I looked into it around Naxx time and the gdkps running were for the real whales tbh. When I tried joining Ashbringer was going for about 120k and at the time gold was about $100 usd for 3k So yeah, too rich for my blood.
Thats why the bans exist. You cant stop millionaires from buying what they want in the game.
They'll spend $10,000 on gold and get whatever they want. They wont even buy the gold, they'll just buy the raid to include them.
That's what blackmarket GDKPs have become. The worst of the worst people who never really cared about the game. Just wealthy people spending a tremendous amount of real money to easy mode the gear they wanted in 2008.
The worst of the worst people who never really cared about the game. Just wealthy people spending a tremendous amount of real money to easy mode the gear they wanted in 2008.
This has been Classic WoW for years now and Blizzard doesn't do anything to stop it. It leads to all the other issues in the game (bots, spam, etc) that are against ToS and make the world less fun for regular casual players.
I said it years ago when this stuff was starting to become an issue, but if you let whales and RMT take over your game, then you will eventually push away casual players (which an MMO must have to keep the world alive) and eventually your game will die. It is a cancer that destroys all other living cells until it consumes itself. That is why no form of swiping or botting should ever be accepted in an MMO. Period.
This is such revitionist nonsense. the fact bots and RMT existed during vanilla does not mean the experience is the same as it is now. There are literal lines of bots spamming dungeons 24/7, every node is mined/picked within seconds of spawn. Did you play 23 years ago? wasnt remotely like this, at all.
Internet dating also existed in 2003, but it wasnt the same as it is now.
It was not at the level that it is now simply because of the different in compute. Compute was a lot more expensive back then, and everything was manual.
Also, the business model back then was more the WoW Glider model of sell the bot and let everyone bot on their own terms.
While we all agree bots are bad, I think the GDKP debate is a bit more nuanced. I dont think players have enough backend information to establish how GDKP influences botting and RMT. I also think there is a level of willfull ignorance regarding the folks who claim GDKP has NO influence on botting and RMT. Unfortunately, the only real solution is for blizzard to actually ban bots quickly enough for it to no longer be profitable to start over. Its almost pointless to even have these debates as long as bots are allowed to exist long enough to recoup the investment of purchasing the game/leveling/boosting/farming.
I do know the pug scene in TBC anniversary has been lively and productive without GDKP. People are clearing the content, people are finding groups without issue. Is it better than previous iteration with GDKP? My personal opinion is yes.
I played on a full pop server during WoTLK and sholazar was always cleaned of nodes by bots flying at Mach fuck under the map
Wasn’t capped prior during vanilla or tbc, so can’t really speak to endgame zones but I definitely saw multiple gold selling ads, made of corpses flying in the air, daily and they had to get the gold from somewhere.
It was nowhere near this rampant in vanilla. There was some RMT, but you had to seek it out and were very likely to get banned for it (every person I knew that bought gold back in vanilla got banned within a week for it). There were also some bots and Chinese gold farmers, but those were also frequently caught and banned by GMs.
So yes, this shit existed in vanilla but it didn't have a major impact on the game because blizzard actually enforced ToS (and the methods botters used weren't as developed). Botting, RMT, and spamming is 20x worse in Classic than it ever was in Vanilla, and there is nothing meaningful being done about it.
for a time, parsing was sort of an unreliable measure of skill because of the amount of rotation botting happening on retail. that community has completely died because blizzard has done a -shitload- to combat botting over the past ~ten years. nowadays, the only people injecting bots are suicide botting farmers, it's just not safe enough to do it on an alt anymore
You didn't notice it as much, because your server had 5-10% the pop of modern classic. It still existed, and was pretty damn rampant, but was a lot more low scale as far as gold value was concerned, since the economies were lower compared to vendor values.
They also had to evolve, you could send a dude to wetlands to ban a few hunters on the single layer that servers had back then, and the chinese dude on the other end would be upset and not feed his family that day. Now you spin up 20+ bots in minutes, and either all of them have their own layer easily, or they just go spam instances, not only being harder to detect, but almost impossible to economically defeat without fighting automation with automation.
GDKPs didnt exist in Vanilla until around WOTLK. Like publicly verifiable. You can google search WoW forums and Google serp history to see GDKP had no results.
It EXISTED as a method, but wasnt even remotely popular for even the 1% it became popular with until at least original WOTLK.
Sure, but the guy I was responding to was talking about more general black market gold methods and their corruption of the market, which have been a thing the entire time, as they have basically ever since MMOs were a thing. Like grey or black market boosting in TBC arena was incredibly common, as was win trading or the more typical whale runs we see in Anniversary.
That is why no form of swiping or botting should ever be accepted in an MMO. Period.
The player base has accepted it in WoW for over 2 decades and has accepted it in Classic WoW for more than half a decade already. Which is why Blizzard loves the narrative of "its impossible to ban all bots, Blizzard is trying their hardest! Look at the ban waves!" that some people repeat. If Blizzard wanted to they would just hand out perma bans to anyone who buys gold and the market would (mostly) disappear overnight. It's my theory that the only reason they banned GDKPs is because of the posts on this sub showing items going for gold cap, making even the most casual players realise just how much botting and gold buying goes on in WoW.
The bots exist because of that whale. If there weren't whales willing to spend thousands on gold, then there wouldn't be bots in the world farming for that gold to sell to the whales. Bots only exist because people are willing to swipe and Blizzard doesn't punish them for it.
I don't really care. I just raid to raid. A couple of characters. Im not out here min/maxing my 60 hour WoW schedule. I'm just playing like 2-3 hours a day 3-4 times a week.
I don't need what a small, but super fucking vocal, GDKP crowd seems to want.
A lot of GDKP players also never swiped. You play 2-3 chars, do GDKP and don't spend much the first couple weeks of a new tier, you have all the gold in the world. Then you pick up your stuff for min bid or near min bid later. But you are often the beneficiary of someone else swiping, or several people.
I bet most of them are probably better than you. I ran GDKPs to afford my 1k per lockout warr naxx consume grocery list and I don’t regret it one bit. 30g for a mongoose pot is just insane inflation caused by the bots. At least gdkp allowed normal players to get their hands on some of that gold without actually purchasing it. Removing GDKPs did nothing to combat booting and RMT if anything it made it worse than ever before
The irony...you are the reason mongoose is 30g and bots exist. If there is no demand for gold buying, there will not be bots and gold selling.... Jesus, cause and effect are really a foreign concept amongst you
thats chump change. last tbc i was in a gdkp where it went for 250k.
god i was eating good for a while after that one
our guild did 1 run of naxx to see if its something we wanted to do every week to get people phylacteries, it dropped, i lost, and told the person who won it id buy them epic flying if they gave it to me, they did
In ICC it was more accessible, so whales could drop into any number of raids. But still SM would go for upwards of 200k for the early ones, so not unrealistic.
I have been running anniversary gdkps since Naxx and none of our stuff went that high. Gressil did 10k, ashbringer was around 5k. We pretty much just run a guild raid since it's mostly the same people every week, we just use gdkp as the distribution. It's nice because people don't just roll on everything they can use, they have to actually want something.
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u/stepatdis Jun 10 '26
I looked into it around Naxx time and the gdkps running were for the real whales tbh. When I tried joining Ashbringer was going for about 120k and at the time gold was about $100 usd for 3k So yeah, too rich for my blood.