Has Blizzards lack of policing turned classic into Pay to win?

I think so.
Because Blizzard have failed massively and completely in not only banning bots more often than once every quarter they’ve also failed to track down the gold flooding into the market, So almost every run is now a Gold-DKP fueled by people who buy gold and there is zero punishment for it.

I think Blizzard have failed to deal with the problem for so long even if they took action now it’d be impossible to track all the gold flooded out, but they could at least try to prevent more from being bought.

Give players a better way to report bots, Hire some GM’s to search instances for bot groups and double check how the richest people of the server got there gold… and Ban their accounts.

Right now there is no reason if you have the money you wouldn’t buy gold to get anything you want in classic, people who at the start of classic were very anti gold buying are now joking about it and have possibly used the service.
It makes the few of us still not buying gold feel completely useless and as bad as the token is to wow… it’d at least be more fair than 3rd party transactions.

Really though, i wish blizzard would just start openly banning gold buyers… make it so if you buy X gold your account is done it’ll send a message that needs to be heard and people who spend big will buy a second account… if they dont already have one… in order to re-fund it next time around.

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Anyone can define “pay to win” any way they want. So can you.

However, the term has a specific meaning for MMOs. Classic WoW does not fit this meaning at all.

This meaning is for MMOs such as ESO (and several other MMOs), which have thousands of in-game items you can obtain with real money. Bag slots, mount speed, player housing, hundreds of items to improve your player house, armor, weapons etc. – if you really want to play the game well, you will pay hundreds or thousands of dollars of real money.

Classic WoW has NONE of this. This is not the design of Classic WoW.

You are blaming Blizzard for gold sellers. Gold sellers don’t pay Blizzard. Blizzard doesn’t make a penny off them. So no, it is not “pay to win”.

Every MMO has cheaters, including websites that sell things. I played DAOC for years before the original WoW launched. In that game you could (illegally) purchase actual characters. Ebay listed hundreds of sellers. That didn’t make DAOC a pay-to-win MMO.

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I’m not overly concerned about bots and RMT because they aren’t a big problem on my server and this don’t really affect my enjoyment of the game much (one of the benefits to being on a smaller server), but OP does have a point in that these things would be fairly easy to police and blizzard has chosen to look the other way. How much money do they make off bots from the subscription, is it worth the legits subs they’ve lost?

Is that really true? Somebody pays their subscription, even if it’s the purchaser of a wow token…

i didnt read the op, but yeah back in the day video game companies were much more involved with their video games. in 2020 blizzard has chosen to basically be hands off in classic wow. they will release content but be absolutely oblivious to any player concerns. literally the only thing they did was restrict server transfers and add layering. THATS IT. the two worst most idiotic decisions and its all they have done other than release content.

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Man these wow forum posts are turning into buzzfeed articles.

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def p2w botting multiboxing collusion etc

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haha ya, they really are.

I don’t think it’s only gold sellers/buyers.

People have been AoE farming and doing stealth/jump runs for since launch. This caused a significant amount of inflation, too.

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He’s saying if blizz lets it happen, at some point it becomes P2W.

He’s got a point. Just because the money isn’t going to Blizz doesn’t mean you’re not paying for an in-game advantage. What good is calling it cheating if Blizz never does anything about it?

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You’re right. But I do think there are a lot of people who don’t have time to level up a mage to AOE farm are buying gold to compensate.

I just can’t believe that EMH would be going for 3-5k gold without gold buying being a thing.

why do you think gdkp runs are fueled by people who buy gold? there are streamers with 30k gold, people are just really proficient at farming. doesnt mean they are buying gol.

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I have like 3000 gold on a holy priest, and all I do is play the game. Its not hard to have loads of cash if you get some lucky drops at the right times.

You can go from 0 to 3k gold+ just by winning a roll on a pair of lvl 44 gloves.

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I’ll never understand why this community argues against the accusation of players buying gold. No one is saying that everyone buys gold, but people clearly do. There’s bots, websites and in-game advertisement that proves that gold buying is very much rampant and out of control.

These websites wouldn’t waste their time and money opening multiple accounts to farm gold if customers were not buying it.

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Classic has always been pay to win. The only difference is you don’t pay with money. You pay with time.

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The sheer number of mages makes me think that it doesn’t matter for the AoE farming. I also know of several folks who put in 12+ hours of playing per day. Most of their time is spent farming and griefing those who “trespass” in their farming territory.

Wrong. Players who buy and sell gold are banned:

I always see posts like this claiming “It’s obvious that all GDPK runs are full of gold buyers/sellers”

Which I would just have to disagree. Even if it looks obvious to you, proof is still necessary.

I’ve tanked for several of these runs, and received 100-200g for my service, and the majority of players can be seen talking about how ‘they don’t have enough gold’ etc etc…

It may have been the bots/farmers who started this massive inflation, but tons of legit players have joined in. Making thousands of gold a day selling ZG and Maura runs.

My point is, nothing is obvious about a gold-buyer. It happens on a 3rd party website/platform that Blizzard has no control over. I 100% agree Blizzard needs to do a better job policing, but the generalizations on this forum are nuts.

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If they put the token on the AH, it would kill gold sellers, alleviating botting issues, and basically providing all the regulation that the entire game needs. The server economies would be normalized, even if the gold amounts would be higher, because prices are so inflated over Vanilla to begin with due to the amount of gold that was bought that the modern wow classic economies are already a train wreck.

Furthermore, if they do allow continuation of your account into BC, they should examine flying mount costs, potentially doubling both based off the trainwreck of inflation that is the classic wow server economy even if they add the token.

I know of at least 5 people with over a million gold already.

Than never banned this one guy (I wont say which server). He has spent in game probably over 500k+ gold on GDKP runs, buying items for the war effort for huge gold amounts. Hell he just bought a ton of Essence of Air yesterday for his guild members enchantments at 50 gold a pop. This morning they were on the AH for 25g or less. Figure end of the week back to normal price of 12g.

So no they don’t ban all gold buyers. I also just looked to see what prices were for gold. $37 for 1000 gold. Who the hell would even pay that? One Chinese seller even had a picture of herself and name in the advertisement. These people just for 1 server claim to have 1 million gold up for sale. Check it out its wild.

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Problem is that increasing the Mount price only makes sense for people who take part in this blown up economy. There are multiple warriors in my guild without a mage who don’t farm, they play closer to Vanilla style game-play and for them getting a mount would be a near impossibility.