this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I guess gold farming bots were too self-sustaining? Blizzard really wanted to make sure they were getting their pound of flesh out of the exchange?
I just can't imagine this mattering in any other instance. It's not like you were realistically farming the gold with the free trial, this is a weird change solely to prevent theoretical abuse.
No, Blizzard makes an extra $5 a month on any subscription bought with gold.
This seems intended to create an extra hurdle for people managing a large number of accounts in the hopes of making that kind of operation less profitable.
I'm gonna be really cynical here and say they're hoping people sign up to auto sub which they forgot to cancel.
Was a long time wow played and back before tokens were a thing it was pretty straightforward to just pay for 1 month only of game time. I stopped playing midway through baf and at that point I mostly bought game time with gold but on the few occasions I did pay for 1 month it wasn't that easy to find the 1 month game time, like the nonauto sub. Then I fired up the game like right before the last xpac, can't remember the name now and it was near fucking impossible to find game time in the store, it kept trying to get me to buy an auto sub.
That seems a bit ridiculous since you can immediately cancel it if you're only in it for one month. It seems like they want to link payments to account so they can ban all accounts of specific boters at the same time that are on one payment source. I'm going to guess that they also want to ban people who are using other regions accounts. Like Chinese and Korean users who play on the American realms. If they have a contract coming up for someone else in China it would be a big push they would need to get the Chinese players back off the American realms.
Free trials can't farm gold anyway because they're capped to 1k gold, so this really does only impact bot accounts for the most part. There's likely a small number of people who use tokens because they otherwise couldn't afford to play, but I expect that's not terribly common.
From the article, it indicates you'll just need to have bought something since 2017 to avoid this wave. I can't imagine someone has been playing exclusively free since WoD while buying the expansions, but it sounds like just paying for the next xpac with money will be enough.
Oh, I've been doing that. This is a hot topic on the big gold-making Discord server, and there are over 10,000 people in there (and that's just English-speaking players who even know about and opted-in to said Discord server).