This isn’t the compelling argument you think it is. GDKP is the very reason why the market is so flooded with mats generated by bots. I saw your other post, you’re absolutely right in that botting and gold selling has always been a thing in WoW, but the magnitude of it is so much more now than it ever was back then, especially when normalized against the player population.
If anything is weird here, it’s that you’re trying to deflect attention away from GDKP by pointing to a separate, and arguably smaller problem that’s caused by GDKP itself.
If folks, yourself included, stopped thinking about consumables as a must haves and stopped buying them up off the AH constantly, we wouldn’t have bots or GDKP at all.
As others have said, the only solution to the problem is Blizzard banning bots and RMT efficiently enough to make those activities non-viable. They currently do not have the competency to do that and are not willing to pay the salary for someone who does.
Right now GDKPs are just another aggravating factor in the RMT problem. I have the luxury to not participate in them, so I don’t. Someone new to the game who does not want to RMT would have limited options, most of which involve massive amount of farming time, made considerably worse by competing against the very bots that are indirectly motivated by GDKPs.
Things we know: bots exist regardless of GDKPs, blizzard relies on players reporting bots to catch them, players are less likely to farm if the gold and effort per hour is less than participating in a GDKP, players are more likely to pay for an advantage, GDKP have an innate advantage to those who buy gold, bots exist regardless of GDKP because people buy gold.
So, GDKP aren’t the reason bots are flooding the market, and GDKP aren’t the reason RMT exists. It is simply an exacerbating factor, Blizzard relies on player reports and less players are in the world. Cheaters have greater access to advantages. By cheaters having greater access, bots have greater incentive, which causes player farmers to be more frustrated and discouraged, which causes more to turn to GDKP to fund themselves.
Solution: Greater monitoring from blizzard on gold selling, buying, and botting. Like it has always been.
You don’t ban GDKP’s. But it is simply dishonest to try and compare the AH to GDKP for incentive of RMT, and its dishonest to say GDKP doesn’t have inherent incentive for RMT.
Maintaining the ban on GDKPS, along with prohibiting farmer bots, warlock/mage bots, and all forms of RMT, will significantly improve WoW.
To effectively implement this, servers should be region-locked, anti-VPN, and each account should be linked to an IP address.
If an account is detected engaging in RMT or botting, the associated IP address should be permanently banned.
Should this measure fail, accounts could then be linked to real IDs for enforcement. While these solutions may not please everyone, it’s impossible to satisfy all parties.
People will buy loot whether it is approved or not. I refused to do gold carries in retail cause people would sneak in real money buyers and innocent people would cop a ban. When you make GDKP an ‘‘official’’ (but player made) loot system, you can focus on banning the gold buyers and sellers. Banning GDKP is a lazy effort to not take responsibility on Blizzard’s end, which you can see with streamers buying tens of thousands of gold on stream and not getting banned.
That seems like a rational assumption. But to what degree is completely unknown. I’m of the opinion that it’s probably not that big of a factor, at least not enough to justify banning GDKP when Blizzard is slacking pretty hard on the issue of existing RMTers and bots. When Blizzard is actually doing what they can and the issue persists to a significant degree then and only then should we discuss banning GDKP. Until then the focus needs to be on holding Blizzard accountable.
I would be careful with this because this kind of approach can easily be turned around and applied to the other side. There is equally no concrete proof that GDKP isn’t the reason whyt he market is flooded with mats generated by bots. The best source of concrete insight here is Blizzard and they aren’t sharing.
What we do have though, is logic and reason. We can apply it to this space and come up with rather reasonable assumptions about the state of the game. In this context, here are things that we know about players…
GDKP distributes large quantites of gold to the players that participate in them.
Players feel strong pressure (both internal and external) to maximize their performance in game through the use of consumables.
Players feel like they don’t want to spend the time farming their resources and so choose to buy them off the AH. I believe you, personally, have said as much.
Here are some other things we know…
Bots exist in world of Warcraft. We can easily observe them in the world, farming materials.
