Summarizing all that, it appears the justification you’re offering for the GDKP ban really boils down to RMT gold prices, so let’s talk about it.
In order to understand pricing you need to understand supply and demand. But first, let’s talk about bots.
Bots must operate with a profit margin (obviously). They need to make more money from RMT than they cost in subscriptions, electricity, infrastructure, and operations. They’re also in competition with other bot operations. So, the gold price will always be marginally above cost and the bot farmers will simply scale out the operation with the capital that they have available in order to (hopefully) reach a desired monthly income. However, there is considerable risk that Blizzard will do their job and ban them, so they need to break even on the account as soon as possible. This means they’ll try to offload gold as soon as possible and it results in a very slim margin business. You’re not likely to get rich by American standards running wow bots, but for relatively small and typically international operators it could be a decent living, as long as your cost of living is low.
Why does this matter? Because the fact that bots still exist in the world means they are profitable. If there was no profit margin the bots would be powered off (obviously). You talk about gold prices, but the price is simply a measurement of the gold supply versus the gold demand.
You’ve focused in your arguments on RMT demand, but let’s talk about supply first because it is important to understand. The price of gold will always go down because the supply is always going up (due to inflation). Due to hyper inflation in SoD the amount of gold a bot can farm per day has gone up, a lot. So, the price of gold doesn’t actually matter to the bot farmer that much. What matters is how much gold (or materials) can be farmed per day. The price, whether low or high, is just going to be marginally above what their cost is to make it because that’s the business model.
Okay, so what about demand? This is what you’re focused on, but you’re looking at the wrong metric. Gold prices have more to do with the total gold supply in the economy than they have to do with demand. As I’ve pointed out, it is a very low margin business, and they can’t sell gold at a loss sustainably. So, how does demand factor in? Demand will inform the bot farmers how many bots to deploy. They’ll maintain a small amount of gold on hand to satisfy orders, but they don’t want to hang onto too much as it comes at a high risk to them of getting lost from a ban or inflation driving prices below what the costs were when it was obtained. So, if the RMT demand for gold is low you will see the bot population decline because they don’t need to generate as much gold. If the demand is high, you will see the bot population increase so that they can generate enough to meet demand. The price in both cases will remain pretty much the same (marginally above cost).
Connecting all the dots…RMTs didn’t go anywhere and so neither did the bots. If the GDKP ban was effective we would see a major decline in bot activity (i.e. the number of bots). I don’t see anyone making the argument that the bot population tanked after the ban, do you? Any decline in bot population was certainly eclipsed by the decline in the overall SoD population (a smaller overall population would naturally result in less RMT demand) but I don’t even see people making that claim. If we had seen something like this, then that would be evidence that the GDKP ban had a measurable impact. Given that we didn’t see that, your primary argument that GDKP increases demand for RMT is shown to be false.
TLDR: Banning GDKP didn’t hurt bots / RMT. All of the arguments in favor of the GDKP ban (including the social structure argument) have been thoroughly debunked in this thread by myself and others on numerous occasions over the last 6 months. This experiment has failed. Revert the policy and allow the community to play the game the way we want, just like in every other version of classic.