I suspect the clones would actually make the gold sellers a lot of money because the majority of the clones aren’t full BiS, and because of that the number of clones buying gold to finish their character would skyrocket.
As for if clones should return… Man, I tell ya I was 100% for this until recently…
I changes my mind not because I had to level fresh, but actually because I did level fresh…
The leveling processes is no joke the best part of Vanilla Era, and its something that gives life to the server in ways that only start to make sense if you play often.
Now, if clones were a thing, yes I would, but they’re not so I’m not crying over it.
Man, at this point I am starting to wonder if some of the bots aren’t operated by blizzard employees who have plenty of time on their hands to run bots and know they’re not getting caught.
My brain is hurting reading not only the OP but the response. Actually in shock ppl could have this opinion. but here we go.
So, not only do you think cloning would hurt GDKP, which it wouldnt my clones have 50k gold on them and i still need some naxx items, but you think Blizzard killed the cloning service specifically to keep GDKPs going? For why exactly? Money? But they dont want to bring back cloning service in which people pay $$ to have their characters? What logic is that lol
Cloning service was killed LONG before era had a resurgence. Nobody was buying them and it was costing a ton of space to store the data. So they simply deleted it. Thats it.
Theres really not much more to it. There is no “return of the clone service” your characters are on WOTLK, they will stay there forever or until cata. Get over it .
I never thought about it your way, but with your logic, the return of clones could actually disrupt the underground gold market (GDKP) still because, well, there could be a lot of people that didn’t clone their characters harboring a lot of gold (smells like seized assets to me!). But what about the whales that have completely bis gear who didn’t clone? If made available to them through a cloning service for a small fee instead of having to start from scratch, that would be a lot of money that wouldn’t have to be spent on gold, which would 100% be from the illicit market because there is no WoW token on era. My impression is that the underground gold market has a lot of real-life money moving through it. I mean, I shouldn’t speculate, but there is no way Blizzard would prioritize the integrity of the illicit gold market, would they? Then why not bring back the service for sale? Oh yeah… deleted… right… right.
Nobody was buying them because there was extremely low demand at the time, obviously because TBC and WOTLK were being pulled from out of the Disney vault. And where do you see Blizzard state that it costs a lot of money to store that data? Do you have any evidence that suggests this? We’re not talking about storing the equivalent of 150 days of video for each day /played; we’re talking about storing simple spreadsheets with numerical values relating to level, class, items, currency, location. No wonder your head hurts; thinking is hard for you, apparently.
Alright so… the value of gold would either drop (because a sudden resurgence of clones harboring gold) or the price could remain the same if we say… just cut gold out of the equation. Drain every clone of their gold, heck, even BOEs. I’m confident people would compromise if it meant at least having their gear, honorable kills, bank stuff. IMO that sorts out the economy for the most part. Not sure why you there would be more boosters… wouldn’t there be less… because the demand for boosts would also decrease?
All clones that were not activated before July 26, 2022 were deleted.
And cloning service began May 18, 2021. Closer to 1 year and 2 months window to clone.
smh…
While I understand it says in this post when they plan on retiring the clone service, can you see that this post is one of those examples of them attempting to reach players about the clones through the forums, which 99.9% of players do not attempt to read. Look for yourself, only 7.1k people even viewed their official post. what a poor attempt to tell everyone they were about to erase everything they worked so hard for.
Finally, just for you @deathsbounty,
I never said character data is stored on excel although what I meant was, to
quote from a private server dev I’ve been asking questions,
“Character data is somewhat analogous to adding rows of information to spreadsheets, albeit in a more structured and relational manner. The storage size for a single character, even one with a lot of progress, would be relatively small due to the efficient nature of relational databases. Just a few KB really.”
what is free about paying to unlock a character that you already spent thousands of hours collecting items on?
They did send a couple e-mails that mentioned the cloning service, however not a single one of them indicated that the character cloning service would be ending. If you have one that does say this, please share it. I just sifted through my email looking for anything about the cloning service and found not a single word about this being a limited time offer.
Clearly you have some negative views about GDKP as a loot distribution system.