Bot accounts sell the materials on the AH and receive gold in exchange.
There is a real world money cost associated with running a bot. Things like accounts, hardware, electricity, and even real estate.
Bots would not exist their operations were not profitable.
From this set of facts, we can draw some pretty reasonable and clear conclusions. Player demand for consumables creates an environment where bots can exist to supply that demand, in exchange for gold. This gold is then sold to other players who redistribute it back to GDKP players who, in turn, use it to buy more consumables off the AH.
Therefore, a very reasonable conclusion is…
Duckling made a statement that I want to quote here because I think some nuance in my statement was getting lost…
I’m not saying that if you remove GDKP these things will go away. However, they will diminish. Furthermore, they will diminish in two key areas…
Players will have access to less gold, making them less likely to purchase all of their consumables off the AH. This reduces demand and bots will become less profitable.
Players who cannot purchase all of their consumables off the AH and don’t want to farm them will leave the game. This also reduces demand and will reduce bots.
Lastly, one comment about something Duckling wrote…
Honestly, I think you do.
Sometimes things have to go, for the greater good. I absolutely accept that, for some communities out there, GDKP is a fantastic loot solution. I stand buy statements I’ve made in the past that, currently, GDKP is the best loot system in terms of player retention as you have to stay in the raid to receive your payout. In any other loot system I know of, primarily when applied to the PuG space, players who are looking for one piece have no motivation to stay in the raid once they’ve gotten what they were looking for. However, just because it has that one good aspect really doesn’t mean we should overlook all of the negativity its brought to World of Warcraft.
Sometimes things are more bad than they are good and they just need to go away. It’s a bummer if you like that thing, but it’s just better for all of us if we don’t do it. I absolutely freaking love driving, especially on highways through the mountains. However, self-driving cars can’t come fast enough, because humans really kinda suck at it and a lot of people die every year because of it. I will miss driving, but if it means that people stop dying because of dumb, avoidable crap like looking at your phone while you hurtle down the road in a giant metal box, well then I’m all for it.
Clearly, nobody is dying because of GDKP in WoW… but the analogy is there. Sometimes the negative aspects of a thing outweigh the positives and we just need to stop doing that so we can all have a better time.
Of course not. They want to keep their options open. If they made the solution obvious then people would start demanding that solution, which may not be in their best interest.
I’m guessing the solution from their perspective is quite obviously not banning GDKP, but if they do that they can make it look like they’re trying without the actual investment required to fix the problem.
If I might put my tin foil hat on for a moment, I also would not at all be surprised if they were actually trying to keep as many bots as possible while making it appear as if they’re trying to get rid of them.
Whether or not any of that is true, we still need to do what we can to get Blizz to do better with the bot/RMT situation. People who are so accepting of a ban on a loot system for the “greater good” concern me. They seem so willing to bend over and take whatever Blizzard gives them. Perhaps it’s because they just don’t care because the consequences don’t effect them personally or perhaps it’s because they’ve gone soft.
If I’m being honest here, I’m not so sure we can draw that conclusion, one way or the other. They have banned GDKP in SoD, a ban that has remained in place for 9ish months. Does that mean there is value in a GDKP ban?
While I certainly have strong opinions about GDKP, I’m more interested in just having the knowledge out there. I really would like it if Blizzard followed up on their SoD ban experiment and were open about what they’ve learned. We know they have more information than we do and so they’ll likely be able to tell what, if any impact its having. I wish they’d give us a blog post of lessons learned.
We don’t have to like the message to be able to appreciate them.
Man, I wear that same hat sometimes. As someone who plays on a dead server and sees the market that currently exists surrounding the exploitation of FCMs, it’s really hard not to!
However, the flip side of this is that again, they chose to do a GDKP ban in SoD and that version of the game has 10 times the player base that Classic Era does. If pure profit was the motivator, they would have banned in Era first and left it in SoD.
I don’t think consistency is every something I’d use to describe Blizzard, though
We’ve argued over GDKP many times but I’ve always been in support of this statement. They absolutely do! It’s just not a one or the other thing. They need to address both.
