I don’t normally pay much attention to SoD but the recent GDKP ban caught my attention as blizzard acknowledged its role in encouraging gold buying and RMT, defined it plainly in terms that would seem to (possibly?) include selling carries and expressed the changes as an experiment, which would seem to indicate their willingness to expand it to other versions of the game if they deem it successful.
What do y’all think? Am I reading into it too much? Too soon to tell? What would you think if they banned carry runs in retail?
You are. Like it or not, purchasing carries/boosts is emergent player behavior and has existed in WoW since the beginning. The issue with GDKPs in classic is that it’s basically impossible to do any kind of non-guild based organized group content that isn’t a GDKP. This is different from retail where, it’s actually quite easy to do nearly all content in the game without buying a boost.
I imagine this would change if getting boosted was the only reasonable way to do content.
Maybe, but it was no where NEAR as bad as it is in modern times
This “industrial-scale” or “commercialized” WTS/RMT crap posted by lvl 1 bots that clutters up chat channels (…such that the channel becomes unusable for real-life human being players) with rapidly scrolling “waterfall”-text spam didn’t exist back then.
Buying and selling a boost was mostly a small-scale word-of-mouth thing where you contacted a local/on server raiding guild, made arrangements, got your boost/carry, and that was it. It wasn’t a highly-commercialized, RMT-ridden “industrial-scale business” like it is in modern times
Correct, but you also have to consider how much player behavior has changed in the last 18-20 years.
Boosts early one were mostly centered around leveling. Gear was still very much a scarce resource, and there were no achievements that players felt they needed to help them get access to more successful groups.
Players were also far less objective driven than they are now, and the reduction of server barriers means you have way more access to players who are capable of actually boosting you in the content than just the people on your server.
On Classic servers where folks don’t want to have access to the WoW token, this is a serious issue. On retail, it is largely just bots that are an issue. RMT still happens but nowhere near on the same scale due to the huge social stigmatization against it and general acceptance of the WoW token.
Whereas it is the opposite on the Classic servers.
They aren’t banning players trading gold between each other for in-game services. They are combatting RMT and botters, both of which have a far bigger proportional problem on the Classic servers.
They quite plainly state in the link I have provided that players engaging in GDKP, which they define simply as exchanging gold for loot will be a bannable offense to players in phase 2.
Your statements about RMTs prevalence in retail are speculative.
I do. But more importantly, banning boosts will do nothing but move it underground and into RMT. If you can’t do it for gold, but you’re still going to do it because there is a market, may as well just do it for cash.
Additionally, how do you police this? What if my friend comes back to WoW after a break and I wanna drag his low ilevel character through 20s? Is that boosting? What if in return for this he does all my crafting for free? That’s a transaction, is that not allowed?
GDKPs are also just not going to go away in SoD, they will exist, you just won’t know about them.
Not really, and that’s because on Classic gold is relatively finite.
On retail, gold is infinite. And this has to do with the existence of already existing gold reserves and surpluses of players.
To insinuate that this would become a bannable offense on retail, that would be speculative. As it has no real basis in reality except “look they did it over here where the financial ecosystem is relatively new, already well explored due to it being a ‘re-release’, and already full of bots.” These two ecosystems, whilst they are of the same franchise, are night and day in terms of what each of these systems mean.
You asked whether they would ban players trading gold between each other on retail because of what happened on Classic. I clearly explained how they were different.
How did you even land on anything other than that I provided an answer that they weren’t going to ban players trading gold on retail … ?
