3 step solution to bots, gold selling/buying and gdkp

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Warning hot take, alot of people arent going to like the following:

  1. Gold is now bind on account (outside of the AH, see step 2)

  2. AH freedom has been nuked. Items now have a market value of (V = Y x vendor price) (V = item value, Y = multiplier) and can only be listed for that amount.

  3. Creative person insert purpose for gold outside of vendor buying etc.

As a personal currency, all 3 are dead.

My question, what would you do/sacrifice to stop bots/gold selling or GDKP which ever you dont like. And where is your line when you say enough is enough and unsub.

2

Man, all these harebrained “solutions”.

Yes, lets destroy the game so we can, maybe, do something about bots.

Tell me, what will you do once bots switch to simply barter items and commodities? Delete flowers, ore and items?

2 Likes
3

So your telling me if buying gold wasnt available you would go to a website to buy 200 copper ore… dude if your gonna pick apart a suggestion atleast use some logic and counter points.

3 Likes
4

You do realize that whoever buy gold from sites is so he can pay big for expensive services/items… if u fok with the game and do all those BAD examples above, u will change nothing. Sites will start offer straight items/services for irl cash. Yes will be harder to manage without ingame currency but it wont be impossible. Its not that hard for real time bids on discord or some sort addon / web page that somebody will invent in no time if this happens. So u really dont need to make the game worse in order to deal with bots or gold sites.

5

Instead of goldselling as others have said, they will directly trade items or continue to sell services for money. Nothing will change.

Even in Runescape where you have the Grand Exchange, with an “average AH value” and where you can under/upper bid on the price to sell for there are still a wide variety of bots.

6

Yes?

What would happen is simply the following, bots would use gold to buy out all the basics and worthwhile items in AH, which would be especially easy given they have set prices per suggestion.

Then they’d sell these commodities to players. There is really not much difference between gold and copper bards or linen or flowers or any other key items that are a necessity.

Why you’d make their life even easier this way, because they would no longer need to operate with one type of in-game “currency” that is easier to track.

You’d just end up having underground RMT AH setup in a jiffy - happened in other games.

So in the end, you fixed nothing, but made everyones’ lives ingame a hell.

7

So what do you do? Bots are already making an impact on SOD, what ever blizz are doing now clearly isnt working and you know as well as i do which “tool” they will resort to using.

You either: 1. Attempt to control the outside market and destroy the integrity of the game through the wow token
2. Control the in game economy
3. Invest an awful amount of time, man power and money to manually do it

Something has to give…

Ok, youve made a good point and explained it. Appreciate it. Much easier to do that then throw out insult imo

So what do you do? How do you win. What they are doing atm clearly isnt working

8

It’s not a simple problem to solve.

But you can’t go ahead and ruin the game for everyone doing brainless changes that won’t even solve anything as noted above.

1 Like
9

I don’t know what to do, but I for sure know what not to do - ruin the experience for legitimate players.

EVEN, if that whole scheme would actually work, you went on and practically made everyones’ lives miserable and you can’t even predict what will happen as a consequence.

For example, even outside bots. Players themselves would prefer to switch to barter and manual trading ingame.

Can you imagine for a second what kind of hell it would be? Got that BIS green/blue? Nobody will sell it for set 20 gold in AH, instead they will sell it trade chat for 300 iron bars and 300 Swiftthistle in manual trade - something they could resell in AH for lets say 100 gold.

You’d legit have full blown PoE style bartering with manual AHs coming up.

As a matter of fact - Path of Exile is an excellent example of how it won’t work. There is no gold, players use ingame “resource” as gold replacement for bartering items. RMT sellers are all still there and offer a variety of acceptable barter resources for sale instead.

10

In another example, New World they didn’t remove gold but just introduced so little gold players themselves went bartering with items.

Goldsellers however started selling items instead so yea, no changes.

11

Let’s solve speeding by making all cars do 25MPH maximum.

Now OP, can you see how stupid what you suggest sounds?

There is no way people can come up with things that Bots (or as I call them Gold sellers) will not be able to work around.

2 Likes
12

Its funny you used that as your example, im sure thats exactly what wales have pretty much done haha

So while i agree after reading peoples counter points and explanations that it isnt a great idea, to call it stupid when other games (as pointed out by multiple people) have thought it been a good enough idea to try, or similar ideas (granted it hasnt worked out very well) is abit too far imo

13

I guess thats one way to kill the economy aspect completely.

Easiest solution:
“hey we changed tos: dont do GDKP or ban”

14

There is more to the issue than just ban GDKPs

  • Until gold has value in an economy people will spend money for bot gold to get the value from it.
  • If gold is devalued than you ruined the game’s economy.
  • GDKP is not a bad thing until bot gold is not used. Due to bot gold it has an unfair implementation for other players. It substitutes one grind with another one. You can farm a mob yourself or buy the item from the Auction House. Now there is one side of people who think you should commit to grinding raids/dungeons to get your gear but also it is a great wealth redistribution between the players. This is about GDKPs itself. I do not like them and prefer pugs but I see some of the viewpoints why they say decent system, bad implementation.

You could just start spamming bot bans

  • Then botting systems start adapting more frequently. Making developers spend time detecting if a singular person is cheating. Bot creation is extremely fast and automated. The speed can not compare individuals inspecting things. Long term it makes removing bots slower.

