it is all part of the plan... possibly

Well....I hate to burst your bubble there but some of the statements in that little piece are oooh a tad off.

Point numero uno - It states Currently, it's estimated to have somewhere between 9 to 10 million active players. Aaah this is way the #@# off. If we have 4 to 5 million active players that is plenty.

In 2015 Blizz user data dropped to 5.5mil and it has not gotten better. So it's probably lower now and that's why they stopped publishing numbers along with the fact they could claim anything to be factual.

I am curious how the tokens help Blizz financially. You just made it easier to NOT pay the monthly subscription. So people like me and many others who bot never pay a sub only use our gold. To give you an idea I can generate 1 year of sub time in about 2 to 3 weeks per an account. That does nothing GOOD to Blizz bottom line because that's US$179.88 they will never see. Now let's say the botting community is 300k strong and we are all doing it which you would be stupid to not do it then that's US$53mil per year they will never see. That's just us botters now what about legits who are doing the same thing but by hand. Then that's money they won't get either.

And yeah you allow us to use it for buying stuff also so guess what all that character change money and pets and mounts well guess what I think you losing their also.

Seeing as this is a new account you are either a winie who got banned and banned from forum or a Blizboy in which case you need understand we are going to be a pain in your @#@ for a long time to come. Remember when Glider went under we all thought Botting was gone...WRONG....in stepped HB and here we are now. Guess what happens if HB goes under? You got it another bot will step in learning lessons from HB along the way.

This game is not over not even close. It's just getting more interesting. As Blizz makes things harder hardcore coders look at it as a greater challenge and so many of the coders started only to show how good they could reverse engineer and outcode Blizz.

It's GAME ON!!!

 

PS your links especially the news site is probably getting their news direct from Blizzard and can state almost anything.

Do you also know that Blizzard even denied the 10.1mil subscribers that supposedly Chilton told them? He even stated apparently that Blizz has over 100 million wow accts. Aaaah yeah sure.

 

You didn't look at any of the links, as you would have seen the dramatic drop in WoW. Nowhere does it say WoW isn't at its all-time lowest subs (in fact, everything makes it clear subs ARE at the lowest ever), but that profits are still up so it doesn't matter. You didn't read any of my points. You skimmed and assumed with your predisposed beliefs and you are completely wrong.

What I presented were scientific facts versus your simple little beliefs.

 

This is why there is a serious issue. You can not have your cake and eat it too. You can not be at your lowest sub rate ever and profits are still up. That makes no sense. I am from an accounting background and can tell you that the token thing combined with lower sub levels makes profits being us next to impossible.

The problem is many of their REAL money is getting offset with GAME money. Game money is acquired for basically nothing and used to lower REAL money. For botters we feed off of this.

What you presented was statements that could have been made by anyone. Blizzard could have placed those facts out there for you to feed on with nothing behind them.

 

Google trends in order to value game population is just plainly wrong. It works horribly. And it's statistics are PAID for. Inflated for bucks.. Stop using it, already.

To be fair, when someone links google trends trying to prove something, those with IT-related formation just smile.

Just look at the links @lumbarjack provided; as search terms related to World of Warcraft searches, they included the following terms: WOW WOW WOW, WOW WOW, WOW WOW WOW WOW, and.....World. Seriously.
All the searches including those terms are considered to be Wow-related searches.Oh, well.
(one would question what is the relevance of them....don't scratch your head, this is paid in order to provide a completely false result.)

In another enlightening aspect here, Final Fantasy is openly considered the strongest wow competitor nowadays in the MMO market. How would you refer to that game? Yep, probably FF; also FF XIV, or Final Fantasy. Well...these terms are not included into those that would be added to the count; only FFXIV would be added (it would necessarily have to be written with no spaces to be added to the count).

 

The trend links are not serious indeed, but points from 3 to 5 can be hardly debatable.

3. The Blizzard portfolio of merchandise, micro-transactions and ingame purchases have skyrocked since Pandaria! With the recent Token system and feeding the battle net balance with them they crossed the border and effectively made WoW P2W, while scoring double wins on all fronts!

