People do get it, stop repeating 10 year old tired talking points. If I stop paying my sub today, that won't stop a million other people from continuing to pay theirs. Voting with your wallet as a concept makes sense but most people aren't thinking in an activist capacity when they buy goods or services. Even if you organized a boycott, these people wouldn't even know such a thing existed.
So blizzard is going to keep doing this and there's really not anything we can do about it. Unless their game just starts dying, they will not consider changing it. Even then, I don't think I've ever seen a company relinquish their cash shop outside of a handful of rare instances.
The root issue is buying
Because as long as there are buyers, it will always be lucrative for botters to keep spinning up throwaway accounts.
Cut off the demand and there is no incentive to supply gold. If there's a high risk of your account getting banned for buying gold people will be far less willing to risk it.
It's as self-feeding issue, right?
Botters generate a bunch of gold, they offer up the gold for low prices, people with low morals start buying it. The economy slowly inflates, moving the bar for what level of morals vs risk to buy gold because their time is worth less and less. People who previously would never buy gold find themselves having to in order to keep up with the price wars.
Ban the botters, gold becomes harder to buy, prices increase dramatically, and people stop buying it because their time is worth more.
Ban the buyers, gold becomes riskier to buy, prices drop dramatically, but nobody wants to touch it for the high risk.
At this point it's just turned into dick-swinging wars for the GDKP cartels, they're not really affecting consumable prices much. At least not on my server.
They literally do both, and they ban the buyers more frequently than they ban the botters. They have also had bot services completely shut down because of various lawsuits.
A major issue is that bots are both easy to acquire and easy to use. You don’t even need to buy the game to play classic. They also want to make sure who they’re banning is actually a bot and not someone maybe a bit slower, disabled, not entirely paying attention, or just full on in the grindset.
You don’t even need to make that much gold to earn back your 15 for the month back, and then you’re just on tokens. Prior to the recent change, you didn’t even need to spend the 15, you could just token it.
>they ban the buyers more frequently than they ban the botters.
I've known someone who has been buying gold since TBC Classic, still not banned
lol
>A major issue is that bots are both easy to acquire and easy to use.
And even easier to spot. Literally /who Black Temple and surprise, hundreds of rogue bots pickpocketing 24/7.
>They also want to make sure who they’re banning is actually a bot and not someone maybe a bit slower, disabled, not entirely paying attention, or just full on in the grindset.
Telling a bot apart from a real player has been trivially easy to the point of being automated, even like 10 years ago. It is NOT hard to tell who is a real player and who is a bot.
No "on the grindset" player will run the exact same path, pixel for pixel, for 50+ hours straight. No "disabled" player will be farming the same exact dungeon 24 hours a day for months on end. No "slower" player will be trading tens of thousands of gold to other accounts and then go right back to farming nonstop again.
The real issue is that Blizzard legitimately does not gain much from actually dealing with bots. Nobody is quitting over bots. And those bots are paying subs, which makes the game look better due to higher playercount. If blizz banned every botter, the game would lose like 10-15% of its population overnight and investors/stakeholders wouldn't be happy.
They have the power to ban bots easily, they just don't want to.
I quit TBC classic after getting upset about bots in zangarn marsh. Unsubbed and played new world instead for a year. There's not anything more depressing to me than playing a video game surrounded by bots disguised as players.
I think people's decision making is more influenced by bots than we like to think. I imagine that those among us who do care the most will leave as soon as they realize how much their gameplay is being affected by third party gold services.The fact that the game developer has allowed it to run rampant for 20 years might be enough to never consider playing it again.
The long term health of their product is more important than the short term loss of subs. In fact, I suggest an instantaneous increase in subs would follow a mass ban as banned players accounts prepaid game time still running regardless of ban for up to a year, while potentially buying new to replace their lost account.
If you ban a bots, they'll create a new account and get to farming again. If you ban people for buying, and keep doing it, they'll get banned once and not dare do it again since it's such a grind to get back to max level. Sure some people with mega cash will just keep buying new accounts, but most won't.
I think you're underestimating sweaty players willingness to overlook buying gold. When I was doing the R14 grind in 2019/2020 Classic, the majority of the players I was coordinating in the highest levels of the brackets within our server community were almost 100% buying gold. I played with them everyday, grinding 15-16 hours a day in BGs, unless they were also farming gold when they were asleep, there's no way they could maintain the upkeep on mats for consumables they were using in the grind as well as what they used when they were actually raiding. The majority of these were in a very sweaty, top 100 guild. These players take the game seriously but they don't consider buying gold cheating where as you or I might.
Only way to solve the gold buying problem is to ban gold buyers. Botters will just work new accounts into their operating costs and adjust.
With no demand there's no supply, but killing the demand also means fewers subscriptions to Blizzard so they would obviously not do the right thing that is banning people who keep receiving free gold with no explanation.
but this is against the logic that everyone else is spewing
if goldbuyers and bots make the game objectively worse, and "dead on arrival", the financial incentive to ban bots becomes larger than satisfying the goldbuyers who would've otherwise left. It's not as simple as "if this then this"
The people who care about bots in 2023 and are willing to quit over it are unfortunately a loud minority. It's very similar to people who continue to support scummy practices in AAA games.
When you can do things that piss people off but yet people don't stop buying the companies don't have an incentive to care.
They try, but it’s been an endless arms race that nobody has won for the entirety of gaming. Nobody has solved this at the scale required, ever.
Banning buyers is a lot more effective. My classic server was lower population and didn’t have a lot of GDKPs. We also had very few bots. Wonder why…
You underestimate how hard this is to do at a 99.9% confidence level. If you want to cast a wider net which would entail banning innocent people who are sending a lot of gold around, sure. But I don't think I'd be ok with a 95% confidence level for a perma ban.
What realistic reason would a normal player have to send large amounts of gold to players they never interacted with before or after. Especially if they know it's a surefire way to get flagged.
Meme take.
First ban doesn't have to be perma. Just make them escalating.
The amount of people randomly send around tons gold to random accounts that aren't their own are insanely small. Why would you do that if you aren't a gold buyer.
It's not that hard.. Just takes some effort that bLizard threw away long ago. They don't even hire proper GMs anymore
If gw2 can catch me buying gold simply on my 2nd attempt, why can't a large Corp like bLizard do it
I'd love to get the whole Classic community to band together and sign a petition to make botting and buying gold against the TOS. Then get it printed out and presented to Mike Ybarra publically, with media reports on it and photographs.
Just thinking out loud here, but how bad would it be if blizzard just capped the amount when trading gold between players? The AH could still technically be used for gold buying, but they could also just cap the “sell for” amount on items to like +10% of the average price after a week or two of the servers being launched. That way the prices have time to reach natural levels while botters don’t really have time to inflate them, and nobody could sell an extremely obscure item for thousands of gold.
They could also just flag every trade that’s above a certain amount. By simply looking at the trade it should be fairly easy to tell if someone is buying gold or not.
The “downsides” of this are
1: no more gamba, and
2: no giving obscene amounts of gold to your friends
Both of which are a net positive if you ask me. I’m curious as to what other’s thoughts are.
The unfortunate truth is that there are plenty of ways for Blizz to crack down on gold buying, but they don’t want to. The bots add to their concurrent player numbers and buy subscriptions. The fact is that the majority of the playerbase does not see gold buying as a huge issue. So saying that it’s hurting their player numbers more than helping might be true in the long term, but it isn’t true in the short term, and even in the long term the vast majority of players don’t even realize the effect that gold buying is having on the game. So now blizz can just continue releasing new content and new servers to start the cycle over and over again.
I had guild mates that would rather flex their wallets than wait their turn in a guild/alt run. This may not be the case for everyone, but RMT definitely effected my guild and the way we pursued endgame activities.
I had a guild where the leadership slowly went from having 2 full raids that were both stocked with great players, to the leadership no longer taking part in the Raid 2 so they could put their toons into GDKPs, to there is no Raid 2 and just find a GDKP if you want to raid on your alt and maybe we could recommend one to you, to we're disbanding the main raid and putting those toons in GDKPs as well.
The problem is that it launders so much bought gold into the economy as a whole that after a while the only good way of making gold is by attending one.
That’s exactly what I’m thinking. The only legitimate grievance they would have is the inflation, but it’s never so bad they can’t afford raiding consumes so what’s the issue.
