response reminds me of when someone gets caught cheating on their spouse and then tries to twist it into making them believe they did it for the good of the relationship. This is pure gaslighting to cover up their greed and nothing else

[@GamingDualities]

to be fair now player can spend ingame gold to buy subscription. makes gold sink

[@25xxfrostxx]

The entire tone deaf and gaslighting response would be funny as hell if I didn't already know that they really are moronic enough to actually believe their own BS. Rest in peace Classic.

[@zerothian6622]

Yeah, and who killed it? All the dipshit classic players buying gold for GDKP runs. Literally the players did this to themselves.

[@enlightendbel]

It's 100% par for the course for Blizzard which also shows that regardless of all that has happened in the past 3-5 years, Activision Blizzard is still the same cesspool it ever was.

[@OWnIshiiTrolling]

Pretty much every announcement for wrath, from not having lfd to introducing discount m+, clearly showed how horribly mismanaged the game is. The token is just the obvious continuation of the trend. Nobody at blizzard actually knows how the majority of the playerbase plays the game

[@Mrgiggles9007]

And the people still playing WoW are dumb enough to buy that shit too. These people will make excuses and justifications for fucking anything that Blizzard does.

[@paradachshund]

Blizzard is really making a habit out of the "we tried but it was hard so we gave up" excuse lately.

[@dIggl3r]

All we're missing is Blizzard adding p2w to D4 now... 😉

[@paradachshund]

@@dIggl3r Oh don't you worry, it's coming. Whatever the game may look like when it releases, I think we can all imagine they'll just add something gross after the fact so it doesn't hurt initial sales. That seems to be part of scummy AAA game play book these days.

[@Drak976]

@@dIggl3r You didn't hear about the season pass? Do you really think that will just be cosmetic? How PoE normally does it is each new season brings unique ways to upgrade your character. The $70 game that already has 3 seasons of battlepasses and $400+ of cosmetics is no way going to pull an overwatch 2 and sell you heroes or other vital things through the season pass. Right? I swear you have to be a blizzard employee I honestly think 10%+ of blizzard "players" are paid or bots or something. Friends and families. Paid mods. Shill for us get free gear. Keep in mind blizzard has basically been caught colluding with botters and gold farmers so don't think that's out of the realm.

[@GamingDualities]

to be fair now player can spend ingame gold to buy subscription. makes gold sink

[@Deverer93]

After the Overwatch PVE "apology" this reeks of the same PR printer. Like they are just taking our good will and milking it until the diminishing returns kick in or they see another opportunity to monetize and then they rug pull us. Should we really be surprised?

[@MythrilZenith]

"What's the appropriate music for the response?" Do you have any clown music?

[@snickle1980]

@@HiddenEvilStudios thanks to a recent youtube video, i know that name... 😁One day, there won't be a youtube comment section. 😐 Endless numbers of AI will flood down here soon. Can that be avoided?

[@MadnessRealm]

The fact that they specifically mentioned having to add the token to the Western regions, referencing both NA and EU specifically, makes me think that this is actually in response to their loss of revenue after the Chinese version was shut down following their contract not being renewed with NetEase I think it was.

[@wslaxmiddy]

The Chinese servers also had the WoW token on classic realms pretty much from the get go(although the servers are gone now). So specifying kind of makes sense, the already DID introduce the WoW token to classic it was just on the Asian realms

[@MrKrewie]

I hope this company crashes and burn some day

[@tzengi372]

Dev 1 - How do we tackle the bot problem? Dev 2 - I got it! Bots sell gold to players right? So, if we sell the gold ourselves then players won't go to the bots. Dev 1 - Genius! Sarah, give this lad our finest bottle of breastmilk. Only the finest!

[@thunderclap2060]

Finest bottle of breast milk💀💀

[@enlightendbel]

Battered Hilt was the pre-shadowmourne weapon Warriors and DKs would get, which came out of the ICC dungeons if I recall. I spent weeks grinding, trading and running dungeons to be able to afford one, they went for about 20K on my realms AH, which was not a trivial amount to get together.

[@deathwrow9652]

Yeah, I bet they're going to be 400k for the first month, then slowly lower to 100k. We had simple raid BoEs selling for 10-20k at the start of the expac, imagine now that bots have been saturating the market for months.

[@calvinwilson3617]

The infuriating part of this was it was obvious they have done literally nothing to combat botting, and now they are using it as an excuse to try to monopolize monetizing gold in their own game. Whats the point of a game if you can just swipe instead of play?

[@magikonkuiz]

Ya know, I ask this of gacha games all the time. The future looks bleak if no one actually wants to play and would rather....ugh

[@TimoRutanen]

I feel like the intent is that you enjoy the ride instead of the prize at the end. By paying a variable amount of money you can fine-tune how long your ride to the prize takes. Unfortunately, it completely destroys the prestige value of getting to the prize, so all you're left with is the ride there. Which sort of incentivizes you to NOT pay to shorten the ride. It's quite a weird balance.

[@Drak976]

@@TimoRutanen There are freemium games where you can play and "compete" for free but eventually you realize you are the content. The whales pay big $ in the hopes of dabbing on you somehow.

[@TimoRutanen]

@@Drak976 It's also proven to be effective to charge people small amounts all the time instead of a large amount one time. People are much more likely to overspend which is of course great for business.

[@GamingDualities]

to be fair now player can spend ingame gold to buy subscription. makes gold sink

[@vanyadolly]

They literally have a financial incentive NOT to fix the bot situation. No wonder it's so difficult.

[@Xynth22]

The thing that annoys me the most about this response from Blizzard is that they act as if the token actually did anything to mitigate any of the mentioned problems in retail after they added the token there. It straight up didn't. And if anything it made things worse because before the token you didn't have multiple massive communities built around selling gold and providing various services for real money or gold which they then turned around and sold.

