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.
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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.
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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.
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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.