World of Warcraft: Current Year

Ukerric said:

If you're selling the run for gold, there WILL be a trace of the gold changing hands. It's when there's no trace of gold being traded between accounts that you can safely conclude RMT was involved.

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They spam on throwaway or trial accounts that list the website you can buy the run from. There is no interaction in the game at all between the buyer and seller to coordinate the sale. It's all done on third party websites and then you just join the group as you normally would any other group. This is not nearly as easy to track as you seem to think it is.

Ukerric said:

No, he means ban the 19 accounts of the guys who run the mythic Uldir raid for you. Getting a large enough raid geared for that raid takes a relatively long time, during which you earn no revenue at all. That kills the professional outfits, and puts a chilling effect on the small-scale raiding guilds that would be tempted to do it.

You don't even have to buy the run. It's easy tracking the advertiser bots (which lasts for weeks, even if they are very obvious... did you wonder why?), and flagging for attention anyone who send them a whisper or mail. Then you track when that guy goes on a M+ or non-guild raid, and flag everyone on that. Then, when a second/third guy you flagged for contacting the outfit gets carried: BLAM. Ban.

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Ok, guess I'm talking about something different then, sorry. I'm talking about buying and selling gold and items, not runs. I highly doubt Blizzard cares about users selling runs - it doesn't really negatively effect their customers and game. Additionally, even if they did care about users selling runs, the amount of time needed for a human to review the data pulled wouldn't justify it (because you'd end up with a lot of false positives) AND tracking the things you mention might not even be available to the data team. As far as banning customers buying - it's always best to temp ban and help correct their behavior than outright ban - they are paying customers after all.

As far as advertiser bots, again, it's harder than you think. 1) Reporting them alone isn't a good metric - your players will also mass report people they don't like, or random people for fun. Seriously - stick in some autoban feature after x number of reports, and asshole users WILL find a way to script that into banning people for fun. 2) Blizzard doesn't appear to run any sort of chat filter that I'm aware of (surprisingly, but I like it). But if it did, those things are super easy to get around, and you will be forever tweaking the filters trying to ban ads/URLs, to the point you'd start disrupting normal chat. And judging from their hands-off approach to filtering chat, the filter just isn't going to get good enough to bother with before hitting that point. 3) Whatever chat restriction you put in place can be gotten around easily. Require membership? Steal account to spam with. Require certain /played time? Steal account or run a script to keep you logged in the game, but without actually doing anything. Require character to be certain level? Do either of the previous and and script in some way to gain exp (I'd probably do pet battles, but I'm sure there are more efficient ways that've already found, that gets past their detection algorithms).

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I have a lot of experience with this, and it always seems easy from the outside, until you see the actual limitations and obsticles you face.

They do care, and they do ban for selling runs/carries for real money. But he seems to think everyone who sells for real money is unintelligent, spams on the same b.net account they run on, and works out the details in game in various chats leaving an easy to follow trail of breadcrumbs.

Honestly on Frostmourne (#1 US Alliance guild) had a number of their players either suspended for 6 months or accounts outright banned for doing carries for real money. Honestly banned reddit thread

Like Khane said, they do care, and they do try to act on it, but it can be hard to detect. Honestly likely got caught simply due to the fact that fewer guilds were doing carries, since it was still relatively early in the tier.

This aint the playerauctions days. All you have to do is "donate" to a streamer and join the run for free.

All of the things you listed are things legitimate players do constantly, they are in no way a good metric to use to identify RMT. Selling and carrying are not prohibited and people carry their friends all the time for free, or as others have pointed out, for being twitch subs or donors, etc. That entire post just proves my point.

Even the groups doing carries for gold and the people paying often do not pay/accept the gold on the characters/accounts being carried/doing the runs. Making that hard to track as well. RMT bans are permanent, and you seem to be OK with them just saying "Oh well no gold changed hands for these specific characters so that can only mean one thing", which is ridiculous.

Who cares if people are selling runs for money really though? You get literally nothing of value, and you'll probably get better gear doing m+ instead

I guess you get an achievement so you can get into easily puggable raids but that's about it

I personally have no problem with it at all, it's a service that people obviously want or there would be no demand. It doesn't bother me one bit but a lot of people get offended that it ruins the integrity of the game if you can buy the same gear that they so "painstakingly earned".

