You know they are selling gold. You know it has ruined the in game economy and community.
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How did that work out for SoD?
How did it work out ? I knew the did it but idk the outcome.
Take a wild guess.
From the looks of things, it seems to have worked out fairly well. SoD is still there and it looks like there are lots of folks playing it.
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Rather well from I have seen.
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Worked out great. All the underground GDKP discords still run and exist but when a run is in progress or when one finishes anyone involved got a 3 week suspension.
We desperately need this in ERA as well. The boosting and multi boxing is next. I know right now multi boxing is kinda legal so long as you do everything manually but everytime I see one I just lose all interest in playing at that moment. Makes the game/server feel dead when I see multi boxers.
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While I personally disagree, I wouldn’t be opposed to them making separate servers like they have for Normal and PVP for GDKP and not.
No noticeable positive impact, from what I can tell.
A lot of folks playing it not because of gdkp ban, but because it’s the best version of classic.
On contrary, SOd lost a large portion of its player base because of gdkp ban.
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The banning of a loot system because Blizzard wants to shift the blame from their negligence and incompetence? No thanks. Keep the silly experiments in SoD.
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What leads you to believe this is true? I looked at the population waves and I don’t see a meaningful post-ban dip in population, only the regular cycle of rise and fall at phase boundaries. It does look like fewer people returned for phase 3 but the GDKP ban happened at the phase 1/2 boundary, didn’t it?
It’s true that the decrease of SoD population in p2 couldn’t be used entirely on GDKP ban because there is no official poll or feedbacks from players who left SoD. But plenty enough people have reported that their guilds/communities disbanded because their members have stopped playing after the gdkp ban.
In fact, the popularity of GDKP means it’s the more supported loot system. If there are enough non-gdkp supporters, non-gdkp raids shouldn’t be choked by gdkp ones.
The current state of SoD hasn’t changed a bit with gdkp ban: inflation, bots, RMT. Nothing a single thing gets better.
In p3 the increase of raid size from 10 to 20 has disbanded many guilds because they can’t find enough pugs to fill in. Raiding is still expensive and making raiding is no longer a good way to make gold with gdkp ban. Good players no longer are interested in playing pugs and prefer to joining guilds to promote parsing culture.
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Of this I have no doubt. That doesn’t mean that the GDKP ban was responsible for a large portion of the player base departing. Maybe it depends on how you’re defining large. Non-zero? Certainly! A majority? Unlikely. Somewhere in between? Probably!
The important question here is whether or not GDKP is a good thing to have in the game, not whether or not it should remain because some people like it. The only real important factor here would be if SoD died off completely in the absence of GDKP. You’d have to be careful about which conclusion you draw there (since it looks like P3 content is also a contributing factor to falloff) but that would be more compelling evidence.
We don’t have that though. The population trends followed the historical cycles of content releases and didn’t seem to change much between phase 1 and phase 2. There was a big falloff in phase 3 (though still following the same trend) and I’m not sure what that’s about. Is phase 3 content bad? I heard it was really challenging, maybe that put a lot of folks off because I know many people who play classic aren’t looking for overly challenging content.
I saw you edit this in and I think it’s a good hypothesis to answer the question I posed above… why was there a dropoff in p3.
Again, I’m not sure we can draw that conclusion. Was GKDP a preferred loot choice by some? I have no doubt about this, but the more supported loot system? Were that the case I think we would have seen a much sharper decline in players at the p1/p2 boundary than we did. I don’t think there’s any non-anecdotal evidence to support the claim that GDKP was the more supported loot system. All we can surmise at this point is that it was a loot system, some people liked it, and some people were vocal about that.
To be clear here, it always sucks when you have a thing you like and you lose it. A good example of this is the TBC enjoyers and, very soon, the WotLK enjoyers. However the major difference between those examples is that GDKP was having real and tangible consequences on the game that many folks, including Blizzard, found undesirable.
The point of the experiment was to identify whether or not banning GDKP would have a negative impact on the game beyond the loss of activity itself. It would appear that it hasn’t. I wonder if Blizzard will ever discuss their findings as a result of this experiment.
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if GDKP loot system is less favoured, then how can it kill other loot systems? Why do raiders prefer to join GDKP over non-GDKP?
I think you’re forming a connection between a common practice to that being a common preference, but I don’t think that’s correct. For a lot of players, GDKP was the only alternative. They didn’t like it, but they did it anyway for lack of a better option.
Which I think is a fair thing for me to say given that once that GDKP option went away and people were forced to explore alternatives, they did so.
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I’ve been on 3 servers during wrath, and although there are more gdkp’s than ms/os, I find it hard to believe that people who don’t like GDKP’s were unable to find a raid that was not GDKP.
It’s possible that some people are quite inept at finding raid groups. It seems far fetched that GDKP groups had much, if any impact on that.
If there has been any noticeable positive impact of the GDKP ban in SoD, I’d be happy to peruse the linked data supporting that.
The assertion that SoD would die out in the absence of GDKP I think has been definitively proven false.
However, whether or not banning GDKP has had any positive impact on SoD has yet to be determined. Like I said, I wonder if Blizzard will release their findings here, or even discuss the kinds of data they’ve been collecting and the conclusions they’re drawing.
They were up front about their reasoning behind doing the experiment in the first place (which I very much appreciate) and I think it’s absolutely appropriate for them to follow that to its conclusion and discuss their findings. Additionally, what their path forward is, even if it it’s just “We’ve found X initially but want to continue the experiment for another phase to collect more data.”
Unfortunately, Blizzard has a tendency to engage with the community on a topic, then ghost us 
We don’t know. It’s ironic how you say we have yet to know if there is a positive impact, but assert it has been proven to not cause negative impact on the player population.
And as you’ve alluded to, we may never know.
I will assert this, there is an absence of evidence of any positive impact that banning GDKPs may have, therefore, it would not likely lead to some magical abundance of such evidence if they were to ban GDKPs in Cata Classic.
As I stated above though, I’d be fine with them having some servers support them and some ban them, so people could choose according to their own preferences.
Doesn’t matter what the data says, you already have the token in classic, banning GDKP’s at this point when you can rmt directly from blizzard doesn’t make sense. Even with the ban rmt is still rampant, bots are still there, people are still swiping. Seems kind of pointless to me.