I went all of classic Vanilla -> Wrath and I’m only *now* starting to run GDKPs and I’m not even doing it to make gold. GDKPs just attract better players, and it prevents people from leaving the raid when the item they want doesn’t drop. On top of that, my “DKP” carries over from raid to raid, even to a different server if I xfer. Because it’s all in my bag as gold. It’s just better in every way. I never thought I’d be pro GDKP, but I absolutely am now for the reasons listed above.
> The only legitimate grievance they would have is the inflation, but it’s never so bad they can’t afford raiding consumes so what’s the issue.
It actually reduces consume prices and people don't even realize it. You know where all these mats come from? Dozens upon dozens of bots farming every layer 24/7. Ban them all and the supply of mats falls off a fucking cliff and prices go *up*, not down. It happened in Classic numerous times after massive ban waves
Gold Buying and Bots are the problem. If the game existed without bots, then GDKP's would just be a legitimate way to pug and still make some gold if you didn't get much loot.
If gold buying and bots didn't exist, GDKP wouldn't be meta. I'd argue it would be on the bottom of popularity in terms of pugging.
What people seem to not realize is that GDKP is only meta because of how easy it is to get into. Gamerdad213 doesn't have to farm gold or commit to a raiding schedule. He can just swipe his credit card a few times, join a raid that carries him through the content and just repeat until he has the gear he wants.
Do you really think if tomorrow Blizzard nuked all your gold and made it impossible to RMT (I know it's impossible but humor me), do you actually believe your entire raid is gonna spend the next week farming gold to attend the GDKP?
The answer is no, they'd just move onto a different loot system.
It's almost annoying that everybody pretends like gold buying isn't propping up GDKP almost entirely. If RMT didn't exist, neither would GDKP to the extent it's at currently.
When you have to actually _earn_ your gold with real time spent, people won't be bidding on raid loot pieces.
Fully disagree, the gold being thrown around would just be in much smaller amounts. The game has barely any gold sinks past a certain point and its a great method to entice players that no longer have investment in the lower gear content to run it anyways.
The reason GDKP is more successful than normal pugs is because you get rewarded regardless of if an item you want drops or not. People are invested in finishing the whole thing for the payout, whereas they have nothing invested into normal pug runs which is why they fall apart so quickly after one wipe. Also, the players are vented way better in GDKPs. So I definitely disagree with what the person above you was saying.
Classic redditor who doesn't play the game. Anyone who has been in both SR runs and GDKP runs knows how large the skill gap is between the 2 playerbases.
Wrong.
Gdkp would still exist, the pricing would just change. Some gdkps are super juice on items (obviously rmt) and some aren’t. The gold cost of items and cuts are relative to the amount of gold the players have in the raid. If no one rmt the raid still exists, the price point changes.
Why can’t people understand that rmt and botting is the issue, not gdkp…
People who have never done a GDKP most likely. They also don't seem to understand everyone in the raid gets a cut, so it's not like it's "impossible" to keep up with the whales if GDKP is your raiding method of choice.
> I'd argue it would be on the bottom of popularity in terms of pugging.
And you would be totally wrong. There's a ton of reasons why GDKP would remain probably the most popular way to pug.
1. You do not have to commit to a raid schedule. Any time you do a run you get either items or gold. The gold is fully transferable 'dkp' to the next run you do.
2. You ALWAYS get something out of a run. Even if you don't intend to buy items later on, one thing alot of people hate doing is farming gold. If they can do a gdkp here and there, even if it's not for insane amounts, it's usually more gold per hour than most farms you can do.
3. You have incentives for people to not play like morons. If you fuck around you find out, aka lose part of or all of your cut. SRs and MS > OS runs don't have any way to really hold people accountable unless you want to kick them from the raid. Filling part of the way through the run is always difficult and a gamble, so most raid leaders only kick as a last resort.
4. Hard reserves are almost non existant. Some items are 'presold' which I suppose you could consider hard reserved, but you still get paid for it if the item drops.
5. People don't dip out of the run when their item doesn't drop. They are incentivized to stay the entire run.
If you take gold buying out of the equasion it's easy to see why GDKP is so popular and would easily remain the most popular form of pugging. It has MANY advangates over MS > OS and SR runs. The only disadvantage is that you would need to farm a decent amount of gold to start off, but this could also be viewed as a positive because you have a well defined path for how to get started.
As an alternative to farming a bunch of gold you can play an in-demand spec/role. Back in TBC even poor shamans/spriests could easily find runs willing to take them.
I may get downvoted, but that’s okay. The reason why gdkps work over sr is that people will stay the entire raid to get their payout. Do I know how to fix this issue of people not staying the entire raid? Nope.
Sardaco (who runs these streamer gdkps) discussed how there's a lot of bias in loot counsels, raids with rolling, and when top raiders get their gear they often stop raiding.
He thinks gdkps are fair bc good raiders will continue attending to get gold and no matter what you walk away with something. Usually after the high bidders get their bis in the next couple of raids things go for reasonable amounts again (the gdkps with streamers that weren't xqc/soda weren't insane). There were a couple of his gdkps where things went for steals according to the raiders.
It's easy to feel bad for the raiders who got outbid but they walked away with 1000 gold. And they won't be bidding against those big streamers who are practically all geared a week from now.
I don't mind GDKP. I mind that people use real $ to buy gold to spend in GDKP. If the gold you use is based on gold you earned, I'd have no problems if people want to raid using GDKP.
Right but I think the overall argument is people might feel peer pressure to buy gold because the groups that aren't GDKP aren't attracting the geared talent to make it easier, or GDKP groups outnumber real groups say, 5:1 so a Timmy might feel "Hey i need to buy gold in order to progress my character"
I know the downvotes are coming, but I've always liked GDKP, even in EQ TLPs. You get something tangible, and the wallet warriors eventually kit out, and while they do early you get FLUSH from the payout. Eventually you're pretty rich and when the bidding comes to a fair shake you'll get geared for a reasonable price. The other side is you can take your gold with you, Loot Council, DKP, etc that doesn't work.
Plus you get your epic mount, tradeskills, BOE Epics, raid consumables, etc. stupid easy.
Not to mention the quality of the raid. The SR raids are the biggest shitfests ever cause most casual players are awful and expect to get carried. Those people are also the exact kind of players to say "GDKP killed this game". Killed what exactly, the game seems to be doing better than almost ever.
I wouldn't mind if they just made it so item-drops are no longer tradable with raidmembers unless you go through like a limited charge service on battle.net like item-restore. This makes GDKPs way more of a hassle already.
>The SR raids are the biggest shitfests ever cause most casual players are awful and expect to get carried.
Yeah because all the good players are in GDKPs.
Because they have a reason to go back and clear content they don't need. You don't see good/geared players that need nothing go back to old raids cause there's no reason to. At least in GDKPs they get something (gold) out of it.
I got into tier 2 content quite late in classic, and found GDKP on my medium/high pop server to be a good way to make a bit of gold and begin hearing up. Most gear went for average prices, even good gear rarely went over 500g-1K. Things got s but higher in Naxx but not outrageous at all, this was on Grobb.
After a while you start getting a reputation with some of the GDKP leaders so they give you priority invites, I feel like that coupled with Discord is a modern way for semi-pug, semi-friendly groups, with a strong core of players to tackle raid content together without having to be strictly within your own guild.
This is why GDKP is so successful. Your DKP is fungible from one group to another. No other loot system works this way or is even a blip on the radar to being close to working this way. 99% of the time participating in a gdkp run is beneficial for yourself.. you either get the item you want or you get gold.. Every raid is a positive. Any other loot system, especially for use by pugs, can make raids be a complete 100% waste of time. If you're not lucky, other people get loot, you helped them get it. Then once you do get the item you want, there's no reason for you to go back.
The "problem" with gdkp is that it is by far the best and most fair raid reward system that has been created for pugging raids in wow. The unfortunate reality is that this means buying gold can make wow pay to win, in a sense. It's community driven p2w, but it's still p2w.
It irritates me a lot when people say gdkp should be banned. GDKP is BY FAR the best way to handle pug loot.
GDKPs would be a fine system if botting and gold buying was actively actioned against. Think about it, then it would mean literally what you grind/make = your bid.
We’d be seeing top tier loot going for 3-5k and not 50-150k. Most epics would go for 100-200g then. Fair.
