I’m 51 years old. I started playing this game when I was 32, 6 months before BC dropped, have played on and off for 19 years. After saying to stop worrying about bots and someone then implying I must be buying gold myself to support people doing that, I wanted to lay down some history for the kids and newer players. Go ahead and ignore one of the old guys, IDC, but I’m saying this for the few who will listen.
Gold selling and botting has been an issue from day one. I remember seeing many level one toons hovering in the sky over Stormwind and dying at once, bodies spelling out a gold-selling address. This was way back!
This is a pay-to-play game. Folks who want to make a quick buck look at this and KNOW there are some easy marks who already think nothing of paying to win. The whole phone game app industry runs on it. Cut off one dragon head, another one will grow.
Harder enforcement won’t fix it. It just makes people craftier. They LOVE to work on the “puzzle” of getting around the rules. It’s like the RL arms race between gangs and the police - they both get new cool stuff, we all suffer. I can’t even say anymore that banning bot and gold-selling accounts would mean money out of Blizzard’s pockets - if they have enough gold to sell, the can buy the gold tokens from the AH and play FREE.
So stop whining about bots and gold sellers. The time to fix that is past. LONG past. Sit back and enjoy the game. Don’t like gold sellers and bots? Don’t use them.
Can we please talk about actual gameplay stuff on these boards now?
There’s one topic about them in recent post history, and even that one hasn’t had a new reply in several hours. This topic is unwarranted, so the only explanation is you’re getting paid to cover for gold sellers. Or you’re doing it for free, which just makes you look even more foolish
I’m saying I don’t think there is a solution. They’re going to keep doing it, we’re going to keep complaining about it. I’m done wasting time and I wish we’d talk about actual game stuff.
There is. Punish the buyers. When the players know that the buyers are being actively hunted, people will be less tempted to buy, and with no market the bots and sellers will naturally move elsewhere
Before any of that though, Blizzard needs to start actually policing their game in the first place
Lord Buddha said: Evil in the world cannot be overcome, only resisted.
Nobody is going to argue with you that RMT and botting have been issues since day 0, but the problem did get uniquely worse in classic a few years ago. There’s a reason the entire GDKP format was banned on some versions of the game - GDKP didn’t exist 2004-2019 as it did in the early 2020s. It was completely synonymous with RMT, and Blizzard pulled the plug when they decided it was too intrusive on their (admittedly oft-compromised) vision for the game.
When people complain about bots and gold sellers, they complain about the way they impact the average player. When RMT controls the price of gold, regular people get priced out of enchants, gems, etc. When totally unrestricted botting is allowed, there are ugly characters with names like hjtznqb and mvwpl taking your nodes, visibly walking under the map, farming mobs. It makes the game world repulsive. How can people be in the wrong for disliking these things and complaining about them?
“Uniquely worse in Classic”, like Retail hasn’t been absolutely infested for over a decade with RMT. Arena and RBG, Raid carries (titles and gear), M+, Challenge modes when those were around. Like, what hasn’t the playerbase monetized at this point? I’d say it getting worse was far more recent than 2019 and has to do with Blizzard’s lack of proper monitoring. People are just open about it now, they don’t hide that they RMT and it’s disgusting. Even on the servers where GDKP is banned.
Yes, it has always been infested, but Retail also has inflated gold price because of the run time of the server. There are legit players with huge sums of gold.
Classic is comparatively young. The value of in-game currency is driven by botting, but more importantly, over how many years the botting has happened. Look at Nightslayer’s auction house, for example: If you were playing Vanilla, how could you be expected to pay 250-300g for a flask? You probably have less than that left over from riding, abilities, etc. from the total pool of gold you earn leveling to the cap.
That’s a brand new server where uncontrolled botting and RMT was able to pump the value so high that it makes a raid consumable - yes, one flask - inaccessible to a normal player.
Maybe if the game wasn’t flooded by non-English speakers spamming every chat channel to sell boosts for levels, boosts for pvp, and boosts for end game pve etc…but that’s all you see anymore in game and Blizz has shifted their focus away from quality to cash in on the RMT mindset. Enjoy the game filled with RMT spam and no actual players I guess.
I never bought gold, not even in other mmorpgs. But bots and gold sellers still need to be put in there place. If you can’t play game without cheating your way to the top, well there’s other games you can play offline.
This is a very weird direction to take it. Can you prove it? Is there a reason you’re saying it’s a “narrative” that GDKP was banned, when… It was banned?
I’m saying that the narrative of “Banning GDKPs” equating to “No or a lowering of botting and RMT” is a false. Both Anniversary and SoD where GDKP is banned has more bots and RMT then Classic where GDKPs are not banned.
All the while Classic has more trackable players then either Anniversary and SoD. Which shows banning GDKPs does absolutely nothing to combat botting or RMT and if it did show anything, it would be showing that banning GDKPs results in MORE botting and RMT not less.
No, there are more GDKPs and players logging Cata, so there are literally more bots and gold sellers in Cata Classic.
It’s really weird that people pay extra money to gold sellers to not play a game they are paying to not play. It’s even weirder when people hop onto the forums to deflect from the obvious sources of RMT, GDKPs.
Blizz should perma ban every gold buyer if they want to actually combat rmt…but they won’t because they themselves take part in rmt. GDKPs were not banned from SoD, saying your raid is a GDKP was what was banned. Blizzard knows this. The community knows this.
Do a be a looking “bro” there are sellers who just don’t do business in Cataclysm. Can’t link it here because I’d get banned. There is no proof that can be shown on the forums without being banned so don’t give me that.
No, that isn’t how that works. Bots aren’t tracked players. Bots and Gold sellers don’t run GDKPs to be logged on warcraftlogs nor are they doing arenas to be tracked in that way.
It is indeed weird that people pay gold sellers to play the game less.
It is also weird that people with hate for GDKPs, that do not understand how gold sellers and the market even works or how they generate gold to sell in the first place work.
For some odd reason, they seem to think that players who a getting paid gold to raid go on to buy additional gold for… I don’t know…
No, the only impact GDKP has on RMT is the rare buyer who clearly bought gold every few months, and the few host hosts that exist… yes I used that twice on purpose. The people who host the GDKPs someone else runs to give that run legitimacy (Won’t steal your cut) in the eyes of the players and take part of the pot as a fee for their “service”.
It is the same setup they use in retail for selling raid clears.
Can you guess what they are doing in SoD and Anniversary? That is right, selling raid clears.
They should. That would stop thing pretty quickly, because bots don’t care that they are banned. Players do. Start hardware and IP banning people while they are at it. Bots would disappear overnight.