It’s unclear though why you would ask this question. The only people who might mind if they brought back the cloning service would be people who just leveled and geared up the exact characters that they would clone, imo.
Catering to the whiners always diminishes the effort that those who actually do things for themselves do, and I suppose doing it repeatedly encourages whining rather than doing something.
Yes, I do have negative views about GDKP. I don’t have to beat around the bush. GDKP has turned into the backbone of the illicit gold market in Classic Era. Ultimately, the demand from GDKP-RMT drives third parties to acquire gold from botting, which in the end diminishes living, breathing people’s efforts to just play the game and purchase things without swiping a credit card. Those who spend gold to buy items in GDKP are seldom the people who grind hours and hours to amass gold inside the game. It’s a sure thing that if you are buying stuff in GDKP, the gold you are using is from bots/hackers, which plague the game to this day. If those who participated in GDKP all acquired their gold through playing the game and not through those that cheat, I wouldn’t care about GDKP.
Because I suspect that a lot of GDKP participation includes people who didn’t play Classic Era on the first go-around. These clones are of characters that already existed? These clones wouldn’t be available to anyone unless you played before Classic Burning Crusade people already spent thousands of hours progressing them.
Are you upset that people were able to clone in the first place? I’m confused about how this harms you if they bring back cloning, unless you have deeply invested real-life money in GDKPs and you want to prevent your shiny GDKP character from being diminished by a resurgence of geared players returning to Classic via clone at the going rate of $5-25.
I doubt this, but for the sake of argument, I’ll take your word for it.
Please do just explain, if you would, how GDKP (regardless of how anybody acquires gold) diminishes the efforts of people to “just play the game,” please.
Inflation. Gold that is injected into the game through bots/hackers reduces the value of regular people’s gold. Unless you are commanding a legion of bots, the value of your time that you spend farming gold is worth far less. As i said; GDKP has a lot of illicit gold flowing through it. its irrefutable. And if there suddenly was a solution to the bot/hacker issue and all that gold vanished; then making gold by playing the game, farming mobs, completing quest, and doing professions would be a more meaningful use of your time. Do you know that people used to do quests for gold?
here is a hypothetical exercise:
You need consumables for raids
Imagine it takes you an hour to do 5 quests that will reward you with 1000 gold.
That reward is static. It will Always be 1000 gold because quests do not adjust their reward based on how much gold is inside the game. That’s okay cause takes only 2 hours for you get the gold you need for your raid.
But now imagine there are hundreds of robots that start doing those same quests that are available to you, except they do it faster than you and collect 1500 gold per hour.
These robots pool their gold together and make it available to people for their dollars because these people don’t want to play the game and farm gold themselves to purchase their consumables. This inflates the supply of gold and reduces the supply of consumables.
So, while 2000 gold used to get you all your raid consumables, now it costs 3500 which means you have to spend more time collecting gold because all the non-illicit forms of farming gold in the game are static.
It’s as I said, before. Inflation. Your raid consumables, boes, enchanting mats, gems, etc… Anything that costs gold will cost more gold because of bots and hackers adding to the overall gold supply in the game. In a gdkp, the loot goes to the highest bidder. Saying it goes to who farmed the most gold in game is disingenuous. It goes to who has the bigger wallet in real life. Obviously, after the GDKP raid is concluded, all that gold is distributed amongst the raid members, and then they go and spend their piles of gold on consumables, boes, enchants, gems, or they save it and spend it later down the line in the next raid tier. Its supply and demand. Do you get it?
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it only affects gold that people already have, or gold from vendoring items. As the amount of gold in circulation increases, and prices of items on the AH, mats, etc. increase, so do the profits from selling things.
For example, if you rolled on Whitemane during Classic P6, it was trivial not only to earn mount money, but to also buy cloth for getting exalted with other factions through cloth turn-in quests before even hitting 60, simply from sending found items to an AH alt and listing them on the AH. I was able to do this before 40, personally.
I mean, this sounds like it would be terrible, if it were true! However, the costs of materials seems to come down in price when more and more people (or bots) are farming them and listing them for sale on the AH, which in-turn also lowers the relative costs of the consumables.