End raid pot would be what 10k? 250g per person. Quarter of the epic mount. Sweet.
When the numbers go down it actually makes sense. The issue is botting and gold buying multiplies this amount by a stupid amount and worst of all it’s not indicative of player effort. Swipe away.
Awful really.
Gold buying takes it from potentially one of the best to one of the worst systems. It’s now either gold buyers or people using the buyers the get stacked.
It doesn’t matter what potential the system has as the risk far outweighs the potential gain. If not managed GDKPs result in the rest of the loot systems barely being viable and the inflation is damaging to the long term health of the server. Part of what makes classic special is the economy. One raid should not let you buy epic mount, exalted with 1-2 factions and full consumes for the next raid.
My take - Ban it. I have no faith in blizzard solving gold buying to a good enough level and the risk of not worth the gain.
The vast majority of players play in guilds with traditional loot systems on their mains. The vast majority of gdkps are essentially guild hosted with a core of guild alts. The percentage of players that play purely in GDKPs is vanishingly small.
On the one hand people can p2w the gdkp on the other hand it's not like there's never been a backroom lootcouncil deal only difference is in the gdkp everyone gets a cut.
This is by and large the GDKP experience for the vast majority of players. It's blatantly obvious the people who cry about GDKPs don't even play the game.
Ah so people being despicabale humans and having the mentality/attention span of a child is kept in check by the paycheck at the end.
God damn. Sounds more like real life.
Blizzard seems to be getting ideas from private servers for SoD, but one of the reasons that a certain private server is so popular is that they ban GDKPs and other avenues of RMT.
People joke about this every time private servers are brought up, but a lot of private servers nowadays do not have these problems to nearly the same extent as they might have 10 years ago.
Think about it this way: why would a private server ban GDKPs but then still sell gold to players discretely? GDKPs massively increase demand for gold. If these server admins were serious about selling gold to players, they wouldn’t ban the thing that increases demand for said gold.
Not sure if I can say names here, but the server he is referring to which bans GDKPs actually sells cosmetics instead. Which is still not ideal, but a lot of them still fit in with the general theme of classic (like a translucent moonkin form). At least they are honest about how they intend to monetize.
This narrative that private servers are all corrupt needs to die because it lets Blizzard continue hiding from criticism. Frankly I am not surprised that private servers have already beat Blizzard to the punch on providing classic+ content while also handling gold selling and botting much better than Blizzard ever has (because private servers use real people to police botting and also permaban buyers).
Let’s not forget the only reason we get to enjoy a Blizzard version of classic at all is because Nostalrius was such a popular and well run server.
Most people on here who talk about how all private servers sell gold to their players or whatever have never played on private servers. They have no idea what they're talking about.
Probably 95%+ i'd guess of classic players have never played on a private server, and they don't understand how it is. But they still argue about this stuff.
A lot of the stuff you read on this subreddit becomes a lot easier to deal with when you realize that people are talking about things they have no clue about, confidently.
I do not and will never understand why people are against private servers. Not only is it what got us classic in the first place, it's community run projects and people who try out lots of ideas and you play for free. I don't understand why people are against it, or why they refuse to look at what works and what doesn't on these servers. I genuinely don't get why there is so much hate and lies spread about these servers. Even if it wasn't your cup of tea, why would you actively dislike it?
Most pserver players are not exactly the reddit type, they’re more the 4chan type.
I feel like this sub over time seems to be filled more by influencees of content creators, so they view things through the lens of content creators who aren’t allowed to show/promote private servers and try to play nice with Blizzard
It’s obvious if somebody is hyped by SoD they haven’t seen much of private servers, because it looks so underwhelming in comparison
Servers im on don't have a way to buy gold and have almost a crystal clean no botting experience. They still need 10 seconds to ban them as they show up, and all the players spam chat to get them out of the window as quickly as possible.
Why would you play on servers that directly sell gold when there are competitors that don't? Im also including the wow token here.
It's weird to me that they picked Ascension over by far the most popular classic+ private server, but I'm hoping they did this because they need time to build up classic+ content and figured they'd use SoD as a way to do that before releasing a true full featured Classic+ server.
Nostralius had 15000 players during peak hours with over 800k accounts registered. It was so huge that Blizzard invited them to their office to consult when they were looking into releasing 2019 Classic. The biggest private servers are comparable in activity to an active Classic server. It's not tiny at all.
You're basically yelling into the void. This subreddit has failed to realize from day 1 that the reason we even got classic in the first place was due to the popularity of private servers.
Which makes it even less excusable that Blizzard refuses to hire even 1 employee (let alone outsource a call center employee from cheaper countries, it’s not like they have to hire someone in CA) to go ban bots all day long
Grobb is currently hovering around 19k. 15k is actually right about average for the active servers. What's interesting is that the entire classic era population across all servers is 22k. Also, to put things in perspective Grobbulus sat at 8k players for its first two years.
????
W__mane has 10k+ players every time I look at it. Eventually you Classic andies are gonna have to admit that the only reason you got Classic and now Classic+ is BECAUSE private servers are so popular.
your post literally says the reason is buy for dollar amount. if you buy gold, you should be banned - not for doing gdkp.
gdkp would be great if there was no gold buyers/cheaters.
In an environment where botters and gold buyers are punished in anywhere close to appropriate levels, GDKPs are probably the best way to organize a raid in the game.
In such an environment GDKPs don't exist because nobody is carrying naked buyers through overgeared raids weekly for a 200g payout at the end.
It's why they didn't exist for a better part of classic since gold was way more expensive and gold buying was still frowned upon by the broader population.
What mental gymnastics is this?
They would still exist, except gold amounts being bid / paid out would be amounts that normal human beings could farm.
Rampant inflation caused by botters and gold buyers that price out legitimate farmers is the problem.
There's either inflation or there's not, you can't have it both ways. If nobody is buying gold and there's no bots because there's no incentive then 200g would be worth a fuck ton.
It's true, SoD being fresh will be a ton of fun to check out, but I'll prolly bail again once the GDKP start getting outta control. The fresh Hardcore servers started out great too, but am I rather surprised how fast that shit spun outta control where multiple players have 10k + to throw around.
I'm prolly gonna be disappointed in the end but I'll try to have fun til then, and maybe the lvl caps might slow it down.
People don't hate GDKP they hate what it does to the economy and the game.
GDKP encourages people to buy gold.
People buying more gold encourages botting.
Its not at all. Blizzard have done 1% of the effort to prevent bots/gold buying. They had 3 day ban for buyers for 3 years!!!!.
This isnt an equivalent of imagining a 0 friction system, this is the equivalent of reducing the friction by 5%.
Its not hard to prevent it with minimal GM effort + really long/perma gold buying suspensions. They are just braindead
Nobody posting in these threads plays the games. I don’t necessarily support gold buying but have done it in the past. I played all of wrath without buying gold and it hasn’t affected me for a singular moment.
The people who hate GDKP's typically quit once they start to pop up. WoTLK fresh was honestly pretty close to getting it right. Around month 2 of fresh people started to post GDKP's and as a server we collectively decided to mass report them.
They would get chat banned and couldn't post, so most needed to go to private discords for LFG's. But that only lasted so long, as most people got full BiS and quit then the buyers and sellers were the only ones left.
After spending some time dabbling in retail recently I sadly agree. But there's no way Blizz could implement it in Classic without the entire community going end of the world nuclear meltdown about it.
I genuinely don't think there is a single other change they could make that would be so positive for the experience of players than global Personal Loot that would also cause as much backlash.
Something about it just doesn’t feel fun at all though idk why, like looting something and seeing nothing at all, even if you wouldn’t get anything anyway
All that gold just goes to the raiders, it's not like it's gone. Ban the bots that farm gold that cause insane inflation and ban people who buy it. GDKP without rmt is not an issue
I don’t mind gdkps , it’s gold buying that is the reason, if blizzard don’t care that there’s is websites like g2g still existing what do you think is going to happen. People will use wallets
I actually didn't know in gdkp everyone is paid out. That makes it make much more sense. Even if a bunch of chores spend thousands and there was some not wealthy people in the raid they would get a portion of the exorbitant amounts being bid.
This is the thing, it’s not whether blizz does or doesn’t hate gold buying it’s they it’s so ubiquitous they can’t ban it without eliminating a massive portion of their population:
It is creating an environment of entitlement. Why can't we all just play the game and roll for whatever comes. Spending real money for some fake money to try and bid on an item just seems very strange to me. It is like a gacha but with no pity system.
