Are you talking about Warmane today? I haven’t played Warmane in a couple years, but to say that Wrath private servers existed only because of mounting excitement for Wrath Classic is an absolute falsehood. Warmane was extremely popular and even overfilled when I played it.
That’s what the majority of people want to do, and that’s the reason why so many people think that their only option is to try and join groups rather than build them themselves.
No dungeon finder naturally rewards people who will put in the effort to run dungeons. The only problem is that many of the people who are willing are the ones who set the bar unreasonably high. If you want to take that power of supply and demand away from people who expect too much, no solution will work better than dilluting their supply and running more dungeons yourself!
I laugh at the people who spam “LF2M Mages MGT Heroic, shard and mount HR’d be geared” because it literally takes them longer to form a group than for me. We end up finishing the dungeon in a similar time frame even though my dungeon run is a bit slower because they waste so much time trying to sift through the people that are ‘acceptable’ to them. We both end up investing a similar time into the game, but I’m spending more of that time actually playing and enjoying it, not to mention, I get to take multiple people who would’ve struggled to find a place.
I honestly don’t know if you’re exaggerating, but I personally haven’t seen the bar set that high.
I would argue that RMTs happen because there’s no friction that stops them. Blizzard has completely ignored the dungeon carry economy and that’s a huge area where this gold is circulated around. GDKPs are obviously the single place where the highest volume of gold is circulated per person, per hour. But really, the root of this issue is that botting remains unmitigated. It seems like private servers have better automated systems for detecting and automatically banning bots.
They’re already going to be addressing dungeon carries, which is FANTASTIC. Now all we need is for them to actually crack down on botters. GDKPs will become far less common once that happens.