You could get more strict with bot bans

  • Now you have an issue of false banning players. Would not be great if you miss raids or events or other stuff due to that

Now a more interesting way: Anti-Cheat type system.

  • Disadvantage: IT HAS TO BE KERNEL LEVEL because anything else has well known work arounds. Now coming from Valorant. There was a lot of backlash. There would be discussions about privacy. IMO that anti-cheat is great. Compared to CS, Valorant has practically no cheaters.

  • As a software developer, there is 100% a development team (or more) working on anti botting systems at Blizzard. My curiosity is if how well and is it even feasible if they can implement this properly. Also would it interfere with addons. If advanced bots can exist through addons than you might need to heavily restrict addons.

  • There are more things at play like the fact WoW is ran on an inhouse engine. Classic and Retail Codebases are likely to be extremely different. One of the reasons SoD might had taken this long is because they had to fork the old version of the Engine and update it or update the old version of the game, bring up on par with modern practices so they could reliably and efficiently develop new content. Also fix technical debt. It is harder to find software developers for a legacy project as they do not want (usually) to work on technical debt infested mess. Genuinely would be interesting to see what they have under the hood. Hard to say anything about this section without seeing what happens inside the bureaucracy, development teams and the codebase itself.

1 Like
15

Personal loot needs to come into this version of wow… no more trading.

2 Likes
16

i like reading such topics.where publisher introduces his 3 step for killing game.

Do you guys realise that big part of AH and whole economy is on bots ?
Do you guys realise that without bots AH will be empty from resources greenies and other stuff?
Do you guys realise without Gold Sellers and lazy whales servers will be empty?

like for example we have bots that are miners and herbalists right? right. the most part of resources ive would even say like 60%+ are from this “gatherers” ,so you will end up with deficit of resources at all. Greenies and BoE blues are included by the way too. nothing to wear for players “Sad face”
We have lazy whales that buys boosts from Gold sellers/RMT guys. yy mages aware. making 100g+ hour from boosting WC RFC and other stuff. if this part of “players” will be gone with who you will play the game? with 100 players that has the same mindset as you? oh dont forget this guys are spread in two factions.

Im not on the side of RMT or lazy whales or bots, i just see the sad future of game without em. you can hate them but you cant rid of em because they are part of this game(of any game) that just makes this game alive too.

for people who always whines on everything just go on empty server and try to play there some,ive seen people cant even form a raid on non populated server.

17

Implementation in other titles does not mean its good or the right thing to do at all. U can call it stupid ESPECIALLY because u have examples how it has NOT worked at all. So now it is not only not well thought out from all possible angles proposition ,but is a one that clearly not working with examples. I think its pretty reasonable to call the idea stupid ( not the person thou ) just one of his ideas. We all have stupid ideas at some point in life or in game so its only a human thing and this is exactly that.

18

Hard disagree here, bots are not required in any sense to have a thriving economy within a game. And yes, while bots may be part of the reason the AH is flooded with items, that only serves to bring the prices down.

Supply and demand. All the bots acheive is to ensure the supply outweighs the demand. If the value of copper ore goes up due to high demand and low supply, guess what, alot of players will take note and go farm it.

Your arguement that bots are required to make the game feel full would only apply to a dead game or dying game. Bots dont group with players for dungeons or raids. If you want proof of how nonsensical this is, go stand in darnassus for an hour and see how many world buffs get popped even to this day.

This is the only thing i can agree with you on, and it is something i severely underestimated. Obviously other companies who have had alternative approaches have also underestimated.

So while you dont agree with what i said, thats fine, and yes your right, people make mistakes or make stupid decisions and that its only human.

However given that GGG doesnt have a tradeable currency within poe, and (as it currently stands) wont in poe2 either, that would imply that someone thought it was a good idea. If it didnt work to the extent they wanted, they wouldnt be continuing it through into poe2. And it has a following, a decent one at that so people must like that aspect.

So while yes, in the context of “solving bots” it is a “stupid suggestion” as it would not solve what it was aimed for, inherintly it isnt a stupid idea, just wont work not within the context of wow.

The whole point of forums and conversing with people is the exchangement of ideas. The best part is, sometimes people see things that you dont at first glance.

19

Your suggestions

20

“there is no point fighting botting and RMT because if you heavily inconvenience them, they will find a new, much less effective way to continue.”

:thinking:

In my opinion, fighting botting needs to start at gameplay, like OP suggests, but i would first start with small changes that most would not notice.

For example, vendor greys, greens, they should be removed from popular botting targets. (Things like spider silk being farmed for the AH is actually fine, since that gold isn’t raw, it just exchanges hands, doesn’t contribute to inflation).

Add those greens to mobs and areas that bots would find difficult, such as elite camps, where players would be incentivised to group and play together.
Add soft mechanics such as spells that you need to Line of Sight or death, which very long cast times.

Funnel wealth and value into questing, as shown in SoD so far, it works quite well to keep normal players head above water in an economy that shoots upwards due to botting.

Games like this, when they don’t evolve with modern times, are open to hideous exploitation, as we have all seen.

Mages god modeing through dungeons? Nerf what enables it.

Rogues pickpocketing through under the floor using flyhacks? Nerf what enables it.

The problem with Blizzard and botting is that they don’t change the game enough, but when they do, its awful, see experience level difference from the tbc boosting nerf.

tldr: target nerf botting strategies until there are none left.