Everyone knows GDKP and RMT go hand in hand. Even the people who claim otherwise do, theyre obviously just lying.
Those who join GDKP runs without buying gold themselves have their pockets filled with massive splits of bought gold.
This system has been an absolute plague on the game for far too long now. It literally caused logging in to Classic to give me the Retail feeling of watching the global chat, and immediately wanting to log out again before starting any activity.
People who refuse to partake in GDKP fall behind. On Era even basic materials like grenades or sapper charges became too expensive for any legit player to purchase.
“jUsT iNsTaLl An AdDoN tO hIDe ThE aDs” Not an argument. I dont want to hide the messages for myself, i want the people banned for the destroying the game. Also what are new players who dont know about addons supposed to think when they read nothing but advertisements?
These GDKP people and boosters need to all lose their jobs and accounts.
Besides, i obtained the craziest and coolest items i ever wanted on WoW through the soft reserve loot system. I had stable guilds with DKP systems, but got me a Swift Zulian Tiger and Corrupted Ashbringer in soft reserve pugs. Its literally a perfect loot system.
It’s my understanding that they’re trial running this in SoD to see how things go. With that said, I’m not entirely sure what they’ll do going forward if it works out.
For instance, the anti-boosting changes they trialed in SoM, while maybe not my favourite, did have the benefit of effectively stopping boosting. That change went on to be added to WotLK but never did get brought back to Era.
Should it?
On the one hand, Era really should stay a (mostly) unchanged version of Vanilla WoW for people to enjoy. On the other hand, it’s not really anything at all like Vanila WoW was. Player behaviour has drastically altered it, with the persistent drive to monetize literally everything changing the game far more than anything Blizzard could have done.
With that in mind though, I think anti-boosting and GDKP are different things. To achieve anti-boosting, it requires game mechanics changes that deviate from Vanilla’s design, which is something I can see some folks not liking at all. GDKP though is an entirely player driven system and the enforcement of it being against TOS would require no in-game changes.
Personally, I do hope this GDKP change proves successful and makes its way to Era. I would really like to see people playing WoW for the sake of playing WoW and not for the sake of exclusively profiting and/or exploiting their fellow player. I have no doubt that some pure GDKP groups exist but they got washed out in the flood of RMT-riddled groups. This is just how it goes… just the same as how the dungeon boosting changes made it so I couldn’t boost my friends anymore, but made it much more likely that my friends and I could play together and find groups for dungeons. You lose some, get you more.
I don’t care what they do to SoD / wotlk / cata - that’s retail in my mind, but leave community micromanagement far away from Era.
Our servers are 5 years old and people are enjoying them plenty (if you don’t like it, there are tons of other versions of wow available).
Buying and selling gold should be enforced and those accounts banned. However, GDKPs and boosting is community interaction and a solution to some of the more complex issues of the game, never should they try to ban those sorts of activities.
Era doesn’t have gimmick like level boosts, wow tokens, and other things that obliterate the immersion - the world is managed by the players and it should remain that way. The best blizzard can do is enforce current ToS and keep a hands off approach (1.14 and 1.15 already caused enough issues).
Players return to Era from WOTLK and are mad that they can’t afford anything or that it isn’t the exact same as it was when they abandoned it years ago to jump into TBC bandwagon. Perhaps if they had continued to play on Era instead of messing around in those pseudo-retail modes, they wouldn’t be so broke or low level on Era and wouldn’t be triggered that people who have been on those servers for years longer are ahead.
Want gold, pickup any gathering profession and you’ll make money really fast, or level a mage and learn to do boosts, or grind some mobs and sell the drops - nothing has changed - people are just expecting everything handed to them and that’s not what Era does. So they assumed everyone on Era bought gold to skip ahead, which is far from reality, most the gold buyers were WOTLK players who returned in last few years and have now left for SoD.
