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Hoi,
i asked myself how much money blizz gave up due to the boxing ban?
What do you think - how many boxed subscriptions were active before the ToS change (worldwide)?
I think blizz did the math before the ban?!
Maybe some boxing-haters will reactivate their subscriptions now...
the actions were not about money, they are going the direction that proved most people wrong. they are listening to protect the future integrity of the game. Even if they bin off the boxers, it won’t stop botters ofc. That’s automated toons that serve their purpose long before they get banned, you cannot kill botters unless they have live monitoring agents.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraxx
Of course they did the math. As much as Blizzard makes decisions people don't like, they're not stupid. I did some research ahead of our podcast this week. In Q2 Blizzard had $461MM in revenue. This is across all their games, and does not include just sub fees. Now how much of their breakdown is sub fees I couldn't tell you and Blizzard doesn't release those sorts of numbers anymore. Another interesting tidbit is that "Engagement" as Blizzard puts it is at the highest it has been at this point ahead of an expansion in a decade.
That means they've had more engagement now than they had leading up to Mists, and potentially even Cataclysm. They did admit this is being driven by the pandemic, but they're apparently doing really well right now.
If you do some bogus math (no one has these numbers), and assume there are 500 WoW multiboxers (probably overstated) in the world, each paying with a WoW token so it's $20 each, and let's say on average it's 10 box, because we want to inflate these numbers to prove a point: $300k/$461MM in a quarter. .06%.
I cannot stress enough how little we matter to Blizzard and from a brand perspective, this is likely the right call for them.
There is absolutely no way there are only 500 multiboxers worldwide. Posts on here alone can get tens of thousands of views. And I've seen dozens of multiboxers on my server and that's just on a low pop realm. I'd argue there has to be thousands of us at least - maybe even more when you include all the dual boxers etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by z0k
A few thousand i believe.
I really wouldn't conflate view counts with active players. I know there are lurkers, and I'm willing to concede there may be upwards of thousands of active multiboxers, but I don't believe that impacts the point I was making. There would need to be over 7,000 10 boxers all paying for their subscription with coins in order for us to even represent 1% of Blizzards income in a single quarter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Generalbrock
I think the financial impact due to the loss of many multiboxers is overstated... and I think this played into Blizzard's decision to take action..
Most multiboxers were essentially free to play players... they used tokens to pay for their subs and expansions... when a free to play player stops playing Blizzard losses nothing...
Most people would argue... someone is buying those tokens for $20... but that's still going to happen with or without multiboxers playing..
There is likely to be some impact based on the idea that multiboxers buying lots of tokens for game time raised the gold value of the token which causes more people to buy tokens....
We don't really know the mechanics of exactly how the tokens work so we aren't really sure how much of an impact this will really be...
The optics of how good this move was will be lost in a matter of a couple months into launch. When the botting community has repeated their efforts to smash the game market as they do every expansion. That was the #1 hate item for the anti MB crew. They only killed the M+ community and rated PvP community.
They did nothing to stop the standstill farmers and herbalist farmers.
I have to believe that the change in leadership has led to a lot of problems with the retail game. It's not getting better. It's only getting worse. Yes, their engagement numbers might be up but we're in the middle of a worldwide lockdown. That won't be the case forever. People denied a real life will seek one out in the virtual space. As soon as real life comes back online they are gone from the virtual space. Then what?
What do you do when those millions new subscribers are gone? Do you make a pathetic attempt to reach back out to the MB community or do you try some new stupid idea to pull in more people?
You can probably guess how I feel about the post-Morhaime Bluzzard.
There were so many possible ways they could have solved this, while allowing us to chill out, do dungeons, raids, world quests, mount collecting etc.etc.
Well, if they couldnt be assed, i cant be assed to support them either, with all the accounts i used to sub on.
I bought several pcs etc 11 months ago, new, worth around 14k u.s.d. I sold and shipped my last item today. Total worth around 20k u.s.d, all my gear. Sold all for 3/5 of new price, so not bad at all. Now all i have left is a 3900x, 32 ram, 1tb ssd, a old 1060 6gb vram and 3 monitors. Gonna play 1 wow account, thats it.
High five all.
It was fun while it lasted.
Hope you figure out a legal hardware solution eventually though.
Only 1 sub to pay for each month, from now on... i feel rich.
/signing off
*affixes tinfoil hat*
This was done specifically before an an expansion release because the amount of people resubbing to the game will more than offset the multiboxers quitting.
I know the feeling manQuote:
Originally Posted by WOWBOX40
You did it to yourselves. Not personally you, but YOU who farmed an area and pissed a regular Joe off.
No tinfoil in my opinion, I am sure that was a factor.Quote:
Originally Posted by EaTCarbS
i just wonder who they will blame for for “ruining the game” now? All the SACs? (Single Account Players?) I should start a thread on the WoW forums, accusing SACs of ruining the game. If they really cared they would have more than one account. Isn’t it worth an extra $15 a month to ensure good cash flow to deliver a good gaming experience? SACs should be banned for lack of enthusiasm! Down with the SACs!
My understandin is that there were also lots of bots doing automated farming leveraging multibox sofware with automation on top...Quote:
Originally Posted by akourbat
Except the person buying the token was always going to buy the token. The multiboxer will not any longer. Multiboxers aren't taking tokens away from other buyers. They are buying tokens in ADDITION to other buyers. There was never a supply shortage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Truelle
Multiboxing software just made it THAT much easier for bots to "multi-bot".
I suspect if innerspace/isboxer and any other software tools had a built in anti-cheat detection to combat the bots (and it actually worked) that we MIGHT not be here in this situation.
I am not saying that Lax should have built in an anti-cheat or that any of the other software devs should be policing their users lol, that's not really their business, and likely most of us would be up in arms at the type of privacy concerns a built in anti-cheat would cause. There are still people who bitch about how far Warden goes to detect cheats.
But the massive amounts of bots I've been seeing "multiboxing" was fucking insane. And I knew shit was gonna hit the fan soon because it was WAY out of hand. Every freaking day I was seeing those fuckers running around, and you could tell it wasn't a normal multiboxer just by the way they moved. Following each other EXACTLY step by step, even when turning or going around objects. They weren't actually using /follow, they were following a pre-programmed path.
Flat banning this software was just the easy/lazy way out for Blizzard to help combat the bots. Will it eliminate botting? Well duh, no. Will it make it easier to catch multiboxing bots? Well duh, ya. Will the bots just go back to single botting or not so obviously "multi-botting"? Most likely. It's possible most of them didn't even use isboxer to bot with, since the subscription cost would just eat into their profit, they probably built their own basic tools or used one of the other free options since they have no need for the powerful tools that were available in isboxer.
We just got caught in the crossfire pretty hardcore.