Why do you feel the need to dictate how we play with the GDKP ban?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I’d like to give some feedback on the decision to keep the ban of GDKP on the Anniversary realms, because what bothers me most isnt even GDKP itself, its the philosophy behind the ban.

It really feels like Blizzard is trying to dictate how a huge portion of the playerbase is “supposed” to play the game, instead of letting the community shape its own ecosystem.

For a lot of us GDKP isnt some dark evil system, it’s just another way to organize raids:

  • Some people love the transparency of gold bids
  • Some people enjoy being able to turn their time into gold
  • Some people who dont have a fixed schedule can still access loot by buying instead of being locked intro strict guild calendars

If someone doesnt like that style, they can simply not join those runs. Thats already a choice players can make, but right now instead of letting different communities coexist you have hard banned one entire style of play that a ton of players enjoy and willingly opt into.

Its not just “no GDKP” but “we know better than you how you should be allowed to play this game on this version”

If we concern is RMT and bots, then go after RMT and bots. Ban the buyers and sellers , improve detection. Dont punish every ligitimate player who enjoys GDKP because some people break the rules. By that logic, you would need to ban almost every system that involves gold since RMT touches everything from consumes to boosts.

If the concern is "social structures” and “guild culture”, again, why not trust the community a bit more?

  • plenty of guilds never touched GDKP and still thrived
  • Plenty of GDKP communities are tight-knit, organized and social
  • Players are adults who can decide what kind of raid environment they want to be in

Right now it feels like we are told “This particular way of organizing raids is wrong, even if you like it and everyone involved consents to it” That is a very top-down, paternalistic approach for a game that historically thrived on player-driven systems.

If GDKP really is such a problem, show us the data or maybe consider less extreme options such as:

  • Run a limited GDKP test period and compare outcomes
  • Implement stronger RMT enforcement alongside it and see if that addresses the root issue
  • Implement WoW Token to reduce RMT (might be extreme, but test?)

Im not asking everyone to love GDKP. Im asking Blizzard to

  1. Acknowledge that a large portion of the community genuinely enjoys this system
  2. Stop trying to micro manage which voluntary loot systems players are allowed to use
  3. Re evaluate whether a blanket ban is really the best approach instead of targeted enforcement against actual rule-breakers

Please consider either revisiting the ban or atleast giving us a more detailed explanation that respects the fact that many of us dont feel “protected” by this, we just feel restricted.

Thanks for reading.

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my favorite part of gdkp was getting RMT gold from whales, and buying illidan loot with RMT gold from my GM

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The side effects.

Just explain me, how can I, on my fresh level 60 resto druid, very well understanding my class, however sitting on my majestic pile of 300 gold (dungeon revenue plus some herbalism) and on average level 45 gear, enter the world of GDKP raiding?

… In 2009 I was tested in some dungeons by the guild and seeing I’m competent enough, I was taken to a previous tier done for fun and got some gear, joining the main group in a week or two. All that as Social rank, even.

GDKP is practically a boosting system. Pumpers get paid by buyers.
GDKP as a system is fine, however criteria to enter are not.

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What ?

Just because you do not believe them or you are a conspiracy theorist, doesn’t mean they have to proof you wrong. They have the data, and we have the proof.

The proof is that many of us saw or encountered the pathetic “feature” which is GDKP.

And yes, they can easily dictate how we should play the game. I want to level up to 60 in 10 hours !! Why I can’t do it? WHO is Blizzard to tell US why we can’t level to 60 in 10 hours?

Seems very solid. If you like c0caine and a bunch of your friends likes it too , doesn’t mean you should be allowed to c0caine freely or whenever you want.

GDKP is the cancer of this game. It encourage RMT to most players who doesn’t have time to farm and want a fast “gear up” extravaganza. The only ones who loves GDKP are the ones who are doing this most of the time, aka guilds or (small) friends grup who create a GDKP raid specifically for them to make fast gold and I’m sure some of them are also selling the gold for real money currency.

So no! GDKP will never come back to Anniversary and I hope ( if is not already ) to ban it on every version of WoW.

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cba going too much into detail, but they banned it because:

  1. It’s a scapegoat. Bunch of monkeys who play this game don’t understand basic economics and think a GDKP ban prevents inflation (how did that work out lmao)

  2. Having banned gdkp, players rejoiced that Blizzard took action. Meanwhile, blizzard allows bots to run rampant (providing additional subs) - causing, yes you guessed it, INFLATION

Basically blizzard banned gdkp because most of the player base operate at room temp IQ

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If you look on the PVE server the prices have never been that inflated, and you cant say that prices wouldnt have been even higher with GDKP allowed, if you take 2019 classic as a example its far to different without mega servers.

Not seeing that you cant compare a bunch of smaller servers economy to mega server economies is room temp IQ

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The GDKP ban did little in terms of lowering the amount of RMT going on. There is no doubt big gold buyers were (and are) around in GDKP raids, distributing illicit gold to otherwise rule abiding players. At the same time, with GDKP gone players have less incentive to visit lower-tier raids as they simply get little out of it. To make gold, geared players are instead expected to farm solo to get gold for consumes and other stuff that is needed in the hardest raids.

And what does that lead to? Well, instead of farming for 2 hours competing with bots to get just enough for consumes, more players buy smaller amounts of gold every now and then just to skip it. That gold is spent on the auction house and is thus spread across the server population, just as whale gold is on servers where GDKP is allowed.

The difference between Anniversary, where GDKP is banned, and servers with a GDKP community, as I see it, is this; on GDKP servers you have blatantly obvious whales with illicit gold, whereas on non-GDKP servers you have way more people buying small amounts of gold. The net sum is pretty much the same, and the gold ends up in circulation anyway.

