Gold Cap Limits

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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As we all know; botting, rmt, gold buying/selling, excessive gold farming has had a detrimental impact throughout Classics history and with Blizz’s track history of staying hands off of Classic in terms of moderation as much as possible we prob won’t be getting the best case scenario of human GM’s banning bot accounts anytime soon.

So

The next best alternative I see regarding this matter is instituting gold caps on future WoW SoM, Fresh, + servers. It’s too late for Era servers in which millions of gold is already apart of the economy and hyperinflation is rampant, but for future servers it would be the perfect time to test setting stricter gold caps.

Some ideas on caps: Classic Vanilla would have a 5k gold per server per account limit where a TBCC server would have a 10k gold per server per account limit.

Consequences: By cutting the amount of gold that an account is able to carry you will both increase the value of gold on the server and bring down cost of items on the server. GDKP’s will still be allowed to exist but you won’t have outrageous purchases such as Gressil, Dawn of Ruin selling for 198,000 gold In 100% legitimately earned no RMT gold :roll_eyes:

If anything, it will make more people able to participate in GDKP’s runs rather then having a couple whales buying everything, thus making them easier to get gear from W/O RMT.

Further consequences: I’m not naive to suggest this is the end all be all solution to the gold/botting problem in Classic and I’m sure there will be people who will have multiple accounts to hold onto gold that exceeds the cap limit, however it will become much more expensive to do so.

Going back to the Gressil, Dawn of Ruin sword that sold, one single account was able to make a 198,000G transaction at the cost of a $14.99 per month subscription.
Try that in a server with a 5k gold cap and it would cost that individual 40 subscriptions with a monthly cost of $599.60 on WoW accounts to complete an equivalent transaction.

This will also make it more costly and less appealing to amass large quantities of gold to sell if you’re only limited to 5k per server account as you would need many more accounts to be able get into the realm of having +100k gold.

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I think people would use popular rare items like lotus and arcane crystals as currency for those kind of trades, before they create multiple accounts. How much gold is a bank full of lotus worth?

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Just the free xfer destinations thankfully

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When there is a demand there’s a supply. when there is a will there’s a way
Kill the supply, another will takes its place in a different form.
Eliminate the demand, the supply will be gone.

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They’re telling me I have to be respectful and then I read a thread like this.

I need an old priest and I need a young priest.

Why didn’t you just title the thread “How to ensure nobody ever purchases a blizzard game again”

If I have to spell it out, people are not going to be happy when they hit the gold cap in a week of farming.

Another please take away people’s cookies thread.

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5k isn’t even enough to get some high end items like sulfuras or thunderfury on a server with a healthy economy. Guilds can easily have more than this on trading characters also. You have no idea what you’re doing or talking about so you should stop suggesting things.

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Found the guy who’s bad at making gold.

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This is making the presumption that you will have current server prices on this server in which case you absolutely won’t due to inflation controls, items won’t cost as much gold but value of gold would increase due to increased scarcity so that 120g arcanite bar would probably be 50-60g and black lotus would be around 25-50g.

Found the RMT’er

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Nope.

Making gold in WoW is easy.

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The nominal gold value might be lower (or not), but either way the items may be less affordable than before. That’s because if the methods for making gold are the same but the storage capacity of gold is limited, then the demand for other items that can hold the equivalent value will increase.

People were already hoarding some items to control demand and raise prices but that behavior would increase under this rule, even if it doesn’t raise the price as much the item is effectively made harder to get.

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Which is a possibility, another possibility is selling high end items for real money instead of gold. Which admittedly would be hard to counter unless we are willing to add limits/decay timers to high end items which would be a great counter to this but at this point I’d say we are salting a field to kill a few weeds.

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But the bottom line is that some things needed for high level playing in Vanilla are rare and competition for them including bots and whatever is what makes raiding expensive. In WOTLK by contrast unless you do GDKPs your expenses relative to gold available are small enough that your gameplay is not affected by the mega gold farmers.

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I’d say the hyperoptimization of current WoW is what makes going fully world buffed, flasked, fully consumed the standard that players strive for tbh, putting some gold cap in place sets limits on how much a single player/group of players can alter their servers economy and puts some constraints on gold selling or if nothing else makes it more expensive to do so.

What that limit should be regarding gold is definitely a discussion that should include community feedback but the main focus should be constraining rmt w/o impacting your casual player as I said earlier, it would be best to have human moderation in which they’d notice that a 198,000g transaction is suspicious vs what we have now which is the wild west in terms of gold selling/buying.

Gold caps are the best way to address botting and rmt that falls within the current blizz approach to classic in which they are being hands off as much as possible and putting limits on gold for new servers is an easy (if not complete) solution for these issues.

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Thank you for adding something of value to this post

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Identifying someone’s motivations allows you to evaluate their position more accurately.

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So what would you propose to fix botting/rmt in classic with the constraint of blizz’s minimalist approach to classic or do you only have one liner responses?

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It can’t be fixed because Blizz makes too much money off the gold sellers.

Your idea just punishes regular players with the extra added bonus of INCREASING real money transactions.

Which you even point out in one of your posts.

You’re so in love with a dumb idea that you’re able to ignore the fact that it makes the problem worse.

18

I don’t think capping gold is the way to go.

My current thoughts about reducing botting and gold selling are as follows:

  • The SoM changes were a great start! Killing crazy dungeon farms and boosting was huge, and should be a thing in all versions of WoW
  • Regulate auction house activity per account (# of auctions created; cap cancelations; better UI; maybe adjust the API to prevent addons from allowing certain abilities)
  • Dynamic resource spawns that’s directly linked to the the cost of the items on the auction house (just a thought. not a conviction)
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While this seems like a well-intentioned goal, it doesn’t seem obvious that creating account wide gold caps of 5K would lead to it.

Why not just ban RMT? I feel that’s a better idea, and has less potential impact on legitimate gameplay.

I disagree with this personally, and any change that impacts legitimate players or playstyles, even if there is a temporary impact to bots or RMT.

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Blizzard can make a lot more money with a gold cap then without.

Going back to Gressil, a single account was able to exchange nearly 200,000gold where with gold cap it would require 40 accounts to transfer a similar amount of gold if we assume cap is set at 5k gold.
1 subscription<40 subscriptions if we are talking just money for Blizzard.

Also most regular players will never see six figure gold balances many won’t even see five figures so if you know the average Classic player gold balance who doesn’t engage in rmt I’d be interested in knowing that number as it relates to caps.