Idk why so many people defend GDKP; RMT in WoW is bad for the game, case closed.
I don’t care if they’re unpopular, I don’t care at what extent it affects me personally. People using real world currency to pay to win is bad for the integrity of the game. Should GDKP / boosting for gold etc be banned? Probably not, but it should be examined with extreme scrutiny.
People should be extremely nervous about buying gold from third party sites, have their accounts nuked, etc.
The gold sink isn’t an aggregate experience, genius. The person spending 100k gold on a single item just sunk gold into the system and others secured profit.
What on earth are you talking about?
You then begin your swim into RMT since most the gold entering your pockets came from a tos violation.
I’ma just dogpile on you with everyone else real quick and tell you that GDKPs are the literal opposite of a gold sink. By their definition, gold sinks take gold out of the economy. GDKPs spread gold around to everyone in the raid.
No, the gold sink is experienced by the individual player via spending gold in a specific area. Your definition is silly
The person that spent 100k gold now doesn’t have that gold. It was sunk into the rmt process to secure loot. They now go buy more gold.
I think the worry is that history will repeat itself as SOD progresses. That is, it’s not bad now, but it will get bad later if left unchecked.
If you can legitimately earn the gold in game, and earning that gold is objectively easier than obtaining a drop from a raid, I think you should be able to pay someone(s) to help you get the item. That’s fair.
But when you have an unaccounted for balance of 2000g on your main that you obtained from a stranger yesterday and rush to start buying all your BiS, yeah Blizz should have no mercy on you.
Blizz needs an IRS audit team.
It’s not my definition, it’s THE definition.
Via a quick google search that brought up the wikipedia page for gold sinks:
Gold sink is an economic process by which a video game’s ingame currency (‘gold’), or any item that can be valued against it, is removed. This process is comparable to financial repression in real economies. Most commonly the genres are role-playing game or massively multiplayer online game. The term is comparable to timesink, but usually used in reference to game design and balance, commonly to reduce inflation when commodities and wealth are continuously fed to players through sources such as gold taps; such as quests, looting monsters, or minigames.
It is gone from the player’s resource bank…
Holy…
You’re literally talking about the opposite of a gold sink and acting like I’m crazy.
You’re talking about gold inflation, where botters sell gold to buyers and buyers then buy equipment in GDKPs, which in turn inflates the economy by adding more gold to the overall game, not taking it away.
Gold inflation. Not a gold sink.
What if every WoW player had to file taxes every year to account for their gold earnings, and anyone who can’t account for their income gets a permanent suspension? 
Brother, a semantic argument is a bad argument.
You know what is being said, stop pretending otherwise.
Gdkps are the primary incentive for RMT, particularly as the game progresses. Better?
Definitely a more coherent sentiment yes, even if we still disagree.
The primary incentive for RMT is that there are large parts of the game that are made easier by having more gold. Whether it’s needing money to learn abilities, or level professions, or buy leveling gear, or yes, even buying BiS gear pieces off the AH or from GDKP.
GDKP is not the primary incentive for RMT, being able to buy gear with gold at all is the primary incentive for RMT. You can buy your BIS off the AH for most classes the same as you can buy it in a GDKP run.
Brother. You now have a new semantic argument. Gdkp is buying gear with gold.
Yes, but not all gold is bought with real money like you seem to believe. If I farm up a hundred gold and then go buy Yorgen Bracers off the AH for 40g, have I done something wrong? Obviously not.
Likewise, if I farm up a hundred gold and then join a GDKP and win Hydraxian Bangles off of Baron Aquanis for 40g, have I done something wrong? Obviously not.
It only becomes wrong when you actually buy gold and thus contribute to RMT and botting. GDKPs aren’t the problem. Botting and RMT is the problem.
By this logic, the friend is the gold buyer in Week 2 because he has the money to bid…
Y’all really aren’t very good at this.
Because GDKP and RMT aren’t the same thing. Case closed.
/headdesk
That’s a gold injection, not a gold sink, and the RMT buyer would inject his ill-gotten gold into the economy anyway using the AH, Trade Chat, etc. And no one drops 100k on an item unless its being bid up to that.
Gold sinks destroy the gold, removing them from the economy entirely. WoW has only had two ways of making us destroy our gold: NPC purchases and repair costs. That’s it. The game isn’t very much fun if repair costs are so outrageous that you cannot thrive in game without pouring a lot of time into farming just to keep your equipment up to date, so we get far in excess of the gold we need for those costs. The same is true of NPC purchases.
You guys harp on economy-this, fairness-that, and you don’t even understand what’s happening around you.
And the cherry on top: in what world is spending 300-400g in MOLTEN CORE considered some RMT-only activity? Do you think people had to RMT to get epic riding? Flying in TBC?
A GDKP in which all 30ish items in MC actually get rolled off for a small amount of competition means you have a raid of about 10-15 carries and 25-30 undergeared buyers that actually want MC loot. Not a single one of them needs to have RMT money for that kind of run… and yet everyone can still make a hunk of gold from the end and be able to pour it right back into the pot the following week.
This is so damn silly.
You messed up and now you are trying to rewrite the definition
Just accept and move on
Ban everyone
and then there’s the guy that resells and the other guy that buys for an additional 200g, under the table ofc.
A ton of it is, though.
Ban buyers!
Absolutely. Sing it loud. Sing it proud.