Looking at the prices of consumes on Anniversary vs. Era the difference in inflation is actually quite small. If the GDKP ban would have made RMT less lucrative, I would have expected this difference to be a lot bigger. It also speaks for itself that the bots instantly moved off Era a year ago - the market turned out to be just as big on the non-GDKP servers, even adjusting for population size.

In a vacuum GDKP is the ultimate loot distribution system. Everyone gets something out of a raid, be it a shiny epic or some shiny gold coins. Truth is though, as long as RMT exists there will always be those who are willing to cheat to get an advantage. To me, the GDKP ban has not proven to be a success, as it mainly removed an incentive for geared players to do lower tier raids, and at the same time facilitating smaller RMT transactions to get gold for the higher tier raids. What the ban did indeed accomplish is to squash the big whales buying hundreds of thousands of gold - but what is the difference anyway, when it all returns to circulation eventually?

The true solution to battling RMT is not a ban on GDKP. The only way to do that would be to constantly monitor the servers for bots and being harsh on punishment for botting and participating in RMT. Where there is a way to cheat, it’s a law of nature that some will do it. I know it is an utopia, but in a perfect world Blizzard would have tools to battle bots and mitigate RMT without a ban on GDKP. At its core there is nothing wrong with that loot system, it’s just that blaming it for gold laundering is an easy solution to a complex problem. After all, it has G for Gold in its name, in opposite to other loot distribution systems.

tl;dr: no, read it.

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Blizzard did have the data and reasons to make this decision. Im not defending Blizzards every decision they’ve made but in the end, its their game, their choise, we just have to adapt or move on (maybe era?) i dont play era but if im not mistaken its not banned there? (no one ever moves on from wow) :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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They would have been higher with GDKP allowed. That is not the point I am making. GDKP in and of itself has no inflationary attribute. Raw gold generation causes inflation. I cannot understand this for you.

it’s not clear what you are trying to say. Are you talking about era vs spineshatter, or spineshatter vs pve.

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GDKP increases the incentive to farm gold though. Raw gold (and money) only increases inflation in the sense that it increases the money supply, but it does not necessarily increase the cost of goods unless demand follows. GDKP Could have been deflationary if it incentivised farming materials and saturating the consumes market.

The best deflationary actions blizzard could have done would have been to make the game harder, ideally hard enough to the point where these completely unsophisticated bots can’t play it, at least not to the point they can solo farm elite high level dungeons such as brd/brs.

Taxation could also have been very effective. Say a 5% cut on every trade, mail or auction (regardless if it sells or not). This would also have greatly reduced attempts at AH scams and created much more stable prices

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I wish people would just be honest and say what they really mean.

“I was making a fortune in gold, banning it puts me out of pocket”

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Nobody cares what trash emergent gameplay that you and other gkdpers enjoy I have been there I’ve seen it it’s a miserable commodification of epic loot bastardizes one of the pillars of the game and blizzard must have noted that removing it shuts down big RMT operations, the most malicious ones infact that inject the gold back to gold sellers online. Good riddance rest in pisza

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That means that the ban is preventing inflation though

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GDKP cannot simply coexist peacefully without negatively affecting everything. If you have a system that allows to buy loot with gold, many will feel compelled to grind gold for hours daily or do RMT, even if otherwise they would not like to do it. Also it erodes the traditional guild structure which is a core mechanic of early expansions. Surely it fosters RMT as well and by extension botting, even though the botting problem exists without it.

In other words, GDKP is poison and it should remain prohibited because it has far-reaching negative consequences for the entire game

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I think there are a lot of nuances to your argument and I always have a bitter aftertaste after reading your particular choice of words.

But I agree.

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No. The ban is not preventing inflation. It arguably reduces demand for gold, giving less incentive for botting. Without data it could be a completely negligible amount of gold compared to the overall market.

When you have 99 other factors that cause inflation, you end up with inflation.

You still don’t understand. Yes, you can ban gdkp. Yes, you may reduce incentives to buy gold. But what does it matter when you still have 2000 bots and everybody is RMTing to get mounts, prebis, AFFORD CONSUMABLES lmao

You remove the best, fairest loot system, where everybody benefits every single raid - to still have 99 other factors that cause inflation.

This is why if you want to prevent inflation you have to tackle botting. It is the only way.

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gdkp is only good for whales and for money laundering.

EPGP is the best looting system hands down!

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Seeing as you cant 100% prevent inflation, nether in real life nor in game, being pedantic about people saying banning GDKP prevents inflation is kinda stupid, but sure it dosnt PREVENT but reduce inflationary forces. And without the data we dont know if the inflation would have been 100 times worse ether but seeing as we both can agree that GDKP at least asserts some pressure that causes worse inflation we should both be happy that its banned.

You cant prevent inflation you can only reduce it. If you are going to be pedantic about it then so will I.

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This is correct.

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You still don’t understand that botting is the problem.

Remove 99% of the bots and you have the perfect loot system in GDKP.

Therefore no, I am not happy that blizzard banned GDKP, because it has allowed them to use GDKP as a scapegoat to spend exceedingly few resources on tackling botting. This is the first point i wrote in this thread, so we’ve gone full circle.

And on top of that, not only do they ban gdkp instead of tackling botting, but you still have obscene inflation because of the botting they’re not tackling.

Your blame is misguided. Could inflation be minutely worse with GDKP? Sure. But it wouldn’t be an issue at all if Blizzard did their jobs.

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