Gold buyers go into GDKP and swipe credit card to get all contested items.
Raid loggers buy golds because they don’t want to farm in open world.
A small portion of the player base is trying hard to get gold legitimately by farming themselves and working on auction economy, because they don’t want to risk a ban. We are already playing under the curve of people that buy golds. People often talk that farming gold is not worth it since you can work in real-life and buy golds.
We need higher sanction against people that buy golds. At the moment, it seem the common sanction is 1 week ban with gold removal.
Increase the sanction.
=> 1 month ban (and then 6 month if repeated, and then permaban).
=> Remove all golds from all characters (back to 0).
=> Apply the sanction to all account that match the same IP address, because some players use multi-account to create confusion. Note that sharing account is against Term Of Service.
Any gold trade and mail trade should be reviewed by a neural network or any algorithm that can safely say “This is legit, this is not”. It’s not an impossible task to do. There’s many metric that can be used to check if a gold trade is legit or not. False positive exist, and they can appeal.
Usually, gold seller use mail or face to face with level 1, it’s very easy to scan all transactions and get a review of what is suspicious. There’s a massive amount of data to work with, training a neural network should be a doable task. Machine learning is one of the solution to this problem if you don’t want to involve more human into this task. With the current computing power you have, you can do it.
But do something please, at least before WOTLK release. You have time to work on that. For a future Classic release, it would be really nice to destroy this attitude of “buying gold”.
Less gold buyers => More people willing to farm => More people online => More retention => More money for you.
8 Likes
Farming = working class
Auction trader = banking class
But if you want to get big people should pay you taxes. Just lead a gdkp and get your 10%.
Some legends say that that some gdkp leader sell their cuts on eBay so Billy can rebuy his gold with his creditcard to join the next dgkp led by the same guys alt.
The problem is Gdkp and it needs to get banned asap.
The damage is already done. The only solution would be new fresh server and a complete reset of the market
yet you guys complain add wow token you guys such joke
No need to make it worse.
Anyway, dunno why you want it to be fixed before Wrath. Golds aren’t an issue anymore in Wrath.
Gold is basically worthless in WoTLK. You get more than enough gold for your flying, dual spec and repair costs simply from levelling and vendor gold.
Consumables and enchanting mats? No worries, they’re going to be botted so hard that they’ll all be worthless anyway.
More people farming means more farming competition which means less money for me.
Where did you learn math?
Gold buying was somewhat of a concern to me during Naxx progression, when one raid could cost upward of 500g and low effort farming made 50gph. I was basically farming full work days in DMEast to afford raiding two days a week after actual work.
But those days are long gone, consumes are super cheap in TBC, especially now with basically free flasks for MotI. And it’s going to be even more so in Wrath with bot farmed herbs turned into enchant vellums, semi-requited (well paying) daily grinds for rep and no gold dumps to speak of.
If people want to run GDKPs instead of guild runs and then buy their own gold back in the sort of closed loop, be my guest. It is of little concern to me at this point.
1 Like
You’re asking them to solve a symptom of allowing bots to run rampant in the game. How about that problem gets fixed, to reduce the amount of gold available in the economy?
Very nice, I wrote a post that mods censored.
Hopefully, I copied pasted it 
This is completly wrong and disconnected from reality.
Less gold buyers will not encourage people to farm more, they are not going to play the game “in the right way”. The thing gold buyers want is : playing TBC like they play retail.
More people to farm ≠ more people online. Gold buyers will not play more, they will quit the game if they can’t insta join a raid with easy consumables and go back to retail or any fastfood game.
More retention ≠ more money for the company LUL. What’s the difference for the company if people spend 15h a day or 2h x 2 for raiding ? A sub cost 13€, we pay for 1 month.
That’s how it works for me :
Less gold buyers or NO gold buyers => Less GDKP, less players, less bots => Less subs, less money for the company.
Prevent gold buyers to “pay to win time” won’t turn them into Super-Farmer Hero. They’ll just leave.
There is a ton of post edited here called : “Why you don’t remove bots from your game” and they NEVER answer. Because that’s the way they make money today.
It would be hilarious if they banned all gold buyers for a month or two.
Half of firemaw would get Thanos snapped
3 Likes
It would, for about 5 minutes. Then basically the entire TBCC would go to full chaos mode since most people raidlog and they’d find out 5 core members from their raid team are missing on Wednesday 15 min before first pull. I expect half of the rest would just quit instead of looking for new guild/pug. Blizz would literally kill TBCC in one swoop. Ha ha, but the gold buyers would at least get punished, right?
Like, I run raids with a guild and have all my stuff crafted from raw mats by guildies. Raw mats that I buy for super cheap on AH, probably from bots. Why would it even matter to me if someone buys gold to pay 10k gold per item in his GDKP pug? I’m asking sincerely.
