wow One-Day Suspensions for Advertising in the WoW Group Finder

[Stan 5,020]

The WoW Group Finder is intended to make group finding in the game easier, but boosting services use it for advertisement, so Blizzard started giving away one-day suspensions to address the problem.

Reddit user NargoEUW shared the email that Blizzard is sending out to accounts affected by the suspensions.

It's good to see that Blizzard is doing their part in getting rid of Group Finder advertising!

[Whiterhino 31]

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

[Lith 52]

4 minutes ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

I don't think it does.

[Whiterhino 31]

1 minute ago, Lith said:

I don't think it does.

I hope not cause I'm just trying to help others get groups and filter out some of the toxicity you find in the group finder.

[meatbag7 0]

9 minutes ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

ofc its not LOL, you said free carries  so no one is paying to play with you. Your goal is to build a community not to make a profit there is a difference

[Lith 52]

8 minutes ago, Whiterhino said:

I hope not cause I'm just trying to help others get groups and filter out some of the toxicity you find in the group finder.

in worst case you just write your twitch name into it and not the twitch.tv stuff so wievers can find you

 

[Jurani 0]

18 minutes ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

I don't see it as advertising if you're just giving free carries and I would hope Blizzard would agree. If there's no payment I don't think there should be an issue.

[Lithari 194]

34 minutes ago, Stan said:

The WoW Group Finder is intended to make group finding in the game easier, but boosting services use it for advertisement, so Blizzard started giving away one-day suspensions to address the problem.

Reddit user NargoEUW shared the email that Blizzard is sending out to accounts affected by the suspensions.

It's good to see that Blizzard is doing their part in getting rid of Group Finder advertising!

Well, they are likely just miffed that they are not getting the profits from it. :-)

[jinsu2301 273]

21 minutes ago, Whiterhino said:

Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

I would be careful with that. The chance you will get reported for advertising your stream (even if the focus is on forming a party or raid) is pretty high. You probably won't get a ban, but you might get squelched by the system since that's an automated process.

 

[Harvey 59]

1 hour ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

That's like highly dangerous.
The blue post stated, "...recently caught adverting ... for in-game services. This action - regardless of payment method - ....". Technically, if you advertise your twitch channel (advertising) to offer free carries to help people (in-game services) for zero payment (regardless of payment method, e.g. visiting/subscribing to your channel), you are also liable to the same punishment.
Also, you have to take into account that your "help of free carries" might be in direct competition with the boosting services who would then likely report you in retaliation. 

Just my two cents. ?

[Nakzul 37]

Streamers that wanna give out free carries can just create the event in the custom category instead I guess.

[Luusee 0]

I fail to see how a one day suspension is going to fix this problem.  Right now in Group Finder there are 10 offers for ingame services. After reading the above post I expected to see none.

[Balor 11]

i will report any streamer advertisement in any place on wow at this point. Twitch spam on my servers Malganis and illidan  has gotten real annoying. At this point they are hoping people will sub to their channel and using wow as free advertisement space.I assume most free carrys are a Scam at this point to get viewers.  They might do 1 free M+ run a hour for most of the ones i see in M+ LFG finder. I know cause im waiting in to get into groups for hours now.

[Hyrcyne 1]

5 hours ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

It's still advertising. Could definitely get a suspension, even if you're doing free carries.

[Calin 45]

6 hours ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

As long as you don't spam and you're not selling but giving away, then I'm pretty sure it wont be an issue

[Buckythemage 1]

6 hours ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

Technically, you still profit from it. Added viewers to your twitch channel does eventually bring in revenue. Also there's also the question of how does Blizzard determine a streamer doing "free" carries versus a streamer doing "lottery" carries. They say sure we'll pick 1 person from twitch stream but you can increases your chances if you sub to the channel or throw bits at the streamer so they'll notice you sooner.

Either way, I'm glad that blizzard is stepping up to punish advertisers especially in GF. If you must advertise, go to trade chat.

[HugeMurloc 43]

7 hours ago, Whiterhino said:

What if I'm a streamer doing free carries to help people? Would advertising my twitch channel to build a helpful community fall under this category?

Try this 

 

Trying to build a strong and helpful Community! /W me for an invite to our free Heroic Carry 

 

You can watch our effort at "enter username" Stream 

 

Thank me later 

[Ragingwolf 286]

I think this was designed to target the players charging real cash for carries for either Raid content or high end keystones.  However streamers can technically fall into this category even if they were doing a service to the community at free of charge.  It's no different than the old days (in any old school mmo) where bots would run rampant and park into town to do their shout macros to sell or advertise their wares followed by another series sending pm's to random people.  And as of now a lot of the Realms are seeing choke holds of advertisement spams being littered in LFG to push onto the player for getting a guarantee high key in for the week or getting AOTC at the cost of either gold or a credit card swipe at their designated websites.

Only advice to the streamers or players that are just wanting to do a community a free service:

Use extreme caution when promoting your self to get more followers.  The last thing you need is to getting banned for enjoying to play the game and helping others.  I know a lot of people don't use this feature but perhaps leaving a note on your main character of Raider IO on days you are streaming and times to join in for the round of carries. Ask current followers to tell their friends or Guildies to tell them about you and their recent runs.  Ask recent additions to spread the word by mouth for the following week if anything.

I know it's more of pain in the *filtered* but it beats getting your account constantly flagged for advertisement in LFG.

[Cheze 6]

the whole point of this is that these ads make the GF harder to use by clogging it with entries that aren't groups players can join; I'm sure your twitch channel is cool and all but if you have a listing in the finder that people can't actually sign up for and join, you're part of the problem

take your twitch spam to general chat or the custom tab or whatever

Edited July 28, 2020 by Cheze

[Halock 156]

I'd point out that there's no auto-detect auto-ban feature working here, as far as I'm aware. It's based at least primarily on people reporting you. 

And while the GMs who review the case (if the system doesn't simply ban you past a threshold of reports) might take no action based on minutiae such as whether or not you're asking for payment... I'd guess that if X number of people have reported you for advertising you're gonna be deemed as advertising. Or spam. Or something. People have clearly found you a hindrance.

So maybe trying to shimmy between the lines of the CoC isn't the best way. Build your advert as a genuine 'looking for group' and nobody'll report you. Everybody's happy. 

HugeMurloc's suggestion above does exactly that, for me. It places emphasis on the grouping, not advertising some service, channel or doohicky.

[SidonisAntares 288]

6 hours ago, Ragingwolf said:

I think this was designed to target the players charging real cash for carries for either Raid content or high end keystones. 

Read the wording of the suspension notice. "regardless of the payment method"

[Ragingwolf 286]

1 hour ago, SidonisAntares said:

Read the wording of the suspension notice. "regardless of the payment method"

Yeah my fault on that one.

[Wildwitch 108]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Remember the gold sellers spam? THIS is worse and I didn't think anything could be worse! I have to turn off my Trade channel because of the damn spam! This is a step in the right direction...now go after Trade :O)

[Missmagy 0]

I was going to say please do trade chat next, but I suppose they are trying to sell something.

I'd just prefer if they would make a separate chat for selling boosts cause that *filtered* is annoying as hell. 

[Crimpson 0]

21 hours ago, Lithari said:

Well, they are likely just miffed that they are not getting the profits from it. :-)

You mean Blizzard?  I mean, they kind of are with some of these if people are paying for WoW Tokens for $20 bucks each and then selling those for gold and using that gold to buy those carries.  They don't want people spending real money for carries, but technically they are allowing it to happen as long as the gold was obtained by legit means like buying WoW Tokens which which is bought with real money.