[@Drak976]

Yes in my time of WOLTK we all knew there was gold selling going on but it was a dirty thing noone wanted to talk about and if someone let flash they had an unreasonable amount of gold they would be shunned as cheaters. I bet after the token "bro why are you poor bro dude" typical Lizzard players. Also when people flash these tokens around in these games we don't know they paid cash $ for them. If you ran a cam websites why not give out millions of "coins" to your buddies to go flash them and show people spending them to create a FOMO atmosphere. It's only fraud if they use real $. If they play with whatever fake coin they can do whatever they want.

[@GamingDualities]

to be fair now player can spend ingame gold to buy subscription. makes gold sink

[@Xynth22]

@@GamingDualities It isn't a gold sink. The gold is going from 1 player to another for sub time, while Blizzard gets more money than a normal sub fee. Gold sinks are things where the gold is deleted from the game. Like repair costs, the AH cut, expensive mounts, etc.

[@GamingDualities]

@@Xynth22 true. but it makes the gold flow. from rich gdkp guys who dont wanna pay for subsription to other players. idk

[@Xynth22]

@@GamingDualities It doesn't really make the gold flow either. But at any rate, I don't know why you are trying to explain how the token works to me. I know how it works, and even if I didn't, it has nothing to do with the point I made.

[@BaghNakh1]

I understand Blizz's logic on this. By putting the WoW Token in Classic, people will either go back to retail or leave WoW for good and obviously if most of the playerbase leaves the game, that means there isn't that big of an incentive for bots to farm such insane amounts of gold since the game would be pretty much dead, hence you get rid of botting. Bots can't sell gold to players is mostly nobody is playing the game anymore, it's actually a genius move if you actually think about it, if before going into the meeting where you will propose this idea, to go into the office bathrooms and take a big hit of crack. Amazing.

[@RubberTag]

Amazing indeed. This post is amazing indeed as well

[@fightcub655]

You live in your own bubble lol. You classic crazies think everyone wants what you want. There is a reason GDKP runs are so popular. You’re the minority. Plenty of people do not care or are for the WoW token. Nothing will change and anyone who quits over this is irrelevant. Sorry to pop your make believe bubble but you do not matter, at all.

[@Drak976]

Here at Blizzard we call it The Overwatch Maneuver.

[@Morg2851]

Remember when people payed 15$ a month and it was a premium experience? No shop, no buyable cosmetics/mounts, everything was earned. There were GMs in town maintaning order. You could call blizzard on the telephone to resolve problems. Servers were full and the factions balanced. The economy was functioning. Cheaters were banned. Gold buyers were banned. Maybe you would encounter 1 bot in the span of an entire year, report him and it was dealt with. Regular updates with ever increasing content and balance. Then the game stopped growing. Here we are now and people keep paying to get scammed, its sad. Gaming talk now is all about money this money that. We used to discuss if a game was good or trash.

[@empressjessica5020]

I remember no shop.and remember gms but what i dont remember is your claims bots and gold buyers and sellers were banned infact i saw more bots and gold sellers in 1 tier of wotlk live than i have in all of wod thru df expacs combined. Also we had vanilla thru cata giving us barely any regular content infact we went 2 yrs each one with never new zones and rarely a couple mini dungeons. So although your comment started out factual it ended in something far from the truth. No need to fabricate extra to just state corporate greed

[@marksr1907]

WoTLK: Rare materials required to craft consumables. MANY. It was many hours of farming to raid prep in WoTLK. This is entirely Blizzard's creation to drive up engagement metrics. COMPLETELY a Blizzard creation. At the time we didn't realize how pervasive Blizzard was going to make this metrics driving technique. Now it's the player's fault? LOL. Some things never change at BlizzAct.

[@xsteelFghterX]

WOTLK classic is now literally a gacha where you buy gold from blizz to have a chance to bid on item drops provided by boosters.

[@Drak976]

Always was. Do you really think it was possible for people to have netherwing drakes like 3 days into BC? How many dozens of proto drakes I saw in the first 2 weeks of wrath? I probably spent months farming them and I probably wasn't 20% of the way there. People are finally coming around to the fact that private servers are wiling to sell people items and that twitter was selling people verifications for as much as $50,000 or weirder darker stuff. We've all been labouring under the assumption that blizzard "turned" bad. What if this was always who and what they were? Is it a crime to sell someone an item privately? Maybe blizzard just cracks down when it's not them.

[@roadrunne255]

It's honestly just sad how many people fall for it, year after year. How many more betrayals will it take?

[@Drak976]

I've literally lost count. I quit 12 years ago so 12x12x15 I've saved $2,160. That used to be a lot of $ now I can't even buy an apple vr helmet. I'd rather set $15 a month on fire then give it to Bobby and his breast milk breath. Every blizzard player and person who buys Diablo 4 is basically everything most of them probably pretend to be against. Is that the real gamer fuel? Breast milk?

[@MntlMajorkozmo]

What I see happening is the token being used to supplement RMT gold sales. They can now use half the cost of a sub to get another month on the account to do whatever it is they do to get the gold and sell that gold. This is making it easier for RMT gold sellers.

[@Xaldarus]

No Ascian music?

[@weystrom]

Why am I watching this? I don't even play any kind of WoW anymore.

[@kimaclaret]

I've been watching Preach videos for years that don't apply to me at all, so you're not alone, if it helps.

[@Tsuna_SoulSilver]

It's like watching a show train wreck. You know it's bad but you can't help but not take your eyes off it.

[@lorestiralongo1618]

Well I never even touched wow to begin with... But still here 😂

[@svenornitier]

I love the smell of schadenfreude

[@mrivarv17]

Good for you. Why are you commenting then?

[@mariusxeno4454]

When Goldsellers have a better support staff than Blizzard themselves 😂.