Inflation in WoW does not work the way that inflation in a real-world economy affects wage-earners, because WoW Players are not earning static wages, but rather have access to the same marketplace via trade/the AH that everyone else has.
Stating as if you know as a matter of fact is disingenuous, actually. While certainly, it’s likely that some GDKPs have gold that comes from RMT, if you’ve spent even an hour or so looking into, or practicing gold farming techniques in Classic, you’ll see that it’s quite possible to farm gold.
I used to do DM East lasher farms on my paladin and grinded about 5K+ gold before ever going to a GDKP. Note, I’m not trying to make the argument that people aren’t RMTing, or even trying to downplay the amount of RMT that clearly must be happening (the cost of WoW Tokens in Wrath is a very clear indicator of the appetite for the playerbase to spend real money on gold).
However, as someone who does not RMT, but who has grinded gold, and has attended GDKPs regularly, and who is also incredibly frugal when it comes to bidding on items (generally), it isn’t as if there’s an insurmountable barrier to entry for the average player to get into GDKP loot distribution raiding groups, and it’s also absolutely not clear that GDKP (or bots or RMT or regular old gold farming) have any negative impact on anyone’s enjoyment of the game.
While I am quite familiar with how the GDKP loot system works, I don’t feel that the belief that it diminishes the efforts of people to “just play the game” is grounded in reality. Nor do I feel that your explanation of WoW economics is very accurate. At least, it certainly doesn’t appear to be so from playing the game.
Okay so… do you not see people posting in the forums about bots and RMT or are you personally not sure if Bots and RMT has a large enough negative impact on the anyone’s enjoyment of the game? It doesn’t sound like it affects you negatively because you are a benefactor even though you don’t personally swipe your own credit card. After all, you attend GDKPs which
we at least both agree …
If you are receiving a GDKP split, I mean, there is a very good chance that you are holding gold that came from RMT. And in classic? 40 man raid GDKPs? U cannot tell me with a straight face that it’s only some GDKPs that have people with RMT-Bankroll.
That aside, If you are true to your word legit non swiping GDKP enjoyer, I can think of many other people who openly boast and upload their GDKP plunders for the world to see who should be held accountable first.
I do still wonder how much gold you make per hour grinding outside of GDKP. My guess is that you are not making 5,000 gold per hour in classic era farming lashers. If you somehow did make that much in an hour, you could consider your time worth 30 dollars an hour had you decided to RMT.
I have to assume you combine some of the gold you farm with the gold split you earn from GDKP, save it up over a few raids and then you spend on an item. I can appreciate someone who is frugal. I’m frugal too. If I were to do GDKP I would make sure I were attending GDKPs where I was sure to receive a lot of gold from splits by running in high bank roll groups as a carry but also separately attend GDKPs where I knew that I could win bids on valuable items for cheap.
The barrier to enter a GDKP is low, but the ceiling is as big as your wallet is. Ultimately the persistent attendance to GDKPs can net you enough gold to buy your own items if you spend wisely. As I said before, if people legitimately farmed their gold for GDKPs rather than RMTing, so be it!
But it just cannot be so.
^thats a lot of chicken nuggies.
which brings me here again will people who raid GDKP be upset if I were take their raid spot my classic era clone?
benefits:
Players that went to tbc/wotlk and never cloned.
GM’s/Officers Looking for geared people to fill their raid.
More people to do group content with.
the economy would boom because of the increase of players buying/selling mats/products.
Harm:
Doomers and boomers wouldnt know what to do with all these people putting them in check after saying some off the wall stuff like “IT WOULD HURT THE GDKPERS AND THATS WHY THEY WONT DO IT”
Boosters/Botters.
Boosters cant make money off of folks that are already 60.
Botters have to deal with new players farming in their zones, and being killed by the new players coming in since era isnt layered nor sharded.
Okay so… do you not see people posting in the forums about bots and RMT or are you personally not sure if Bots and RMT has a large enough negative impact on the anyone’s enjoyment of the game? It doesn’t sound like it affects you negatively because you are a benefactor even though you don’t personally swipe your own credit card. After all, you attend GDKPs which
40 man raid GDKPs? U cannot tell me with a straight face that it’s only some GDKPs that have people with RMT-Bankroll.
