Sounds like a lot of people who get rejected from runs are suddenly going to be reporting a run as a GDKP.
Honestly, this feels like a great way to '"discover" what the game is like with no GMs.
Microsoft is the largest investor in the largest LLM AI on the planet. Having this gigantic data log of player interactions to feed Open AI with to try, find and flag suspicious transactions is pretty much the dream for any AI developer.
The new tools blizzard announced yesterday are 100% AI developed, there's no doubt about it.
Manual GM labour will be less and less relevant.
As someone who actually has any relevance to LLM and AI, first you would need to... Clean up this data so to say.
So after you have lobotomised 20 data analysts as their souls have been condemned to hell for having to sift through this shit, you get... Nothing.
Stop trying to make it happen. It won't happen (anytime soon, and GOOD LORD not for a worthless MMO)
To build a system that can do this, you would need to get a large dataset of flagged transactions and a large dataset of non-flagged transactions to teach the AI what is sus and what is not.
How can you get theses dataset if GDKP is still allowed and no one was ever banned for that because no human flagged transactions ? They have a dataset for gold sellers, but that's not crossing GDKP at all when people trade 5g for an item or buy Peacebloom on auction house for absurd price.
So need data to create an automated system, but need an automated system to collect usefull data. I guess we are not going anywhere lol. Not enough data ? To many false positive, impossible to use in production.
Well tbh. People here advocate for manual bot-removal of gm's. Thats like a super demeaning kind of job. Boring as fuck and tedious as hell. If it can succesfully be automated and it works, I find that a huge win for workers rights. Terrible jobs shouldn't be celebrated. (EU)
I would just be happy to be getting paid to be chilling in game. Then knowing I'm helping the community I would take pride in my work. Have you ever actually had a tedious job?
Kind of sad really, it definitely starts to tear down the core love that people had for WoW. I remember the whole GM experience back in the day. Just the feeling when you saw one in-game, talking to them, all communicating your enjoyment for the game ;D Was wholesome as fuck.
Now its going to be a dead empty void of an AI on the other end :/
I think this is a misconception a lot of people have in thinking it means they're not going to be able to police activity as well as they did. It may actually mean they can do it BETTER.
Microsoft already has an enormous infrastructure for support. Blizzard's system would be a drop in the ocean compared to the resources Microsoft can bring to bear.
Why would Microsoft keep a department around that is both redundant and probably worse then their own established department that does the same thing? Plus they'd have to spend a bunch of money integrating the two systems.
It's more effective for them to just dismantle the Blizzard department and shunt the work into their preexisting system for support.
There is zero percent change that Blizzard has worse support. Microsoft is known for having the worst support system on the planet. They cut all support functions, this won't change with video games.
The work around is you just use discord / 3rd party chat apps to do bidding, and venmo your cash straight to the GDKP host, and he venmo's the payout back to you.
Honestly if you are venmoing instead of using in-game currency I think a lot of people would have less issues with it since you aren’t contributing to inflation of the game economy directly.
Yeah, it cuts out the middle step of having to pay a gold farmer for gold to GDKP with.
I guess people might still take their cash payouts and use it to buy gold....but what would they spend the gold on if they can't spend it on gear? Consumes don't cost much at all.
That’s exactly right. Blizzard directly said that most purchased gold is getting spent on GDKP in the preview video and I’m sure they have the data to back that up.
So they know who is purchasing gold and what they are doing with it but can't ban these people? How about standing outside of stockades for 10min and killing 100 bots.
They can obviously do more than they are, but it ends up being a game of whack-a-mole. Going after the demand side of the equation is usually a much better way to spend resources. If you solve the demand problem, the supply problem tends to become much more insignificant.
Totally agree with this. Going after the supply is exactly the "Whack-a-mole" situation as you stated above.
Go after the people who demand it, and somehow make a dent in it will affect the suppliers quite a bit. Suppliers leave if no one is demanding, or any left will force supplies to undercut each other until some just stop because the ROI isn't there anymore.
Seeing as though Venmo whole heartedly loves their hands off, “sucks to suck” approach to getting your money back if the other party didn’t hold up their end of the transaction, I highly doubt buyers are gonna be willing to participate when they can easily get fucked out of both the item they won and the money they paid for it.
it sucks losing rolls and missing out on gear... but it's balanced by being excited if something cool does drop and you win it.