[@Drak976]

Ha I was looking at a Diablo bot site for uhh reasons and they did seem like the kindest people I've seen online in awhile. Member when Blizzard used to have great tech support? Me neither because you used to not have to contact them da dump tiss okay I'll see myself out. Hey for the haters it was for Diablo 2 offline and it's doing just a terrible job. Bone teeth. The bot has brought me great shame.

[@Gillrien]

The problem with gaslighters are that you have to completely, fully, 100% disregard their meaningless words. Only their actions matter, when you deal with real people who are like this you need to make a spreadsheet just to converse with them. List their actions, list their wants, and through those two you can respond to the empty words they say with the true conversation. "You say this, but this is your goal, and this is the actions you take." Confront them on their lies always. But realistically, they'll make a ton of money off of this because the gamers will always support them and the trend will get worse. We've known about Blizzard for a while and who the execs really are, it's nobody's fault but the players for continuing to support them and vote yes for these actions with their wallets.

[@WakoDoodle]

probably with nostalgia-blinded die-hard fans is they don't care about what happens to everyone else, only what happens to them. If it's not a problem to them currently, they don't care; even if it affects them in the future. So the moment it affects them, they'll whine and complain when it's already too late. Or the worst case is they'll continue to ignore it, because they'd rather live in a fantasy of their own violation then admit they made a mistake; because admitting failure seems to be the hardest thing for people to do. (Me included) But its easier to blame others, so they'd probably blame anyone else besides the ones that cause the problems. Wouldn't be surprised if they blame microsoft or the EU just because they interacted with activision-blizzard at some point. Regardless if they're actually involved or not. The human mind is both confusing and obvious sometimes...

[@Drak976]

@@WakoDoodle The dichotomy of man. That is their audience sad broken people. It's predatory like the lottery.

[@JustAName0258]

okay, so if enough people would be selling accounts or whatever, blizzard would be like, ohh yea, thats bad, but hey, since we are too lazy to do anything about it we will sell those things ourselfs? (totally not for profit btw.... -.-)

[@adjwindu70]

So... why doesnt FF14 seem to have an RMT issue that impacts the casual/new player? The RMT is there and the ff14 login board has a news line saying how many are banned on any given week. Yet a regular ff14 player doesnt have to buy things to "keep up".

[@neugassh3570]

FF has no gearing basically.

[@Reldan]

There are really only two big things where Gil would matter - buying crafted gear and materia for week one raiding after even-numbered patches, and power leveling your own crafter (where you just buy everything needed to clear all the quests up front instead of making it yourself as intended). What keeps this from being a massive problem are manyfold. Crafting is a desirable and fun thing for a lot of players, so there's a lot of supply out there that keeps prices from getting into the crazy territory you hear about with these GDKP runs. Players know the prices will plummet after the first week because so many crafters will have made too many pieces of gear chasing those week-one profits, so anyone willing to just wait a week will get everything they need cheap (and frankly most players are enjoying the story and other patch content and not jumping straight into Savage Raiding). And then it's about 6-8 months in between times when this occurs, so it's not a constant demand and players can save up if they need to. More than that Raid gear is always better than Crafted gear, and in FFXIV you get it by getting trade-in tokens as raid loot rather than having the specific stuff drop, and there's a lock-out of only being able to get one such item per boss per week that means you can't really use money to skip the line. There's no system like in WoW where every extremely rare uber-drop that occurs a whale can just buy on the spot and gear ultra-fast. FFXIV looked at the problem and built solutions into the system. WoW just said, "How can we further profit ourselves by leaving things as-is?"

[@jet44444]

Making money in FF14 is also waaaayy easier. The game basically throws money at you, it’s not really necessary.

[@dimvots6729]

Have you seen the FF store ? They dont need token when ppl buy cosmetics.

[@Reldan]

@@dimvots6729 While both are profitable to the respective companies, something like the WoW token comes at the expense of making a lot of player's experiences functionally worse in the game if they aren't wiling to pay more by officially equating paying more money to buying power. FF draws a line where there's nothing you can buy in the shop that you can then sell in-game for in-game currency - even the dyes are not sellable if they come from the shop (just if you get them to drop in-game you can put them up on the market board).

[@deathwrow9652]

Anna basically said, "We don't have the gold yet, wait until the buyers come to our GDKP runs and give it back to us."

[@Lapouchy]

Interesting bit regarding your Saudi story Preach - During Classic on Gehennas there was a guild bankrolled by Saudis that did just that (beef bar). They were quite famous for it, paying people not only to gear their characters, but also farm r14 for them. I remember a few and if you ever spotted the actual owners playing their uber geares characters they were terrible - but in premades they were piloted by top players, played in top teams. It extended even past the salary, as they actually offered to fly people "on site" to grind their characters for them. One of people who accepted was a rather well known private server streamer/personality and he'd been memed on Gehennas for that to no end.

[@loser-nobody]

What a crazy world we live in! People with too much time and money in their hands just like to start sponsoring all sorts of niche competitions... Being filthy rich sounds boring AF if that's their idea of fun! haha!

[@Drak976]

@@loser-nobody LOL that's the trick in the end is they live in the same boring world as us. Millionaire turns the tv on and he sees mostly the same crap as someone on broadcast. Maybe broadcast guy gets a Medicare Part B commercial maybe millionaire guy has them sell him a vacation but same thing. Oh my steak is a little more tender.

[@xsteelFghterX]

I feel like they drew some faulty conclusions in the past when they introduced the wow-token to retail and the number of mailicious accounts decreased. However most of those left retail because they could make more on classic-server RMT, not because blizz pushed the wow-token on retail servers.

[@VictorMachadoThundermight]

Did they just said "Demand is increasing" then proceed to argue with an "Nah, you don't need that much money in wrath"....

[@Drak976]

Yes gas lighting. Compulsive lying mixed with demoralization and I don't even know what else there's not words for. Evil.

