Here’s the thing… I can accept, and even be ok with the fact, that some people legitimately and truly enjoy GDKP as a loot system. I don’t think it’s as many as some folks would have us believe for a various reasons, but I’m sure there are folks out there who do like it. Unfortunately, what I can’t be ok with is what GDKP has done to WoW. How it’s changed the perceptions of the playerbase and strongly forced the game down monetization and pay to win paths that the original design never intended.
This is no different than loot boxes in games and everything that has come with that. Sure, loot boxes are a great way to collect a few things in a game you like, but unfortunately that have come to dominate the industry and heavily exploit human psychology.
Sometimes things that can be good are not good for us. GDKP is one of those things. It’s taken over and driven some very negative practices in the game. While Blizzard absolutely should ban gold buying, they also need to ban what has become a major driver for it.
If the only thing keeping you in WoW is GDKPs, I find it acceptable that you would move on in its absense. You should be playing WoW because you enjoy WoW, not because you want to make your gold number go up at others expense. There are plenty of other loot systems available and GDKP isn’t any better, it’s just different. There’s a lot of talk of how fair GDKP is, but it’s almost always by people who have been running it for a long time and have a lot of gold to throw around. GDKP is extremely unfair to newer players who don’t wish to RMT because it requires an excessive amount of grinding before you can even get an invite to a run.
I would say that other loot systems are actually more fair because, upon joining a guild, you’re at least eligible for some loot from day one and in less time than it would take you to grind out the buy-in for your very first GDKP run, you can be eligible for higher tier loot in LC systems.
Loot systems are a hotly debated topic in WoW and they all have positives and negatives. GDKP addresses some negatives of more traditional loot systems, but it’s clearly come with its own as well.
I’ve seen this repeated often but there is no tangible evidence that the dropoff in that region correlates with the GDKP ban. In fact, if you examine the population curves, that dropoff you see at the end of Phase 1 is proportially comparable to the same dropoff you see at the end of Phase 2. Furthermore, if you examine every phased release in WoW’s history, you see the same pattern that the SoD graph is currently presenting.
What I suspect you’re doing is attributing the large population decline beteween Phase 1 and Phase 2 entirely to the GDKP ban, with no evidence other than a few forum posts and your own bias to support it. There are a lot of reasons why players may have left and not returned during that period. I myself am a part of that statistic and the core reason is that while I think SoD is really cool and love that it exists, it just wasn’t for me. I’ve heard this a lot… “SoD is just not what I’m looking for.” We also saw this same pattern in WoW Classic 2019 to begin wth. A massive population spike for Phase 1 followed by a significantly diminished population for subsequent phases.
We can never know the true cause of why people departed from SoD. While I have absolutely no doubt that some folks left SoD because of the GDKP ban, I also know there is no convincing evidence this was the cause of it “[losing] hundreds of thousands of players in the following weeks.”
Not only is this statement wholly incorrect, skill is probably the smallest contributor to overall player performance in Vanilla WoW, it in no way addresses the text you quoted.
You should not be able to throw massive quantities of gold at the AH so you can have 100% uptime on the best consumables in the game. If you want them, go farm them. If you can’t spend the time farming them, either learn to do without or leave the game.
You are currently buying your way to a tier of play that lets you compete against those who do have time to go farm all of the consumables they need.