Uh WTF?

[The IT Monkey]

My brother and I were discussing this last night...

WARNING PURE SPECULATION AHEAD

We are thinking that since it says "Economic Exploitation" in the emails it has to do with large transfers of Gold between accounts on the same IP address. This probably flags your account. Now it's a new system, just implemented obviously, and the CSR's or Account Specialists or what have you are absolutely bombarded with flags. They are not taking an indepth look at the accounts they are just trusting the flag and hit the "temp ban" button... after all, it's not like it's a perma-ban, just a slap on the wrists, so how careful do they have to be?

Now, I imagine that a gold seller does have multiple accounts coming from the same IP address and by the nature of their "business" they transfer large sums of gold between said accounts.

But so do we as multiboxers. As do families who play together. Even before I multiboxed I would loan large amounts of gold to my brother (who is also my roommate) and vice-versa.

So what we concluded, and again this is just pure speculation, is this:
A) The settings on the new system were a bit off. I really don't think that the amount of gold we transfer back and forth between toons is anywhere NEAR what is transfered between gold sellers.
B) The people who were reviewing the flagged accounts were not really doing much of a review due to the HUGE influx of flags as soon as this thing went live.


In other news... I have begun getting spam emails and whispers again for PL services and Gold Selling. I think the spammers have found a way around or through the measures Blizz implemented to protect us.

[Eteocles]

With dailies ingame(And the daily quest-per-day limit raised to 25 with the last patch), removing the cost of epic flying would be pointless; it's a nice goal to have for awhile, and achievable even by casuals(God knows there's always a couple hundred in shatt at any given minute on mag and that's a generous estimate)

And yeah you're right...I WAS getting gold-whisper ads recently...had 2, first one I replied "Oh dear god not you assfuckers again" and report-spam'd him, 2nd "ENJOY UR BAN LOLZ" and report-spam lol

[Eteocles]

Well that's the thing, if they did remove it for said casuals then the non-casuals wouldn't have anything to do. 42 days for something as good as an epic flyer sounds about right, and you're not factoring in the drops being sold, cloth, grays, and blues/purples that can fetch 200+g each(The Apexis items, one of which ALWAYS drops if you do Shartuul and now shartuul's darkrunes are easily obtained within 5 daily runs so that's at least once a week if one doesn't outright drop); 2 dailies in skettis, at least 4 in ogrila(Demons, bombs, rays, simon) more if you count shartuul depending on darkrune luck

The Sunwell Island dailies are jokingly easy, the only real trouble there is ganking lol and there's at least 3-4 dailies there to boot and all just as quickly completed + the flight there is near-instant from silvermoon/IF.

Plus it's not just those casuals who buy...I've seen instances where people who play plenty buy just out of laziness, and everything in wow is sickeningly easy/fast to do; no amount of changes will EVER fix that. You could just TALK to the npc for the 12g/day and have 20 of them stacked in shattrath and people would STILL buy.

I'll repeat myself from other threads/irc:
The bottom line is that people are stupid. Very stupid.

[marvein]

With dailies ingame(And the daily quest-per-day limit raised to 25 with the last patch), removing the cost of epic flying would be pointless; it's a nice goal to have for awhile, and achievable even by casuals(God knows there's always a couple hundred in shatt at any given minute on mag and that's a generous estimate)

And yeah you're right...I WAS getting gold-whisper ads recently...had 2, first one I replied "Oh dear god not you assfuckers again" and report-spam'd him, 2nd "ENJOY UR BAN LOLZ" and report-spam lol

Casual player, say 2 - 5 dallies a day. (I don't care that you CAN do 25 now, most peeps dont' have time for that, period) = ~120g
5000g / 120g a day = approx 42 days. Thats if you play every.single.day for the dailies, and don't spend a dime on _anything_, including possible repair bills.

Dooable? Heck ya. Peace of cake. Reasonable to the casual player that plays probably just once or twice a week and wants instant gratification? HELL NO. "right click, buy gold"

Blizzard has done an excellent job flooding the market with gold to help eliminate gold buying / selling ---- only to piss all over themselves by increasing the demand for buying gold by making a highly desierable item insanely expensive.

and if they removed the cost of those high demand gold sinks then what would we all do with our gold? I really cant think of any to spend my 7k gold on other than an epic mount.. Sure you could do a couple hundred here and there on some patterns or a random item, or level a twink but what else? Now i would certainly enjoy it if blizzard lowerred it csome (like to 3k instead of 5k) but its fine.

My only peeve right now is the amount of gold seller spam ive been getting recently and they send it to my alts 2-3 at a time. It is fun being able to respond with 'die in a fire' 5 times at once though, lol. just gives me some satisfaction even tho it does noting to them.

*reedit* best option to avoid those tells is get one of the spamblock addon that ignores tells from characters below the threshold you set (ie lvl 1) Or you can go crazy and get one of the blacklist/whitelist things where you create a safelist for tells and all the rest are ignored.

[thinus]

Casual player, say 2 - 5 dallies a day. (I don't care that you CAN do 25 now, most peeps dont' have time for that, period) = ~120g
5000g / 120g a day = approx 42 days. Thats if you play every.single.day for the dailies, and don't spend a dime on _anything_, including possible repair bills.

Its 11g for a daily, how do you get to 120g from 5 daily quests?

Dooable? Heck ya. Peace of cake. Reasonable to the casual player that plays probably just once or twice a week and wants instant gratification? HELL NO. "right click, buy gold"

Be really careful how you phrase this. It is almost like you label all casuals as gold buyers while the officers of some raiding guilds have been banned because of gold buying so they can afford consumables, repairs, etc.

Buying gold has nothing to do with whether you are casual or not.

And I quit WoW before after grinding dailies day after day after day after day after day.

[Dorffo]

Just to add a random anecdote to the "not all gold buyers are casuals" train of thought...

Prior to TBC release, my guild leader and 5 officers lost their account(s) for buying gold to help fund Naxx attempts. They cried about it a little bit, then just re-rolled on another server.

[thinus]

And most hardcore raiders have a few alts and paying for enchants for your gear (500g for mongoose everytime you get a new weapon as a rogue), paying repair bills, paying for consumables, etc all adds up. Now imagine having to go farm daily quests once more to get your alts epic flying mounts...

I don't think you can make a case for hardcore or casual being more likely to buy gold. I think it is different from person to person, some people will buy gold, some won't.

Your point stands about the 5000g cost of epic flyers being the main source for gold buying.