[@Sarnith]

Oh for sure. Over on Mankrik we have quite a few people that will just toss gold cap at items from Ulduar. Death's Verdict is going to be nuts. I imagine opening bid on Shadowmourne to be the one collecting it will open at Gold Cap and go from there.

[@Tentacl]

Can we be pragmatic for once please? It's a product in the dying phase and blizzard is bleeding it as much as it can, it's simple as that.

[@TheTaintedeclipse]

Incorrect, ICC is about to release so it is far from it's "dying phase". If anything it was about to hit the peak of what classic was looking forward to do.

[@Drak976]

Dragonflight dev detected. Plz give numbers on who is playing Classic vs who is playing retail plz. I hope you guys realize that right? If Bliz has like 900 devs it's almost for sure some of them are here right now defending their jobs.

[@wslaxmiddy]

27:47 If they are sold out and you can't buy them for GOLD isn't that a good thing? Meaning people AREN'T buying WoW tokens with cash, or at least enough to supply how many people wanted to buy them for game time.

[@TheLrx1]

Basically to fight the crack epidemic they start their own dealership ''for the good of the players''. Nice

[@AndragonLea]

"Gold scarcity was the name of the game in vanilla WoW, giving you meaningful choices and making gameplay engaging. That's why we implemented the WoW token so you can engage your Wallet No Jutsu to hit that paywall in its weakpoint for maximum damage and make it rain in Azeroth." 10/10 response. If they wanted to stop bots, they could actually hire people to ban bots. Every player I know can name a dozen places bots are swarming like flies. There's probably not a single player that couldn't report at least one a day. All it would take it actual people to do the banning. Why spend money to combat the problem if you can cut yourself in on the action and use the problem as a reason to profit instead?

[@nanakocchi]

translation: We are missing some CNY from chinese players who used to buy our Token in classic ever since we stop providing services over there. Please help Bobby getting a new Yacht for his son's birthday.

[@blaket1841]

Just remember when all authenticity is lost there's no reason to play on official servers. Take your money elsewhere. Credibility is lost when they take a cut of gold selling themselves. The whole point behind classic project is now moot.

[@Fishstyyxx]

The problem with inflation was brought on by Daily quests with gold rewards, starting in TBC...

[@molin1]

It occurs to me that Blizzard could avoid a huge amount of ill will by simply not taking a cut for tokens sold in Classic Wrath. But they won't do that, because of course it's about the revenue stream.

[@CM_87]

First music he played: Keep Crashing - Ruzer. :)

[@WarnarI]

As for gold farmers in wrath classic, first fimger should go to Blizz as not only was the level skip bundles carried over from classic bc. They had DKs FREE for all in wrath classic until earlier this year (old level lock placed back on).

[@MrSjanten007]

Why not just go after the buyers instead? Just leave the bots to farm, track where to gold goes and ban the accounts of people buying gold from them?

[@xzygy]

I mean, I get it, this isn't an easy problem to solve, but they could do a lot better than they are, and for the amount of people working on this, their lack of progress is telling.

[@hades5061]

The gold selling websites are often better ran with much better customer service than bliz's support and ticket team.

[@15Bravo]

Blizzard1: We can invest a small amount of money to hire people to actively play the game and look for bots and ban them to retain integrity! Blizzard2: How about not invest money into integrity and not only that, but we will make money off the loss of integrity just to make earnings calls sound better. The next earnings call is more important than long term health of a product or integrity! Bobby Gallywix Kotick: Ill take 4 number 2's please!

[@tocu98]

When you talked about the saudi Prince in Austin Tx there is a similar start to the story but very differant ending. Just before the first F1 race in Austin which was also the first time F1 hand been in the US in many many years so was a big deal an Assistant shoed up to the Driskle (very old hotel for American standard but not the Savoie) ask to setup renting one of the floors every year of F1, person at the counter snap came back and said this is not a service we offer. The Assistant immedialty came back with how much to buy the hotel. The person at the desk without hesitation said This is a historic hotel its not for sale.

[@Drak976]

Is this what Texans tell themselves how they're not for sale? Do you think historic buildings are like owned by the government I guess? Because normally it's a business owner trying to grand father himself out of renovations etc. I hate southerner stories so much. I understand the idea of a tall tale but you have to make it at least semi believable/make sense you know?

[@MythrilShotgun]

NGL, if tokens were available when I was hard in on TBC classic, I would have 100% bought tokens. I just didn't want my account to be banned. But that's exactly why it should not be a thing. Just legitimizing a pay-to-win system.

[@Evulchair]

With the the amount of players i have seen defend it, i'm starting to think its deserved tbh.

[@Drak976]

Yes Lizzard players get what they fing deserve. Imagine feeling sorry for a CoD kid. Oh wait that's literally the same group now.

[@shrubninja6444]

So one thing I've always been super suspicious of is stuff like that guy at 34:00 saying players are always buying sold tokens. There is absolutely zero chance that there are as many players paying gold for the tokens as there are players selling the tokens for gold, and I've never heard of tokens not selling. Even if there were as many players farming gold to pay their sub as there were players buying the tokens, the people paying money for tokens aren't selling one token a month. I am positive that Blizzard just sends players gold for their tokens regardless of whether there's a player buying it, and just adjusts the gold prices based on general demand to make it look like it's all going to players.

[@Drak976]

Well yeah that's why it's not in dollary doos. If it's in "gold" and "tokens" in their game they can do whatever they want. if they tried to play games with $ it would be a crime. Now you know why games make you use tokens. Same with gift cards. Complete scam.

[@Proverb.]