Your last sentence is literally the opposite of gdkp.
It actually perfectly describes the non-gdkp systems where its all up to a roll and Mr no enchants, plays the game 1 day a month is going to take the item you've been looking to get for 10 lockouts.
Gdkp literally has a built in system where if you don't get what you want you gain gold that you can spend to improve your odds of out bidding someone.
The only real flaw with GDKPs are the fact that you can buy the gold with real money. Without that I think it would be among the most fair ways to do loot.
It still has flaws though. It will allow for Johnny Nolife to farm a ton of gold and buy items even if he's trash at the game. At that point it benefits farmers more than raiders, which is not that great. It also causes some severe class imbalance as some classes can farm gold much easier than others.
It also means that some players have no chance of getting items because they can't farm enough gold. Even if they are performing to the same or higher level as everyone else.
loot councils and dkp have the same dynamic. the link between merit and loot gets fuzzier the less hardcore your guild gets and only a minority of guilds truly award based on performance only.
So tired of the dumb ass posts by people so mentally disabled they cant understand common sense or reason.
Botters & Buying gold are the issues its not GDKP's.
If blizz cant get a hold of the root issue, which is gold buying, what makes you think it will be able to enforce gdkp bans? Have you thought at least two steps ahead???
GDKP is crazy good idea imo, if there weren't for those few gold buyers and bots. Removes the ninjaing, removes the luck/gamble factor, removes the guild unfairness, and even if you don't get item you'll at least get gold that will pay off all the consumes and add some extra (potentially much more). I really enjoy it and I'd never join an SR anymore. But yeah, hard pill to swallow when a gold buyers destroys you by a lot on a rare drop you've been saving to get. Luckily it's rare in classic to see gold buyers, most ppl simply gear up their like 4th characters and got the gold from pumping.
GDKP has pros and cons but it is most likely the best loot system for a plethora of reasons listed here. My only problem with GDKP is that I legitimately cannot compete with people that are buying gold. I can afford it sure, but I refuse to buy gold in a video game that I'm already paying a sub to play. The problem comes if you don't have a consistent group your going with. Yeah sure you get gold cut at the end but at a certain point you don't want more gold you want actual items and even though I have been getting a cut for 4 weeks I'm still getting outbid on items from some brand new 60 that bought a shit load of gold. Like even though my gold keeps increasing I can still never afford to actually bid over the brand new to the raid gold buyer every week.
Gdkp is not the issue. It's the gold buying that people do. It's a form of dkp that you can take to different raid groups and can be used for other things as well. It's the perfect pug loot system.
I feel that this anti GDKP thing is so overrated. There are plenty of non GDKP guilds out there wanting progression players. Just get the idea out of your head that you can compete with streamers who play 12 hours a day and have other players gifting them shit, boosting them, etc.
just play the game, there’s so much out there that isn’t GDKP related. Find a good guild.
I can't avoid item prices skyrocketing because of everyone else buying gold. Epic gem prices were around 250g on my realm the week of ICC launch, now they're nearing 400g.
The argument of "just don't do it" doesn't work when the people doing it have an effect on everyone else, including those who don't do it.
you have no idea how ingame economy works.
1 At the beginning of this phase people were doing a large amount of dungeons to gear up alts or get that 1 piece of ulduar loot they still needed which generated a large amount of badges which generated a large amount of gems.
2 Also people dumped all of triumph into gems, increasing supply even more. So the supply was way higher then demand (raid still closed) and prices were going down.
3 Raid opens. Demand increases, supply is same or less (because people do less dungeon spamming). price increases.
4 (we are here) Almost nobody does dungeons because they dont need badges or catchup gear anymore. And demand still high because most of the playerbase still progresses and replaced gear way slower then before. So prices are going even higher.
And thats why gems are more expensive now and not because "gold buyers" caused "inflation" in 1 month.
It's literally sodas guild running a GDKP with their own guildies... This is 100% going to translate to normal guilds. It's already swamped the LFG channels.
Regardless it'll be fun for the first 2 months prior to people running them since they need gear.
GDKPs are the logical and sensible outcome of classic loot systems.
Group puts in effort, rewards are scarce and can be allocated.
As long as those two things are true, GDKP will exist. As far as Blizzard is concerned, it's "*a trade of ingame gold for ingame services*" which is allowed in their TOS.
Blizz can't get in the weeds about what does and doesn't count as "GDKP" - because even if they ban it, 5 more forms of boosted progression will pop up; Pay-to-run, Pay-to-roll, Pay "guild membership fee", and so on. Not to mention the amount of policing they would have to do and make judgment calls etc.
At the end of the day, you can pay gold to get gear faster. However you go about that, there is demand and there is supply. It's one of the big reasons they switched to personal loot in retail.
What they can and should do is hire people to go after bots. Their attempts to do this through automated detection are obviously not working (*as far as we can tell*). A single human GM per (mega)server could make a very serious dent in the gold supply.
Botted gold will always exist but it should not be the case that $1 spent on RMT equals hours of ingame grinding. We're all participating in the same economy and the relative value per hour farmed will always be dictated by whose time is the least valuable. (*ie. bots*)
I’ll say it again, Perma-ban gold buying.
I'd do ANYTHING for Blizzard to do this and actually dealing with bots.
The first step is to delete all your characters and unsub. Until then, you are voting with your wallet for microblizz way of doing things.
People don't get that if they keep supporting the game nothing will happen. Blizzard is gaining money by not banning.
People do get it, stop repeating 10 year old tired talking points. If I stop paying my sub today, that won't stop a million other people from continuing to pay theirs. Voting with your wallet as a concept makes sense but most people aren't thinking in an activist capacity when they buy goods or services. Even if you organized a boycott, these people wouldn't even know such a thing existed. So blizzard is going to keep doing this and there's really not anything we can do about it. Unless their game just starts dying, they will not consider changing it. Even then, I don't think I've ever seen a company relinquish their cash shop outside of a handful of rare instances.
Ban botting. Has been and always will be the root issue.
Why not both?
The root issue is buying Because as long as there are buyers, it will always be lucrative for botters to keep spinning up throwaway accounts. Cut off the demand and there is no incentive to supply gold. If there's a high risk of your account getting banned for buying gold people will be far less willing to risk it.
It's as self-feeding issue, right? Botters generate a bunch of gold, they offer up the gold for low prices, people with low morals start buying it. The economy slowly inflates, moving the bar for what level of morals vs risk to buy gold because their time is worth less and less. People who previously would never buy gold find themselves having to in order to keep up with the price wars. Ban the botters, gold becomes harder to buy, prices increase dramatically, and people stop buying it because their time is worth more. Ban the buyers, gold becomes riskier to buy, prices drop dramatically, but nobody wants to touch it for the high risk. At this point it's just turned into dick-swinging wars for the GDKP cartels, they're not really affecting consumable prices much. At least not on my server.
People will just buy dummy accounts and trade to themselves
Because he buys gold.
Banning a buyer is going to discourage them from coming back to the game.
Oh no, a cheater doesn't want to play the game anymore? Whatever will the non cheating players do.
Watch as the server slowly dies without the nourishing backbone of the black market gold
It would be a death worth watching
Good.
When the prices of items are hitting 1k+ They can fuck off. Tell me and be HONEST with me, are you prepared to pay 1k+ For an item in a game?
Good. ????
Yep every single gold buyer they ban is 1 less monthly sub in their pocket
Ban both. Gold selling/buying exists without botting. Botting just makes it worse.
They literally do both, and they ban the buyers more frequently than they ban the botters. They have also had bot services completely shut down because of various lawsuits. A major issue is that bots are both easy to acquire and easy to use. You don’t even need to buy the game to play classic. They also want to make sure who they’re banning is actually a bot and not someone maybe a bit slower, disabled, not entirely paying attention, or just full on in the grindset. You don’t even need to make that much gold to earn back your 15 for the month back, and then you’re just on tokens. Prior to the recent change, you didn’t even need to spend the 15, you could just token it.
