It depends on the item. Consumables are basically tied to the bot activity, more bots = lower consume prices (except consumes that bots don’t 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 ‘potentially’ 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 isn’t feasible so they are also incentivized to buy gold.
At the moment it isn’t super noticeable since the raids are way undertuned and low level consumes are much cheaper.
That’s 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 Blizzard’s 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 Blizz’s 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.
I can’t help but wonder if I’d also be rallying against GDKPs if I stuck around for late-game Classic, given the amount of posts like this. I’ve 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.
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 “I didn’t know! my mail said GDKP payout!”
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 I’m 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 doesn’t 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 isn’t the best option but I love arguing online and honestly lose sight of the scope more often than not.
It’s 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. I’m loving it.
Let’s 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 isn’t about stopping it, it’s deliberately deceiving you and turning your attention to a scapegoat to keep you complacent, much like politicians do.
I don’t 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 it’s banned right now
Sorry but the AH let’s you directly convert gold into items some of which are BiS. And you get to do so without the inconvenience of having to clear a raid and be subject to lockouts, loot RNG etc…
So yeah everything on the AH is just as prone to being being involved in an RMT as anything in a GDKP.
Because you made the ridiculous claim that there wasn’t evidence to support Blizzard not handling botters and RMT, yet I propose the very obvious visible evidence to support it and you act all smooth brained like it doesn’t exist. GDKP were also supported and commented on as acceptable by Blizzard btw and have been around since BC.
A spade huh, so in other words you don’t know what it is but you thought the word sounded good so you used it without knowing it’s meaning.