Every aspect of WoW has bad egg gold buyers and cheaters in them, GDKPs are no exception. However, this claim some people love to make that “almost every GDKP player is a gold buyer and GDKPs are the reason” is false and just an emotional response from people that either had a bad experience once or don’t participate in them at all.
They blame gold buyers for the lack of any quality MS>OS/SR PuGs happening on their servers because higher performing players that actually PuG raids almost exclusively stay away from MS>OS/SR PuGs because the people in GDKP’s are generally better.
High tier players tend to only run GDKPs because instead of carrying bad players with nothing in it for them, they can actually get something out of it in the form of the pot at the end of the GDKP even if nothing they want drops. MS>OS and SR are just way too frequently a total waste of time, especially the more geared you are, with a gdkp you are rewarded with gold for doing your job with or without the item(s) you were looking for.
Additionally, people that look at the GDKP adverts in the final phase of an expansion and see the pricing or attend one when they’re back after 10 months crash out shouting they bought gold and that no one can spend 100k for a raid item are so damn funny and narrow minded. Most of the gdkp communities on my realm during phase 1 of Cata were doing 3k normal loot, 5k heroic loot minimum bids which even in WotLK wasn’t a lot of gold, but yes over a year later and all od Cata behind us, those same communities are now running 10k normal loot, 20k heroic loot minimum starting bids.
It’s a natural progression and people that come back into the game after not participating the entire expansion go wide eyed and think everyone is buying gold and that the AH is ruined from buyers the reality is that we’re been in Cata for more than year now, many players have leveled multiple alts, farmed for hundreds of hours over that time and sold the results on the AH, dailies completed almost every day each week, sold their tradeskill work for tips, and over that time have gotten to have a very large gold supply from it.
After the Firelands patch and the Molten Front dailies opening, if you do the dailies and you progress to have them all unlocked, a single character makes about 850g plus mob drops for 15 minutes of work or less depending on how many others are there and if you group up with some. a lot of those who raid and still frequently play WoW as their main game likely have 3 or 4 or more 85’s on their account so with 1 hour or less they can make 4-5k gold without even having to farm and sell on the AH or anything.
That was like 4 months or more ago now, in that time if they kept doing them each day on say 4 characters and 5 times per week. that’s over 250k gold in just strictly repeatable quest reward gold without factoring in any farming or any other things they may have earned gold from in that time. Add in GDKPs, with weeks and weeks of runs where just like any other loot system sometimes they get no gear while other times they get a few, any week where they buy a few items and end up spending more than the cut and going negative on the week is just made up for in a following week when they dont get anything from the run.
The people that hoard their gold and consistently farm, sell services and/or do dailies and have a ton of gold stocked up may just decide to spend a ton of it in the first couple weeks of the new tier. It’d put them low on gold, except now they are almost full BiS, they’ll keep raiding every week and eventually pick up those last items they’re missing but for all the rest of the phase they are just getting their full cut with nothing spent over and over and over.
That’ll add up to a ton of gold over an entire raid phase and if they run multiple characters that just gets even bigger. Any half decent player can look at the markets, understand what is going to be important early in an expansion and build up a good sized starting sum of gold to run with. If you continue to run over the entire expansion any half good player has absolutely 0 reason to ever buy gold.
Its almost always the worst performing players that just never get better no matter what anyone does to help, the 40 year old dads that work 60 hours per week, or the gacha kids with parents CC that are the gold buyers because they are either too bad, too lazy or too short on time to actually accomplish things in the game so they try to swipe the card and bypass all the effort and build up that other players put in and get straight to the reward instead.