This is a particular relevant selection from the wowhead article:
"…as pick-up groups became more accessible in Wrath of the Lich King, using gold in place of arbitrary points became a popular way to distribute gear in pick-up groups; players would pay for an item and the gold would be distributed among the rest of the raid. This way, everyone wins - even if you didn’t get an item, you ended up making some money for participating in the raid.
Sounds neat, but this equal-redistribution of wealth version of GDKP doesn’t exist anymore. As anything in life where money is involved, people quickly discovered ways of making it even more profitable - why sell every item for a flat amount when you can start a bidding war? Why share the proceeds with a bunch of pugs when you can farm the same raid and sell the same items with your heavily geared guild group in half the time? Selling runs didn’t start with GDKP, particularly at the highest levels of World First competitive raiding, but the general popularity of those pug runs paved the way for it to become socially acceptable to trade gold for items. Today, we see the results of that refinement, with gigantic sales Discord servers trading millions and nearly every guild in the top 50+ routinely selling their own raid spots, offering achievements, mounts, gear, battle pets, titles, and more. Guilds routinely rake in thousands of dollars worth of gold each tier, which is in turn used to buy BoEs or WoW Tokens to pay for gametime and services; at $30 USD for a faction change and $25 for a realm change, it costs roughly $1,650 for a guild to change servers and transfer 30 characters from Alliance to Horde, as the vast majority of high end raiding guilds have done over the last few years - nearly all of that is paid for with gold.
Think that’s a lot? Method claimed to have spent 40-100 million gold preparing for the Race to World First Battle of Dazar’alor. Limit spent 10-15 million gold faction changing their entire roster twice to get an extra piece of War Mode PvP gear on each character. Who knows how much was spent buying Corrupted BoE’s during Ny’alotha, but you can be certain it was quite a bit more, as prices inflated beyond all reason due to the early power spike from Corruptions; even mid-tier guilds have Auction House flippers searching small servers for relatively cheap BoEs to buy, server transfer, and resell for 2-5x the price.
So what does this have to do with botting and RMT in Classic WoW? Because Classic isn’t Vanilla. Guilds aren’t jealously guarding raid strategies anymore, pugs are common, players know which items are worth pursuing now better than they did before, and there are a lot more avenues of communication now than just the official realm forums. The sales tactics and infrastructure used to trade gold may have been refined after Vanilla, but it’s in full force now and Classic is just another avenue of profitable business. Even the guilds who explicitly refuse to participate in RMT are still affected by it, as much of the gold they take in payment originates from some bot or seller. Of course it isn’t just restricted to WoW, but that’s a whole other story."
