For all the attention GDKP is getting as an end-goal for RMT gold, what about the origins? The bots farm via fishing, grinding, mining, herbing, etc. and then guess what they do? They sell the illicit material to the community.
You know those super cheap mana pots you’ve been enjoying? Ever wondered why prices trend down even while consumption is high? That’s bots selling it to you. Where is the outrage?
So if we’re going to embrace the strawman argument that GDKP should be banned because that’s where some people spend bought gold, why not also target a large source of the gold that’s being sold? Things you buy on the AH.
In order to rid ourselves of bots, we need to make mana potions and other bot-farmed consumables bind on pickup or prevent them being posted on the AH.
FAQs
Scenario looks like this (simple math)
Bot farms 100 mana pots and sells for 100g to player A
Player B buys 100g for $10 (bot profits $10)
Bot farms 100 mana pots and sells for 100g to player B
Player C buys 100g for $10 (bot profits $10)
rinse and repeat.
With GDKP gone people won’t be buying as much gold from the bots
Gold in wow is a zero-sum system. The amount of gold in the system is the amount that gets spent. There is no interest rate in wow and so if you aren’t spending your gold it just loses value to inflation.
Consumables are cheap, nobody will buy gold for consumables
Well, they are currently cheap, but again gold in wow is a zero-sum system. So if the supply of gold increases (because folks are no longer hoarding gold for GDKP) then they will spend it elsewhere. So, either demand has to increase to match supply (meaning we all consume more) or the price rises (inflation). Regardless, the gold will get spent one way or another.
The gold exchange rate goes down and so the bots are less profitable!
It sounds that simple, but it actually isn’t. Once market shocks are stabilized, the exchange rate is related to inflation. So when inflation occurs, the exchange rate goes down. This means that those materials the bots farm can be sold to you for more gold and the bot makes more gold, which can then be sold in RMT for a similar amount of money as before. The bot farms don’t actually care about the exchange rate as much as people might think they do.
With GDKP gone the rate of inflation will slow!
I think initially it will spike as the gold previous hoarded for gdkp must be repurposed somewhere else, but after the market shock is over the rate will likely slow down compared to before. Is that good or bad for bots? Well, it depends on the bot activity.
Bots farming by killing and vendoring want a slow rate of inflation because the vendor price remains the same. That said, these bots get phased out in time due to inflation.
However, bots that are farming and selling on the AH dont mind a quick ramp of inflation because they can sell for higher and higher amounts of gold.
So in reality the bots will just adapt to market conditions. If stonescale eel sells for 30g each, they will simply move to fishing bots (for example).
People that bought gold no longer have anything to spend it on, so inflation stops!
Similar to the above, but let’s take a close look at the effect of GDKP on inflation and on bots.
First, there are a few things to establish.
- There is no meaningful deflationary feature in WoW. So inflation will never stop, in only speeds up or slows down.
- Raw gold in the economy is farmed through looting corpses, vendoring items, completing quests, and so on. Basically grinding.
- GDKP produces no gold, it only distributes gold that exists in the economy.
- Bots can choose to farm raw gold, or farm materials to sell for gold. Which they choose depends on how inflated prices are compared to vendor prices.
Okay, so in a GDKP you are competing with others and the metric is raw gold. So, in order to have an advantage you need as much raw gold as you can get your hands on. This means that GDKP encourages bots to farm raw gold initially, through grinding. But this has diminishing returns because as more gold is farmed and inflation scales up, the items don’t vendor for more gold. So when SoD is first released, the bots start off just grinding away raw gold to sell.
After a while though, the static income from the grinding becomes less profitable because of inflation. Normally that would mean a transition from bots farming raw gold to bots farming materials to sell, which is slightly less efficient for bots (because they will always have vendor trash to sell) but still an improvement if prices are inflated. However, GDKP artificially keeps them farming raw gold when they otherwise wouldn’t because people are hoarding gold to win bids in GDKP, causing hyper inflation and an arms race of gold.
What does this mean?
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If I’m a bot farmer, I would actually prefer that the rate of inflation remain lower for longer so that my vendor trash remains more valuable. GDKP’s hyper inflationary tendency isn’t as good for bots as one might imagine.
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The price of gold will balance out and people will still pay bots to farm what they choose not to farm themselves.
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If a bot can sell 100g of farmed raw gold in 10 hours for $100 (easy math) that’s not meaningfully different than farming herbs for 10 hours, selling the herbs for [insert inflation adjusted price], and then selling that gold for $100.
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The exchange rate of gold doesn’t matter all that much. Exchange rate speaks more to inflation than it does bot profits. And that’s the main thing banning GDKP will do, simply slow inflation down (but not reverse it).
