I am literally talking about the classic versions.
Classic was hella expensive even when this mage was on it, i think flasks were 200g a pop.
TBCC came out and raiding got cheaper then as time went on in TBCC it got even cheaper.
Then WOTLK-C launched and that was even cheaper than TBCC.
But with your logic it shouldmt be because im 100000% positive the Bendiction of Classic had far less gold in circulation than the Benediction of WOTLK-C.
I see ICC gdkp pots hit over 1,000,000+ gold and yet raid consumes are like 12g/ea.
You can raid ICC weekly for less than 300g and you can literally do an 8 minute dungeon that knocks out 2 daily quests at once that gives you 160g and you can do that every single day.
More gold on the server doesnt equate to higher prices.
Super sweaty guilds do split runs. People can get gear advantages with soft reserve loot runs. You can offset RNG by running with a guild so you compete for gear against fewer people each time something drops.
We are comparing GDKPS to random roll raids against different players every time you run a raid. How many people actually do this? Gold buying and running gdkp is the fastest way to get bis, but people not minmaxing still get almost full bis on characters they play seriously. They can still clear the raids, and they aren’t at a disadvantage.
All I can say is from my experience, I can do the raids, I get plenty of gear, I do not gold buy. Someone else buying their gear has zero impact on my ability to enjoy the game. I’m also not at a significant gear disadvantage because I raid on my characters, and I regularly get loot whether it’s a guild run or gdkp.
You do not need data to point out that GDKP is pay to win. The system itself is designed to incentivise having the most gold. Having the most gold is comparative, and RMT gives you an advantage over those that earn gold conventionally. Having the most gold means you win the items, giving you an ingame advantage. So there are two stages of this that both encourage gold buying, and give an advantage.
This is something of an anecdotal argument, and it does move away from my original point. We can talk until the cows come home about what we’ve seen ingame, but no such data exists to directly show exactly how much gold inflation influences consumes.
However, a simple point to how economics works. Item prices are determined by how much people are willing to pay for them. If you have more money, or need it more, you’ll pay more. I’ll go into detail as this seems to be something of an understanding issue here: It’s called demand-pull inflation.
As GDKP RMT buying players spend their purchased gold, it doesn’t just vanish; it gets distributed among other players in the GDKP pot split. This means more players now have more gold than they would have otherwise. With more players having more gold, the overall demand for goods and services in the game increases as they can now buy more. As a result, sellers can charge more for items, services, and consumables. This is demand-pull inflation: where increased demand in an economy leads to increased prices.
Over time, as more gold circulates and prices rise, the value of gold diminishes. What once cost 100 gold might now cost 150 gold, reducing the purchasing power of passive gold income. You can see this in the price of many items on the AH right now. This inflation affects all players, not just those buying gold. Players who don’t buy gold find that their earnings have less purchasing power, making it harder for them to compete in the market and afford items. If a player levelled right now from 1-25 normally, and did all quests, he might have maybe 60g or so at best. This was huge back in the day, but means little now and wouldn’t even buy you full BoE’s.
This is another quantify argument which we cannot prove or disprove because it’s entirely circumstantial. Originally, the position was that it wasn’t guarunteed because the items didn’t drop. Now somehow being in a guild makes it more likely, when you have to compete even if it does drop, whereas you wouldn’t if you had the most gold to bid in a GDKP? That’s still a clear advantage, being able to win the most gear. And while super sweaty guilds might do split runs, they aren’t as sweaty as the people that buy so much gold they guarantee that even if they have 10 people or 40 for a raid, they’ll win every drop they want to use. Split runs don’t remove the possibility of someone competing for a roll with you on an item being down to chance. GDKP does. That is still an advantage.
You do need data though because even if gold buying gives an advantage it comes with several negatives that people weigh the decision against.
It costs money, why buy a virtual currency when you can earn it for free? I know I wouldn’t
It is against the ToS and doing so can lead to getting all your gold taken away and you recieving a suspension. Some people don’t want to risk it the risk outweighs the reward. I know I would never jepordize this account by breaking the ToS on purpose.
It has a negative stigma attached to it. This alone is enough to keep some people away.
The sites are unsafe and you are likely to get a keylogger and your account compromised if you go to a gold selling site.
People can earn tons of gold in creative ways without buying it.
So this is really missing the point here. Nobody is saying you need to RMT to buy stuff. The argument is about gold inflation. The idea is that the more money you have, the more things tend to cost.
Nobody has argued that items will get so insanely expensive so you don’t buy them. That’s what dumb people do to flip markets and end up crashing them. The idea is that you leave markets as profitable as possible that people still buy them. That’s how stuff at your supermarkets works.
And when that item goes up, it’s because of push-pull inflation. Wrath with the token is very different.
Nobody argues that there aren’t downsides to buying it. But similarly, there are upsides and as you say advantages that are pay to win.
Do the advantages offset the downsides? Well, I think they do. It’s a much more rational argument you’ve made than others in here I will admit freely.
(By the way I agree entirely about sticking to SoD, i was sort of railroaded there by the point they made and tried to explain it and probably shouldn’t have.)
All i am saying is that it’s an objective truth that it does give some huge advantages to people in getting gear and for some that’s enough to buy gold. And in doing so, there’s an inherent incentive within GDKP to do so.
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.
And you’re right here, that it’s difficult to quantify the exact amount of people buying gold explicitly for GDKP’s, or partially which would be fair to include as gold has many utilities but if that is one of them then it should be a factor.
However, my point being that it incentivises it in the inherent nature of how GDKP"s work. So long as betting the most gold wins you the gear, that’s tangible. The warnings and risks less so.
As for a solution I agree on all three fronts. However, I do think they should either ban GDKP’s or consider putting a hard cap on gold bids quite low. This would at least reduce the incentives to buy gold. If an item can go for other a thousand gold currently, that is too much and it’s not feasible that anyone outside of RMT would be spending that much. Even 100g cap would be reasonable.
I apologise for the low effort reply as I am raiding.
this would be nice but there’s griefers who are spending $1 or 5,10 and getting people banned using their IGN lol. this happened a lot in classic re-release in naxx and is happening in SoD rn. If you get gold in your mail you’re done. I saw a forum with screenshots of a guy reporting the gold in his mail and he still got banned. This company needs a huge over-haul
Uh huh we’re all nodding and totally believing this. It’s honestly crazy how every single game actually has no cheaters, just people banned for all the wrong reasons!
Hard agree I mean come ON guys, who would purchase gold to then get the most powerful items currently available in the game with it? Personally I’d spend the gold on buying in-game alcohol or ERP dating services.
You mock it because you know it is true. That is to say if someone bought gold for a GDP run that is more then likely not the first time they bought gold and thus getting rid of gdkps will not keep people from buying gold.