11:08 This is exactly right, the Classic playerbase is to blame 100% for this and yet they are the ones crying and asking "why are you ruining our Classic experience?" Are you serious? Every SINGLE one of my friends who plays Classic Wrath RMTs for GDKPs, even the ones in guilds because they run GDKPs on their alts. All of them. They all buy gold. I will repeat myself for the ones who lack comprehension skills. ALL of them buy gold. I understand the feeling of not vibing with this Official response because it does seem ridiculous and frankly just straight up a lie. My man just wrote down some numbers and said "believe me this is the amount we banned" I mean, no I don't think I will. I can login to elwynn forest for 5 minutes and click on every bot character, if I had GM powers I could ban these people in seconds. Maybe quit investing thousands of dollars in trying to fight them with automated coding and just hire some interns who you pay 15 an hour to just do what I described, that seems a lot easier. But still, the Classic community cannot seriously think the integrity of their game was ever in place before the WoW token like, that's also some grade A BS

[@dimvots6729]

Yeah hire slaves to ban the bots gz man.

[@RzuTriple]

I'm using the wow token to pay for my gametime for the rest of wotlk without having to give blizzard another cent. Why play cata if it's just going down the same bad timeline...

[@gpturismo]

Dungeon Finder: No changes, WoW Token: "no changes"

[@darkfire8008]

I miss the dungeon finder

[@Drak976]

@@darkfire8008 I know lots of people crap on it but it was one of my favorite features of Wrath. I even played on a popular server Laughing Skull but I guess most people were doing it guild based because finding a group for a dungeon was near impossible before dungeon finder then after it I was able to do tons of lower level dungeons on alts that I never had a chance to do live even when I was in the zone interested looking for groups like BRD maybe I forget the names underground fun orc dungeons in fire land and yes I know sigh that probably describes half the game.

[@greenxintet1651]

Infuriating beyond belief, its simply blatant lies. They can do better but they dont want to

[@boredgeek]

This depends on the 'they' you're talking about. If 'they' is the upper management and people in charge of payroll and deciding if they need to hire a team for something, then you are correct, they don't want to spend more money than they feel they have to. If 'they' means everyone including the dev's and the person who made the post? I highly doubt they don't want to do better. I can almost guarantee that the Classic WoW team, and the WoW Retail team, the ones who actually manage and work on the game, would love to have a dedicated GM team that can spend the time in all the servers checking on potential bots. But they haven't been allowed to do that. They haven't been given the money or resources. They get told to do something with what they got, and what they get is what we get.

[@Nightstalker314]

Yes, they can. According to botters Warden would have to get way more aggressive and invasive on the users system. I guess you would have 0 problems with that.

[@DaveTV12]

Wow classic player base: We hate pay to win. Also Wow classic player base: We've done everything in our power to make WoW Classic pay to win through GDKP.

[@ianashmore9910]

GDKP is only pay to win if you buy gold.

[@Barsee23]

when they say pay to win they would be talking about using real life currency, gdkps are done with in game currency/gold

[@HiIThinkImReal]

I don't like what Blizzard has done to Classic. I cancelled my subscription today. To everyone complaining, remember: the only language Activision-Blizzard speaks is _money._ Vote with your wallet. Complaining alone will do nothing.

[@Norex7777777]

unrelated but the music at the very start of the video sounds so awfully familiar, i just cant put my finger on it, does anyone know what it was?

[@MIKEaddictedtoYT]

My only real take on your thoughts is about the "people who wanted a genuine real classic wow experience", these people lost that battle a long time ago. They didn't just lose, they lost when the most common way to PUG content became GDKP/Ticket runs.

[@mykeCA82]

The battle was last the moment original classic was no longer classic. There is no recapturing that feeling. Players have the illusion of playing like it was back in classic, but it really isn't, so any outcry about whatever happens to classic is just nonsense.

[@FoxHoundUnit89]

When they ban a bot used for selling gold, can they not also then ban the players who buy gold from them? If they make it clear buying gold will get you banned, will that not mitigate the problem?

[@phunkym8]

bought 5000 for epic flying too and the guy had me waiting in ratchet while i saw him on the map coming closer from the orc starting area in a straight line through all the mountains and when he popped up he was lagging through the air across the water

[@VoidShyrok]

Y'know, my late father had a saying. "Paper shields to cover their asses." That's what I'm getting from this corporate thesis.

[@stoi_]

#nochanges, as annoying as the community could be about it, was ultimately about preventing two things: 1. Level Boosts 2. WoW token It took 4 years but they've been totally vindicated. Hardcore will be the new Classic, and SOM2 will have a token before Naxx drops.

[@Keldiur]

Unfortunately, and for the worse, the nochanges crowd failed to understand this is not 2004. Blizzard does not give a shit about policing the community which gave way to Gold Boosting and GDKPs ten fold what they were in 2000s. People had money but no time. Instead of implementing some changes to elevate this (by which I do not mean the token or level boosts, more like cross server and a better partyfinding tool especially when pops started to tank) the nochanges crowd gave Blizz the go ahead to do the least possible work. The game I remember could never come back. It felt like a rush to gear and content by any means necessary, by time or by gold. To be fair though,I am playing Classic now and having a blast. The modern day "rush through content, consooom" crowd is gone and the people who generally love the game are all that remain.

[@RobCastov]

How do you sell out of digital/virtual piece of code. That, in theory is infinitely replicable...

[@melissas4874]

Does anyone realize that this means they have been considering putting the token into the game since Classic was first released? And they kind of wanted to, but are listing some reasons they didn't. Either way someone has been pushing for this in Classic for a number of years. The retail game has the token and also has bots - they may have less of them, but they are absolutely there. This has only made people be a bit smarter about their botting. And when you see it in retail and report nothing happens anyway. The same group will be there a day, a week, or a month later botting on some spot for mats to sell on the AH so they can then sell gold. Essentially this is a "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude. And essentially it does come across as maybe Blizz does know people are using GDKP for loot and feels this is a great opportunity to make some extra money. Maybe one of their devs is in a guild that does GDKP runs just like their devs benefited from selling M+ and CE runs to players for gold.