I don’t entirely disagree with most of your post, but I do want to comment on this part. This isn’t really as it seems. Yes, you can make a lot of gold using gathering professions. In fact, I’ve done this very thing. Since I started playing Era again I’ve managed to pool a good amount of gold (over 5000), owed entirely to the massive inflation the market has seen as a direct result of RMT.
On the surface, this seems like a lot… I mean, that’s a epic mount for 5 alts, right? Then you go look at the price of consumables, or hear what people are spending in GDKP runs, and you realize that it’s not very much at all. I was talking to someone last week who was saying they spent 10k in a GDKP run and got a whole bunch of gear. Awesome for them, but that’s twice as much gold as I’ve farmed in 6 months or so? You can maybe start to see why GDKP is fueling RMT purchase.
I’m not saying you buy gold, or that the GDKP runs you participate in are RMT. If you tell me that you and your friends value this practice and you treat it as is, I will take you at your word. As I said above though, sometimes you gotta let things go.
Personally, I would have chosen a different route first here because I absolutely agree with your statements here:
… I really have trouble understanding why this is such a challenge for Blizzard. Especially when their GDKP post says they have methods of detecting GDKP activitites. If they have that, do they not have methods of detecting gold purchase? It’s a mystery to me, and one that Blizzard isn’t sheeding any light on, so I guess it just is what it is.
The other side of the coin here too though is that I do agree with Blizzards comments…
This is largely true. The motivations of a GDKP group just aren’t the same as a guild group. A GDKP run sees the more benefit by prioritizing profit over the benefit of the group because most of those folks won’t see each other again. By contrast, a guild group sees bigger gains in prioritizing group progression because those folks are coming back week after week to help the guild move forward.
People are viewing WoW differently than they did even 5 years ago, more as a way to profit and less as a way to bond with other players and overcome challenges. Whatever good aspects GDKP brings (and I do believe it brings some), I think they’re outweighed by that shift in motivation that takes a lot away from what it means to be playing a game with others.
Maybe if humans could just stop humaning for a hot minute, we could all have nice things
I played SOM in its entirety. That change was one of the greatest things they ever did to WoW. Not having /lfg and /2 flooded with Boosting spam, as well as that people were actually running dungeons.
I agree with you that 5k doesn’t go very far when it comes to purchasing things from GDKPs (though you can gear a toon prebis + AQ20 / ZG / lower end MC / BWL gear for 5-10k gold), it will only purchase a single item in higher tier raids.
For example, in the naxx GDKP I’ve been attending weekly for the past months, items start at 10k min bid and the total payout is usually 20-35k (depending on whether I get top healing bonus ) Yet, the payout of an AQ20 or something can be just a few hundred gold. The cost of items in GDKPs is tied to the demand and difficulty of content, easy things have really cheap items and hard raids like naxx (which you need 38+ people with experience in the content, really good gear, lots of consumes, world buffs, and wipes can ruin the lockout for everyone) have really expensive items because there are only a few runs each week that can clear the content.
The guild I am in on Era runs naxx as SR + a ‘points’ system which many people enjoy and they had 2 naxx teams prior to SoD now there is only one per week - so there are many ways to gear a toon without ever attending GDKPs.
However, consumes are expensive (and were expensive even pre-tbc early phases) when I was on a server without GDKPs. I had to farm multiple hours a week to be able to attend raids properly consumed and eventually stopped raiding and quit for a while because I couldn’t spend the time farming.
When I returned to the game around covid time, there were GDKPs and I was able to fund my raiding and pvp activities from the gold earned in those runs. Even though I did GDKPs, even back then, I still did naxx with a LC guild to gear my main. So weekly I could mix MC / BWL gdkp for gold and naxx LC for gear.
