It does promote some RMT demands; some people buy gold to join and sell, and most hoard gold for the next runs. I think the coefficient ratio would be very low, like 10-20%. RMT and bot remain very active after the ban. Have you seen the bug farm? It’s full of swipers.
Cutting GDKP is like chopping off our right arm because of a mole on the finger. It’s a rule to stop bad actors, and at what cost?
I am not sure if the dev team understands the community around GDKP. There are regulars in all GDKPs, it’s social, efficient, and fun. The ban didn’t serve any purpose they outlined. I would argue that the GDKP Discords are even more social than most guilds.
On the other hand, banning bots and buyers would do wonders.
Probably a very good point that has been mostly overlooked in this thread. Everyone points to RMT but they didn’t even say that was a reason for the fresh GDKP ban.
How much of a wonder has it done, though? Given the likely overall herculean effort they’ve put in over the last decade in trying to rid the game of RMT (or at least diminish it), do you think all that work has improved the RMT situation by roughly 10-20%?
The idealistic route in this case is just not the realistic one.
Even if removing GDKP only hurt RMT by 10-20%, I feel that’s a win over the entirely ignorable progress they’ve made on combatting RMT simply through direct enforcement.
I’m not convinced they really do much in terms of direct enforcement, anecdotally I’ve heard people say that if you get banned for gold buying it starts with a 3 day ban and they don’t take away the gold or items…
Not sure if that’s true if anyone else can confirm/deny
Regardless of what they care about, having carries makes raids fast and smooth.
Geared players (carries) do not like to raid SR, or MS > OS with undergeared players because they get nothing out of it and those players often underperform for their own gear.
So enjoy the 3+ hour pugs for easy raids, because without GDKPs most players will run with guild and not pugs alts or even open runs for farm content.
What happens when pugs tend to be bad, there are less pugs, and more players quit. By banning the only system that incentivizes good / geared players to pug, they community is just harming itself.
Nowhere in that post is anything stated as a certainty on the relationship between RMT and GDKP and as a matter of fact they called it experimental, which implies they were uncertain what the outcome would be.
Edit:
Corrected by Zipzo they do mention there being an undeniable connection between RMT and GDKP.
Why don’t they talk about it in their fresh post then? I mean honestly. What changed? Why didn’t they say something like, “We believe the GDKP ban brought about a significant reduction in RMT from our experiment in SoD.” Why is it crickets on the matter?
I mean I guess. I’m not trying to say this is a smoking gun or anything. But it seems really strange and could possibly suggest their conclusions suggest the RMT GDKP relation isn’t initially what they thought it was. Or perhaps that there’s just a fairly simple workaround which negates the impact the ban could have had.