This is all working under the assumption that anyone entering a GDKP is automatically deciding to break TOS and purchase large amounts of in game gold for real life money.
This just isn’t close to reality for two obvious reasons:
People typically enjoy their accounts and don’t want to be banned
Buying gold is expensive, a lot of people simply can’t justify the real life money cost to get some gold in game to buy a few pixels
Yes, there are obviously some unhinged people who are happy to spend half their mcdonalds salary on a few thousand gold, but the large majority of players are not cheaters and do not break TOS.
The moment you approach this discussion with the immediate assumption that the only reasonable way to enter the GDKP ecosystem is to break TOS, is the moment you are not thinking rationally.
It’s fairly common. Enough that you’ll see hardcore streamers slip themselves bags and gold with the addon off. Even in a self-proposed challenge they’ll cheat AND break TOS.
Not even a lot of people have to do it. But if you go into a raid and that raid is supplied by a gold-buyer. He buys up all his stuff and then you take said money and pass it down to your alts or pour it into buying your next consumes, it inflates the market.
Now instead of a brand new fresh 60 having to farm maybe a 100 gold for that epic they need to farm 500 gold for it since the market has been artificially inflated.
Not every person needs to break TOS for the economy to be affected and the people who don’t break TOS and are trying to break into raiding have the most difficult point of entry.
I really wish we wouldn’t form our concept of reality based off streamers, people who are directly financially incentivized to perform well to a public audience.
The average player is absolutely NOT dumping extra real life $$$ to get an ilvl upgrade in game a bit faster, it is just not reality.
This entire mantra of GDKP is full of RMTers is so far from the truth, this is coming from someone who has participated in multiple different organized GDKPs every week for years.
That was hardcore as in Hardcore World of Warcraft not mainstream streamers. My bad that wasn’t clear.
Its not that you’re RMTers but that you have very likely benefitted from RMT and had your expectations molded by what a realistic price of an item is by how much an RMTer might spend on it.
I once again wish to highlight that I’ve directly participated in all kinds of GDKPs.
The prices massively fluctuate, and it’s very obvious when you’re in the presence of a swiper (they will usually also directly tell you, it’s just the kind of people they are, basically the vegans of GDKPs).
Yes, obviously, i have received cuts that were inflated somewhat by being in a run with an RMTer, just like every other player has sold items on the AH to RMTs for an inflated price that only they’re willing to pay. GDKP participants are more directly exposed to this trickle down, but it impacts everyone, there is no clear ‘quarantine’ of this purchased gold.
But, all of this does not change my expectations on what items are worth, that is why I would take my fresh alts to MS>OS runs first to slurp up easy gear to avoid having to pay for it in GDKPs. I only spent gold on what I felt was good value for me, because I do not RMT and gold IS a finite resource for me, just like the majority of participants.
This is going down a huge tangent to be honest, most of these anti-GDKP threads usually devolve into a drawn out discussion on RMT and completely ignore every other factor of GDKP vs other PUG systems, of which are there are many.
Why? Because peoples problem is with RMT, not GDKP.
If RMT was properly enforced by blizzard, we would not be having this discussion.
People should funnel their anger at blizzard for taking the LAZY way out and outright banning ALL GDKP instead of stepping up their efforts to ban gold buyers, bots and sellers.
Removing player agency in the name of saving some moderation costs for their corporation, no one should be happy about how this was executed in SoD regardless of your feelings towards GDKP or not.
Yep… most people complaining about economy issues simply do not play the game properly. This is an MMORPG, you can play however you want. (Until your favourite play style is made against TOS because they’re too lazy to enforce existing rules)
all I can is that … if GDKPs existed … I would be playing with my 3x 50s right now and almost everyone else I know would too … i give 2 shts about who buys what from where but if there is literally NO incentive for me to log on to this game … why would I ?
GDKP ban is not the reason why the game is dead. That is copium. OG vanilla did not have a super popular GDKP scene (since barely anyone knew what that was) and was one of the most popular games to date. The problem lies in new and interesting content. A lot of SoD hasn’t really added any new content, In fact, phase 3 allowed you to completely skip doing any open world content by running in circles for a few hours. Will you people stop parading GDKP as the holy grail that can save a game that no one wants to play whether there is imaginary currency incentive or not.
No contribute to the economy farm for some mats. Farming is a waste of time though if you gotta compete with bots. GDKP encourages gold buying which increases botting which then makes GDKP the only way to make gold. Without GDKP maybe players will look at the damage inflated mats cause instead of whining about inflation when consumes get expensive. Maybe if more players farmed they might recognize bot posts and start reporting the right bots. Players who farm don’t post 1000s of mats but bots do. GDKP ruled the whole economy in WOTLK literally only way to make gold was to participate in GDKP anything farmable was flooded with botted mats then people would bid 100,000 or more on a single piece of gear shadowmourne went for 1000000 gold on benediction where did that gold come from?