[@ItsRinaldo]

Maybe if a large percentage of the player base wasn't completely fine with RMT, the precious Classic Experience that never existed could have been preserved.

[@djbcubed]

Still is largely Blizzard's fault if you believe this. People wouldn't be fine with RMT if they were actually worried about being banned for buying gold.

[@ItsRinaldo]

​@@djbcubed Yes they would, being afraid of being punished for an act is not the same as being against an act.

[@flech3025]

The gold sellers have 24/7 live chat assistance but good luck talking to a live person for support at Activision Blizzard...

[@Akinon93]

I like how blizz gives the exact same reason they introduced wow token originally, which has proven to not only not stop botting in the game but also absolutely wrecks game economies and playerbase

[@therabbits69]

except this is just a lie on your part. botting in retail is literally near 0. I have not seen any bots in retail for months if years, and I do play both versions. Botting in classic is insane compared to retail and it is based on the fact that botting in classic is due to gold selling. the token in retail removes that 3rd party botting.

[@Xynth25]

I mean Classic's economy is absolutely boned already. The token isn't going to make that shitshow any worse.

[@Akinon93]

​@@therabbits69I'm lying because you personally haven't seen bots or gold sellers? Damn I didn't know only your reality can be correct. But no, there are bots and gold sellers still. You can literally Google it and find websites selling gold, alongside carry services

[@Akinon93]

​@@Xynth25honestly true, but still a bad move by blizzard

[@dustin3435]

You know I have seen KZbin ads saying there giving you these wow services if you pay them money I always reported but nothing gets done saying it's against terms of service to wow. But I think blizzard don't care enough to crack down on it on other platforms cause it would help.

[@UMCorian]

"So, we decided the best way to deal with RMT was to stop spending money to try and fight it and profit off it instead." - What Blizzard actually means. It's the one solution Activision always has in its problem solving toolbox.

[@urazz7739]

How about just banning those buying the gold as well as the gold sellers? Or at the very least suspend them and take away the gold. Pretty sure that would kill off the incentive to buy gold for a lot of people that do because they don't want to lose their accounts or waste money.

[@LethalShadow]

That would require work though. And it would make Blizzard less money.

[@orckykat]

Not sure how i feel about this as i no longer play wrath classic.

[@bplup6419]

"Malicious actors have entered the business." Hi pot, have you met kettle?

[@unbanshee2985]

So if this is to target RMT and make people stop buying from botters I see a one kinda obvious and major issue. That being wow tokens at the moment are not competitive in terms of price versus RMT. After like 10 mins of googling I was able to find an RMT site selling 10k gold from anywhere between £8 to £11 depending on the server. Compared to the wow token that is currently sitting at around 9k after falling from a peak to 18k two days ago and costing £15. At 18k per token that makes the exchange rate 1.2k gold to 1 GBP vs RMT which is 1.25K gold per 1 GBP That means that even at its peak value wow tokens do not currently out compete RMT trades. If you want to reduce RMT by offering a legitimate alternative then you need to make it unviable or unprofitable for RMT players to keep going. The suggestion here that there are a lot of resources being invested by bad actors to continue RMT suggests that it does currently make a lot of money for those involved meaning even if you want to run them out then you kinda need to crash the RMT price of gold to lower the margins on it. This has huge ramifications on the rest of the game as if wow tokens get too valuable then gold inflation gets wack. The whole RTM statement kinda falls apart with basic investigation and comparisons though so I don't see this working with prices as they are now.

[@ensanesane]

It's as if the only reason to keep wow token price higher is so they can make more profit

[@Mosan13]

The token isn't meant to be competitive with RMT, it's a safer way to do it that doesn't involve 3rd parties that actively cause harm to the game. Look at streaming services vs pirating movies/shows, it's' proven that if you offer a safer and somewhat reasonable way to do things, people will do that instead even if it costs more.

[@The_Yukki]

​@@Mosan13 it's a cost analysys once streaming services boomed and you were forced to sub to 3 different services for 3 different series pirating became a thing again.

[@empressjessica5020]

Im kinda shocked you 4 dont understand the token system. Its price is only set as a baseline one time and thats release. Same as when it dropped retail. After that it adjusts off a supply and demand from buyers and sellers of the token. Domt believe reality? Np retail tokens have been tracked hourly every hour since they launched you can go see season by season week by week day by day hour by hour amd see the shifts as they follow player traffic and player trends amd demands on load

[@Drak976]

@@empressjessica5020 It's sort of like what Merrena said but with less blizz defense force behind it. People feel guilty buying rmt while blizz is good and blizz tells them this is good. They don't have to feel dirty. There's tons of people in my life I'ved tried to give pirated movies software audiobooks whatever to and they just don't want it because it's stolen goods in their eyes. WTF I'm surrounded by paladins. BTW the moment I can download and 3d print a car sorry Elon boohoo I'll print your rocket next and hopefully by then I'll get the no explodey version.

[@Drak976]

3:25 >We're adding wow tokens for your own good. We didn't want to. This hurts us more then it does you son.

[@lanceeverett5221]

It worked in Retail, right? Where is the data that supports Blizzard’s claim this has worked against their token profits or other in-game downsides? Notice Blizzard makes no commitment to token profits going directly to developing a better solution.

[@wslaxmiddy]

As if anyone who actually buys gold would see the WoW token and be like "Oh wow now I can buy gold legally, and for double the price? Screw RMT I'll just buy WoW tokens and get half as much gold as I could on an RMT site." This makes less than zero sense

[@Kibaikasu]

I've been priced out of WoW. I'm a disabled person that cannot work, my only income is a monthly benefits check from the government and I live check to check. I consider myself lucky to be able to pay $15 in a month just to be able to afford to log in. Now with Token nailing that last nail in the economy's coffin I find myself in a situation where the AH, and the rest of the game as a result, becomes basically inaccessible past max level, making this game no longer worth playing. At this point Blizzard might as well make the game F2P, as things stand that will be the only way I'll be able to even think about playing WoW again. Thank you Blizzard, for killing my ability to play my favorite game.

