This is where you’re stumbling. There is no “normal or intended.” Bosses drop loot and the players have to form an agreement on how to distribute that loot…and as long as you have 40 people in agreement, then its all gravy.
I literally did buy all the BoE pieces i could when MC launched. Like, I literally did that. Also, this is pretty much how Classic Everquest works on Project 1999, the game I came from before Classic WoW. I don’t see anything wrong with it at all.
the MMORPG is divided between solo tasks and group tasks.
gold comes from solo tasks. and is spent in preparation for group tasks.
I prefer to think of it as organic or not and I wouldn’t think of GDKP or dungeon boosts as an organic type of play, especially in vanilla content. Not that it makes it wrong, but it’s an entirely social construct that Blixzard didn’t encourage. I’m not sure when GDKP started in retail, but I know I got in on it by WoTLK and through MoP. By then I was in an established guild and we sold carrys so I stopped participating, but they probably kept going.
I assume GDKP has existed since vanilla or at least TBC, but at a far less prevelant rate since with so many new players without established accounts hoarding gold wasn’t as prevalent and therefore GDKP didn’t have a big audience, but became more and more popular over time as people kept amassing gold and wanted to dump it.
To that extent you’d think that classic wouldn’t be able to sustain GDKP like vanilla also couldn’t, but it’s 2020 and we all know how the game works so gold is already becoming irrelevant and being inflated due to people capitalizing on legitimate farms the game allows.
Regular DKP or Loot Council, or basically any other form of loot distribution are all player constructs. In EQ, a boss dropped a thing and that was that. There was no pop-up to click that auto distributes loot. One of the most common ways to distribute loot for items that are modestly valuable but decently common is just “Alphabetical order.” There was a /random feature that was used some times.
The fact that WoW has a built in /roll feature for loot is just a side-effect that the developers of WoW came from Everquest and automated a system that was all ready organically developed there. However, turning currency into loot is very common in EQ too since only a handful of items are “soulbound.”
But yes, GDKP was common in Vanilla…at least from MC/Ony where the content was consistently puggable even by the average player base 15 years ago. The only thing different is that the value of a single gold piece is lower today…even through completely legitimate means. But that is not a good thing or a bad thing…it is simply a thing.
It’s your gold. You can do whatever you want with it. GDKP was never “not allowed” as far as I know. But practically no guilds do it for a few reasons. One of them is the lack of incentive to perform as well as you can because you just buy your gear anyway.
I am very confused by those saying gdkp was prevalent in vanilla. I was in a hardcore guild and we would sell to individual buyers (carry runs, basically) - and everyone knew those buyers were buying gold. It was just common knowledge. They were few and far between though.
Gdkps as we know it it though? I never saw anything like it until wrath, and even on ultra high pop servers like blackrock - and the gold was split amongst the carry players, not the entire raid.
So a person can lie, cheat, steal, cheese, exploit, or buy their way toward “winning” the game, and as long as they can get away with it without Blizzard banning them, anything goes? While I suppose that’s technically true, it’s just not the way I look at the game, and I can’t help but frown upon such behavior.
And I know it’s ultimately Blizzard’s responsibility to decide what is acceptable or not and then police it, but as we know, this game is not being actively managed. I have no doubt that many of the behaviors running unchecked right now would have been fixed by Blizz had they occurred with such regularity in 2005-2006, but I know that they are not going to do anything about it now. So all that’s left is the frowns. 
A GDKP run can be run completely legitimately, Yes or No?
Trying to stop a legitimate activity because some have illegitimate gold is completely backwards. You ban the people buying gold, you don’t stop people who have earned their gold from spending it.
If there is no gold buying involved, then yeah, that would be less bad. But I’d still frown upon it, and would never participate. Same with boosting. Or multiboxing.
I’m apparently a weird guy. I’m also a sports guy, and I look at games like I do sports. If someone builds an obstacle course, you run the damn obstacle course. And you measure yourself against the others running the same obstacle course. You don’t pay someone to come by in a helicopter, pick you up, and drop you off at the end of the obstacle course and then say you did it. I don’t know when that became such a strange concept. I guess I’m getting old.
You’re having trouble detaching GDKP from paid carries. Conceptually, GDKP is only about loot distribution and has nothing to do with how a raid is cleared.
Unfortunately, even in sports…the richest have advantages. They can afford the best gear and the best trainers and can afford time off to practice. However, what you want the game to be and what the game actually is can be two different things. Ultimately, the bosses just drop loot and its for the players to decide how to distribute it.
However, all of that is completely irrelevant to GDKP and gold buying/selling. By your own admission they can be run completely legitimate. Trying to stop something completely legitimate because someone MIGHT or CAN use ill-got gold in that system just doesn’t make sense…its like closing down a restaurant because someone might spend stolen money. You don’t do that…you punished the guy with stolen money, not the business.
To be clear, I haven’t tried to stop anything. I’ve just said that I don’t like it, I refuse to participate in such behaviors and frown upon those who do, and here’s why I don’t like it.
“A man got to have a code.”
I think the main concern among players isn’t the GDKP itself, it’s the fact that it can be false flagged for gold selling. I heard a person got a ban for attending a MC GDKP in where a Garr binding dropped and sold for ~15k
But the thing is that we don’t know the full story, the person that got the binding was a mage (funny, I know) over a warrior and him being a mage to get that much gold he either spends a lot of time in ZG grinding gold or, he’s a gold buyer.
I think GDKP raids are fine to do, personally I haven’t done any cause i only have one level 60 and spend most of my time on that. My friend on the other hand does GDKP’s a lot and he hasn’t been banned so, in my personal opinion it’s perfectly fine to do them… Until Blizzard says that they’re against ToS or something like that.
So your friend lied to you, you can’t loot the Garr binding to a mage. And it’s not worth 15k gold in any world. You need 2 binding and 100 arcanite bars to forge Thunderfury.
Yes, it is still allowed.
As far as I know, some players run GDKP for a reason:
Pay for other players’ time or get paid for offering help.
Yes you can. And I was informed that it sold for 29k gold not 15k. doesn’t matter if you think it isn’t worth that much, GDKP’s are done on a bid system so it can easily get to that amount if the gold and the want is there.
How many hours you can farm 29k raw gold?
Mage can farm “raw gold” around 66g/hour, that’s max you can get from loot and vendor.
Don’t you think GDKP create bots and RMT?
The demand for gold does. But you don’t stop completely legitimate things to stop people from doing illegitimate things. Have you seen the uproar about putting a limit on instances to try and stop bots?
That wasn’t the only reason they said they put the instance limit out. The bigger reason was, “exploitative” gameplay which Blizzard refused to elaborate on so we can only guess.
I took it to mean the flying bots that were in ZG.