Both 4. and 5. are self explanatory: The best content creators were moved out of WoW expansions ago and we are yet to see something groundbreaking from the WoW Dev team since WotLK or ... decade?
And those marketing practices Blizzard were performing since ages as well.

 

The thing is tho, tokens isn't something that Blizzard put into the servers, it's players that buy them to sell them for gold.
And one token cost more than one month subscription. So with every token bought by a botter = more money for blizzard.
And if they ban a botter they can and have wiped the account balance, they remove the gold, the gametime bought with the token is lost and can't be refunded if bought with paypal or whatever = less loss in refunds.

 

Exactly - its double win for Blizz.
They feed the goldbuyers with very expensive gold and regularly rip the goldsellers, while removing gold/banning accounts/etc.
Plus on banwave all the purchases with battle.net balance (aka ingame gold) cant be refunded, contrary to the Paypal ones.
Keep in mind, Demondog70, casuals, which resub with tokens, used to sell gold for 2 months game cards, so they have not paid a buck to Blizzard before as well.

 

Nope. I still don't see that. It's one person gold to another person gold. That does not affect Blizz bottomline. You are buying gold inside the game. There is no gain for Blizz in real time cash.

 

The statement is that the token are part of an affect that even with subs dropping by like 50% Blizz still manages to do better than they did with twice as much subs despite the fact we are now able to buy things with in game gold which we could not before and had to spend real time cash.

Say that you lowered the amount of gold being sold MAYBE but that still is not putting one red dime in Blizz pockets. All that is happening is that instead of me having 10 million gold stacked away now I have 6 million and I never have to buy for game time for 3 accts for one year. For gold sellers who use to pay for subs now they only pay for the first month and never have to pay again for x months until a ban. Yes the gold spent on game time is higher than if you bought it with cash but that becomes irrelevant when Blizzard get no REAL LIFE CASH.

From an accountant stand point it's as simple as this. Unless Blizz is able to bank a dollar extra into its bank it means nothing and in game gold is like a no value commodity until its' exchanged outside the game and Blizz is not benefitting from any exchanges. Botters use the gold for game time = Blizz loss - Botters sell less gold because they buy game time - Blizz does not gain the botter loses gold but saves real life cash - I don't see it from any angle.

 

Tokens are Blizzard entry to Gold selling; period. It's hard to debate that it helps Blizzard financially. It gives Blizzard money that previously, they wouldn't have; the gold buying Real Money.

On the effect of tokens regarding Blizzard total income (including subscriptions that were paid with RM in the past but now are paid with tokens), it is a double-edged Sword. Granted that some people will use gold instead of money for it, but it is not like that Gold didn't have a real money equivalence in the past; my guess is that they made the calculations before, and decided that it was profitable for them.

Sometimes we botters have a biased vision of the gold reality in game. We have hundreds of thousands, quite often millions of gold at our disposal; that often creates the feeling in us that ours is a common situation.

It is not; the average Wow player has under 50k average in their accounts. They cannot even obtain enough money to buy a token, or they just value the time they would spend in that more, and choose to pay for it.

On your latest sentence, @Demondog70 , you have a water clear example on how blizz benefits from game token bought by botters : Botter buy token----botter sells less gold-----BLIZZARD SELLS TO THE GOLD BUYING CROWD THAT SAME GOLD, legally, without any risk for them.

Blizz is wining this battle against goldsellers big time, that's out of the discussion.

 

@pimpampum I agree with everything you said except about Google Trends Explore, especially as it agrees with you that Final Fantasy XIV (online game) is the only competitor close to World of Warcraft -- you seem to misunderstand that related terms have to be weeded out, and that if you don't pick the online game version your search is completely skewed. For example, you can't just use the broad search term wow (even though most people search that way) as it also includes things like the band bow wow wow. And you can't use just tera as a search term as it would look like it was crushing WoW (as there is a massive hit East Indian song by that name).

