It’s incredibly obvious that many, if not most, of the competitive players are buying gold. Worse, it’s starting to look like the lesser of the assorted evils. Normal gathering and grinding in the open world is overrun by bots and RMT farmers. Prices for mats, consumables, and boes are inflated beyond belief.
Many instance farms are openly abusing pathing and safespots. Every streamer is showing you how to do this, and it’s seen as normal now. And they are also, apparently, easily botted. Or heck, just flyhack in the instance and bot that! A regular player can choose from: be unable to compete, participate in exploits, install a bot, buy gold for RMT, grind for minimal return, or … quit. Then Classic can become a nice place for bots to play with other bots. A sort of museum piece of automation – right out of an old Star Trek episode. Or maybe The Twilight Zone.
I don’t do any of those. Maybe once every two weeks I go and grind Satyrs in Azshara for about an hour to get some Demonic runes. The gold drop from raids is enough to keep raiding.
I’m confused by what you mean compete. Do you mean flask and elixir for every raid and every trash pull? Cause that’s not being a “regular” player at that point.
You’re not wrong. But look at the evidence we do have. The bots exist because there is a market. If you complain about bots, you are complaining about gold buyers, they are chicken and egg. If the market were smaller, there would be fewer bots.
For the build up to Scarab Lord and the release of AQ, the price of gold was about double what it is now. Which led to the explosion of bots we are currently living with. We will naturally see fewer gold farmers if the price continues to stay low – although the marginal cost of continuing to farm after the initial cost of setting up your gold farming empire is basically subscription price so there isn’t a lot of reason to stop farming and selling gold once you have your set up – hence the need for bans from Blizzard to keep the cost in time and money (time is money, friend!) higher than the market price of gold. So long as the earnings for gold are more than the cost of producing gold, botters will continue to run their bots.
Beyond that, I urge you to pay attention. I am in finance and accounting, so I tend to notice discrepancies. If you look, you might begin to notice that some things simply don’t add up without RMT gold. I am not here to point the fingers at any particular players, if they want to permanently risk their account for easy gold, that’s really their choice to make. It’s just a game. But the situation is getting out of hand on a macro scale.
I just want Blizzard to police their game for the good of the game.
No, we can’t. Not in a game that costs 50 cents a day, or $15/month. You can’t rent a human-run game for $15/mo. If that game ever exists, it will cost $700/mo. At that price it would break even.
GMs cost $14 per hour or more. That’s the law. Worse, GMs have to be experienced WoW players, who undergo further training as GMs. GMs have to know A LOT to be any good. In my opinion, it is not likely that Blizzard can even hire as many GMs as they want to hire.
Maybe GMs aren’t the answer. Maybe that is just a fantasy. Maybe a real-world game has cheaters, and nothing can stop that. As someone pointed out, if no players (real people) bought gold, the gold-selling websites would disappear. So would farming bots.
False, Blizzard had in game GM’s in Vanilla and they did drop the ban hammer on bots quite regularly.
Inflation has impacted the economy a bit since 2004, but its not so out of sight that it would cost anywhere near 700 bucks a month.
The costs of WoW in modern dollars would be ABOUT 20 bucks a month.
The costs of development of old Vanilla wow cost in the neighborhood of 200 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money that needs to be paid back. The costs of development of Vanilla had to do mostly with development design and all the labor costs of that. The game engine and servers (software the actual game) cost only a small small small portion of that.
The cost of physical infrastructure is only a small fraction of the subscription.
Classic WoW on the other hand its damn near as close to 100% pure profit as you can get because all the development cost was taken care of 15 years ago.
3 GM’s per every 5 servers each one on an 8 hr shift, pay them 25 bucks an hr.
Classic WoW has 76 Servers NA Oce and EU
The rough and dirty of HRS per year per employee is 2080
At a 25 / hr Rate with 100% man power giving you 1 GM full time around the clock coverage would cost $2,340,000 For all the realms annually before taxes. Lets double that for taxes and bennies, and say it costs 5 million annually.
There are roughly according to the estimates an approximate average of 3000 players per realm because some are over pop, and some are under pop.
There are roughly 228,000 players playing, 12 months of the year @ 15 bucks a month 41 Million intake.
I think its worth while to invest 5 million a year into Classic to keep the game enjoyable for all, and those GM’s would be dedicated to Classic specifically giving them REAL GM power, and real in game knowledge that you don’t get when you have a diversified platform.
Lets say it cost 20 million bucks a year for the Server infrastructure, internet, power, etc.
5 million for the GM’s
That’s still 16Million pure profit before Uncle Sam takes his cut, and that is damn good because Blizzard gets to reap the rewards of good will, the kind of advertisement of a brand you just cant put on a bulletin board, its the sort of reputation that Blizzard once had because they displayed just how much they care by providing the highest level of service for the product.
High Quality server always brings in the customers when the value for money is there.
As mentioned above, to actively ‘patrol’ realms the way some players suggest would take the population of a small 3rd world country.
The costs on that would be prohibitive to our players.
Wow, you really believe that only 3,000 people play per realm? You really think an estimate of 228,000 players is even CLOSE to the number of people playing Classic?
it’s close. it’s about 400k relevant toons, actually per ironforge.pro but alts reduce player count by about 2 to 2.5 so it’s probably about 180k actual relevant players.
I said it in another thread but even just locking the mega servers back to prevent transfers would ease the bot cancer that now has spread to every other server. But blizzard is probably making a ridiculous amount of money off transfer fees so they’re letting it slide for now. Potentially because of their new expansion as well.