What Blizzard Can Learn from Google About Punishing Illicit Currency Buying

On his YouTube Channel today, popular Twitch streamer Asmongold discussed in quite a lot of detail, the current Blizzard Entertainment policy of going after World of Warcraft in-game gold buyers.

For those of you who don't know, in-game currency manipulation within an MMORPG like World of Warcraft is a huge destabilizing issue for the in-game economy, and with the upcoming launch of WoW: Forever a mere month away, the issue has taken on a renewed level of importance for Blizzard.

In Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment, "gold" is the primary in-game currency, traditionally earned by spending hours completing quests, slaying monsters, and crafting items.

But for players who want the game's prestige without the exhausting grind, a massive black market exists: players simply swipe their real-world credit cards to buy massive amounts of in-game gold from third-party "gold farmers". This illicit real-money economy has plagued the game for nearly two decades.

What Players Do With Illicit Gold

In short: they buy their way to the top.

Instead of legitimately spending weeks leveling up a character organically, gold buyers purchase services known as "Boosts" or "Carries". They pay a team of high-level, heavily armed players to drag their weak character through difficult dungeons. The buyer just stands safely at the entrance, soaking up massive amounts of experience points and hitting the max level in a fraction of the normal time.

Once they are fully leveled, the gold is used to skip the endgame grind through "GDKP" (Gold Dragon Kill Points) raids. Normally, teams fight difficult bosses and roll dice to see who wins the rare loot that drops. In a GDKP run, the loot is literally auctioned off to the highest bidder for raw gold.

A player with a wallet full of illicit gold can waltz into the hardest content in the game, outbid everyone else for the best armor and weapons, and instantly transform into a top-tier powerhouse overnight. This "pay-to-win" pipeline fuels a vicious cycle: it creates rampant in-game inflation, floods the servers with automated farming bots designed to harvest gold to meet player demand, and ultimately ruins the game's economy for regular players who are trying to earn their progress legitimately.

From Zero to Hero: In-Game Currency Buying is Toxic for MMORPGs

 

Asmongold's Take on Blizzard's Policy

Blizzard's current policy on gold farming includes enforcement on both buyers as well as the sellers of gold. And this is where the controversy arises.

While this might sound like the smart thing to do -- to go after the demand as well as the source -- by doing so, Blizzard has unwittingly handed a powerful weapon to griefers which can be used to destroy their real-life enemies.

Criticizing this policy, Asmongold makes a great point as to how this policy aimed at the end buyer could be used against players in a malicious way.

In his video, Asmongold states that under this policy, if he wanted to go after a streamer he disliked, he could get them banned from World of Warcraft by simply setting them up with a few fake gold purchases and then simply reporting the person to Blizzard.

I completely agree with Asmongold on this point. Blizzard has gold farming enforcement entirely backwards and they need only look at how Google handles SEO backlink spam to understand how correct Asmongold is on this.

No longer does Google ban websites outright with bad external links from poor quality websites. Instead, they devalue the links themselves and go after the link farms.

Why? Because by going after the end purchaser you absolutely weaponize your bans. Let me explain.

This exact scenario played out in the SEO world a decade ago, leading to a major policy shift known as the Google Penguin 4.0 update in September 2016. 

Prior to this update, Google would penalize or completely de-index websites that had spammy, low-quality backlinks pointing to them.

Predictably, people weaponized this through a tactic called "Negative SEO", i.e. by paying cheap overseas link farms to blast their competitors' websites with toxic links to intentionally trigger a Google penalty.

Recognizing that they had given bad actors a weapon to take down innocent sites, Google changed the algorithm. With Penguin 4.0, Google stopped penalizing the recipient sites. Instead, they simply devalued the bad links (treating them as if they didn't exist) and directed their enforcement at penalizing the link farms themselves.

By neutralizing the threat, Google instantly removed the incentive for weaponized reporting - a lesson Blizzard desperately needs to learn today.

Does This Sound Familiar? 

This is exactly the scenario Asmongold is warning about, just applied to websites instead of World of Warcraft characters. When a system punishes the recipient, that policy can easily be weaponized, leading to dramatic and unintended consequences.

Blizzard Gold Bans Are Negative SEO

Having worked in SEO for decades, I saw this weaponization first-hand. In highly competitive spaces like the ticket industry, shady brokers would routinely buy toxic backlinks and point them at competitors to intentionally get them de-listed from Google right before a big game or concert launched.

During my years in the agency world, I saw this happen to innocent clients constantly. I was routinely hired to clean up the collateral damage of these "Negative SEO" attacks - working to build positive authority and submitting massive disavow files directly to Google just to prove our clients weren't the ones buying the spam.

While the gold-buying in-game has been quite a big issue for World of Warcraft over the years, there are better ways to address it without handing a powerful weapon to disgruntled players. 

Blizzard should change course now, learn from Google's past pivot, adopt a similar approach and go full force after the true source of destabilization = the gold farmers.

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Here’s Asmongold’s full video: This is so bad that Blizzard had to intervene