The solution was no master loot or personal loot, but everybody whined about it and, you know, #nochanges.
Yes like dungeons in wotlk.
Yes, I enjoy a badge system a lot.
However you will get people who shout that theyāll have no reason once they have all the badges they need.
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Yeah thatās true, I think thatās why it could be nice for there to be vendors for BoP consumables or even profession mats, but BoP so it doesnāt affect gold economy.
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Iām not meaning to argue in bad faith here. I donāt understand how that could be a larger avenue for trading gold than the AH. This may be due to not seeing a lot of GDKP ads on my server, and not experiencing late-game Classic. To my experience, the AH sees tremendously higher throughput of gold, and to my reasoning, higher throughput would mean higher volumes of RMT gold.
This is true. I tried using the waybackmachine for a couple of sites, but nothing came up. Given that youāre putting so much effort into posting, though, Iāll take you at your word. Can you tell me just what the price drop was?
The reason I was snarky in reaction to this links back to not seeing how the AH wouldnāt be a bigger correlation than GDKPs. To me, it seems that GDKPs would be a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking.
Gotcha. In that case, once again, my mistake. What I have a hard time is the notion that Blizzard is powerless against botters and RMT. Thorās video describing how bots were banned en-masse was a simple an elegant solution, but one that requires paid staff to do; dropping a rock in the middle of a bot path and banning everyone that got stuck. Given Blizzard can clearly detect bought gold, it seems a simple matter of banning gold buyers. I think Blizzard has plenty of cures for botting and RMT that they refuse to utilize in favor of automated tools which results in the cat-and-mouse that could easily be solved by a few employees.
100% fair.
Expanding on the previous, I would have preferred to see Blizzard opting instead to hire employees, which I believe would do more to solve the issues. However, SoD is for experimentation, so sure - letās have the experiment and find out.
I clearly need to take a break for the forums, then, and take more care in the tone my text imparts. Thatās on me.
I agree, and should have worded that more carefully. I meant those who are caught purchasing gold, rather than an autoban on anyone whoās received it. Though to my knowledge, what you described is how theyāve done it; regular receipt of illicit gold was what would trigger a suspension for people doing GDKPs.
I canāt help but wonder if my anxiety toward this whole debate is fueled by seeing this time and time again.
What did he mean by that?
Ah well, Iām probably asking the wrong people. 
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No, I made no such claim. I said the social phenomenon moved in similar ways.
Itās hard to take you seriously when you get the amount of gold in circulation off by an order of magnitude.
Thereās millions of gold active in classic sod.
I think the badge system was one of the best ideas Blizzard introduced, and the introduction of it for SoD would invalidate the entire appeal of GDKPs for me to begin with.
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It depends on the item. Consumables are basically tied to the bot activity, more bots = lower consume prices (except consumes that bots donāt farm).
The thing is that in higher raids, raiding becomes really expensive if you are doing it at top tier and using consumes on cooldown - on Era it can cost a warriors over 1-2k an hour to be raiding with rage pots, lips, flaks, sharpening stones, goose, etc.
The same will eventually occur for SoD - so players that want to play at the top level will be incentivized to buy gold to be able to preform. Farming that kind of gold on a weekly basis just to go to a raid to āpotentiallyā win items is just not realistic for most players.
Even running naxx will cost at least a few hundred to a thousand gold in consumes + gold for FR set - for all players during progression. For many average players farming more than the epic mount just to try a raid isnāt feasible so they are also incentivized to buy gold.
At the moment it isnāt super noticeable since the raids are way undertuned and low level consumes are much cheaper.
Thatās why many like GDKPs since, at the very least, they paid for the consumes that were used during the run.
The traditional Blizz explanation for not perma-banning gold buyers was that it crsated more problems than it solved. They found that perma-bans lead to the guilty parties purchasing max level, BiS geared toons from RMT websites. Apparently, these accounts were stolen by the RMT sites from legitimate players, or, leveled on accounts which were paid for using stolen credit cards, which resulted in chargebacks from the credit card companies in addition to the credit card companies threatening Blizzardās abilities to use their payment platforms.
