Biggest joke that has come out of sod is thinking that the gdkp ban has had any real impact on RMT or bots.
All it did was kill the pug raid scene, drive players to join guilds (the best result of the ban), and made the sweats play less alts.
No swipers quit the game or stopped swiping because of the gdkp ban. They just continued to swipe. Every phase has had significant player power that swipers just bought with gold.
Not to mention (unless the tokens literally don’t drop ie no mage/priest/warlock tokens) a fresh 60 can get 5+ Pieces of T1 in a single MC run. For Free mind you. If GDKP’s were a thing they would have to pay 50g+ per tier piece.
Reals are better incentives for players to keep pugging the non-current raid tiers because you can spend them on Toys, Cosmetics, Reagents, or boxes that may or may not have expensive items inside.
Wasn’t the GDKP ban reusing the SoM raid changes did a number. So many pugs just cant to seem to get past Firemaw with 0 affixes in BWL for example (I’ve cleared it on Black Affix with my guild).
Furthermore what also happened until recently is alot of players didn’t want to play alts because they would need to grind the runes. Which isn’t the case anymore since you can get them all for 1 copper and is why SoD is seeing a resurgence in players.
New and Returning SoD players are also surprised that, thanks to 30 Reals from MC, they can easily get nearly a full set of T1 gear for free because people who are geared to the Teeth are running MC for the Reals.
If GDKP’s were in SoD New and Returning players would not be getting so much MC gear for free they would need to pay 50g+ per item.
The way raiding is right now and the pug seen is great and healthy without GDKP’s.
There is no resurgence homie. Ironforge.pro is based off log data, if more people were raiding it would be climbing. Using phase peak population, SoD lost 169k raiders between P1 and P2. 142k between P2 and P3. And another 110k between P3 and P4. It’s been between 75k and 55k for the last ~6 months. Losing all of your alt/multi character raiders (gdkp ban), alongside people not wanting to alt in the first place (runes sucked to farm), on top of atrocious pvp balance. People gave up.
The majority of the raid scene is still guilds. Guilds log. The pug scene on WG NA ally is dead. Peak hours 1-2 groups forming. And the group quality is just as bad as the scenes livelihood.
I literally sat in IF last week and stared at LFG with everything enabled, including world bosses. There were 2 groups forming for an hour, 6pm. That was it.
You also need to understand, MC is the easiest raid. Even in it’s 20 man format. There were 0 ZG’s forming, 0 AQ small’s forming. And not even guild recruitment ads for AQ big. It is DIRE. Following the rune change, I’m not surprised there’s MC pugs. But it’s not going to result in a larger raiding pop for more than a couple of weeks.