These days, without GDKPs I would never take my main to a raid, it is far too expensive on consumes (even if they were 1/2, 1/3, or less the price) to buy flask x 2, mana pot x 5-10, dark runes, shadow pot x 5, frost pot x 5, weapon oil, and more to just take my healer into a raid which I need zero items. (running a melle dps or tank cost far more)
However, with GDKPs I can (and many others do as well) enjoy running with our best geared toons while we get a payout that allows us to buy consumes for pvp, gear alts, and generally never have to worry about gold in the game. But to get a toon geared to the point in which they can earn big payout in GDKPs takes a long time - I played that main since covid and it is nice that fully geared toons have that sort of ‘value add’ to an Era account.
Without GDKPs they would just sit around SW looking pretty and unable to pvp / pve unless they want to farm - or buy gold.
Pre GDKPs many people bough gold to play the game. Era is a game of consumes and to play at the top level it is expensive, many players don’t want to half play, we want to push our toons to the limit. And before GDKPs people had no choice but to buy gold or spend near 100% of their freetime farming. GDKPs may incentivize whales to buy gold (but as I stated - I think they and the sellers should be perma banned), but they also allow many other players to enjoy the game without buying gold. Even if RMT was fully banned, GDKPs would be the best source of gold - because they are where players can get the best items in the game.
It makes a lot more sense that the most geared players can earn the most gold by helping carry raids. (versus the no GDKP world in which a full t3 healer can earn the same amount of gold as a fresh level 60 farming consumes out in the world - and prob less than a fresh lvl 60 dps class).
I bolded the part that I want to call attention to here. It took me 5 months to farm up enough gold with gathering professions to meet the bare minimum for what you’re calling pre-bis in a GDKP. That’s a lot of money… and the main reason it’s so much is inflation.
Like I said, I’m going to take you at your word and assume you’ve never purchased gold, instead making all of your funds through GDKP. However, it’s important to realize that a sizeable share of your gold is still purchased gold. Someone else just bought it and gave it to you via a GDKP. You might be one person who doesn’t buy, but so many others do, and that is the sole reason why you feel you’re forced to run GDKP to make gold in the first place.
Purcahsed gold has shot inflation on our servers up to a massive degree. Those raid consumables that you feel you need (which you may or may not actually need) are so costly because that’s what people are paying for them. They are paying that much because gold doesn’t mean anything to them, they can just buy more from the organizations that run bots to generate it, and run GDKP to cycle it back.
For you, the only way to keep up without purchasing gold is to run GDKP on an already geared toon and take the gold that people bought. For someone who doesn’t want to run GDKP, or for someone who isn’t geared enough to get a carry cut, the only option is to farm for months and months or to buy gold.
I’m not trying to paint you as a bad guy here. Like I said, I’m quite willing to take you at your word that you have the best of intentions in and around GDKP. However, I want you to understand the true scope of what’s happening here. The only reason you’re paying so much for raid consumables is that RMT has flooded the market with gold. Gold buying is 100% the problem, but GDKP has become a prominent and central redistribution method for it.
Without GDKP, things would be worth a lot less and the gold you generate from in-game activities would actually go a lot further. That 5g you get from selling a grey weapon from a UBRS run is much more meaningful than it is today.
However, here’s the real issue. While banning GDKP is an important step in taking away a core driver for RMT in Classic WoW (assuming it’s successful and does come to Era), all that gold is already in the economy. Even if Blizzard decided to fully engage and start strictly enforcing it’s anti-RMT policies, the damage is done. All the people who bought gold, or built up a massive gold stock pile of said purchased gold through GDKP, still have it. The prices of good stay high because the economy is still over-saturated.
The only difference is, the people without gold or who are starting new characters now have no way to catch up to those who do. This isn’t me saying that Blizzard should do nothing here, it’s me really trying to drive home how broken the economy is. I think Blizzard’s attention on GDKP is a good thing, but it is by no means a solution.
I don’t ever feel forced to run a GDKP, I see SR in trade chat all the time and am in a guild that does every raid, including naxx, with a SR + points systems. I run them because they are enjoyable and my method of farming gold.
