I’ve been suggesting they were since 2005. And if they are why wouldn’t they make a shop. Maybe because gold buying in classic games is more lucrative in their original way of doing it?
You have:
Acceleration increasing gold buying demand. Because it was defined as being there last time in TBC classic on the heels of Vanilla classic .
XP to gold conversion bug in TBCC Anniv. Is this real or are they head faking?
Claims they don’t like boosting business. But could eliminate it by selling a 70 boost, since there’s a demand for it anyways. And they know that can’t stop it. So wtf?
Solo old-world dungeon farming nerfs.
New nerfs. And none of it affects botters. ONLY legit players.
Thank goodness I’m not in a sweaty guild anymore.
It’s an old game. Why does it even matter to them? Classic Wrath was filled with exploiters. And every Influencer was spreading the exploits. Even the Blizzard promoted ones. And no one was banned.
It’s really annoying, Blizzard, Just let people have fun. I don’t need to buy gold, I just legit level alts. But the sweaties? YOU, Blizzard, forced them into buying gold.
Logically - Blizzard is a moderately sized company with probably a significant percentage of employees who have advanced access to the game.
In this pool of employees, there are possibly a small percentage of potential bad actors.
It doesn’t need to be a business strategy or a conspiracy - it just needs to be one employee who decides to supplement their income using job related assets.
A reasonable smart and motivated employee who doesn’t get too greedy could shift thousands of gold into the illicit market - without ever making a direct sale themselves. Especially in classic which probably has less oversight.
Do I believe this happens? Yes. Without doubt.
Do I believe Blizzard supports this? No. Not officially. They may look the other way or just be purposefully oblivious - but I don’t think a “perk” of the job is “You can sell in-game currency” as a benefit to employment.
It would be fun to look at HR records and see how many employees have been terminated for this over the last 20 years. I bet they have an entire training course when they onboard new hires warning them about these extracurricular activities.
I guess it is just like employee theft and breakage in retail. Cost of doing business.
To draw a correlation, the Los Angeles Police Department as an entire entity is not the drug trafficker, but some officers within are. Thus, the need for internal affairs, etc.
I have theorized for many years you have employees that are supplementing their pay. On the one hand, shame on them, on the other hand, Blizz was probably underpaying their talent. So…
You and I are on the same page. I think you have dirty cops somewhere. This is why some gold gets popped, and others don’t seem to. The Mule strategy.
Blizzard’s strategic responses remind me of 1980s drug wars. Instead of killing the market value of the product, they ratchet down in attempts to “fix it” but all it does is instead raise the value. This recent change only meant bots would need to have five accounts in an instance, and their product price just moves to the right. Whereas, a legit player farming Strat would be hurt.
It didn’t win the drug war, and their strategies will not win the bot war. My guess is a few employees want it exactly that way. Somewhere they have a Rayful Edmund III and he/she is raking it in.
My point is this is far more nuanced. There’s lots of stuff that has changed from Classic to anniversary so being confident on believing to know what’s causing the issues is foolish.
Moreover, the people I know who are buying gold are the same people who do not exist in-game except during raid night; a lot of them haven’t bothered to get T5 attuned yet. So the idea that if GDKPs existed it would fix or alleviate problems, general server economy and gold buying frequency, is kind of laughable if you ask me. Oh yeah, all those people buying gold to avoid playing the game are totally gonna spend the time setting up so they can farm GDKPs.
IDK. I don’t really care that much about GDKPs beyond the fact that it obviously was used for RMT, but people pretending to know what’s causing all the problems because of a single data point witu many other changes in tow makes me sigh.
Blizzard also let us boost as many toons as we want this go around which means enthusiastic players can more easily get an alt army put together and would likely stress the economy more due to a higher than normal alt count. Or the fact they launched limited servers this go around with layering management has been a complete circus.
You don’t actually know, it’s just easier to push your propaganda.
I botted over 15 accounts last TBC. made about 150k gold avg per ban.
I used it just buy items in gdkps instead of buying gold….
TL:DR terms of service will not PC hardware/Ip ban or anything. Ive literally played my same bnet account on the pcs i bot on. They always ban the account and allow you to create more.
A free game that died 15 years ago(has about 2k players rn) bans more efficiently than blizzard. They ban your Hardware ID so you cant use the same GPU to bought/play the game for example.
Been saying it since last tbc the employees are definately the sellers
They are turning a fiat into real money(usd is another fiat but much more trusted than online currency…..)
In a way this gives me some schadenfreude, because that means all those bots and node farmers are putting in time and effort to compete directly with Blizzard who has unlimited resources and no labor costs.
And can ban them without recourse.
And they are paying their competitor (Blizzard) for the privilege.
Not even Cosa Nostra had that level of racket going.
It’s kinda hard not to look at the “dungeon changes” they made and then reverted and not actually see a correlation or attempt-to if you know what I mean.
