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Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

Happens every other week, doesn’t it?

I loved these games. But the community around them is so utterly toxic now. Maybe it always was. But it didn’t feel so seedy to me back in the day.

Blizzard doesn’t seem to care about cheaters anymore, and doesn’t do any sort of community standards enforcement... you used to get banned for saying racist or homophobic things, or selling stuff for real money. There doesn’t seem to be any moderation any more.

Blizzard even added the ability to pay them for gold now, even in WoW Classic. So... it just feels gross. Monetized and gross. You buy gold, from Blizzard or non-Blizzard sellers, and then you pay incels to run you through dungeons to get gear. No need to make friends, or treat people like people. You can just (indirectly) pay to win.

That's just not the game I loved. And the fact that people all just sort of accept the way it is makes it hard for me to enjoy these games now.

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IME it's the opposite, where you could say anything and would never get banned unless you met some manual review threshold. You can be reported by a small group and receive an automated 24hr (increased if recurring) mute regardless of content. This led me to stop talking at all in these games.

Can you elaborate on cheaters? What kind of cheaters? Actual honest-to-god manipulating memory and getting some advantage? Or do you mean someone abusing an exploit?

RMT is a tricky subject and hard to get right. Even in Diablo 4, on release if you just traded a 'fair' amount of gold (~30million) you would get an automated ban. I wouldn't call this not caring.

Have they deleted anyone's account for buying gold recently in Classic WoW?

Go join a PUG raid and the first thing they do on the Discord is offer to sell you gold so you can buy gear in the raid. It's all just GDKPs now.

Rather than enforce the rules... ever... they just made it so you could buy gold directly from Blizzard now too.

And there are still a billion bots endlessly farming dungeons in the game. Still a bunch of people running auto-hot-key scripts (or outright rotation bots) so they can parse. Check the AH, you'll see impossible amounts of fish and ore and herbs all being sold by the same characters...

Why should they intervene in RMT? If you want to buy gold that's fine, if not that's good, it's none of your business if someone else does.

Also there are guilds that don't use GDKP, of course all pugs do it. You can also assemble your own raid and charge as much as you want and reserve everything you like. That's the good part of assembling a raid. The bad part is... everything else.

Because the game should be separate form my real life.

If I can just swipe my credit card to win... it takes the joy out of it for me. I can do that in real life enough already. We aren't talking about "a lot" of money to your average adult. It's not impressive for someone to spend a few hundred bucks -- but it really is impressive if someone earns 300k gold all by themselves in the game.

I don't want to play a game where paying real money is even an option. What you have in the game should represent your skill, talent, knowledge, and social skills / communication skills. Not your willingness to spend real money on a video game.

Back when the game was real, I didn't know anyone who bought gold. I'm sure they existed. But in Classic, the very first PUG I joined sent a link to a Discord where they were like, "Hey buy gold, everyone is doing it!" And it just felt perverted to me. I get a lot of gaming is based on real money now... and that's a huge reason I don't play many video games any more.

Paying 3rd parties for gold, items, or xp was a Diablo 2 thing. They specifically designed Diablo 4 to make this hard to impossible.

You can't trade legendary items. They're account bound. And if you're trading lots of gold you get banned.

It was even a D3 thing already, remember the RMAH ? The main reason why (almost) all ActiBlizz games are online only is to make cheating harder. (They are particularly victims of their own success here, less popular games have it easier.

> I loved these games. But the community around them is so utterly toxic now.

A good number of my friends play Final Fantasy XVI, and something that surprised the heck out of me is how friendly the community is. The moderation team of the game is quite active in muting problem players, and the community seems to have come to the consensus that acting like a toxic WoW player is frowned upon. They still run into them occasionally, but they're outnumbered.

because game is hollow.

That's really good to hear.

I am hopeful that, when I'm old, I can be in the nursing home raiding ZG like it's 2005 again!

I think Classic WoW was sort of like "New Coke" in that it wasn't at all the game as I remembered it. It was more the "Private Server" version, where everyone min/maxed the fun right out the door... and (because I'm old now) I didn't understand what all the "GOAT Chads" were saying. And various Discords were all just alt-right Trump Frog memes and I lost interest in that fast. There's like a generational lingo that I just wasn't part of.

You talk about the community being toxic and then you say people running dungeons for gold are incels. I think the community is better without you.

I'll give you an example...

I had played the game for like an hour... and someone had a guild name of like, "Sixteen is Legal in TN" or something to that extent. And it's all just super cringy. That to me is a sign the person behind that character hasn't spent much time around women.

Since Blizzard closed WoW in China, I found https://www.azerothcore.org/. They have a simple docker setup tutorial. I’ve been playing for a month and it’s been very interesting because they only support the English client. I’ve also learned a lot of English and currently feel great exploring the whole world alone.

For what's a pretty complex project, it would have been great if more of the community could have settled on a single project, rather than having to have mangos/trinity/sunwell/azeroth =/

> or selling stuff for real money

Gold sellers were spamming Trade and LFG when i played WoW back in 2005

I really enjoyed playing the original Everquest for a while, then followed friends over to WoW. I was definitely impressed by the game and the world in WoW, but within about a year I could see how "MMO economics" would become a dominant force in that style of game.

I bailed and never looked back, and nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind about the fundamental issues with that sort of game. Pay to play is just so dull and predatory.

What I don't understand is how, all these years later, they can spam the same message from the same accounts thousands of times before they are caught. They are using such exotic techniques like putting spaces between the letters in the url. It amazes me how little effort has been put into stopping these things over the decades now. One can only assume it's not considered a problem to them.

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