Wait, im confused. If you’re not trying to push sunwell progression, why do you need this gear?
I saw in your post you mentioned you wanted to get into a “decent guild” before WotLK which I can understand I guess, but you yourself mentioned you have a full time job and dad responsibilities.
Even if you bought a full set of BiS gear from SWP, any “decent guild” would likely look at your logs and see that you in fact have none and would know you just bought your gear, likely lessening your chances of getting invited.
If you actually want to join a good guild and have the time to dedicate to that, gearing up right now is probably one of the worst ways to do that. When WotLK launches, go hard and farm your pre-raid BiS and then apply to such guilds.
We’re on the tail end of a very linear progression expansion. Of course you’re going to have issues right now gearing up. It would be the same if you started playing WotLK classic when Ruby Sanctum gets released.
GDKP’s are not the problem. The problem is expecting to be able to join an already established guild without putting in the effort or time.
Exactly this. GDKP’s are, for PuG’s/guilds that have their gear already, the best / most fair way to run raid loot.
I’ve seen people change up their Soft Reserve items to in-demand items they don’t need just so if they win they can then sell that item to someone who actually needs it.
I’ve seen people equip a different, worse piece of gear than what they have so they can roll need on an item and not be questioned about why they rolled need on it.
But you can’t really do that in a GDKP. Sure you can bid an item up, but there’s a chance you burn yourself and have to pay for an item you didn’t want (or else lose your share / name and shame / etc).
Why would you want to go to a SR raid and hope you win an item against 4 other people when you could not only buy the exact item you want, but potentially even make gold as well for your time (assuming you aren’t a pure buyer since some if not most GDKP’s I see don’t split to pure buyers).
What’s the difference between buying gold to go to a GDKP versus buying gold and paying a top guild for a carry? At least in a GDKP if you take the time to gear your character you can make some good gold by being a carry. What do you get out of a SR raid when you’re geared? Literally nothing.
GDKP’s are a problem in a few ways, not as big of a problem as gold buying and botting more like a nuisance. Before I get off topic however, I’ll list a couple of reasons of why they’re a small but annoying problem.
Issue #1: It’s normally intimidating to new players who don’t have money or just want to play the game the way it was INTENDED to be played.
Issue #2: It encourages rapid gold buying practically fueling the issue, there’s always a demand for gear but when the gear costs gold there’s a demand for gold. Basically an infinite cycle.
Issue #3: It in a way robs the community aspect of raiding. Raiding is meant to be an experience where players work together to overcome challenges to earn loot and maybe befriend each other, this is the literal exact opposite.
Issue #4: Partially caused by Issue #3 and gold buying. The vast amount of GDKP raids is horrendous because the vast amount of them. On my server Sulfuras for every MS>OS/SR raid I see there’s 8-16 GDKP raids.
Kind of tired when I wrote this and I’m too tired to actually fix any structural/grammar mistakes, however if you’ve read this I hope you at least comprehend the point I’m attempting to make.
Megaservers are unusually pay 2 win in the sense that the raid leaders take way more than a 10% cut.
Anything over 10% cut with a few bonuses given out to various classes is downright robbery and you shouldnt involve yourself with such a group. Leave the server, find a better one, or make your own gdkps that aren’t robbing its raiders.
I just did a BT gkp with a 5% cut and a chunk taken out for bonuses, nobody wanted the drops and the cut sucked regardless, but it was decent. Buyers always get a cut as well unless they afk the entire raid on my server.
As always, complaining about GDKPs being unfair on the player is a diversion from the real problem, botting, gold farming and gold buying, these should be perma-ban offenses for any offences and blizzard have been screwing this up since classic phase 1 and continue to do so. It’s beyond a joke now and their risk assessment profiles on this topic are a clown show.
They have 100% lost more players over this pay 2 win botting and gold farming epidemic than they have gained in sub fees over this, especially long term. They would have retained far more players for far longer by removing the ability to boost anyone and actually policing the gold farming, buying, and selling.