As I work with big data for a living, that costs a fortune but agrees down to a percentile with Google, you are allowed your opinion. Though why an ego-driven corporation like Activision/Blizzard would pay Google AdWords tens of millions for online advertising every year (which they definitely do) and permit (if they had any sort of paid influence) WoW to be publicly showing such a dramatic and constant decline (with lower and lower spikes during expansions) or allow any competitor to pay for (fix) those incredibly embarrassing results is something you'll have to work out. Also, I would outright love to hear the name of an IT department that openly mocks Google.

Regardless, the point I forgot to mention, and which this forum wouldn't allow me to edit my original post is:

7. Microsoft is now openly targeting cheaters in online games with its Game Monitor to make even more profit (and this is just the beginning):
http://wccftech.com/game-monitor-anti-cheat-windows-10/

As per point 5 of my original post, it is no stretch that accountants for OS companies (say Microsoft and Apple) are now already happily accepting funds to hand over lists of their OS users using cheat signatures to gaming companies willing to pay (and thereby also increasing cost savings by no longer having to constantly lose money to research and player decline due to the hamster wheel of cheat-versus-security evolution/innovation) -- and unlike any blizzard out-of-process scan, it is and will continue to be perfectly legal and completely avoids privacy issues and laws.

Yes, @Demondog70 people will continue to hack WoW - even if for just the intellectual challenge. I refuse to waste my life virtual fishing and have never been banned for my own code (I need mats and I need gold and I'm not being blackmailed by Blizzard for them). And because I will never release my work to kiddie clickers, my program will never be a signature known by blizz or ratted out by any OS for a fee (though I would also never use a standard OS anyways). And, to be clear, I have no problem (especially with rotation and farming bots) with people with lives removing the grind from WoW -- as it makes raiding and achieves much easier when I play (especially killing bosses). But because there are those who actually enjoy playing the auction house and making gold, Blizzard must cater to these masochists by publicly banning farmers when it is most cost effective (before other releases and WoW sales).

And I especially have no problem with WoW botting in particular (except PvP), as there is only a constantly repackaged grindfest after blizz intentionally abandoned this franchise to its leftover retarded cousin developers (epitomized by little dick-tator Ghostcrawler) who are only capable of reskinning old content created by real artists in order to reduce costs while blizz focuses on its shiny new golden properties.

Believe me, if this wasn't how my old p'n'p gaming friends wanted to keep dungeoning from a distance, I'd have dropped this recycled garbage a long time ago.

 

I was kinda thinking if Demondog knows that token costs 20 euro and when botter sells gold, he gets 13 euro. 20-13=7 to Blizz cash from every single token

 

It still not real world cash. If I gave you $20 monopoly money can you deposit that into your local Chase account?

They are allowing you to take in game cash with no real world value and buy items they would normally sell for real world cash.

Would you give me your car and sign it over to me if I gave you $20,000 in monopoly money?

I understand fully the difference between the token price and what the WOW player would pay for a months time but in my eyes it works out bad for Blizz because they are allowing you to take something of real world value, game time which we pay our hard earned cash with and buy it with something we can accumulate with in game effort which we can use a bot to acquire. I really don't know how better to explain it. You are trading something in the real world has little to no value and get something of real world value.

The only person who has a real value is the botter who would sell it for gold. He now has less gold to sell to buyers so in a way you can say he looses but he also saved real world cash because he now does not have to buy game time.

I bot for one day and I buy a month's game time. How did Blizz win? Now I don't have to give them 13Euro or 14.99USD....Now I play for a month FREE in my eyes. It cost me one day of a month and I get 29 days extra. If I am greedy I can bot for 4 days and buy 4 to 5 months worth of time. Or maybe buy an item from the store.

 

You dont get it: Every Token you buy with Gold was bought by a Player with Dollar/EUR.... They paid 20 Dollars for that and you get less battlnet money or gametime. When you buy gametime with your token, you saved the gametime, but in fact someone paid 20 dollars for your month gametime....

 

/facepalm
/facepalm
/facepalm
/facedesk
/fasedesk
and very very STRONG /facepalm
......... im out of discussion with him......

 

Calm down mates, no need to lose the composure on this.

