they control the supply of the mats… it’s like how OPEC can reduce supply if it wants to increase oil prices 
I played this game when it was “retail”, from 2005 all the way through end of original Cataclysm. People then who could afford these AH prices were the smart guys who could grind out thousands of gold playing the AH ups and downs over months. They were also the people who didn’t buy anything if it wasn’t at a low price. Nobody in Vanilla had 20k gold legit without being some kind of market savant - most were just a bit better than broke.
Classic WoW players are obviously (sadly) heavy duty gold buyers. These are not people who are buying gold to get a mount, or a BOE, they are going to a website every time they want something. Got that site on speed dial.
Not everyone, but there are enough people buying large sums of gold that it ruins the game. The bots, the AH prices, the boosting, all of it is just a symptom of the real problem - gold buyer scum. On Era the excuse was that it all came from GDKP, we knew that was a lie and we can see that the same thing is repeating itself on Anniversary servers. You have a large enough population of people who are going to pay to win that it cannot be fixed without aggressive permanent banning - and the bots would dry up like a creek in a drought because they won’t waste their time if nobody is buying.
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Fixed that for you.
To be fair, after 20 years of the game being out, most people who want to take it seriously know where to farm. 20k gold would’ve been ~3 weeks of farming for me in 2019 classic. Assuming 8 hour sessions purely focused on that goal. And I know mages had more efficient farms than that.
So it’s possible, and there are people deranged enough to farm that kind of gold.
But it’s certainly not helping that blizzard doesn’t do anything about the botting and RMT. I’m honestly convinced it’s something of a runaway reaction where the more it happens the more it happens. Bots come in, farm, make gold, sell it, get banned months down the line, rinse repeat because they’re making more than they’re losing having to make new accs. Players come in, find out people are buying gold, not getting banned or only getting banned for a week or two, and now it’s in their mind that it’s not really being punished. Sure, some of them will stand strong “cheating is cheating” and all that, but we’ve clearly seen that there’s a large chunk of players who don’t care at all. Laughing and talking about buying gold publicly because what are the odds they get punished at all?
It’s only making things worse, arguably accelerating the issues as more and more people get into the mentality of “well everyone else is doing it and not getting banned”.
That’s why streamers feel comfortable taking donations/sub gifts to boost in arena or carry for mythic (raid and dungeon) achievements/clears on retail.
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I see the card swiping GDKPers hijacked another thread.
They continue to seethe.
Thanks for another incredible post. Did you copy-paste this from another thread?
You have literally one single thing to comment, which is that for some reason all the GDKPer’s are big mad about a change that doesn’t affect them.
I think it’s somewhat interesting to try to think through who actually cares. I mean, of course as you say:
So yeah, ban the bots. But, who is actually impacted negatively or cares about bots? It isn’t anybody who is raid logging. It isn’t anybody who is just running dungeons or going to be queuing into BGs when they come out. It isn’t anybody who is engaged in WPVP/ganking.
So who? People whose gameplay is farming herbs and ores? I can imagine that might be fun for some people, but is that really the people complaining? Or is it just people who watch someone on a stream complain about bots, and then get all worked up about someone else’s opinion?..
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Personally it does ruin my experience when I want to go farm in the world and have to compete with a bot for mob tags or resources.
It’s quite literally part of the reason I dropped mining for herb in 2019.
the gdkp = a large potion of rmt argument was so flimsy that blizzard themselves didn’t even use it when it came to the banning of gdkp, they used eroding social structures remember?
What precisely eroding social structures means is not clear to me, is it that people preferred not to join guilds but joined gdkps instead? but i thought we liked sr’d runs? is that not exactly the same thing? is sr not eroding guild social structures by causing people to go to them rather than join guilds also?
Fundamentally most of us knew that botting isn’t a symptom purely related to gdkp, because botting is prevalent on every online game that has any form of currency or leveling system, the problem is a mixture of the players (who simply have become so minmaxed focused that they’ve applied real life dollars to gold in the game and found its more efficient to farm real life) and the people who run the game being completely unable to control it.
The new services channel is a prime example, a place for bots to spam their summoning services but they just use lfg all day every day, nothing happens
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I can understand that, but there are 2 things to point out: 1. being on a PVP server solves half of that issue, and 2. you’d have to compete with other players anyway. But sure, I can understand that some people get emotionally distressed or upset if they think they are losing to automation.
