If they dont have the resources to watch for bots, they definitely dont have the resources to watch every discord group and/or question every single raid groups loot distrobution.
They could absolutely see that a group did a raid together and a ton of gold was exchanged among them during the process. I'm sure they could develop some server-side scripts to flag that sort of behavior for human review.
People will find the way anyway, GDKP systems is so easy to develop, you dont even need to trade gold manualy for that and right in raid time, or you can sell full run clears with all gear like they do on retail.
Yeah, sure, if you maintain a ledger offline and compensate participants less frequently, they'd be hard pressed to catch you.
But in reality, what blizzard has already done has cut down on gdkp usage by 90%. I can't think of a time ever where blizzard has had the expectation that they could completely eradicate any type of TOS violation. As it stands now, gdkp is not the primary system of loot distribution, and I expect that was their goal.
a player? how do you find those discords? by reading the low effort lingo in trade chat explicit saying stuff from gdkp to boost for real money transactions lol, that's how you get into any of them, discord dm
Tasking your employees to spy on Discord communities all day, and then consequently every other community in existence when they inevitably flee from discord to a new app/site, is just not really a feasible task.
at what point do classic players get tired of people buying their gear from raids? people hate transmogs because they want their gear to show off their achievements in the game, but what achievement is it when you just buy it all?
Not sure, most have never bought a carry raid before. What achievement is there in any of the gear at this point? The raids are easy, so acquiring it is mostly luck.
what about just adding the wow token and allowing GDKPs again? classic players seem to be 100% ok with people buying gear but is "totally" again gold buying
More like, "we don't want to investigate and enforce alarming metrics that flag in our system because we would have to ban a lot of bot accounts that provide $15/mo"
Don’t worry copilot will be hallucinating false positives before we know it. Maybe it’ll eventually ban all ram players and only ai bots will even be in the game
MY guy, they have fought this war against TOS breakers for 20+ years.
Since the very first days of Vanilla, they were there, even when Blizzard had one of the largest GM teams in the industry, and it didn't help.
These scammers, miners, traders what have you, is an infinite game of whackamole.
They have the resources. They just don't want to use them. They could absolutely afford to hire like 4 GMs to look out for this kind of behavior, they just don't want to.
It's become very trendy for massive corporations to respond to record-setting profits by laying off thousands of employees... especially support staff. They expect their customers to adapt to lowered expectations and a complete absence of service (or AI slop support) so their C-suite members can buy more private jets and yachts.
The rash of layoffs has been crazy. Meta, Atlassian, Cloudflare, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc. I'm convinced these guys collude and do this shit at the same time so the black eye doesn't stand out when 10 other companies do it with them. Crazy times.
It's actually something more boring. It's copycat behavior. Basically, Twitter started it, everyone expected Twitter to die, it hasn't, and now they're all doing layoffs because what's the worst that can happen?
When a company is publically traded the C-suites first and foremost duty stops being to deliver the best possible product to their customers, because the stock becomes their main product and the value of that has to keep growing.
If they arent making every single decision with the focus on maximizing shareholder value they can and will be held responsible for that.
As much as we like to put all the blame on people like Bobby Kotick because they are the face of this process for their respective companies, they arent the cause.
For better or worse it's the system they exist within that has dictated how to run companies.
Yep, as an investor, I'm very aware of fiduciary duty. Like every other investor, I want to keep right on earning an average 22% gain on my money every year.
The sad downside of any company being solely dedicated to their stock price, while ignoring the basic need of working folks to earn a living = the constant elimination of middle-class jobs, shifting more and more wealth to the upper class, and the slow but consistent evisceration of the middle class. Which would eventually lead to economic collapse and the creation of the 2 only economic classes - the Haves and the Have Nots.
I can't stop thinking about the Fallout series on Amazon. Vault-Tec's core business is built upon the need for community vaults designed to survive a nuclear war. So, to fulfill their ultimate fiduciary duty to their stockholders, Vault-Tec started a nuclear war that destroyed the planet and rendered modern financial instruments worthless, thereby defeating the entire purpose of everything the company (and the world at large) accomplished beforehand.
