I think a good example of how much it might just be affecting them now is google adverts and I have seen these myself…
The adverts that are able to be served on youtube itself are another discussion but my point here is the algorithm obviously picks up you’re watching WoW content and actively serves you gold buying websites, pservers etc.
We can all acknowledge that gold buying is literally and affectively as old as the MMO itself. Difference being in no time before were there adverts that EVERYONE can see for it, let’s be honest for some people out there that’s basically enticing it and at a minimum declaring it “part of the game”. Bad for marketing especially in the long run.
This is why I used 1930’s America as an example to pre-AI, a lot of these things have reached the point where it’s “broad daylight” behaviour. Historically that leads to a reaction and big change, regardless of what we are talking about.
It might sound like I’m hailing AI as the big saviour but the major reason it will be significant with all of this (everything) is that it becomes no longer a battle of human reverse engineering. Gaming companies like Blizzard are currently in a never ending war with hackers, botters, criminals, whatever. What Blizzard create (warden) has to be reverse engineered, what the hackers create…has to be reverse engineered. Over and over, slower and slower.
If it becomes an “AI war” for these companies/enterprises vs “criminals” then who do you think wins now:
Microsoft - Funding - $300,000,000,000
Random Bot Famer - Funding - $30,000
Really simplifying it here but hopefully you get my point. If you don’t get it (1930’s America again) try rob a bank now, see if you can A. Get away and B. Not be caught down the line with the use of…data. Forever hunted by a powerful organisation with a bottomless budget because you stole their money.
This is a common one that comes up. You can probably find interviews with previous GM’s themselves but that job is a lot harder than forum goers like to make out.
You’ll also find that many of these hack programmers are ex-employees of these beloved companies because they get paid more to help reverse engineer what they created in the first place. Remember all those scientists from WW2? Bit like that yea?
You also touched on one of the points that has historically proved to become an issue with such things, the fact that it would be a low paying job and lets be honest it’s a job that will be outsourced abroad from their western offices. This means low, if any loyalty and next to zero help from government agencies including police (cyber crime etc).
One thing that people who raise this as a solution on the forum seem to forget is that their judgement is clouded. Your judgement is clouded because you like the game, you want to see it thrive. Those low paid employees? maybe don’t have so much personal investment as yourself.
Imagine you worked at a job you weren’t loyal to, someone approached you for just some information on how you do your job. You wont get caught or get in trouble, you send it all over an encrypted connection etc. You get paid £2k a month, they want to give you 6k for the info. Gun to your head guess right or wrong…would most humans take that or not? What about most humans in more impoverished countries?
buyed Shoulder/Waist slot from Ah for the moment, payed less then 15g so can’t see any problem
Some Quests on lvl 40 gain 4-6 gold
Rest slots PvP-Dungeon-Quest loot
after getting pre Stuff you don’t need Gnome loot for real, it’s only nice to have
While road from 25-40 Ah gains more gold for your bag then you invest in anything
I start P2 with 48 gold, now after buy mats for enchants and skills etc I got 100 and I don’t need the Gold anymore
Do you use an adblocker? Most people do. Why? Because they don’t want to see ads everywhere, all the time. It makes your experience worse, even if you don’t buy anything or try to ignore the ads. The same thing is true in WoW. GDKP is a business and the marketing of it is aggressive, obnoxious and unrelenting. When I play a game I don’t want to have to put of with someone shilling their business constantly.
Lets keep it simple. Employee do job badly, sacked.
Not a lot of secrets to sell.
Gm teleports to bot . Simple observation, few gm tricks and done.
I have been GM in different game and I can tell you, it is the most effective way to fight cheating. All those stories/excuses for peasants are just to boost profits.
Obviously their solution do not work, yet.
Yes, but the adverts popping on websites directly is actually related to how web browsers and websites now work, with their algorithms having evolved to a point where they can process your data to make suggestions that are related to them.
Back in the day Gold sellers would create level 1 characters and directly /w players with a macro, advertising their websites. Soon after they would delete the char, create a new one, rinse and repeat. Now algorithms do it for them.
Yes, now try buying a pre-bis/bis Blue/epic BoE and see how those 100g suit you for that purpose ^^
And I agree with you, I don’t think buying any pre-bis gear is smart, when the difference in your performance is gonna be so minimal if all you’re missing is that 1 or 2 items to be pre-bis. And also, most of that pre-bis gear comes from dungeons or quests, so, yeah
GDKP’s don’t affect the game. At no point did someone point a gun to your head and force you to join one. Vast majority of PUG advertisements on LFG chat were for MS/OS or Soft Reserve. It’s like if you want to join a guild you join one that has a loot system that suits you. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that something destroys the game.
How? The only way you can say it changed the game is if it vastly increased the gold buying industry which it didn’t. Gold buying has been around way before GDKPs were a thing. There are some people who buy gold for GDKP’s but it’s really unnecessary considering the amount of gold you make at the end of a run.
Quite possibly the worst/non-sensical analogy I have heard against GDKP’s. Plenty of PUGs and guilds around that didn’t operate a GDKP system, more so than actual GDKP’s but because you are against them your attention is drawn to them more.
Banning GDKP’s isn’t what winds me up though, it’s the fact that Blizzard reverted the increased gold rewards from quests and added even more gold sinks into the game which made no sense if they wanted to reduce gold buying.
They should have kept or even increased the amount of gold from quests and mob loot, whilst reducing gold sinks to bring the desire for gold buying down to the point of irrelevance.
Blizzard have achieved the square root of FA by banning GDKP’s but still keeping gold buyers desire to buy gold. They have the ability to detect GDKP’s and ban people suspected of manipulating AH auctions to hide GDKP’s and gold buying but can’t/won’t effectively ban bots (as they bring in subs)
They didn’t revert a thing, you got more gold because exp gets converted to gold when you are max level in phase 1 the max level was 25 so you got the exp you should have gotten converted with the exact formula being used being 6c per point of exp you should have gotten.
Prices are high because people are reaching 40 and starts to do quests that gives heaps of gold. We saw the same thing 2 weeks into phase 1. Give it a few more weeks when people are running out of green, yellow and orange quest to make money of.
Not entirely aware of all the BiS lists for all classes and specs, though I have the feeling there won’t be many greens that are better than gnome/dungeon loot. Maybe a few, but not many.
And the fact that someone “doesn’t need to” does not at all mean no one will do it. If that was the case, prices would drop to a point people would eventually see it as being a deal worth making and start doing it. The fact that prices are high means there is enough demand to justify those prices. Maybe you don’t buy them, I don’t either, as I have told you already, but we are nowhere near 100% of the playerbase, and there ARE people who will. Many times they will do it by buying Gold to be able to afford them.
This is naive, to say the least.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Gold buyer. You want to buy raid gear, but you can’t cause Gdkp’s are gone. What do you do? The obvious, you buy the best stuff there is on the AH.
It doesn’t require 200 IQ to reach this conclusion.
And you got that info from?..
Willy, that guy is a henious troll, feeding him is worse cause those trolls crave attention and if you give it to them they’ll feel even more like they’re special.