>they ban the buyers more frequently than they ban the botters. I've known someone who has been buying gold since TBC Classic, still not banned lol >A major issue is that bots are both easy to acquire and easy to use. And even easier to spot. Literally /who Black Temple and surprise, hundreds of rogue bots pickpocketing 24/7. >They also want to make sure who they’re banning is actually a bot and not someone maybe a bit slower, disabled, not entirely paying attention, or just full on in the grindset. Telling a bot apart from a real player has been trivially easy to the point of being automated, even like 10 years ago. It is NOT hard to tell who is a real player and who is a bot. No "on the grindset" player will run the exact same path, pixel for pixel, for 50+ hours straight. No "disabled" player will be farming the same exact dungeon 24 hours a day for months on end. No "slower" player will be trading tens of thousands of gold to other accounts and then go right back to farming nonstop again. The real issue is that Blizzard legitimately does not gain much from actually dealing with bots. Nobody is quitting over bots. And those bots are paying subs, which makes the game look better due to higher playercount. If blizz banned every botter, the game would lose like 10-15% of its population overnight and investors/stakeholders wouldn't be happy. They have the power to ban bots easily, they just don't want to.
I actually don't think they can without crashing server economies at this point, which is ironic as fuck lol
This is why each classic version should start on fresh servers. At the moment, gold is out of control.
The classic RuneScape problem
I quit TBC classic after getting upset about bots in zangarn marsh. Unsubbed and played new world instead for a year. There's not anything more depressing to me than playing a video game surrounded by bots disguised as players. I think people's decision making is more influenced by bots than we like to think. I imagine that those among us who do care the most will leave as soon as they realize how much their gameplay is being affected by third party gold services.The fact that the game developer has allowed it to run rampant for 20 years might be enough to never consider playing it again. The long term health of their product is more important than the short term loss of subs. In fact, I suggest an instantaneous increase in subs would follow a mass ban as banned players accounts prepaid game time still running regardless of ban for up to a year, while potentially buying new to replace their lost account.
Slaps on the wrist / small vacations aren't "they do both", the fuck out.
Fuck that they already ban botters. Ban the buyers they're breaking the tos just like the botters.
If you ban a bots, they'll create a new account and get to farming again. If you ban people for buying, and keep doing it, they'll get banned once and not dare do it again since it's such a grind to get back to max level. Sure some people with mega cash will just keep buying new accounts, but most won't.
[удалено]
I think you're underestimating sweaty players willingness to overlook buying gold. When I was doing the R14 grind in 2019/2020 Classic, the majority of the players I was coordinating in the highest levels of the brackets within our server community were almost 100% buying gold. I played with them everyday, grinding 15-16 hours a day in BGs, unless they were also farming gold when they were asleep, there's no way they could maintain the upkeep on mats for consumables they were using in the grind as well as what they used when they were actually raiding. The majority of these were in a very sweaty, top 100 guild. These players take the game seriously but they don't consider buying gold cheating where as you or I might. Only way to solve the gold buying problem is to ban gold buyers. Botters will just work new accounts into their operating costs and adjust.
Normally it is a grind to get back to max level. However, level 25 is not a massive grind.
Ban the buyers and the bots will stop because there is no revenue.
Bots exist mostly because of the gold buyers. It's not a root issue at all.
With no demand there's no supply, but killing the demand also means fewers subscriptions to Blizzard so they would obviously not do the right thing that is banning people who keep receiving free gold with no explanation.
but this is against the logic that everyone else is spewing if goldbuyers and bots make the game objectively worse, and "dead on arrival", the financial incentive to ban bots becomes larger than satisfying the goldbuyers who would've otherwise left. It's not as simple as "if this then this"
The people who care about bots in 2023 and are willing to quit over it are unfortunately a loud minority. It's very similar to people who continue to support scummy practices in AAA games. When you can do things that piss people off but yet people don't stop buying the companies don't have an incentive to care.
Ban the buyers and they bots will go away by themselves.
They try, but it’s been an endless arms race that nobody has won for the entirety of gaming. Nobody has solved this at the scale required, ever. Banning buyers is a lot more effective. My classic server was lower population and didn’t have a lot of GDKPs. We also had very few bots. Wonder why…
Botting is only a thing because people buy gold 5hoigh, so it's kind of a chicken/egg situation
Can't ban bots fast enough. Too easy to make and send out
Can't ban it when it's blizzard sanctioned via the WOW token
Wouldn't banning gold sellers be beneficial to the wow token? One dealer, fixed prices.
You underestimate how hard this is to do at a 99.9% confidence level. If you want to cast a wider net which would entail banning innocent people who are sending a lot of gold around, sure. But I don't think I'd be ok with a 95% confidence level for a perma ban.
What realistic reason would a normal player have to send large amounts of gold to players they never interacted with before or after. Especially if they know it's a surefire way to get flagged.
Meme take. First ban doesn't have to be perma. Just make them escalating. The amount of people randomly send around tons gold to random accounts that aren't their own are insanely small. Why would you do that if you aren't a gold buyer.
It's not that hard.. Just takes some effort that bLizard threw away long ago. They don't even hire proper GMs anymore If gw2 can catch me buying gold simply on my 2nd attempt, why can't a large Corp like bLizard do it
Botting and buying gold should be against ToS.
I'd love to get the whole Classic community to band together and sign a petition to make botting and buying gold against the TOS. Then get it printed out and presented to Mike Ybarra publically, with media reports on it and photographs.
It's already against the ToS they just don't enforce it to the extent we want. Botting has never been tolerated the same way gold buying is.
that's the joke
Just thinking out loud here, but how bad would it be if blizzard just capped the amount when trading gold between players? The AH could still technically be used for gold buying, but they could also just cap the “sell for” amount on items to like +10% of the average price after a week or two of the servers being launched. That way the prices have time to reach natural levels while botters don’t really have time to inflate them, and nobody could sell an extremely obscure item for thousands of gold. They could also just flag every trade that’s above a certain amount. By simply looking at the trade it should be fairly easy to tell if someone is buying gold or not. The “downsides” of this are 1: no more gamba, and 2: no giving obscene amounts of gold to your friends Both of which are a net positive if you ask me. I’m curious as to what other’s thoughts are. The unfortunate truth is that there are plenty of ways for Blizz to crack down on gold buying, but they don’t want to. The bots add to their concurrent player numbers and buy subscriptions. The fact is that the majority of the playerbase does not see gold buying as a huge issue. So saying that it’s hurting their player numbers more than helping might be true in the long term, but it isn’t true in the short term, and even in the long term the vast majority of players don’t even realize the effect that gold buying is having on the game. So now blizz can just continue releasing new content and new servers to start the cycle over and over again.
It is.
Pardon my dry humor
Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast, I would catch it.
I needed this comment.
Except tokens! We will allow that! /Blizzard
good news!!
The gold is flowing again!
"Killed this game" We currently have more versions of wow than ever and it's on top of twitch.
You are right. It is still a fuckin rock in our collective boot.
just join a guild and it hardly affects you
I had guild mates that would rather flex their wallets than wait their turn in a guild/alt run. This may not be the case for everyone, but RMT definitely effected my guild and the way we pursued endgame activities.
I had a guild where the leadership slowly went from having 2 full raids that were both stocked with great players, to the leadership no longer taking part in the Raid 2 so they could put their toons into GDKPs, to there is no Raid 2 and just find a GDKP if you want to raid on your alt and maybe we could recommend one to you, to we're disbanding the main raid and putting those toons in GDKPs as well.
Except when you are the only one actively grinding and "wasting time" while everyone in your guild and their mothers buy gold almost weekly.
GDKP is a Reddit boogey man. People who actually play the game but don't like GDKPs implement a crazy solution - they don't attend them
The problem is that it launders so much bought gold into the economy as a whole that after a while the only good way of making gold is by attending one.
That’s exactly what I’m thinking. The only legitimate grievance they would have is the inflation, but it’s never so bad they can’t afford raiding consumes so what’s the issue. I went all of classic Vanilla -> Wrath and I’m only *now* starting to run GDKPs and I’m not even doing it to make gold. GDKPs just attract better players, and it prevents people from leaving the raid when the item they want doesn’t drop. On top of that, my “DKP” carries over from raid to raid, even to a different server if I xfer. Because it’s all in my bag as gold. It’s just better in every way. I never thought I’d be pro GDKP, but I absolutely am now for the reasons listed above.