GDKPs would not be a problem if nobody was able to effectively buy gold, you could literally just do some dailies, and go raid, the bids and cuts would be reasonable, they would still inflate over time as people farmed gold the normal way, but it wouldnt be 10% of what it currently is, and new players would have a normal barrier to entry, simply leveling up in the open world with a profitable profession would net you a few thousand gold that would be more than enough to get 2-3 pieces per raid.
gdkps set a precedent on the server and people are least likely to pug because why roll the gear when you can jusy buy it and guarantee it and i dont blame them either
Something I’d add is the economic consequences of GDKPs… It creates a two tier system of gold farming, where those who are able to do the carrying have access to a gold farming method literally 5x better than any non gdkp method in the game… combine that with the fact that the ones who actually would need to spend gold in gdkps aren’t often entitled to a cut at the end… and the pressure for them to swipe gets even worse… There’s also a pretty severe economic disadvantage to the players who don’t participate in gdkps at all, given that it is again, literally 5x better than any actual in game activity for gold generation.
All in all in encourages people to buy gold to get gear, and punishes any players that don’t partake in gdkps by relative farming power.
So it sounds like the problem is gold buying realistically and not GDKP’s. I ran GDKP’s back in OG WotLK and never had any of these issues that are prevalent on servers nowadays.
If blizzard is going to fix it they have to fix the root cause. Banning GDKP’s would just move people to getting “carried for gold” instead
Ban it all. Paid carries, paid boosts, achievement carries, arena carries, and gdkps. The gold buying itself is already against the rules, just pathetically enforced.
None of it is all that difficult to do, it merely takes the willpower to actually act for the integrity of the game. Sadly, Blizzard hasn’t had any integrity for years, and it’s cost them thousands or even millions of players over time.
If they where trying to actually ban people they’d do it more than once every 6 months.
Fact is they aren’t banning gold sellers and bots to try and eradicate the problem, but rather they’re licensing them to operate on blizzard servers by charging them a digital key and a subscription fee, then leaving them alone for periods of time long enough to churn a profit. It’s taxing the practice, so Blizzard can make money, not trying to eliminate it. There’s a world of difference.
I’d add Blizzard’s method also comes with the perk of being able to make a PR statement about how they’re totally pretending to be against the practice, while still profiting off of it… and players like you apparently eat that garbage right up.
For bonus points, look at the timing of the ban waves. Generally they end up happening after a report where they can boast about MAU’s and subscriptions to shareholders.
the reason it happens in waves is they want to try and get as many as possible they should do it more often
the fact you think they can just stop all botting the moment they want is ridiculous
i dont eat that garbage im just realistic that botting will sadly always be apart of majority of games
This is what they tell you, but that’s not the truth at all. Active moderation costs more money but is more effective - but also has the negative effect of losing out on revenue and making their activity look worse when reporting it.
If you truly believe it’s more, “effective” to let blatantly obvious bots go untouched for months - making a lot of money, and easily affording a new account - you bought into their PR.
And permanently at a Bnet/hardware/payment method/everything you can think of level. There are workarounds for any ban, but make it hard enough to return and it’ll lose it’s appeal.
Sellers and buyers. You RMT you start over completely.
Their “study” was biased. Permas work when enforced with enough severity.
Scorched earth the whole works and post their names on the forums. “These people engaged in RMT: [List of names/guilds/servers]”
If you don’t want to lose it all don’t risk it all.
Prepaid cards are widely accessible and can be loaded with the funds necessary for one thing at a time and aren’t tied to a name typically - and if they are it can be fake.
HWID bans are only effective if there’s some sort of kernel-level program running, otherwise HWID spoofers would be more than enough to deal with this.
Why would the names of these players matter or even be relevant if they were permanent / HWID banned?
Blizzard would lose far more revenue from all of these bans than they would make in people resubbing due to the bans.