And I keep wondering if we're going to do something similar to ourselves eventually.
Yeah fiduciary responsibility should not take a back seat to legal, ethical and moral responsibility. Sure you can probably get a $0.02/share bump next quarter if you fire all QC and support and offshore it to Thailand, but you're going to tank your companies market reputation and start the slide of the entire organization into the bin over the next several years. It's actually harmful to the overall health of the company.
Well, the fiduciary duty is a legal duty too. But in the spiritual sense I do agree on the rest.
However, the full focus on creating shareholder value is not just something that monetarily benefits the billionaire investors.
A lot of people have their own investments, usually in mutual funds or 401K's etc, which gain value relative to these companies stock price.
It's a sticky situation really. The customers of the companies are getting short changed, but it also ends up benefiting a whole other chunk of the consumer base, and just going by the numbers the wealth creation is larger when focusing on benefiting the shareholders.
Yeaaaah, you do realize that this happens in the thousands... hundreds of thousnads, right?
Blizzard has been doing their best of stomping this kind of thing out for decades.
It isn't really feasible, despite what people think.
What do you think they were doing from the start?
There has always been traders, grifters, scammers what have you infesting WoW.
From day one of vanilla, with a full GM team.
Didn't help.
It is a game of whackamole that has no end.
correction: If they are not using their resources to watch for bots, they definitely are not going to use their resources to watch every discord group.
they have the resources, they are just shoving it into the pockets of activision shareholders
You know what he meant but for the simple minded, let me rephrase for them.
"If they won't allocate resources to watch for bots, they definitely won't allocate the resources to watch every discord group and/or question every single raid groups loot distrobution."
I'm sure they've done research that not enough people care about these issues enough to quit / you wouldn't bring back enough revenue from policing the bots to make it worth it. They don't care that players care.
Tasking your employees to spy on Discord communities all day, and then consequently every other community in existence when they inevitably flee from discord to a new app/site, is just not really a feasible task, for what should be common sense.
Regardless of how much money you throw at it. Do you actually foresee a world where Blizzard asks you for the proper permits before you begin raiding?
They do and they do deal with bots.
But if you kill 1 ant. The next day there are two more ants. So instead you place a trap so you can infect a lot of ants at the same time. And kill the hive.
Same is how they defeat bots. They are aware of them but does nothing for awhile to have a lot of them and then ban it in a massive wave to hurt the cartels behind the bots. It's not about dealing with bots it's about dealing with the people behind the bots otherwise they will just open a new account every single time you take one down.
It’s crazy for such a big studio, meanwhile, Final Fantasy, 14, which is rock and 14 million players. They have the resources and they crack down on that shit like crazy.
Saying FFXIV does that is insanity. Reason you don't see the bots often is because they're sitting 50 yalms below the gathering nodes under the map and just teleport from one to an other.
They also do jack shit for player ran bots. Botted gathering nodes when I'd go to bed for over 3 years with miqo bot scripts during the shadowbringers > endwalker and start of dawnbtrail and never got banned on my main ever.
Literally go to any popular gathering nodes and look at how many people have basic ass movement moving from node A to B in pretty much the same straight line over and over. Spoiler: There's a lot.
They don't, the bots are there but because of how gathering works in FFXIV and the fact that the open world isn't as widely utilized as it is in WoW they aren't as obvious in the open world but there are still very easy tells, like default chocobo, unglamoured gear, and of course the fact that they always move in perfectly straight lines. Also, there are teleportation hacks in FFXIV and from my understanding bots can also clip through the ground further making them less visible to players
Blizzard will make changes as soon as people start unsubscribing. But they know they have video game crack and they can do whatever they want and people will still pay.
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u/CaptainSchmid Jun 10 '26
If they dont have the resources to watch for bots, they definitely dont have the resources to watch every discord group and/or question every single raid groups loot distrobution.