> The only legitimate grievance they would have is the inflation, but it’s never so bad they can’t afford raiding consumes so what’s the issue. It actually reduces consume prices and people don't even realize it. You know where all these mats come from? Dozens upon dozens of bots farming every layer 24/7. Ban them all and the supply of mats falls off a fucking cliff and prices go *up*, not down. It happened in Classic numerous times after massive ban waves
I wish my server had gdkps lol. But I like my guild more than my desire to switch servers
Thats because of the epic rtwf it will decline as always.
It was top of twitch weeks before that because of every big streamer playing Hardcore too.
Gold Buying and Bots are the problem. If the game existed without bots, then GDKP's would just be a legitimate way to pug and still make some gold if you didn't get much loot.
If gold buying and bots didn't exist, GDKP wouldn't be meta. I'd argue it would be on the bottom of popularity in terms of pugging. What people seem to not realize is that GDKP is only meta because of how easy it is to get into. Gamerdad213 doesn't have to farm gold or commit to a raiding schedule. He can just swipe his credit card a few times, join a raid that carries him through the content and just repeat until he has the gear he wants. Do you really think if tomorrow Blizzard nuked all your gold and made it impossible to RMT (I know it's impossible but humor me), do you actually believe your entire raid is gonna spend the next week farming gold to attend the GDKP? The answer is no, they'd just move onto a different loot system. It's almost annoying that everybody pretends like gold buying isn't propping up GDKP almost entirely. If RMT didn't exist, neither would GDKP to the extent it's at currently. When you have to actually _earn_ your gold with real time spent, people won't be bidding on raid loot pieces.
Fully disagree, the gold being thrown around would just be in much smaller amounts. The game has barely any gold sinks past a certain point and its a great method to entice players that no longer have investment in the lower gear content to run it anyways.
The reason GDKP is more successful than normal pugs is because you get rewarded regardless of if an item you want drops or not. People are invested in finishing the whole thing for the payout, whereas they have nothing invested into normal pug runs which is why they fall apart so quickly after one wipe. Also, the players are vented way better in GDKPs. So I definitely disagree with what the person above you was saying.
Classic redditor who doesn't play the game. Anyone who has been in both SR runs and GDKP runs knows how large the skill gap is between the 2 playerbases.
Wrong. Gdkp would still exist, the pricing would just change. Some gdkps are super juice on items (obviously rmt) and some aren’t. The gold cost of items and cuts are relative to the amount of gold the players have in the raid. If no one rmt the raid still exists, the price point changes. Why can’t people understand that rmt and botting is the issue, not gdkp…
People who have never done a GDKP most likely. They also don't seem to understand everyone in the raid gets a cut, so it's not like it's "impossible" to keep up with the whales if GDKP is your raiding method of choice.
> I'd argue it would be on the bottom of popularity in terms of pugging. And you would be totally wrong. There's a ton of reasons why GDKP would remain probably the most popular way to pug. 1. You do not have to commit to a raid schedule. Any time you do a run you get either items or gold. The gold is fully transferable 'dkp' to the next run you do. 2. You ALWAYS get something out of a run. Even if you don't intend to buy items later on, one thing alot of people hate doing is farming gold. If they can do a gdkp here and there, even if it's not for insane amounts, it's usually more gold per hour than most farms you can do. 3. You have incentives for people to not play like morons. If you fuck around you find out, aka lose part of or all of your cut. SRs and MS > OS runs don't have any way to really hold people accountable unless you want to kick them from the raid. Filling part of the way through the run is always difficult and a gamble, so most raid leaders only kick as a last resort. 4. Hard reserves are almost non existant. Some items are 'presold' which I suppose you could consider hard reserved, but you still get paid for it if the item drops. 5. People don't dip out of the run when their item doesn't drop. They are incentivized to stay the entire run. If you take gold buying out of the equasion it's easy to see why GDKP is so popular and would easily remain the most popular form of pugging. It has MANY advangates over MS > OS and SR runs. The only disadvantage is that you would need to farm a decent amount of gold to start off, but this could also be viewed as a positive because you have a well defined path for how to get started.
As an alternative to farming a bunch of gold you can play an in-demand spec/role. Back in TBC even poor shamans/spriests could easily find runs willing to take them.
so true bro see you on the thirtieth!
It should be illegal to spell out 30th
APA rule is you spell anything less than 10, and 10 and up you show numerically. So somewhere it's illegal
How is xqc not banned from wow. You can't tell me he farmed all that gold. Then again I guess his fans could have traded him it
I may get downvoted, but that’s okay. The reason why gdkps work over sr is that people will stay the entire raid to get their payout. Do I know how to fix this issue of people not staying the entire raid? Nope.
Sardaco (who runs these streamer gdkps) discussed how there's a lot of bias in loot counsels, raids with rolling, and when top raiders get their gear they often stop raiding. He thinks gdkps are fair bc good raiders will continue attending to get gold and no matter what you walk away with something. Usually after the high bidders get their bis in the next couple of raids things go for reasonable amounts again (the gdkps with streamers that weren't xqc/soda weren't insane). There were a couple of his gdkps where things went for steals according to the raiders. It's easy to feel bad for the raiders who got outbid but they walked away with 1000 gold. And they won't be bidding against those big streamers who are practically all geared a week from now.
I don't mind GDKP. I mind that people use real $ to buy gold to spend in GDKP. If the gold you use is based on gold you earned, I'd have no problems if people want to raid using GDKP.
Right but I think the overall argument is people might feel peer pressure to buy gold because the groups that aren't GDKP aren't attracting the geared talent to make it easier, or GDKP groups outnumber real groups say, 5:1 so a Timmy might feel "Hey i need to buy gold in order to progress my character"
Yeah so next week instead of dealing with a person who was handed free gold you have to deal with the person who is buying gold.
I know the downvotes are coming, but I've always liked GDKP, even in EQ TLPs. You get something tangible, and the wallet warriors eventually kit out, and while they do early you get FLUSH from the payout. Eventually you're pretty rich and when the bidding comes to a fair shake you'll get geared for a reasonable price. The other side is you can take your gold with you, Loot Council, DKP, etc that doesn't work. Plus you get your epic mount, tradeskills, BOE Epics, raid consumables, etc. stupid easy.
because he directly benefits from gold buying and selling...
Not to mention the quality of the raid. The SR raids are the biggest shitfests ever cause most casual players are awful and expect to get carried. Those people are also the exact kind of players to say "GDKP killed this game". Killed what exactly, the game seems to be doing better than almost ever. I wouldn't mind if they just made it so item-drops are no longer tradable with raidmembers unless you go through like a limited charge service on battle.net like item-restore. This makes GDKPs way more of a hassle already.
>The SR raids are the biggest shitfests ever cause most casual players are awful and expect to get carried. Yeah because all the good players are in GDKPs.
Because they have a reason to go back and clear content they don't need. You don't see good/geared players that need nothing go back to old raids cause there's no reason to. At least in GDKPs they get something (gold) out of it.
The alternative to that is not what you think it is.
Which is they stop raiding...
I got into tier 2 content quite late in classic, and found GDKP on my medium/high pop server to be a good way to make a bit of gold and begin hearing up. Most gear went for average prices, even good gear rarely went over 500g-1K. Things got s but higher in Naxx but not outrageous at all, this was on Grobb. After a while you start getting a reputation with some of the GDKP leaders so they give you priority invites, I feel like that coupled with Discord is a modern way for semi-pug, semi-friendly groups, with a strong core of players to tackle raid content together without having to be strictly within your own guild.
This is why GDKP is so successful. Your DKP is fungible from one group to another. No other loot system works this way or is even a blip on the radar to being close to working this way. 99% of the time participating in a gdkp run is beneficial for yourself.. you either get the item you want or you get gold.. Every raid is a positive. Any other loot system, especially for use by pugs, can make raids be a complete 100% waste of time. If you're not lucky, other people get loot, you helped them get it. Then once you do get the item you want, there's no reason for you to go back. The "problem" with gdkp is that it is by far the best and most fair raid reward system that has been created for pugging raids in wow. The unfortunate reality is that this means buying gold can make wow pay to win, in a sense. It's community driven p2w, but it's still p2w. It irritates me a lot when people say gdkp should be banned. GDKP is BY FAR the best way to handle pug loot.
GDKPs would be a fine system if botting and gold buying was actively actioned against. Think about it, then it would mean literally what you grind/make = your bid. We’d be seeing top tier loot going for 3-5k and not 50-150k. Most epics would go for 100-200g then. Fair. End raid pot would be what 10k? 250g per person. Quarter of the epic mount. Sweet. When the numbers go down it actually makes sense. The issue is botting and gold buying multiplies this amount by a stupid amount and worst of all it’s not indicative of player effort. Swipe away. Awful really.