The claim was made that substantial, but not permanent bans actually led to the players who had purchased botted/stolen gold to mend their ways and act appropriately.
Whether-or-not Blizzās explanation was wholely true, I do believe there was method to their madness.
(I tried to find the blue post in question, but my Google Fu is weak today.
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I canāt help but wonder if Iād also be rallying against GDKPs if I stuck around for late-game Classic, given the amount of posts like this. Iāve never seen it rise to the point of disruption or displacement. Could you elaborate further? A general timeline, even a vague one, would help contextualize it for me.
This adds a lot of context and I appreciate it. My raiding experience in Classic was much more laid back or casual in comparison and seemed to be consistent with my server. When you say at a high level, are you referring to content like Naxx, or pushing parses?
Either way, the anxiety about GDKPs eventually becoming a monster problem now makes more sense to me, so thank you.
Thank you, this is a good post and explains a lot. It never occurred to me that banning gold buyers would just incentivize them to do far worse.
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Both.
Naxx, and even AQ40, are expensive in terms of consumes and gear required - especially without overgeared carries.
They can also be very expensive in terms of time because a lot of groups that wipe with WB, will be hard stuck and either have to rebuff or go again another time.
Even without GDKPs the cost of these consumes are about the same (and perhaps higher if there are less bots). The demand for certain consumes tends to always outpace the supply - especially during raid releases.
in the past things like the neutral AH were used for this kind of thing, what I think made GDKP more common as a route is that it gave more assumed plausible deniability.
The old āI didnāt know! my mail said GDKP payout!ā
It may also have something to do with monitoring systems in place for the AH. I wish I could give a less opinion based answer here in general, but those are my observations over the years.
Once I am not on a woefully unprotected work computer I will find the info again. Right now 1G is less than a dollar, which is a pretty reasonable drop in general. I say woefully unprotected because our technician straight up clicked a bad email link and we had to change everything recently. No we have not put a system in place to stop this in the future. That was a ramble of useless info, sorry.
Not entirely powerless, just really really outgunned. Whoever creates a better mousetrap for bots in MMO games is gonna make so much money.
This is sadly the crux of the issue.
I have encountered enough fools who bought gold then got actioned that Iām pretty sure they can detect this but choose to do it in waves to prevent (I guess kind of?) bots from figuring out their detection programming for detecting them.
Their detection software is to an extent automated, where they fall short is in the human review process and the time it takes. Which you stated and I do agree with, more bodies to help fight the issue.
I think they chose to do this ban as a way to better detect other avenues for RMT gold as well. If these sellers/buyers resort to the AH they should be easier to detect as well after this ban.
I hope it does have a positive effect on the RMT issue, if it doesnāt and they revert it the forums will explode much louder than they are now lmao.
I get myself suspended on here intentionally to force breaks. It isnāt the best option but I love arguing online and honestly lose sight of the scope more often than not.
Itās just super important to remember that the forums are not the in game community.
I will always respect those who are able to look inward. It is a sign of maturity to be able to walk oneself back a bit. I appreciate that from you 100%.
Could be, I know from some of my other hobbies that these people ruin things just to ruin them and profit themselves.
Calling others out for false equllivances while in the same breath defending your own and reducing your opponents to ontological evil. Quite impressive, election season dosent produce this much cope and vitriol. Iām loving it.
Letās be honest here Blizzard puts hardly any effort into removing botters and RMT. They talked about all the resources they have to stop GDKP but somehow none of that translates to policing botters or RMT, hmmm. If you think about it logically for just a moment you will understand it isnāt about stopping it, itās deliberately deceiving you and turning your attention to a scapegoat to keep you complacent, much like politicians do.
I donāt think you can really make blizzard out to be the big bad wolf here when they explicitly said multiple times in their video that the gdkp ban was only because of large player demand for it. Most players want gdkp out, and that is the only reason itās banned right now
They never said that.
Oh my sweet summer childā¦
Prove it then, otherwise its a dishonest claim. I understand itās easier to be contrarian despite published proof to the opposite of your claims.
And for our next exhibit, an ingrained victim complex!