GDKP ruins the integrity of MMO’s in my personal opinion. It used to be that people got together with a bunch of friends or like-minded individuals to achieve a common goal, that being getting gear and clearing the content. That way of playing WoW has gone extinct. Now a days it’s all about getting enough gold to pay someone to get the gear and clear the content for you. Blizzard used to ban accounts for this, way back when. But now that Blizzard gets a cut, aka the wow token, so it’s all good.
GDKP is a money laundering pyramid scheme, just try and change my mind on this. Money laundering involves disguising financial assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them. In this case, taking dirty gold obtained through less than TOS-friendly means, “cleaning” it through the GDKP system, then reintroducing said gold back into the market. A pyramid scheme is a form of investment in which each paying participant brings in two further participants, with returns being given to early participants using money contributed by later ones.
Example of how a GDKP can be used to launder gold:
A player will buy gear or progression with “dirty” gold, get some gear or achievements, and then peace out. This gold is then distributed among the players that were there to make some money and not get gear. This gives the money a “rinse” through the GDKP and creates a plausible paper trail of how the money was obtained legally. This gold is then sold either to other people, gold selling websites, or Blizzard through the WoW Token. Now that the gold has been “cleaned”.
Here’s just a few tell-tale signs of a pyramid scheme(though by no means all of them):
There’s an emphasis on recruiting new participants.
Promises of high returns in a short amount of time.
Easy money or passive in-come.
Complex commission structure
No demonstrated revenue from sales
Any of those sound familiar? A lot of GDKP’s have new people coming and going constantly, it’s part of the model after all. You ever do well in a GDKP run only to not be invited back the following week because they’re “testing a new guildie” or some such? How many of you got sucked in to your early GDKP runs before you knew what’s up with promises that you’ll make a bunch of gold at the end of the run? How many times were you told “It’s easy, just show up, kill bosses, get paid.”? How often have you or someone you know been screwed because only the raid leader and/or their inner circle know how the payouts truly work, and how often has it been the case of “just trust me, bro” when it comes to asking how exactly the money gets paid out? Heck, even the Comb-Over Messiah has stated in streams before how easy it is to screw people over in GDKP’s or covered the drama surrounding it.
Gangsters of old cream in their graves at the idea of the GDKP. GDKP’s truly are the perfect meld of two fraudulent schemes into one.