They don't want cash leaving the game. If you pay for a carry with cash, it is going directly to the 3rd party. If you pay via gold, the player had to get that gold within the game (typically from purchasing a wow token).

Ukerric said:

You underestimate tracking and datamining. You don't even need anything but a simple "A talked with B", "A grouped with C", "C gave loot to A" type of logs:

1) You can absolutely detect the spambots. They are horribly blatant. The alternative is not to advertise in game, which severely restricts your audience.
2) You can flag anyone who interacts with the spambots by sending them tells/mails/whatever
3) You can track which raid group those flagged characters join
4) Bonus tracking: they haven't joined much raid groups yet / they are undergeared vs the average joiner of pickup raids (more likely to be a carried guy)
5) Bonus interaction: they join a group, and everyone gives them all the loot for which they qualify (more likely to be a carrier group)
6) After the 3rd...4th...5th??? flagged guy who joins the same group of accounts, you have detected your seller group, which you can investigate more thoroughly (if necessary)

You do scoring: each raid joined get a +X% score added based on likelyhood that this is a carry run, and your CM just have to investigate the top scores in descending order. The raid with 60% score won't get investigated. The professional outfit that runs a heroic Uldir thrice a week with alts for a carry gets a 400% score quickly.

You won't catch 100% of the RMT. You'll just catch the largest ones. It's a funnel of interactions: spambots (lots, replaceable, but mostly detectables) -interactwith-> potential buyer (pretty much the only guy who interacts with spambots) -raidwith-> carry group (fewer numbers)

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I can't tell you how wrong this is. As Khane mentioned, this is all typical behavior of characters. How many CS staff are you going to hire to comb through the tens of thousands of results you get every week? I mention CS staff as they are by far the lowest paid, and you surely aren't paying devs or data analysts for this.... right? And if you ARE going to put this much effort into combating RMT, you're spending the bulk of your resources to go after gold/account sellers, as that fuels account theft and fraud (the amount of fraud behind MMOs and mobile games is truly staggering). And any program you can devise to track this stuff, the sellers can change variables on a dime, and now your awesome detection program is a huge waste of time.

Let me put this another way - when you have thieves/RMTers making a $100k+ a month doing this stuff, I guarantee their motivation is FAR superior to any employee trying to stop them. And they will dedicate FAR more time to overcoming anything you can think up. Who do you think wins this arms race?

The RMT guys are also paying for tons of subs. Blizzard is still a business.

Fyff said:

The RMT guys are also paying for tons of subs. Blizzard is still a business.

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It's pay to win, with extra steps!

Fyff said:

The RMT guys are also paying for tons of subs. Blizzard is still a business.

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Maybe. I used to make 250k+/mo screwing around, and that bought me a lot of sub time. Blizz says it is player money, but they are probably generating it now in order to sell tokens. I used to make 8000k gold a day. The last BFA emissary thing got me 14 gold after travel and repairs. 14 gold. 8000 gold a day to 14 gold. And they still haven't fixed it. That 2000 gold WQ thing pops up twice a month so it is not a fix.

I only log in once every day for a few SECONDS to check WQs and I log out again. I played an hour a day every day in Legion.

I'm not logging in that much myself anymore. Do the daily emmisary quests on my main just because I still have tortollans and champions of azeroth to reach exalted with.

Been playing console games recently. Last time I played console was on the old Turbo grafx machine. Things have come a long way today. On a ps4 pro with my 4k tv and damn it's like watching an interactive movie. Plus it's more comfortable lying on my bed playing than sitting in my chair.

If things don't get interesting in BFA next patch will probably let my sub slide until next expac.

Ukerric said:

Get ready for the next Pet Battles: The Future of the Warcraft Franchise on Mobile - Is Warcraft: GO Happening? (Speculation)

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Let's be honest: this is what we all play high fantasy games for. 10/10. Knees perfect.

You captured a Varian!
>>Assign to slave fight pits to level up.
>>Rename slave?