Also, using the example of the SoD ban, evidence currently suggests that it’s easier to enforce a SoD ban than it is to enforce a botting/RMT ban. This by virtue of the fact that SoD has effectively eliminated GDKP but has, presumably, not eliminated botting/RMT.
To reiterate, I’m not saying that banning GDKP will elminate those entirely, but they will drastically reduce their impact. Botting and RMT was present even as far back as Vanilla but oh man, it did not define the game like it does now… and we have far fewer players than we did back then too. It’s nuts how prominent it is, and how willing today’s gamers are to pay for progress.
This is outright incorrect. I addressed why in another post.
However, so what? This is a positive thing. A bunch of people playing the game in a negative way left the game and moved on to a game that’s more in line with their monetization expectations.
If Blizzard banned RMT the population would take a huge hit too. Are you advocating that RMT should not be banned because of this?
Given that you overstated the connection between GDKP and SoD’s population dropoff, I naturally question the validity of this. I don’t know one way or the other, but I also don’t play SoD so I can’t see the bots like I can on my own servers on Era.
Without knowing more about SoD, but assuming that the same consumable pressues exist, it seems unlikely that there would be any more (or less) botting and RMT than on Era for reason other than that SoD players are more open to RMT transactions. This might actually be true because SoD does seem to favour retail more than it favours Vanilla, which in turn draws a crowd that is accustomed to having access to the WoW token.
Either way, SoD players actually do have a reasonable way to geneate gold for consumes. That game throws money at you in a big way. It was already quite high in Phase 1 but I believe they actually increased the gold reward from quests. The problem remains the same in both versions of the game… people feel like they need consumables (they don’t) and either feel like they can’t farm them (they can), or don’t want to. So they create a demand for purchase in quantities that create a market for professional farming operations to move in and profit off of that.
That’s crazy that gdkps didn’t exist when the Authenticator was introduced to combat accounts being stolen by gold sellers who were liquidating assets of players to keep up with the demand for illicit gold.
But no, let’s only exclusively focus on gdkps instead of being heavy handed against buyers and sellers, surely once the loot system is removed then the bots will go away. Surely sod has reflected this with their ban of gdkps.
Crazy how gdkps still aren’t banned in other versions of wow when they’re “supposed to be this big contributor of rmt”. It’s almost like sod has proven that wrong and all this is just because people want to hate gdkps while hiding behind the shield of RMT. Pretty easy to vilify us when we’re viewed as gold sellers and buyers instead of just raiders trying to do clean runs.
What a dumb take that can be applied to any and all aspects of wow that involve gold. None of it is a must have. This is an arbitrary line that you’re drawing for your narrative to stay focused entirely on gdkps while ranting about RMT, while simultaneously deflecting from RMT avenues that play massive roles in its operation. It’s almost like it’s not about RMT, and is just about hating gdkps.
One thing I will definitely say, the AH and RMT are linked but not in the way of just using the AH and having matts up there. People use it to launder their bought gold on throw away accounts, the fact blizzard doesn’t just like, notice that, or care enough, is wild. Like, truly beyond the realm of mind boggling. It should be so freakin easy to track.
I am making assumptions there, for sure, but I struggle to understand how it couldn’t be tracked and enforced.
I can’t help but agree. I mean, when they made the SoD GDKP ban they were clear that they had ways to detect if players were engaging in GDKP activities. As far as I know, the SoD GDKP ban was successful at least in that GDKP is no longer an activity in SoD.
So if they can detect when players trade gold in exchange for gear, presumably they can detect the activites you’re referring to now. So like… how does RMT even still exist!?
While I think their reasoning is flawed and that it’s proven unsuccessful, I at least understand that they want to delay actioning bot accounts for some time. However, what value is there in delaying action against a player purchasing gold? Slap 'em with an immediate ban, remove the purchased gold from the economy, and move on.
As much as I don’t want to tinfoil hat, when people say actiblizz and microsoft keep accounts around to extra bot/buyer sub money, sometimes their actions really do just back it up
