After 4 years and 2 expansions, WoW Classic has finally gotten the notorious WoW stamp in Europe and America. It didn’t go down well with fans. But in a statement Blizzard writes: in the fight against the bots you need this tool. And it doesn’t have a big impact anyway.
Here’s what Blizzard did:
This is what Blizzard says now: In a detailed post in the forum, community manager Kaivax explains that the step to the WoW brand was not easy. The team had resisted the introduction for a long time.
However, WoW and WoW Classic are overrun by bots that farm gold and sell it to players without permission for real money, so-called “RMT” (for “Real Money Trade”, i.e. real money trading). The problem has accompanied WoW Classic since its release.
Blizzard recently banned 120,000 accounts in WotLK Classic and the forum post mentions another almost 250,000 Battle.net accounts. The brand makes farms less lucrative for bot providers and has little impact anyway, Kaivax explains:
In Wrath Classic, your weekly activities are largely self-sustaining. […] Completing your weekly raid, a few dungeons or dailies will give even the most eager and well-prepared players more gold than they need to receive.
In Classic and Burning Crusade, gold was an even bigger topic. A brand is unimaginable there. Kaivax says that Classic should be there to give the feeling of the past and not a 1:1 copy of what was in the past. The constant grinding in the endgame was necessary back then, but today it feels more “out of place”. In Wrath the problem is not so big.
However, Kaivax admits that the fight against bots and trade is unwinnable – but the team continues to fight. The brand is only a tool for this fight. But there are always new technologies used by fraudsters to overturn Blizzard’s measures.
Even the release of WotLK was pretty overrun – apparently thousands of bots crept among the players:
Hundreds of players are crammed onto a boat for the release of WotLK Classic and I’m right in the middle of it
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“We don’t want that, it doesn’t go with Classic”
The reactions in the forum are still negative. Kaivax’s post received strong criticism. The Classic community does not want any changes to Classic, although there are already too many of them.
Some even accuse Blizzard of not caring about the needs of the fans. Absolute chaos reigns in the subreddit, and the rule not to talk about private servers was briefly lifted there.
While there aren’t any real defenses to the statement, there are at least a few players who don’t seem to be taking the token that closely. For example, some are asking whether the deleted dungeon finder is coming into play after all, or whether the brand could not be exchanged for Battle.net credit again. A few players apparently want to buy Diablo 4 for WoW gold.
However, the tenor is that most of them do not want to play retail, but classic. The brand doesn’t fit in there. However, major changes are also pending, especially in retail:
Does WoW lose its “13 € per month” compulsory subscription after 18 years?