Tokens didn’t set the stage, tokens were put in because gold buying was prevalent enough that blizz wanted in on it.
People have always bought massive amounts of gold.
I agree with gold buying always being there. Tokens normalized it and brought it mainstream. Runs in retail go for 100’s of thousands. Bliz just cut the middle man and sell you the gold direct.
Its the same player base essentially from retail to classic. They got used to buying gold and I can only guess that it’s being used in GDPK runs. Only now it’s being bought illegally and laundered thru GDPK raids.
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You really think you can launder gold?
Blizzard knows where every piece of gold ends up, if they wanted to they could pull back every piece of gold they suspected was bought via RMT
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It just doesnt make sense for any but the newest players/biggest whales. 10k gold is $100 give or take. I could earn that in a few gdkps for a handful of hours raiding. Unless you just really really hate raiding it seems hard to justify… and if thats the case what do you need the gear for anyway?
Debatable. They couldn’t stop it before so they started up their own gold selling business. They aren’t stopping the druid instance farming bots… so who knows how much they really care.
I honestly don’t think they care as long as subs are coming in.
I’ve personally known people who have had things pulled back for RMT, they just rarely do it. Probably too much effort unless its a recurring issue with someone.
They do ban sellers all the time though
I kinda get it… I wish gold buying didnt exist but its almost impossible to do away with. I dont think any game or platform has managed it yet… At least by controlling it they deincentivize other damaging side effects like botting and account hacking… though they could have probably been better with how they implemented tokens (limit on number/week for example)
They used to.
How could they justify pulling it from hundreds of toons that only attend GDKPs and get paid out by that gold? What if those players spend their earnings on consumes? Other GDKPs? Unless Blizzard’s system stopped the transfer immediately as it left gold seller to buyer’s hands there is too much entropy in the system for them to make a clear decision of “oh, this person was involved in RMT and will know why they were punished”.
Gold sellers know this and will set up or run multiple GDKPs so they can have gold transfer hands multiple times, making Blizzard’s decision to ban the person holding the final gold less likely. There is so much gold being traded that bots generate and no gold sinks for it to exit economy. So that gold concentrates in these GDKPs, who then turn around and trade/sell gold. Some GDKPs even have gold sellers on hand to introduce buyers to so the gold the buyer spends is recycled right back to the seller.
I got flagged once when I gave a friend 10k for epic flight, but that was a long time ago. I do think they go primarily after the sellers. Although I think most sellers have well insulated operations so it’s a fruitless endeavor. Probably why they started up the token business in the first place.
The only thing i see that is diminish the quality of the community is the crying babies that post here every day…
gdkps are going to be much worse in classic wrath.
They don’t need to justify it. But the justification is easy, bought gold isn’t real gold in their eyes.
They could follow the whole path if they REALLY wanted to, pulling back everything bought with it, but that’s far too much effort, they’d likely just ban the buyer.
Yes, they can follow the path of the gold, but they can’t follow the actual ID of the person behind each account or that player’s intention. So much gold is generated by bots and gets cycled into the economy by GDKPs that simply deleting all RMT gold would upset people that would think their disappeared gold was a bug or wouldn’t understand why Blizz took their gold/items bought with that gold. At the point it changes hands after buyer gets the gold from the seller, that’s where Blizz doesn’t risk taking back gold because it could harm legit players in their eyes.
Literally none of that happens outside of the fantasy you made up just now
Why would you believe this to be true, lol? On what are you basing this? They can pull logs of peoples movements to prove theyre afking in AV but you think they can’t tell which player is holding a certain amount of gold??? Just admit you dont know what youre talking about and move on…
They’ve done it before.
They’ve also removed duped items that people have bought with legitimate gold, with no compensation back to the buyer.
It all just depends on how much they want to pursue it.
I’m fully aware that GDKP tend to make people buy gold, my point is that remove gold buying and GDKP will still exist, just at a lower scale. I never bought gold and was always able to find GDKP runs without greedy organizers that invite whales, they do exist.
It depend on servers and groups, there’s definitely elitism and greed in GDKP runs but it doesn’t represent all the GDKPs as a whole. As far as I know, Faerlina is one of the worst server in terms of RMT, elitism and greed, stuff will go for 5 to 10 times more than other GDKPs on Pagle for example.
You’re calling me a tourist LOL that’s funny. Have you played WoW in the past? ever heard of gear score? ilvl gate keeping? gear check before invites? those always happen in late phases and it’s always been there on official servers, can’t tell about private servers tho but that problem has NOTHING to do with GDKP.
Classic was a huge success, I don’t see how it was “killed” by anything.