[@Thavleifrim]

We are minimising the impact of people buying gold by making it easier than ever to buy gold. Got it. Do they think their players are idiots?

[@maxmagnus377]

Why did they even try? The last decade of wow implementing different (predatory) ways to make more money for shareholders have been met with "everyone hated that". Why did they think a lengthy explanation would remedy that?

[@B_a_h]

The issue is they are focusing on the wrong problem. The problem they claim to be addressing is the RMT sellers and putting them out of business/preventing them from starting. The problem they need to address is the amount of gold in the system. But the sellers can't create gold out of thin air. It needs to be farmed (mostly) by bots. The bots ARE the problem. But trying to put the bots/RMTers out of business instead of ban them doesn't help if all you've done is take their place. For example if pretoken, 100k gold per day entered the economy from RMT. You release the token and magically every RMTer/botter becomes unprofitable and stops. But now 100k+ per day (probably more) is entering legally through the token. You haven't stopped the problem, you've become the problem (and increased profits at the same time).

[@kesh862]

If you want to prevent illegal RMT, ban players who buy. It's as simple as that. The solution isn't to play wack-a-mole with bots or to launch the WoW token, it's to implement real consequences for people who buy. 2-week temp bans on a tiny minority of buyers just isnt enough.

[@Darksoul9669]

They could also just like add shit to alleviate GDKP runs with game systems. Make it easier to join guilds with a better UI/UX? Idk literally anything other than this? This is the lowest effort attempt to alleviate a problem that doesn’t even exist for players who just form or find guilds; and pretty transparent LE that one comment said. They’re milking classic before its run its course. They went too long without classic giving them a consistent revenue stream so they do this instead of doubling down on seeing what kind of era appropriate changes they could make to the game itself and classic being just another reason to have a WoW sub and captive audience.

[@Kikkia2018]

Blizzard has such a corporate reaction to bots. Rather than try to get rid of them, they try to make more money than them.

[@lokoma6682]

i listen to Fleetwood Mac - Little Lies reading that blue post

[@kinggrantking]

I actually have no clue why you would pay any gold for items in classic. You buy hardmode loot and then do... What? You still can't parse because you're not good. You still can't get into a top guild because you're not good. The raids are so easy no one is impressed even with full BiS or achivements or mounts. I really have no clue what getting items does for you as a buyer.

[@theperfectbeing]

It's the same mentality asmond pokes fun at all the time, they can't wait to get all the gear they need so they can stop playing the game. It's actually ridiculous, we had many meltdowns in our guild because someone would want a piece of gear (especially pvp oriented stuff) and then would get the item and not log on until next week on raid day

[@Briank-vs7xp]

So the people in that gdkp average payout is 700k ish and 50k is 2 thousand dollsrs so they are making yearly salaries

[@toaster13666]

i really want to say that i really don't care about this... BUT I'm leading a mid-to-high-level guild. Most of our players are with us for years now. We have 25 Raids on Mo+We and 10mans on Friday. We are active, well organized and mostly self sufficient. But sometimes players leave the game and recruiting new players gets harder and harder.. A problem we see is that the massive amount of GDKPs robs us of potential players and the WoW-token only futher incentivises GDKP. They happen around the clock, they are full of really good players and having enough gold guarantees you an Item. Difficulty aside, the social aspect of raiding is the biggest difference between Classic and Dragonflight.... and it's dying at an alarming rate.

[@The1rust]

To be fair, I don't think there's much room for enjoying a good vanilla experience in any era ever since Classic was released because of the sweaty community which has permeated so far in to the game. That's not to say gold buying, min-maxing and services didn't happen "back in the day" but it's incomparable to the experience we're seeing with the recent releases. This just compounds an already rampant issue.

[@ch.k.3377]

If Blizzard and WoW were a couple, you get the feeling that Blizzard is looking for a reason to break up with WoW.

[@patlabsgaming5329]

If this was about countering RMT they wouldn’t have shadow dropped it. This post would have come well before the release

[@Inshokuten69]

I once tracked 40 bots doing cata dungeon runs to farm raw gold. I checked the named when I logged in, and before I logged out. They were doing it for a bit more than two months despite multiple reports from most of the guild I was in, as well as members of a gold making community I was a part of. Napkin math was several hundred thousand gold every day just from those 40, and there were hundreds of characters not just the 40, and they were still doing it when I stopped checking. Maybe there wouldn't be such an impetus to do it if the bots were banned in a timely manner.

[@Drak976]

Of those are you sure none of them were fake players (and by that I don't mean people running gold farming bots)? I used to play on Laughing Skull back when it was a thing (I had no idea it just sounded cool so I clicked it). There were just absolutely so many people that would stand around with BiS gear. They'd never raid. They'd never talk. They'd never pvp. You'd never see them out in the world. You'd never see them anywhere outside the city. They'd never bg. They'd never buy or sell in the AH. They were just there. I think that's part of what cross realm dungeon finding was you not noticing blizzard "agents" that have absolutely no reason to be in that dungeon with their perfect gear playing perfectly never saying anything in an hour. You'd have to be a WoW autist to not find that strange. New x-pack comes out and all these silent agents already in bis gear before anyone is raiding anything. They're not bragging. They're just standing there reminding you of what you could have. They might not even have a guild or if they do it's of other small silent people. I was only 57 when BC came out so it's perfectly understandable how people would pass me but I played a solid 10 hours a day and it was like these people had access to the expansion for months. Either bots/and or blizzard agents/friends/something was going on. Get to a zone within a week of the expansion coming out and everyone knows all the unlocks for bosses noone has heard bout in future expansions a year out. Shifty shifty. There was definitely levels between Blizzard employee GM and shmuck player and I could see it.