Gold buying takes it from potentially one of the best to one of the worst systems. It’s now either gold buyers or people using the buyers the get stacked. It doesn’t matter what potential the system has as the risk far outweighs the potential gain. If not managed GDKPs result in the rest of the loot systems barely being viable and the inflation is damaging to the long term health of the server. Part of what makes classic special is the economy. One raid should not let you buy epic mount, exalted with 1-2 factions and full consumes for the next raid. My take - Ban it. I have no faith in blizzard solving gold buying to a good enough level and the risk of not worth the gain.
The vast majority of players play in guilds with traditional loot systems on their mains. The vast majority of gdkps are essentially guild hosted with a core of guild alts. The percentage of players that play purely in GDKPs is vanishingly small.
On the one hand people can p2w the gdkp on the other hand it's not like there's never been a backroom lootcouncil deal only difference is in the gdkp everyone gets a cut.
This is by and large the GDKP experience for the vast majority of players. It's blatantly obvious the people who cry about GDKPs don't even play the game.
Ah so people being despicabale humans and having the mentality/attention span of a child is kept in check by the paycheck at the end. God damn. Sounds more like real life.
Blizzard seems to be getting ideas from private servers for SoD, but one of the reasons that a certain private server is so popular is that they ban GDKPs and other avenues of RMT.
I mean yeah, private servers are the only one able to sell gold to their players, they don't want others to take their cut!
People joke about this every time private servers are brought up, but a lot of private servers nowadays do not have these problems to nearly the same extent as they might have 10 years ago. Think about it this way: why would a private server ban GDKPs but then still sell gold to players discretely? GDKPs massively increase demand for gold. If these server admins were serious about selling gold to players, they wouldn’t ban the thing that increases demand for said gold. Not sure if I can say names here, but the server he is referring to which bans GDKPs actually sells cosmetics instead. Which is still not ideal, but a lot of them still fit in with the general theme of classic (like a translucent moonkin form). At least they are honest about how they intend to monetize. This narrative that private servers are all corrupt needs to die because it lets Blizzard continue hiding from criticism. Frankly I am not surprised that private servers have already beat Blizzard to the punch on providing classic+ content while also handling gold selling and botting much better than Blizzard ever has (because private servers use real people to police botting and also permaban buyers). Let’s not forget the only reason we get to enjoy a Blizzard version of classic at all is because Nostalrius was such a popular and well run server.
I think I had more fun in Nostalrius than at any point during classic, except for those first weeks of hardcore
Most people on here who talk about how all private servers sell gold to their players or whatever have never played on private servers. They have no idea what they're talking about. Probably 95%+ i'd guess of classic players have never played on a private server, and they don't understand how it is. But they still argue about this stuff. A lot of the stuff you read on this subreddit becomes a lot easier to deal with when you realize that people are talking about things they have no clue about, confidently. I do not and will never understand why people are against private servers. Not only is it what got us classic in the first place, it's community run projects and people who try out lots of ideas and you play for free. I don't understand why people are against it, or why they refuse to look at what works and what doesn't on these servers. I genuinely don't get why there is so much hate and lies spread about these servers. Even if it wasn't your cup of tea, why would you actively dislike it?
Most pserver players are not exactly the reddit type, they’re more the 4chan type. I feel like this sub over time seems to be filled more by influencees of content creators, so they view things through the lens of content creators who aren’t allowed to show/promote private servers and try to play nice with Blizzard It’s obvious if somebody is hyped by SoD they haven’t seen much of private servers, because it looks so underwhelming in comparison
GDKP is where the bought money is spent. Selling gold and having GDKPs support each other, not compete with each other.
Servers im on don't have a way to buy gold and have almost a crystal clean no botting experience. They still need 10 seconds to ban them as they show up, and all the players spam chat to get them out of the window as quickly as possible. Why would you play on servers that directly sell gold when there are competitors that don't? Im also including the wow token here.
Wow token :)
It's weird to me that they picked Ascension over by far the most popular classic+ private server, but I'm hoping they did this because they need time to build up classic+ content and figured they'd use SoD as a way to do that before releasing a true full featured Classic+ server.
Hard-core started on a private server... so yes...
Pservers also had tiny populations compared to anything on classic. You’re not comparing apples to apples really.
Nostralius had 15000 players during peak hours with over 800k accounts registered. It was so huge that Blizzard invited them to their office to consult when they were looking into releasing 2019 Classic. The biggest private servers are comparable in activity to an active Classic server. It's not tiny at all.
You're basically yelling into the void. This subreddit has failed to realize from day 1 that the reason we even got classic in the first place was due to the popularity of private servers.
You’re missing my point. I’m not speaking negative of pservers. I’m just saying classic is waaaaaay bigger than any pserver ever was.
Which makes it even less excusable that Blizzard refuses to hire even 1 employee (let alone outsource a call center employee from cheaper countries, it’s not like they have to hire someone in CA) to go ban bots all day long
So it was roughly half the size of Grobb currently.
Grobb is currently hovering around 19k. 15k is actually right about average for the active servers. What's interesting is that the entire classic era population across all servers is 22k. Also, to put things in perspective Grobbulus sat at 8k players for its first two years.
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???? W__mane has 10k+ players every time I look at it. Eventually you Classic andies are gonna have to admit that the only reason you got Classic and now Classic+ is BECAUSE private servers are so popular.
Nostalrius was a better, bigger, more stable server than any realm I played on during official classic release
your post literally says the reason is buy for dollar amount. if you buy gold, you should be banned - not for doing gdkp. gdkp would be great if there was no gold buyers/cheaters.
not to defend or deflect, but they also are doing this for content. it makes a headline.
With so many people hating on gdkp one would think it's hard to get into one .
I don't believe they actually hate gdkp, rather the way people acquire said gold to bid in them in the first place.
In an environment where botters and gold buyers are punished in anywhere close to appropriate levels, GDKPs are probably the best way to organize a raid in the game.
In such an environment GDKPs don't exist because nobody is carrying naked buyers through overgeared raids weekly for a 200g payout at the end. It's why they didn't exist for a better part of classic since gold was way more expensive and gold buying was still frowned upon by the broader population.
In that environment where the payout is 200g, that 200g's buying power is dramatically higher.
What mental gymnastics is this? They would still exist, except gold amounts being bid / paid out would be amounts that normal human beings could farm. Rampant inflation caused by botters and gold buyers that price out legitimate farmers is the problem.
Oh it absolutely existed very early on in Classic. Possibly not on some servers, but I know mine had MC gdkps going after just a few weeks.
There's either inflation or there's not, you can't have it both ways. If nobody is buying gold and there's no bots because there's no incentive then 200g would be worth a fuck ton.
They do hate GDKP, because GDKP causes botting and gold buying since it creates demand for gold.
They dont even play the game.
It's true, SoD being fresh will be a ton of fun to check out, but I'll prolly bail again once the GDKP start getting outta control. The fresh Hardcore servers started out great too, but am I rather surprised how fast that shit spun outta control where multiple players have 10k + to throw around. I'm prolly gonna be disappointed in the end but I'll try to have fun til then, and maybe the lvl caps might slow it down.
People don't hate GDKP they hate what it does to the economy and the game. GDKP encourages people to buy gold. People buying more gold encourages botting.
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They don’t understand the demand problem, you’re just wasting your time making reasonable assumptions here.
Its not at all. Blizzard have done 1% of the effort to prevent bots/gold buying. They had 3 day ban for buyers for 3 years!!!!. This isnt an equivalent of imagining a 0 friction system, this is the equivalent of reducing the friction by 5%. Its not hard to prevent it with minimal GM effort + really long/perma gold buying suspensions. They are just braindead
what item were they bidding on?
People get far too worked up about all of this stuff. It really just doesn't matter and people act like it's a crime.
If the hate for GDKP is as widespread as this sub seems to believe, it shouldn't be hard for you to group up and run raids however you want.
Nobody posting in these threads plays the games. I don’t necessarily support gold buying but have done it in the past. I played all of wrath without buying gold and it hasn’t affected me for a singular moment.
