World of Warcraft: Blizzard Taking Stand on Win-Trading
May 17th, 2008 | by Shintar |Blizzard is currently taking a more active stand on the issue of Arena Win-Trading. Blizzard released a formal response on the WoW General forums.
Blizzard is mostly targeting the most abusive win-traders and giving them a 72 hour suspension, plus the removal of all Arena gears and points of the current season. To help with this, Blizzard made a few changes to the Arena system in patch 2.4.2, in addition to monitoring the Arena system.
For those who don’t know what Win-Trading, or Game Trading, is about, Win-Trading is basically two teams trading wins and loses using a loophole in the Arena system. To achieve this, both teams of similar ratings, usually brought for hundreds of gold, try to queue for an arena game at the same timeusing a voice chat program like Ventrilo. Most of the time, the two teams will end up seeing each other if the Arena game pops at the same time for both teams. If they want, the Losing team can send in a member to check if there is anyone in the opposing team. If there is no one for 5 seconds, this makes they are in the same game and that member will give the signal for the rest of the members on both teams to enter. Method will probably change from team to team but this general idea from what I’m told and understand.
Game trading is usually done at late night or early morning where there are few teams actually playing. Since there are few teams over 2000 arena ratings, this method works best with teams in the 2000 ratings since the prized S3 shoulders can be obtained as well.
Personally, I’m glad to see Blizzard taking action on win-trading as this makes Arena completey pointless. For better or worse, I’m sure many win traders that got caught will probably quit World of Warcraft, if temporary. Heck, I would if all my S3 gear was removed and now I have to start all over. I’m sure patch 2.4.2 will also put an end to team selling as well.
Blizzard’s forum response can be found here.