I did gear my alt mostly through GDKPs and while I did give it a few thousand gold to start off (spent no time farming prebis just hit ZG soon as I hit 60) - it was able to get decent gear including pvp offitems (rings from c’thun and neff) and a pugio from AQ40, from earning its own gold in GDKPs. A lot of runs nothing you need drops, so you spend zero and get your cut.
I do know some players that purchase gold, but the majority of players I’ve met in GDKPs are there to earn gold or because they generally enjoy the system. Before TBC I knew many more people who openly stated they were buying gold, and that was before GDKPs’ current prominence.
This is where I think it is more complex, than gdkp = more expensive consumes. Even with zero RMT, the cost of consumes is very high in vanilla. Especially on older servers in which the majority of the population is at higher levels, geared, and does not desire to farm - there is a lack of raw supplies, potions, etc. hitting the market.
Without any method of earning gold in raids players will spend many hours farming to purchase consumes. If a healing potion is 50silver, flask 100g, mongoose 10g, etc. but I can farm 50g an hour, it is much more expensive than today when flask is 650g mongoose 50g potions between 1 and 50g (lol was 1g for many months until SoD came out) but I can farm 10k gold an hour in naxx.
The gold is in the economy, but remember with GDKPs players are incentivized to hold the gold and save it for items they want and when they use it they distribute it to players. They are not hoarding gold to play the economy for profits.
I think they do, they can gear the old fashion way (with SR or guild) then join GDKPs as carries if they want a cut of the gold. Or they can do like my rogue and just gear in GDKPs, but slightly cheaper items and get more from payout than you spend.
When people buy a gressil for 500k or a binding for 350k that gold gets spread to 39 other players, if a new player had taken their toon into that MC run and the 350k binding dropped, they will get a cut of it. Though rarely is there two big spenders that want binding and it usually goes for 20-50k but it has gone for far more when there is high demand in that run.
In SoD/WotLK? I’m reasonably sure that the SoM changes were migrated there. Definitely WotLK because I remember working on a Warrior Dungon Solo character and running into some of the mechanics in ZF.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, I was a kid and not super hardcore in OG vanilla. But I don’t remember boosts and GDKP being the norm like it is in Era.
I think if they did daily lockouts for all dungeons and banned GDKP it would make the game a more genuine classic experience, not less.
Era isn’t trying to provide a ‘genuine classic experience’. They are 5 year old vanilla servers, with good pvp, fun degen raids, and lots of players that have different goals meeting in one area. Micromanaging Era player gameplay isn’t really a solution.
If players want a ‘genuine classic experience’ what we need are fresh Era servers that reset after 2 years.
I guess my perspective is this. As someone coming back to era (my old character got moved and I missed the window to copy them =( ).
Trying to find a group for a dungeon and not being able to get anyone because everyone is boosting feels bad. I can’t afford a boost, nor do I want to stand around instead of playing the game.
I’ve leveled alts on Era and was always able to find dungeon groups. Just do quests in the zone where the dungeon is and spam in that local channel to find other people leveling.
Not everyone is boosting.
Era isn’t ultra friendly to new players that think everything will be available instantly, nor should it be, it reflects the fact that some players have a near 5 year head start on you. You can catchup if you want but it will take months or years - and that’s okay.
If they do rolling fresh servers, than players that want to level in a world in which everyone is at the same page will have place to do so. But it is not possible to turn Era into that place.
But remember Era is static - when someone is bis they are not getting any better gear, so they may be a year of work ahead of you, but when you catchup you will all be at the same place forever. If you assume it will take at least 20 to 30 days /played on your first main to get near bis, then you can start to enjoy the journey - and if it isn’t fun at any point - there are many other versions of wow to enjoy that may fit one’s playstyle and desire more.
) Yet, the payout of an AQ20 or something can be just a few hundred gold. The cost of items in GDKPs is tied to the demand and difficulty of content, easy things have really cheap items and hard raids like naxx (which you need 38+ people with experience in the content, really good gear, lots of consumes, world buffs, and wipes can ruin the lockout for everyone) have really expensive items because there are only a few runs each week that can clear the content.