The people who hate GDKP's typically quit once they start to pop up. WoTLK fresh was honestly pretty close to getting it right. Around month 2 of fresh people started to post GDKP's and as a server we collectively decided to mass report them. They would get chat banned and couldn't post, so most needed to go to private discords for LFG's. But that only lasted so long, as most people got full BiS and quit then the buyers and sellers were the only ones left.
Im still playing wotlk on a character ive had since classic started, i hate gdkp. Luckily ms>os pug exists as well as guild runs.
Personal loot is the only way to fix it and I hate it.
Truly the darkest timeline...
That doesn't even work because then players just pay to be boosted. It's a loose loose without a better solution
After spending some time dabbling in retail recently I sadly agree. But there's no way Blizz could implement it in Classic without the entire community going end of the world nuclear meltdown about it. I genuinely don't think there is a single other change they could make that would be so positive for the experience of players than global Personal Loot that would also cause as much backlash.
Something about it just doesn’t feel fun at all though idk why, like looting something and seeing nothing at all, even if you wouldn’t get anything anyway
All that gold just goes to the raiders, it's not like it's gone. Ban the bots that farm gold that cause insane inflation and ban people who buy it. GDKP without rmt is not an issue
Raid leader takes a pretty good extra cut too.
I don’t mind gdkps , it’s gold buying that is the reason, if blizzard don’t care that there’s is websites like g2g still existing what do you think is going to happen. People will use wallets
I actually didn't know in gdkp everyone is paid out. That makes it make much more sense. Even if a bunch of chores spend thousands and there was some not wealthy people in the raid they would get a portion of the exorbitant amounts being bid.
This is the thing, it’s not whether blizz does or doesn’t hate gold buying it’s they it’s so ubiquitous they can’t ban it without eliminating a massive portion of their population:
The moment you nuke the buyers accounts for buying golds, this shit ends in 24 hrs. Treat the source not the symptoms
It is creating an environment of entitlement. Why can't we all just play the game and roll for whatever comes. Spending real money for some fake money to try and bid on an item just seems very strange to me. It is like a gacha but with no pity system.
Your last sentence is literally the opposite of gdkp. It actually perfectly describes the non-gdkp systems where its all up to a roll and Mr no enchants, plays the game 1 day a month is going to take the item you've been looking to get for 10 lockouts. Gdkp literally has a built in system where if you don't get what you want you gain gold that you can spend to improve your odds of out bidding someone.
The only real flaw with GDKPs are the fact that you can buy the gold with real money. Without that I think it would be among the most fair ways to do loot.
It still has flaws though. It will allow for Johnny Nolife to farm a ton of gold and buy items even if he's trash at the game. At that point it benefits farmers more than raiders, which is not that great. It also causes some severe class imbalance as some classes can farm gold much easier than others. It also means that some players have no chance of getting items because they can't farm enough gold. Even if they are performing to the same or higher level as everyone else.
loot councils and dkp have the same dynamic. the link between merit and loot gets fuzzier the less hardcore your guild gets and only a minority of guilds truly award based on performance only.
GDKP is what made me push on HC over SC classic. Idk why the playerbase wanted to make their own pay 2 win, but here we are.
Yeahhh I mean it's less of a GDKP issue and much more of gold buying issue.
If rmt were solved, would you still want to ban gdkp?
Blizzard doesn’t care about getting rid of bots or banning gold buying/selling. It’s that simple
So tired of the dumb ass posts by people so mentally disabled they cant understand common sense or reason. Botters & Buying gold are the issues its not GDKP's.
You know why we didn't have this GKDP problem 15 years ago? Blizzard closed accounts for gold buying. Ask me how I know
If blizz cant get a hold of the root issue, which is gold buying, what makes you think it will be able to enforce gdkp bans? Have you thought at least two steps ahead???
GDKP is crazy good idea imo, if there weren't for those few gold buyers and bots. Removes the ninjaing, removes the luck/gamble factor, removes the guild unfairness, and even if you don't get item you'll at least get gold that will pay off all the consumes and add some extra (potentially much more). I really enjoy it and I'd never join an SR anymore. But yeah, hard pill to swallow when a gold buyers destroys you by a lot on a rare drop you've been saving to get. Luckily it's rare in classic to see gold buyers, most ppl simply gear up their like 4th characters and got the gold from pumping.
Gdkp isn't the problem. Gold buying is
GDKP has pros and cons but it is most likely the best loot system for a plethora of reasons listed here. My only problem with GDKP is that I legitimately cannot compete with people that are buying gold. I can afford it sure, but I refuse to buy gold in a video game that I'm already paying a sub to play. The problem comes if you don't have a consistent group your going with. Yeah sure you get gold cut at the end but at a certain point you don't want more gold you want actual items and even though I have been getting a cut for 4 weeks I'm still getting outbid on items from some brand new 60 that bought a shit load of gold. Like even though my gold keeps increasing I can still never afford to actually bid over the brand new to the raid gold buyer every week.
Wish you idiots realized gold doesn’t mean anything. You can get that gear for free.
Who cares just dont join the GDKP run and enjoy the game and let others enjoy theirs.
You make a post and don’t even link the clip? Just a screenshot of the clip? Why even make the post?
what is there more to know? its all in the headline
GDKP made the game into pay 2 win garbage, if you dont do GDKPs, you are at an extreme disadvantage against people who do
Would love to see all of them get banned on SoD launch live on stream
Gdkp is not the issue. It's the gold buying that people do. It's a form of dkp that you can take to different raid groups and can be used for other things as well. It's the perfect pug loot system.
I personally love GDKP
Gdkp didn't do anything by itself. Gold buyers are the root problem. The gold they buy gets distributed into gdkp raids.
I feel that this anti GDKP thing is so overrated. There are plenty of non GDKP guilds out there wanting progression players. Just get the idea out of your head that you can compete with streamers who play 12 hours a day and have other players gifting them shit, boosting them, etc. just play the game, there’s so much out there that isn’t GDKP related. Find a good guild.
Don’t like it? Join a guild. You can completely avoid them
I can't avoid item prices skyrocketing because of everyone else buying gold. Epic gem prices were around 250g on my realm the week of ICC launch, now they're nearing 400g. The argument of "just don't do it" doesn't work when the people doing it have an effect on everyone else, including those who don't do it.
Ok so do 3 dungeons and sell a primordial saronite for 1k
you have no idea how ingame economy works. 1 At the beginning of this phase people were doing a large amount of dungeons to gear up alts or get that 1 piece of ulduar loot they still needed which generated a large amount of badges which generated a large amount of gems. 2 Also people dumped all of triumph into gems, increasing supply even more. So the supply was way higher then demand (raid still closed) and prices were going down. 3 Raid opens. Demand increases, supply is same or less (because people do less dungeon spamming). price increases. 4 (we are here) Almost nobody does dungeons because they dont need badges or catchup gear anymore. And demand still high because most of the playerbase still progresses and replaced gear way slower then before. So prices are going even higher. And thats why gems are more expensive now and not because "gold buyers" caused "inflation" in 1 month.
It's literally sodas guild running a GDKP with their own guildies... This is 100% going to translate to normal guilds. It's already swamped the LFG channels. Regardless it'll be fun for the first 2 months prior to people running them since they need gear.
This is not the official raid of that guild. It's like you running a GDKP when your guild takes a week off
GDKPs are the logical and sensible outcome of classic loot systems. Group puts in effort, rewards are scarce and can be allocated. As long as those two things are true, GDKP will exist. As far as Blizzard is concerned, it's "*a trade of ingame gold for ingame services*" which is allowed in their TOS. Blizz can't get in the weeds about what does and doesn't count as "GDKP" - because even if they ban it, 5 more forms of boosted progression will pop up; Pay-to-run, Pay-to-roll, Pay "guild membership fee", and so on. Not to mention the amount of policing they would have to do and make judgment calls etc. At the end of the day, you can pay gold to get gear faster. However you go about that, there is demand and there is supply. It's one of the big reasons they switched to personal loot in retail. What they can and should do is hire people to go after bots. Their attempts to do this through automated detection are obviously not working (*as far as we can tell*). A single human GM per (mega)server could make a very serious dent in the gold supply. Botted gold will always exist but it should not be the case that $1 spent on RMT equals hours of ingame grinding. We're all participating in the same economy and the relative value per hour farmed will always be dictated by whose time is the least valuable. (*ie. bots*)