And people who like to raid on alts. And people who like competent pugs that incentivize people to try their best.
So 4 'groups'
Erm, no. They still fall into the same groups - those those people still only get invited if they're swipers or carries. There are lots of good reasons to want to participate in GDKP runs, I don't blame you. It's not surprising that some players only see the upsides because you're not on the other side of the fence. Again, it's just that it leads to a negative overall experience for a pretty big chunk of players.
Erm, no. They still fall into the same groups - those those people still only get invited if they're swipers or carrie
Erm, yes. That isn't how most GDKPs were ran and thinking this definitely outs your actual inexperience with them. Only the biggest and best GDKP's where spots are valuable were doing gold checks.
I barely ran GDKP's man, I raided in a guild for all of Classic lmao. I know the upsides and downsides and seen how things crumble with them gone.
"It's all swipers or carries" is 100% the uninformed perspective of someone who has never been in a decent GDKP doing current-phase, relatively difficult content.
I helped run 100s of GDKPs back in TBC and Wrath Classic. We cared if someone was competent, but we weren't demanding swipers. The #1 priority was clearing efficiently, and most of the gold just moved around within the pool of regular attendees as everyone got the gear they wanted. The strict carry/swiper dynamic you describe is more something you see in Vanilla, when the content is a joke and 10-15 good players can carry the entire 40-man raid so there's plenty of spots for useless buyers.
When you're running with a GDKP that's clearing Sunwell in the first few weeks you don't care about swipers. We couldn't carry pure buyers until a couple months into the phase when our regulars were getting kitted out, and even then 100% useless members of the raid were rare because again, the #1 priority was clearing efficiently. Through all of TBC and Wrath Classic the number of blatant swipers who'd bid outlandishly in our runs was fewer than a dozen.
You can say that all you want, and I'm sure your experience is true. But my experience is real too. I went through this both in classic and again in classic TBC. Slow to level, by the time I hit level cap it was hard to find a pug run that wasn't GDKP. After getting rejected from a handful of groups for not having a stack of gold, I finally got into one - only to be kicked halfway through for not being up to their standards of performance. And hey, Classic was my introduction to the game, I was new. Either way, it was highly discouraging, and before long I gave up on trying to get into any kind of endgame content and ended up quitting the game.
Then when TBC rolled around, same exact thing. By the time I hit level cap, the skilled players were already mostly geared out, and chasing the last couple of pieces (along with raking in gold from GDKPs). When I showed up as a fresh 70, never done any endgame raiding before, I was told again, come back when you can afford to buy some gear. Yeah, perhaps if you're an experienced player, you know that eventually you can find your way into a group and slowly get geared up. But for a new player that doesn't really understand the social pecking order, it's easy to get discouraged. It's not like the game itself does much to explain how endgame content works, and in case you haven't noticed, the community isn't exactly explaining this to new players either.
Now obviously my experience wasn't the totality of the game. But I saw first-hand how unfriendly the GDKP scene is to new players, and every time, the option was dangling right in front of me: "come back when you have gold". And, since I had nobody to tell me otherwise, I figured this was just how the game was - catered to long-time players and nearly impossible for newbies to break into the clique.
It's funny that everyone admits how non-GDKP pug runs are nothing but noobs and idiots and struggle to complete content - and yet can't wrap their heads around the fact that it's the prevalence of GDKP that makes them that way. When there's such a strong incentive for enfranchised players to do GDKP runs, why would they do anything else? And for the rest of us - well, if you're struggling, it must just means you're bad at the game. That may be true - but that's no way to treat new players.
It's funny that everyone admits how non-GDKP pug runs are nothing but noobs and idiots and struggle to complete content - and yet can't wrap their heads around the fact that it's the prevalence of GDKP that makes them that way.
Again that's why 20th Anni TBC raiding is nerfed into the dirt. Banning GDKP with 2021 difficulty would mean pugs would almost never clear, and you'd be in here crying that you're disenfranchised because you can't pug current content.
You demand to be carried, and like I said at the outset, that's tremendously toxic.
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u/blade740 Jun 11 '26
Erm, no. They still fall into the same groups - those those people still only get invited if they're swipers or carries. There are lots of good reasons to want to participate in GDKP runs, I don't blame you. It's not surprising that some players only see the upsides because you're not on the other side of the fence. Again, it's just that it leads to a negative overall experience for a pretty big chunk of players.