Win trading and buying/selling points

[capnpop]

Apparently Blizz shut this down finally.  Some bannings, some 72 hour vacations, always the loss of arena points/gear.

http://arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?p=168324

Edit: buying/selling isn't being punished, but if you bought from a win-trading team you can be punished the same as them...

[Kothnok]

about time

[Shadowwolf]

/cheer!

[Gutboy]

I love how everyone in that thread is totally innocent of anything. Just like in "Shawshank Redemption" -- no one in prison is actually guilty. 

Three cheers for Blizz, and I don't even do arena.

GB

[Trismus]

I've never really seen a problem with buying points, tbh. It just cuts down a long grind, doesn't give you access to anything you can't already get. Heck, a 1100 team can get 4/5 s3 just by playing 10 matches every week.


Win trading I despise tho. Except when they give me free points because they screwed up, then it's okay :p


-Tris

[Nasanna]

Personally, I don't like the idea of buying points- it's similar to the guilds selling a spot in their TK run or whatever for T5 shoulders. Attunements used to be the requirement for getting raid gear. And now with S4, the personal ratings will pretty much eliminate win trading and point selling.

And reading through that thread in the first post- everyone seemed to think they were innocent: "I just did it for one week!" "My teammate was the one doing the trading, not me! I just played on the team!" 

[Muridin]

I don't understand what win trading is. Can someone explain it for me?

[Nasanna]

So you get two arena teams, lets call them A and B. Lets say they both get up to 2000 rating on their own. Then both teams queue for arena at the same time. When the arena match pops, both accept if they will be facing each other (there is some kind of addon to tell you what arena and its number you will be in).  Or you can play at offpeak hours to make sure that they will be more likely to play against each other. If not, they requeue and try again- this is why sometimes you zone in and there is no other team.

Then Team B loses all 10 of their games to Team A, giving them a big ratings boost. However, Team B's rating will go down a lot since they lost a bunch of games. Then there are 2 options- Team B works their way back up to Team A's rating by actually winning legitimate games and continues to feed Team A wins. Or Team C, with the same rating as A comes in and feeds Team A points. Then Team C will be around the same level as Team B and can feed them back up to Team A's rating...

Or Team C is at Team B's level and feeds them points so that they can win trade again with Team A.

In S4, you will be penalized for not accepting matches- you automatically lose points as if you had played and lost the match if you queue and don't accept the battle.

Win trading is different from point selling/buying. A team that sells or buys points works up to a high rating. Then, they sell a spot on their team for some amount of gold. The person who buys in plays 3 (probably losing) games, then the real teammates play the other 7 games to keep the team's rating where it is so that the point buyer can get a lot of arena points at once.

[capnpop]

Nas has it right.  Blizz seems to be taking a heavy-handed shot at this and anyone who win-traded or was on a team that win-traded basically got stripped of everything they got through all of season 3.  This means that even if you played regularly for a couple months and then win-traded for a couple weeks for a friend or...really anything...you can lose most/all of your s3 gear and extra points. 

This has bit many people in the butt.  If you play on a team that win-traded (even not doing it yourself) you lose the gear.  if you bought points from a team that win-traded, you lose the gear.  Blizz isn't forgiving about this and it's humorous seeing how people are getting so angry about it.

[Telfurion]

Was any mention made of Blizzard's disapproval of this prior to taking gear.  If not, Blizz is totally out of line.

[Shadowwolf]

They arent totally out of line. As per the ToS they can do what they wish with accounts. Theres a loophole in the rules and regs of the game that states that they are authorized to take any disciplinary action they see fit if someone is deemed using their account in ways deemed exploitative.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=20224

see "Abuse of Game Mechanics"

Because of that, whatever action they take is final however what they do with deleting the items isnt something new. If you buy gold from a website somewhere, they remove the gold and the items you purchased with the unauthorized funds. This isnt really any different in that instead of gold, people are using arena points they didnt legitimately earn.

It was a matter of time before this happened as they have come out on the forums months ago stating to everyone that they would be cracking down on it as it was becoming a problem and people were unhappy with it.

Generally with Blizzard when it comes to exploiting the game, they let things slide for a while and see what comes of it, when it becomes a serious issue where customer support and GMs are inundated with complaints, they post on the forum stating its an exploit, yada yada and usually, once the forum post comes, people caught doing it after are going to be punished for it. Basically they give amnesty to those who did it before the forum post and thats considered the formal warning to stop.

What I find hilarious at that link Cap posted is some of these people claiming innocence saying "it wasnt me, it was my friend using my account" or something, which according to Blizz policy is also against the ToS and the punishment for that is even worse where they ban the account outright. These people complain about losing S3 items and they dont realize how lucky they are to still have an account at all.


The thing of this is, point selling and win trading is wrong. It was never intended to be allowed, but as with anything new, the Arena system had to evolve. The developers didnt bank on people manipulating things to advantage themselves beyond what was intended, so because of it, they are making changes to how the system works to stop it. Basically you cant ever know off the bat exactly what kind of "illegal" ways someone is going to use something till you make it available. Yes, you can fail your way through Arenas and get some S3 items, however its going to take you a really really long time to get there if your team rating sucks and you only play 10 games a week. How fair is it to those people who try, but they cant get a rating very high and can only commit to a few hours a week to play to go without S3 or better items and people who dont even play more than 3 or 4 games a week can walk around with almost all S3 items in a mere few weeks because they know someone or paid gold to get on a high rated team.

Buying arena points for real or virtual currency is no better than buying gold from a spammer. Blizzard has finally put the lockdown on it and made it clear thats how they view it with this recent wave of account purges.

Im ecstatic about this crackdown personally. Its bad enough in 3v3 I lose to teams that stack class advantages over my own team, Ill except the limitations there, but when I lose at 3v3 because the opposing team has 2 of 3 people in S3 head to toe that have no business being in my rating bracket and are only there because they sold their services to someone to improve their team rating for points, that pisses me off.

[Shadowwolf]

I found the warning post which was made back in February. Basically Blizzard made it known they dont condone the behavior but were choosing at that time to refrain from taking action against those doing it. They did say in that post that policy could and might change and they reserve the right to change their minds if they want later...which apparently they have.

[blizzard author=Malkorix link=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4823213020&pageNo=1&sid=1#3]I can see how this might cause some confusion. I'll attempt to clarify this for you a bit, though it's worth keeping in mind that this represents our current stance on the subject, which may be subject to change later.

At the moment, buying and selling both teams and arena points is not a violation of our policies. These are however, very unpopular practices, and we do not support them, despite opting not to punish this behavior.

What does this mean for the man on the ground? It means that if you should choose to engage in these practices, it behooves you to employ far greater than normal levels of caution. Since we don't currently support these practices, we are unlikely to intervene in any n/xmif the deal goes south.

Conversely, if someone is thinking of getting into the scamming business with this in mind, I can say that it is a very poor idea to do so. Not only is this hugely detrimental to your reputation on a realm, we've been known to have sudden (much like a tsunami, or an earthquake) changes of heart on issues of this nature if it looks like someone is willfully attempting to take significant advantage of our willingness not to involve ourselves in certain transactions.[/blizzard]

[capnpop]

Buying/Selling points has not been actioned so far.  Blizz (it seems) is not going after those that have done it or are doing it because they assume that the changes in 2.4.2 will fix it.

What has happened is that those who have bought from win-trading teams are getting the same treatment as those who actually did the win-trading.