That Infernal Blue Dot

Believe it or not, I'm pretty happy with what Blizzard is doing with WoW right now. Do I love and agree with every single decision they make? Of course not. I think the anniversary servers are everything I don't want Classic to be for example, but I just don't play there. There's enough going on that I can just focus on the things I enjoy and get good value out of my subscription.

I'm also not exactly a hater of cash shops. If given the choice, I'd rather MMOs didn't have them, but I know that money needs to come from somewhere, and as long as they don't actively annoy me, I'm like... fine, do what you must. Sometimes I'll even buy something myself.

However, there's something Blizzard did to their cash shop recently that annoys me big time, and as far as I can tell I'm literally the only person on the internet bothered by this. It may be that the search term "Blizzard shop blue dot" is too vague, but I've also tried different variations of the search, even different search engines - and yet, I couldn't find a single reddit or forum post talking about this. And by "this", I mean what you can see below:

Basically, a couple of patches ago, Blizzard decided to add a fake notification to the shop button every so often, to make you click on it and open the shop if for no other reason than to make the highlight go away. And yes, it is indeed a fake notification as it doesn't even only appear when there are new items in the store. Sometimes they've rotated what's on the front page, but even that hasn't consistently been the case when the blue dot appears as far as I can tell.

The reason I hate this so much is that I strive to be an inbox zero person. I don't always succeed, but I do try to keep my emails and notifications clean, and it doesn't take much for me to take the sledgehammer out and revoke all access for an app or company that's consistently bothering me about nothing just to get my attention. It's what first made me hate Facebook, when they started sending me daily "notifications" about stuff like "a person made a post", which was absolutely not notification-worthy.

I know that not everyone is sensitive to this kind of stuff - when I look over my husband's shoulder he always has 99+ unread notifications on YouTube and Discord and seems completely unfazed by that. He's fine with ignoring all attempts by anyone to get his attention. However, that I literally couldn't find a single other person talking about this is still wild to me. I tried to see whether there's maybe an addon to "mute" shop notifications but had no luck on that front either.

If you have any knowledge of how to make this go away (other than replacing my UI entirely), please let me know!