There are significantly less people playing Era than SoD.
I had a Warrior in your guild for a few months. Definitely a GDKP guild. Definitely filled with gold buyers.
I regularly log on Era and play around. It’s worse than it was. I have no desire to regularly raid because the one character that I would like to finish (this one that I’m posting on) would be after items that sell for impossible amounts of gold.
Unless, you know, you buy gold.
idk. I think people have their own opinions, but none of them are just blanket terrible. There are things I like about all of them. I stopped playing SoD, because I feel that the devs are deliberately catering to the loudest complainers, and that’s an uncomfortable group for me to be around.
Cata has some pretty interesting gameplay, but it does make sense that if you can stomach all the automation, then why not just “gO To rEtAiL?” And Retail has some quite compelling gameplay as well. If you enjoy pushing keys, playing to give yourself a scorecard, and generally interacting with others as though they are NPCs, it’s a fantastic game.
If you MT or top dps it takes like 3-4 months to get the gold for a gressil from only naxx payouts.
It drops every like 4-8 lockouts.
So you can afford 1 in 3 gressils from GDKPs payouts. Is that not enough for you? Would you rather a system in which more stuff is given to you?
Oof bad take OP. I mean I took a dps cat Druid and got full bis thru nax and cleared all content without even spending barely any gold. (Consumables)
A CAT DRUID
Yeah let me just slide into a main tank role in Naxx 
In reality, you’re not going to come back to the game and main tank successful Naxx raids. If you want to clear week 1, you’re going to have to join an existing run and slide into a DPS role (with players who are more geared than you because they have been playing the same character for literal years).
And every payout is not profit - consumables cost money, boons cost money, getting world buffs on these servers requires you to schedule your life around the drops because they don’t happen very often.
You’re looking at 6 months of treating WoW like a job before you can afford one item. And then you have to wait for it to drop.
None of this is fun. Endgame on Era is completely inaccessible for people with lives.
…unless you buy gold. Which is why it’s so prevalent on Era.
so ive got back on era in the past month and things have gotten worse.
1)i havent seen any non gdkp raids on whitemane horde.
2)the minimum bid is way to high. 500g mc loot? 300g for trash zg loot? plz
3)no one is buying loot. yeah you might have had a different experience. but ive ran 8 molten cores the biggest payout was 600g lowest was 120g lul
this was just my experience you guys might have had a different one.
This hilarious. You’re so far off the mark.
It is plenty accessible to people who have been enjoying it for years.
Perhaps a game mode that allows long-term progression isn’t for you, retail and SoD have plenty of instant gradification.
Vanilla will stay enjoyable for years to come to those who play it, and GDKPs are a great way for us to organize.
New players can make their own raids, but so many expect to be carried right away like below:
Nothing is being held from anyone - retail and SoD players just come back and compare themselves to vanilla players and tear up.
It happened when they all came back from wotlk as well - they cried, bought a bunch of gold and said it was the only way to progress, as they compared themselves to the players that never went to tbc. All the bots and sellers follow them too.
__
Turns out for those that just keep enjoying vanilla - gold, items, and fun all come without much work. But those that quit for every fad version always feel behind.
Regarding Retail / Cata is mostly the player base that’s terrible (not their actual skill) just playing with them sucks because they make the game into work rather than fun.
You mention automation, If you’re talking a crazy amount of WA’s, Addons, and rather questionable macro, then yes… what a mess.
Forever Classic, Ethereal, and Peak are 3 that I’ve found so far on my 2 weeks of playing Horde. I’m sure there are more, but they won’t be advertising in general/trade/world usually.
Found a couple more today: Myrmidons and Eclipse.
Oh, that’s true, too! I was referring more to the automation for group matchmaking, where you almost never see the same people again, and there seems to be little interaction beyond what you might expect with an NPC.
I’ve had pretty positive experiences with almost everyone I’ve come into contact with in both, but I think I’m consistently an outlier on the luck scale with regards to the people I run into in general.
You’re responding to a tier 3 Warrior avatar.
Already done the progression. Went through it all with a guild. Would love to come back and work towards finishing my nearly BiS geared characters every once in a while.
