Was farming bugs solo yesterday in Silithus - watched a multiboxer claim an entire area with 15+ level 50-60 mages following his main. He was probably leveling all of those characters to sell them on the black market to make real money. All of the husks he farmed can be sold to make quite a bit of gold. He can multibox any dungeon or raid by himself and never have to play with anyone else to beat all of the content in a massively MULTIPLAYER online game.
Yes, Blizzard’s change in stance on issues such as power leveling, botting, multiboxing, etc. has completely changed the integrity of the game experience for solo players. It has objectively become far more pay to win now than it ever has been in the past. Many private servers have handled these issues far better than Blizzard is currently doing.
people care too much about others, and their remembrance of buying flight was a monumental achievement for them back in the day. for some reason folks think others should have to “struggle” to come up with 5k gold because that’s how it’s supposed to be.
there’s 1 problem, even if gold is wiped to 0, folks will have flight very quickly anyway, because the proven efficient methods of farming have been fleshed out and established by private servers.
i disagree - there were gold selling sites during vanilla - people bought gold back then too.
literal player demand in the meta zoomer 2020 gaming world is really why gold selling is so prevalent.
Doesn’t seem hard to ban. Maybe Blizz could hire me to do their security work for them
Have automated checks looking for mailing of large amounts of gold either from level 1-30 alts or from the same level 60 chars (if they use a max char) multiple times. Needing to use a different level 60 to send gold for every transaction would definitely slow down the business
Have automated checks looking for insanely stupid AH deals like an item worth 30s being put up for 1000g and bought by someone
That alone would catch like 90% of gold seller transactions
Smaller trades/deals could circumvent it but it would make the process more cumbersome which would decrease the frequency
No, because bots and gold sellers have been in the game since
shortly after launch. The only thing that has made it worse
is the botters knowing exactly where to go at the start to
make their farming the most profitable. They didnt have
to search for the farming spots this time around.
objectively no - the availability is the same for anyone to participate in “paying to win”
so it’s not worse. It’s the same as it has been - as it is for any game where gold selling is profitable.
people with cash and not time have always eluded to these methods - look at redguides for eq, player auctions website — what you are describing as getting “worse” has always been around in just about any online game i’ve ever played.
what’s worse is people assuming and judging folks with a large sum of gold “cheated” or bought it with IRL monies.
It means that you pay real money to get stuff you can’t actually get in game that’s good. I don’t think classic has loot or things like that bought with RL money that someone playing regularly cannot get.
Retail on the otherhand…some of those battle pets (like lil’ rag) definite fall into that category of P2W.
I agree that the market for purchasing currency with real money is inherent in almost any video game where it is profitable to participate in said market.
However, you are specifically talking about gold selling / buying and not addressing any of the other factors in this debate such as multiboxing, botting, powerleveling, etc.
You can pay for multiple accounts and play from the same IP address with 10+ toons to completely trivialize any design aspect that pertains to time, difficulty or teamwork. This further enables a different problem: botting.
Botting has only been recently addressed by Blizzard, but was arguably worse than it has ever been in this version of the game, since the launch of Classic. This had and continues to have a dramatic effect on the in-game economy. It is the very thing that makes gold selling worse - the prices of all commodities have been inflated by these bots. They farmed so much gold early on that they are able to completely control the auction house by instantly purchasing any item that is posted below their average market price. Go ahead, try to farm 1000 Plaguebloom and flood the market in order to lower prices. They will buy your 1000 Plaguebloom within minutes. They’re also constantly farming all of the resource nodes, at a much faster and more consistent pace than your average player. Prices have become so unrealistically inflated that it practically requires the casual player to buy gold with real money in order to keep up.
Powerleveling… Blizzard not addressing this issue as they did during Vanilla is encouraging the other issues listed above. Multi-boxing botters can level so many characters at the same time now. I have seen people leveling 10-15+ characters all at once. This is obviously going to flood the black market with level 60 characters and increase the issue of Pay 2 Win even more.
Here’s the thing: you can’t eliminate any of these things without eliminating the others as well. Each issue makes the others much more difficult to identify and solve. Activision Blizzard is the type of company that values the short-term profit from dealing with these issues as minimally as possible. They prefer this to the potential short-term loss they would experience by actually addressing the issues fully to begin with. Like Blizzard used to do when they valued the integrity of the individual player experience over profits. Prove me wrong.
I don’t play retail but have friends that do and they say that the Uber guilds take RL PayPal payments to run someone through high mythic raids, and they do it constantly
With the amount of loss Blizzard has taken in the past few years I would not be surprised if they own one of the Gold buying websites.
And they need all the accounts they can get so they don’t want to ban any more.
i`m agree the game turn out to be a joke everything have a gold price , making the game so toxic , and this is not blizzard fault but the player fault ,
sadly player these day dont play to have fun and the lore of the game , but min max and speed run , also player are lazy and thinking they are big expert , and buying everything with gold and not work for i t
on the other side blizzard dont do much to fix the issue ,
sadly for me this is not vanilla and cancel my sub , i think is better i buy new game with my 15$ every month because blizzard do nothing about multiboxing and all this gold selling stuff
Seems like authentic experience to me. Gold buying and botting was rampant in vanilla. I think the fact you can actually buy awesome top notch gear with gold in this is a great thing.
If you don’t like Gold-DKP then don’t run with a guild that uses it.
The problem with GDKP is that it provides a front to launder gold that has been purchased from gold sellers. It can be used legitimately, but are we really supposed to believe that people spending 10k+ for DFT or the tear got that gold legitimately? Does the team carrying them really believe that? In the case of one particular carry team I know they know they are carrying gold buyers.
Oh yes, i 100% know who i’ve been helping who pays gold and now i have said gold to spend in Gdkp’s also… its a nice system but the prices have just gone up massively… all that happens is farming is not worth doing anymore unless you have zero gold… and you just run gdkp’s exclusively.
Its a shame its been left to happen and i hope during TBC gold buying is punished more… its one thing to ban all the sellers… its COST OF BUSINESS… but if your account being closed is cost of buying gold… many less people will be willing.
, and buying everything with gold and not work for i t