[@Inshokuten69]

@@Drak976 Yeah these were gold farming bots. You'd stand outside certain cata dungeons and wave after wave of demon hunters would zone out, stand still for a second or so and zone back in. Hundreds of them doing the same dungeon over and over 24 hours a day 7 days a week for months at a time. Every 10-15 runs they would mount up, to presumably vendor, and then start over.

[@greggreyes6869]

been curious if mike is a united or a city fan

[@Kenosos]

Is anyone surprised, complaining about Blizzard was like screaming into the void, I stopped playing their games after BFA and the only way they will ever listen is if others do the same.

[@JoshHolden-Aka-evani]

A guy in my guild on classic ran an indonesian sweat shop where he had over 20 pcs set up and people working to farm gold, they made alot of money. not what you and i would call alot but for them 200 usd a week is alot.

[@jaydalonas6569]

If the Wow Token is so good at stopping bots/RMT - how come Retail WoW still has this problem? Maybe it's a slow burner and you don't see the results immediately - but it's around 8 years since it was introduced in Retail, so you would think that the bots/RMT sites there would be obsolete by now, especially as now in Classic Blizzard are pushing hard to convince us this is the only solution to the problem!!! It didn't work for Retail, but trust Blizzard guys, they are doing this for our benefit and this time it will work, it's not them just wanting a cut of the profits, honest 🤔

[@Mosan13]

"it didn't work for Retail" Not fully, but the amount of bots/sellers on Retail is down massively since before the token came out. It made a huge impact. I remember back in 2007 gold sellers were actively advertising in cities all day, I remember the floating corpse signs. You don't see that anymore. The only Ads you see now are for boosting services. I would like to add that I don't think they should've added the token to classic, but saying the token did nothing to bots/sellers in Retail, you're just wrong.

[@jaydalonas6569]

@@Mosan13 I stopped playing Retail soon after SL launched as I hated that expansion. But for all previous expansions I played I can assure you there were plenty of bots. The forums reflected this as well with the 'usual' complaints. RMT for boosting services was also rife in every channel available. Now I believe that they added a channel for boosting services available for gold only in line with their TOS, and yet even today friends who play Retail tell me that the lfg tools still have boosts for RMT and the official boosting channel also the same. If there are no gold sellers anymore, how is it that I can Google WoW EU gold and find numerous sites that offer gold and/or boosts for PVP, Raids/Mythic+? Surely these sites would no longer exist if the Token is the solution to this problem. You are of course welcome to disagree with me (yes I remember the line of Orcs spelling out a site with their bodies in Orgrimmar). However the only thing that changed is that hacking the system to do this is no longer needed, it's much easier to advertise on line or in game using the channels provided by Blizzard themselves. This may be because they know that even though it is against the TOS, Blizzard really do not care enough to enforce their own Terms. So no I do not concede that I am wrong, but thanks for the response.

[@Davivd2]

This is the most obvious flat out lie that Blizzard has ever told. "We banned 248k accounts in the last 2 weeks." If that was the case, Blizzard would A) Never want to stop this from happening because all of the replacement accounts having to buy the game over and over again would be making Blizzard a ton of money. B) the sub numbers for WoW classic in total are sitting around that number. So when we see these reports of sub numbers, they would be doubled if that many bots actually existed. I used to run in to a bot every day while I was questing in the burning steps. I reported this bot 6 times. Never once was he banned. Leveling an alt there months later, that bot was still there. Not only that, but Blizzard contradicted their own statement in this post. "We cannot cause the demand for gold to be lower". Ok so there's a high demand for gold? Then they turn around and say that you don't even really need to farm, that your characters are self sustaining through normal game play. So if our characters are self sustaining, and for "most normal players" who log out after raids and play other games during the week, how is it that we have this "demand" for gold". I've cleared all content in this game from the start of TBC until the current patch. Not only that, but I dropped professions at the end of TBC to level JC and enchanting completely through the AH. I was nowhere near being broke. I never once participated in a GDKP. I never once sold anything for some crazy price on the AH that I wasn't able to sell it for back in 2008. Bots camped individual herb spawn points all over the place for the entirety of TBC classic, 24 hours a day. Flasks were still selling for 50 gold a piece, which is exactly what I paid for them back in 2008. We knew that this was going to be a BS post from the start. I just never expected them to try and throw out actual numbers that are in no way in line with reality to try and justify their greed.

[@empressjessica5020]

Since you dont understand ill explain. Then you will not understand me and argue something else in a reply but here goes anyway... The demand they speak of stems from the community the community gatekeeps each other and creates a huge demand for carries for gear and kill credits and pvp ratings just to deem good enough to play with others this all costs gold. The higher the gatekeeping the higher the demand for gdkp, carries and boosts and those increase gold demand. And it is that source they cant stop because its community effect by the players piss poor attitudes and the tryhards that want to hang out with them. But you also have normal players that just play and progress at an eased state and for that they state the gold income is fine..

[@darkfire8008]

@@empressjessica5020 Honestly, I swear it's difficult for people to catch when the community is the source of the problem.

[@melvinanndy]

"We will not be introducing WoW Tokens in Classic as we want players to experience Classic WoW as it were back then" - some dev during TBC Classic release. Right. Same ol same ol....you guys never change. Well done.

[@Hemlocker]

It's the gaslighting and the "we took ages to come to this really hard decision guys, we didn't want to do it but we did it for the health of the game, we did it for you!" that really gets me. Personally I think that RMT and GDKP are an inevitable consequence of outdated game design and that there's really only so much Blizzard can realistically do to fix the problem, but there were so many better ways they could've gone about approaching this and communicating it to their playerbase.

[@madrox1989]

Ban GDKP, limit in-game gold trades (through trade window), limit AH listings, limit gold cap. They have tools they choose not to use.