The lasher farm in DM: East was OK, and it was instanced so bots wouldn’t impact it. Though, the changes made to dungeon reset points kind of ruin that for legitimate players.
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Being on a pvp server doesn’t solve the issue if the bots are on my faction.
There would be less competition when there’s not also 3-4 bots in the area as well.
I play warrior and couldn’t lasher farm, and didn’t have any guildies interested in jump runs, nor were they worth doing thanks to bots crashing the value of every thorium related resource including the gems, except arcane crystals.
But I could make ~150g/hr farming ghost mushrooms uncontested in mara so.
That’s why I stated it as half the issue. I mean, I get it… I also play the game. And sure, I support banning bots and/or gold buyers. My vote would be to fine account that have been found to buy gold, so you’d have to pay incremental fees to unlock your account if you wanted to keep playing it. And that could go to funding the anti-bot technology development team or manual teams.
Alternatively, I’d also support free for all open world PVP regardless of faction either server-wide, or within range of gathering nodes.
But personally, I don’t really care about bots. They don’t particularly bother me nor interfere with my gaming experiences.
Yeah, I did it on a paladin. That was slower than mage, but viable, and not too horrible gph.
Nice.
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It’s more an issue in my eyes because I hate farming. I genuinely hate the time I HAVE to spend in arathi mining iron till my eyes bleed because I need 8 million iron grenades to be a viable pvp class. But I do it because the pvp is fun. I very much do not enjoy when the time I must spend farming is increased because I’m forced to compete with some botter.
It ended up being more efficient to drop mining and buy iron for grenades. Probably because the botters were stealing it all.
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I would think that the opposite applies here. If you hate farming, wouldn’t you be happy to have others do it for you?
Oh yeah, I see what you mean. That’s a kind of rough one, and it’s not really like you’re going to make gold buying mats to level engineering… or even from it later.
Maybe! I mean, that does seem like a reasonable assumption, but it doesn’t really take that many other people competing in a zone for this to be the case, bots or not.
I’m very careful with gold spending. If I can get it myself I usually do it (even if I don’t like the process) because it saves gold in the long run. No reason to empty my wallet for things I can obtain myself, and I have mining for leveling engi anyway. This strategy is why I’ve only had to run like 10 GDKP’s total, because I only go as a carry, maybe bought a single item and just held on to the cash.
So it’s just like, a combined annoyance right.
Then I’m at 60 with mining and even IF I can get uncontested farming of RTV’s, I’m not making money doing it unless RNJesus blesses me with many arcane crystals (fun fact, he and I have an ongoing beef and I will be fist fighting him soon over this 12 month streak of sub-50 /roll’s) because the market is cratered by bots AND players overfarming RTV’s because arcane crystals are so scarce.
It’s kinda stupid the most efficient way for me to obtain a lionheart helm or stock up on engineering stuff I need to make myself is to drop the profession that lets me farm it myself, and level an unrelated gathering profession.
waattt???You do know GDKP is bannable offence, right???
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nope, sorry, absolutely nothing is wrong with the economy whatsoever thanks to the GDKP ban. it literally fixed everything. stop being delusional
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I found badlands to be more efficient for iron. 500+ grenades and counting for now. Iron grenades my beloved.
But if you say things are expensive you must be nub who doesn’t know how to make gold according to these guys.
First of all, yes, exactly right. I was a GM of a progression raid guild in original Vanilla → WotLK (retried as GM in Cataclysm) and we had a zero tolerance for gold buying. I have gkicked people for it and if there were serious questions about a player they never got an invite. The culture of the game in progression raiding was very different though, and we were very averse to any appearance of cheating or “pay to win”. I’m sure that some in the progression raiding scene got away with buying gold, cause cheaters gonna cheat, but I think our stance on it was the norm.
This, 100%. Going back to my first paragraph the social stigma of gold buying is also gone. The tolerance from all parties for gold buying, win trading etc. is super unhealthy for the game and very discouraging for people who refuse to do it. I can see the gold making angle from the people who want GDKP because without it how are you going to compete with someone putting it all on a credit card - terrible.