There are 2 things that are hard to understand, but are essential for getting a broader view of this:

1) @Demondog70 There is a real equivalence between Gold and Real Money. If you can't accept that, you need to illustrate yourself on virtual currencies. No matter that you value your hard earned 100 bucks so much more than your bot-generated million gold...real values of them are similar.

2) @Gandalf @elfasvonpa We should also be aware that both tokens and Gold amounts are unlimited for Blizzard. They might say that they won't create tokens out of thin air ( instead of those paid with RM) ; but they will provide no documents on that. And Gold......Gold value has dropped incredibly along the latest months / latest year. Which is just logical considering they have (can create) infinite gold to sell, while Goldselling companies do not. They are bringing them on the bridge of non-profitability, and they don't care if they provide 100k , 300k or 3Billion gold with every token. Because their resources are infinite.

If they needed to create more tokens in order to alter the equation on gold prices, they absolutely would.

So, don't buy the "every token I buy means 20$ for blizzard" cause that's crap. They would sell the buyer that gold directly, without our intervention, if they wanted. They just like to make us feel part of the economy.

But don't be mistaken; if at any point they need to set us away, they will. This is not a full-transparent market. This is THEIR game, and their MADE-UP economy.

 

Very solid arguments. I can barely add more than this - The gold/real money market is totally owned by Blizzard with their 2 recent steps - launching wow tokens and linking the tokens with the battle.net balance, so any battle.net virtual good can be obtained with WoW Gold, including Destiny 2, which have nothing in common with Blizzard!
Respect, mate!

 

Blizzard now has a god tier anticheat expert who used to work for kaspersky: he got up to speed on Overwatch and is now herding the leftover and millennial sheeptards hidden away in the warcraft spare room. And, as part of his ego trip, he will continue just messing with and playing psych warfare with loldk and FH, which he views as his personal nemesis.

OS corps are also adding anticheat to their platforms, and Blizz is already negotiating with OS and AV companies to buy lists of any client using bot signatures.

Mostly only Chinese bots running now, and you should have noticed realm prices starting to spike because of all this (wow accountants have demanded gold farming be killed so ah prices go up so increased casual player token purchases make up for free falling sub numbers).

The god tier/complex anticheat expert is close to finishing a vector for banning pixel bots (especially with auto clickers) that will attach to suspected accounts via heuristic feedback, but if he fails (he's good but not as good as he thinks he is or has sold himself to be) Blizzard is about to drop an updated screen lock and other code to combat the final few standing WoW bots, including: several chinese, one korean, Frozen, Maxdps.ru, and some other semi-private workarounds (with a focus on the russians, pvp, companies selling piloting/runs, and world firsts).

The only thing holding them back is concerns about just how many subs are using pixel bots, and the reaction from the user base to the the new screen lock code side effects.

 

I am sorry, but I see no serious approach above:

1. Considering names you mention - Frozen, maxdps etc, their player base is close to statistical zero, so banwaving them is like taking down less than 0.0001 of the accounts pool. No real accountant in Blizzard would pay a penny for such "manpower", especially for the one of supposedly overqualified one. The same apply to the pixel bots as well.

2. If this old man, you mention, was so super skilled hax0r, Blizz would not be a potential donor for class action lawsuits, since their recent privacy breach via the out-of-process scans on ALL the programs, visible in the process list.

3. From his public twitter account, we can easily assume, he is too old for a competitive job like his current one, but we must admit, that he is noticeable more skilled than his predecessor.

4. The OS-level anti-cheat support is not serious for Blizzard nowadays, because they cant protect Win 7 / 8 OSes with them and non-Win 10 discontinuing would harm the subscriptions a lot!

5. Wow without farm-bots is obvious utopia and all wow accountants realize that. They are perfectly aware how to keep the farm botting moderated and still benefit from its effects.

I have no idea, why he should have personal nemesis vs loldk, since loldk is around since decade or more before the old man starting to mess with WoW and probably would be around for a while, after the old man is fired off the Blizzard boat. (which looks very close, if he is the "clever" guy, who started privacy breaches and Blizz gets into legal troubles with it)