Lets be clear a certain segment of the WoW population would buy gold with or without GDKPs existing. Get rid of GDKPs and these people will continue to buy gold to pay for raid supplies, mounts, power leveling professions or whatever else costs the gold they aren’t willing to farm for.
So it is a bit disingenuous to say well X player is buying gold for GDKP’s when that player would be buying gold anyways because for them buying gold outweighs the risks it carries and they don’t want to farm it themselves.
I doubt the number of people who buy gold solely for GDKPs is very large, rather I suspect buying gold is a gradual thing that a person tries out with a small amount, then gets addicted and gets bigger and bigger amounts as what they want increases (oh I just need 5g for training, swipe, oh I just need 10g for consumables, swipe, that blue boE is 50g i’ll swipe to get that, etc… up to well 500g to ensure I can get what I want from a GDKP in SoD sure why not Swipe)
My thought is that Blizzard needs to focus on 3 things.
- Banning bots
- Banning gold sellers and dismanteling their entire network of holding accounts and whatnot.
- Banning gold buyers. One warning of a week ban and stripping of all gold and anything bought since the transaction removed from the account. Second offense permenant ban. Why not a perm ban first time? Not everybody knows Gold buying is against the ToS.