Goldbuyers are pretty miserable. Should be 6month bans for sure. People can legit farm thousands of gold normally, just play the ah properly and make 5k gold a day.
IMO, most of the golds buyers don’t want to play a MMORPG.
They want to play a Dungeon Crawler online.
They don’t care about any pillar (which include farm) of the genre, they care about the instanced “competitive” content.
Lot of players would farm if gold buying were more punished.
Since gold buying is a free action (you risk 1 week ban), players often don’t want to farm.
I got permabanned in Mist Of Pandaria on all my Battle.net accounts for gold buying.
Seems like a very radical punishment, unless you were caught and did it again a few times after.
I simply sell my services as a tank to get gold, because lets be honest, mindless farming is NOT fun at all. Times have changed. In Vanilla TBC I used to farm elementals after school and in weekends to farm gold for enchants for my PvP gear. I hated it, but I needed to do it because w/o enchants you’re irrelevant in any form of end-game content.
I also join GDKP’s to make some gold.
In any case, I don’t care how someone gets his gold. And I don’t understand why people care so much. I don’t have any problem with bots, because I don’t see them. Raiding on my server is cheap, which is perfect for me. Enchants are also not too expensive because mats are cheap.
We live in 2022, and people care way more about their time than they did 14-18 years ago. Gaming has evolved, yet we play a game that has not evolved at all. People apply their current values to the old game, and they just say: I don’t want to spend my whole Saturday farming 500 to 1k gold just so I can play the game for maybe a week. And I agree: thats bs… Its the reason I stopped playing Classic in the first place. I booted up the game on a Saturday, my gf gone for the day, and I started running my rounds in Winterspring to collect plants, which I sold on the AH for decent amounts. I started my run, and I thought to myself: why am I doing this? I didn’t saw any other way at that time to make gold (i was a holy paladin w/o prot gear). I actually went back to retail because gold is not really a thing there.
My friends all think the same. They don’t farm, they sell services in game to make gold. Either through gdkp’s. selling their services in arena, or selling tanking/healing service for low geared 70’s.
Blizzard can tackle illegal gold buying by just offering a resellable WoW token. Times changed, and if you like it or not, we all have to deal with it. Capitalism always shows where the demand is, and its the mistake of policy makers if they can’t jump into that. Its not the fault of the free and open market.
1 Like
Selling tanking services is a legal a way to make gold. Buy gold on a website isn’t.
Remove this kind of services in the game, and I’m not sure you’ll find people who spend 15k for a token.
Prices will fall, and forming GDKP’s groups won’t be interesting or efficient enough.
I don’t care about “Imagine you farm in 2022 to make gold and enchant yourself” thought. That is A legit way to play the game, as being a mercenary.
Bro… We lost humanity because people can’t get the ability to put themself in someone else’s shoes.
It’s not effect me, so I don’t care. ^^
So let them ruining the game, we don’t care. 3/4 of my friends left because they can’t join a guild, and can’t join a raid because RL needs T6 pumper to raid on Karazhan (thoses T6 pumpers who bought T6 token in GDKP and wants some T4 offset), or GDKP’s RL needs 10k gold to join a SSC/TK. Maybe 50K to join a BT/Hyjal GDKP ?
If you think there is no link between thoses problems, my words are useless.
I’m playing the way I like. I’m farming ore to make gold. It’s long and painfull as always, but it worse with 75% bots in the zone (maybe more). It would be the same with real players, but it won’t effect me, it’s legit you know. Not an injustice. 
And again, they censored me two times on this last post. There is nobody to answer us, but to remove divergent post…
It’s not effect me, so I don’t care. That’s why we lost humanity.
They censored me again and I lost my 4000 words answer, sorry for it, I’m out. You’re right, bots are not a problem. Kappa.
(never forget to copy/past your answer before posting)
And again, they censored me two times on this last post. There is nobody to answer us, but to remove divergent post…
It’s not effect me, so I don’t care. That’s why we lost humanity.
They censored me again and I lost my 4000 words answer, sorry for it, I’m out. You’re right, bots are not a problem. Kappa.
(never forget to copy/past your answer before posting)
And again, they censored me two times on this last post. There is nobody to answer us, but to remove divergent post…
It’s not effect me, so I don’t care. That’s why we lost humanity.
They censored me again and I lost my 4000 words answer, sorry for it, I’m out. You’re right, bots are not a problem. Kappa.
(never forget to copy/past your answer before posting)
And again, they censored me two times on this last post. There is nobody to answer us, but to remove divergent post…
It’s not effect me, so I don’t care. That’s why we lost humanity.
They censored me again and I lost my 4000 words answer, sorry for it, I’m out. You’re right, bots are not a problem. Kappa.
(never forget to copy/past your answer before posting)