The main reason I came to Era was because I missed the original game, the community, accountability and a general sense of togetherness in our shared enjoyment of the game. Now players are doing this ludicrous pay to win. Hundreds of gold for a lvl 20-40 for a few runs through Gnomeragan or SM or whereever. Thousands of gold to join a raid if unguilded (or competing for raid gear with a paying outsider). Elite quests in the world? Why find a group when you can whip out 100 gold and have someone kill it for you? I had a level 35 player paid a 60 hunter for the Gurubashi Arena chest spawn. You can literally buy world events and participation allowed depends on how much you can pay another stronger player in game currency. Eras appeal is lost in light of this.
Is this what we want? Low levels running around incapable of advancing in the game unless they purchase gold to hire another play to play the game for them so they can max level faster and get the best raid drops as fast as possible? Is that in the spirit of Era?
I’m not looking for defense of the practice but seeing more stories of how your game play has personally been disrupted or ruined by pay to win players. Why gdkp makes you not want to even bother raiding. Why all this makes you want to cancel your sub.
These gdkp people crying “but what about the ones who can only play a few hours a day/week, tell them no more gdkp”. Ok. No gdkp. If you don’t have time to raid you certainly don’t have time to grind and farm up gold. Purchasing gold… why? Go to classic or retail and pug every raid to your hearts content without blowing real cash on what you can experience with just your game sub.
Pay to win is toxic, game ruining and incentivizes purchasing gold.
As endearing and commendable as it is to point the finger at others or elsewhere while taking no personal responsibility, I would point out that if you wish to play a version of the game where GDKPs have been banned, it exists, and on the same client!
Agreed. But GDKP and boost purchasing is not pay to win. It’s using in game gold to pay for in game services. It is no different than using the auction house.
RMT happens because of lazy people and greedy companies refusing to properly address the issue. It should surprise no one that SoM has showed us that trying to ban GDKP has little to no effect on RMT.
why would you think that Kitsuna, has anything to do with the game being play to win. also, you didn’t answer the question. is this the type of game you like to play?
I’d consider anything where you can use real money to pay for an advantage pay to win. But only when there is an official channel for doing so. So anywhere there is a WoW token I would say that’s a pay to win version of WoW.
Perfectly acceptable opinion there… We all need to work together with blizz to make the game what it once was.
SoD is such a nightmare to play with meta slaves and broken immersion with the community.
ERA is impossible to play without a chill guild. Once you need a group for anything be it a quest or dungeon or begin raiding and try to find pugs get ready to flip out that credit card on a gold selling site.
Firstly, that’s not what I stated. I stated that SoD is a version of the game that does not support (indeed currently bans) GDKP, which is what the OP seems to have an issue with.
Point: There is a version of the game you can play right now that has what you want.
Secondly, while I believe I understand the reasoning behind the hyperbolic or satirical usage of P2W in the context of this post, there are false or seemingly intentionally misleading statements in this, as well as in your reply to me that indicate a desire to push a narrative and force individual preferences upon others.
Agreed. I hold the same thought about P2W. When the game itself accepts the fact P2W exists by putting a system in place to make their own outlet for gold sales or currency I find that P2W.
People hold a grudge against me in the Gw2 community for stating the ability to directly buy gems and turn gems to gold to buy services from players or legendaries directly from the auction house is P2W.
I agree, personally. But some folks enjoy a hyper inflated, boost and gdkp riddled world. It’s not for me, but who am I to stop them?
I once posted here that we needed to take action and be the change we want to see in the world of Warcraft.. This was pre HC/SoD infusion of players coming back to Era when our biggest issues were clones, and GDKP topics didn’t litter the forums on the daily. The post still stands.
We must be the change we wish to see.
I realize that’s much easier said than done, but it’s up to us, the players, to build the communities we wish to take part in. It’s a large reason I stuck it out on Grobbulus Era and haven’t touched Whitemane since 2022.
tldr: “I came back to a game in which people have been playing for a half a decade and I am upset that they have a consistent in-game way to exchange services. Instead of becoming useful to others in Azeroth, and thus earing lots of gold, I come to the forums and post that the game is ruined.”
I completely agree with your assessment of the game. It’s a huge bummer and the longer it goes on the more players who try to avoid it feel pressured to do it as well.
Fortunately, there are communities that exist that still play the game “traditionally”, they can just be hard to find. If you don’t mind a dead server, and at the risk of stealing his thunder, look for posts from Jarl-Grobbulus. There’s a guild there called Legacy who is just kinda being awesome. Working together to kill bosses and support each other. It’s kinda great! Because the server is dead there’s a very low amount of bots (they still exist because they can freely transfer off) and there is no paid boosting or GDKP runs.
The only real downside is that you can’t really get dungeon groups the same way as you can on Mankrik/Whitemane.
So anyway, pay to win is totally ruining the vibe on Era, but you can still have fun in spite of that
Haha GKDP is the very definition of pay to win. An item drops, you pay, you win!
Really though, the more traditional sense comes when people pay real life money for the gold that they use in those runs. Whatever my views on GDKP as a whole, RMT undermines the system entirely.
SoD community is hard at work ruining the state of it. Between the laundry list of requirements to join someone’s raid and parse checking or the flood of bots, scammers and the usual MMO crap.
Its not that ERA has been out 5 years and people are coming fresh to it complaining about people’s wealth or status. We’re complaining from a veteran point of view from playing and being here since either the beginning or during SoM.
Once 60 content is done on SoD and whatever horizontal plans if any for it like Karazhan or other raids in the vanilla world locations, people will return to ERA for sure. But they’ll return to demanding gold for anything or everything. Prices will jump, bots will sky rocket again in Dire Maul.
There is change to be had here but majority just ignore it and accept realities that can actually change if people give a damn and try. I do my part by baiting and reporting gold buyers and basically anything with chinese letters on a hunter(their pet names).
Perhaps, the bots generally follow the tbc / wotlk / sod crowd, so era has been heathier in terms of bots in 2024, though we did experience a crazy price jump in consumes at the launch of sod due to the lost supply of consumes that was being generated by bots.
However, I would posit the state of the game is more accessible to anyone willing to play than it has ever been. And by play I simply mean login and do things in the game from professions, to running dungeons, and raids, etc. buying zero gold.
It does indeed. It would be quite frustrating for someone who is really good at farming gold and has a lot of time to do so to go to a GDKP and just constantly get outbid by people who mysteriously only show up for raid time but somehow have unlimited gold.