It’s not possible without buying gold. GDKP’s ruined Era’s endgame.
It is possible, you just don’t want to put in the time or commitment.
SR and LC guilds still exist.
Very well could be an outlier there, but nothing wrong with that at all. As for the game automation, ikky ikky ikky, that sorta junk is why people clear the content then whine that its too easy and why retail got as mechanically exacting as its become.
All blizzard needs to do in order to SAVE retail and Cata for that matter is flat out disable an addons / macro that can provide the following functions.
Detect enemy casting,
Detect enemy buffs,
Read / parse / observe / report the combat log in any way shape or form.
Operates a timer to track CD’s of your own or your enemy.
Macro that can Detect conditions of any sort in any way shape or form.
Macro that can target enemies / players in any way shape or form
Simply killing those functions would then allow them to build the game much more simplistically and achieve the same level of difficulty as present without all the BS strapped on that keeps new players away because they are not gonna download all that BS nor will they want to setup all the WA and Macro.
Macros IMO should be limited to weapon swaps gear swaps, and dead simple key condensation IE Alt, Shift, Ctrl modifiers to cluster 3 - 4 spells say for example on the Y key or something, allowing that to do multiple functions depending on keypress modification.
Realistically anything more than that should be regarded as and punished as cheating.
Additionally UI augmentation should also be limited to only ever displaying default UI information just in a more pleasing format or place. This is not to be confused with reading the combat log and displaying that information.
One last thing to save retail…
Strip the classes down mechanically so that all the abilities and junk that needs to be spammed in order to set up for Zeh big damage ya! With all the silly debuffs and buffs required, cut all that crap out and just make Frost Bolt for example do big damage, and Shatter actually mean something, without need for this that and the next thing conditionally to be a thing in the first place.
Also damned be the PVE balance, this pipe dream never happened in the history of wow and the closest they ever got was 5.2 and 5.3 MoP, everything before that and everything after that was directly imbalanced by design for certain class builds to be kings on a certain fight OR like everything from 6.2 and forward… intentionally making a class spec bad to force a re-roll meta.
I see the T3 which is why I said MT or try to top DPS.
But regardless of how you got your gear, why should 39 vanilla players be eagerly waiting for Axewipe to return to complete their guild raid?
The world keeps spinning when people went to tbc, wotlk, sod, retail - us vanilla players kept going.
Anyone who played got their items and gold, the idea that you cannot return and finish your bis is just false.
But if you think that 39 other players should bend over backwards and give you gressil, thc, kiss, etc within a couple weeks of you returning that is a bit delusional imo. But there are tons of players that think that way and thus they hate GDKPs.
I don’t think any version of the game has ever lasted 5+ years… including OG Vanilla.
Era is 5 years old and still going strong for a lot of reasons, but not because it’s bad like you claim.
They shouldn’t. Which is why GDKP is so pervasive. And the dominance of GDKP is why people buy so much gold.
GDKP needs to be outright banned or else it will never get better.
You’re not getting in these / not getting any gear if you want to come back to raid Naxx for a few weeks.
In 2021/2022, you actually could get into SR Naxx raids on Classic Era for 1-2 weeks at a time, without committing to playing Era long term.
In 2024, the only way you come back and enjoy your characters without a long term commitment is if you buy gold and join GDKP’s. I don’t like that.
GDKP is that.
Yes, it is.
But you’re not getting gear playing like that unless you buy gold.
Which is the entire problem. GDKP actually makes perfect sense for Era. The problem is it doesn’t work because people buy gold and jump the line. Which means you need to also buy gold if you want to keep up.
Can’t ban every single gold buyer. Gotta ban GDKP.
That’s just not true. Look, your gear is great, but you need/want a couple pieces. You can talk to people who organize GDKPs and say, “Hey, I want to raid and go for (insert item name), but I won’t have enough until I get some payouts, can I just come and pump for a few lockouts before I am able to bid?”
I don’t think you’ll have any problem finding raids that will take you. And unlike other DKP, if you can only show up here and there, then take a month or so off and come back, guess what? You still have your DKP to bid with!
You don’t have any gold? You probably aren’t winning BiS item bids, just like any other DKP raid on your first day.