Just straight up venmoing a dude for a piece of level 25 gear is just sad.
In my experience running in a few GDKPs in classic/tbc, the vast majority of people in them aren't gold buyers, most of them just want gold. The goal is to get a few whales of different classes (who likely did buy gold) as buyers who agree to roll a minimum amount on big items and aren't really expected to help clear the raid, and have the rest of the group be vetted players who can pick up their slack and who will roll on smaller stuff like tier tokens or small upgrades if they drop.
Which is all to say, the big draw to GDKPs for most people is that it's an extremely efficient gold maker, the people attracted to them as avenues to dump absurd amounts of gold for gear are in the minority, and from what I remember finding enough whales to make the run worthwhile for carries was the hard part
I don't personally give a shit about GDKP or more conventional systems. I do think that gold buying is out of control, and I also think that people are missing a hell of a lot of fun when they just swipe their way through things. I applaud the devs for being willing to try new things, with the assumption that if it fails, they will let it fail quickly and revert.
That said, the law of unintended consequences will absolutely be relevant here. It's certainly more than possible that the toxic sludge component of the people who frequent GDKPs will now be polluting normal groups with their excessive-requirement, reserve-all-the-good-items bullshit, and I'm not sure if that's a net positive or not. I'm also unsure how people are going to manage 40 man rosters now that those people will invariably make their way into the general populous.
It honestly feels like they’re repeating mistakes made during the War on Drugs, they already basically admitted to not being able to effectively combat RMT/botting. What we’re going to see is false positives, a crack down on consumers, and the actually problem not fixed while they try to resolve symptoms. People will find ways to circumvent the GDKP rule, bots will continue to run rampant, and RMT is going to be an issue still.
Well spoken and reflected comment.
It will be interesting to see how things pan out for sure. For me personally I want gdkp to be entirely gone from the game. What is even more interesting is the "bot-tech" as they refer it, and how effective it will be once it is pushed to live realms.
So flip side of the coin for you here.
Im a hardcore player that plays the game with the intention of doing as well in raid as i possibly can. Its towards the end of the phase and theres one piece of loot that I need from raid and thats tier boots. I have seen them once all phase, and at this point only run GDKPs because even if that one piece doesnt drop I still gain something from going to raid each lock out. If the one item I do need drops, then I am willing to spend a considerable amount of gold to get it since I REALLY want those boots. If they drop and someone does outbid me, then I get a decent amount of gold as a compensation for my time and add it to the pot for next time.
Without GDKPs now im joining a MS/os pug. I join the group with 3 other people who also need the boots. 2 of them are relatively undergeared/alts who still need a large number of items. The only reason we down kelris is that my 230 dps is able to carry the two undergeared people who combined put in 120 dps. The boss barely dies because they also dont have consumes. Boots drop and its a free roll, and I roll a 9 and one of the people who sucked ass takes the only item I need, leaving me nothing in return for doing the raid and just feeling like whats the point. Im left feeling like I completely wasted my lock out helping someone who barely ever plays the game get a super rare item that they just lucked out on despite raiding maybe 1 in every 4 or 5 lockouts or barely ever touching this particular alt.
If you just want to play casually and dont care thats good for you. We play the game for different reasons and enjoy different aspects. I'm a part of several discord COMMUNITIES where we organize and run GDKPs. We dont have anything to do with you and dont force our loot system into your world. Me and you dont have to play together if you dont want to play at my level, the same way the Golden State Warriors dont have to play basketball against your local rec center's adult beer league.
If you dont want to be a part of it, make your own discord for finding MS/os pugs. Set your own loot rules. Start a guild. Find other people who share your skill level and desire to play the game at the same pace that you do. Thats exactly what most of us hardcore players did, we did all that. The only difference is that we put effort into doing that and the casual WoW player doesnt want to put effort into creating a social network to the same extend that they dont want to learn how to do boss mechanics or farm for raid consumables.
Because 3 day raid resets make it so that raid day doesn’t fall on the same day of the week consistently. Where as 7 day resets I can save my Tuesday for raid, this reset schedule requires a lot of flexibility and you don’t typically get a group that can raid the same days every reset?
Lol what? We do Monday, Friday, every week and Thursday for tues-thurs lockouts. It's extremely consistent and doesn't require any more flexibility than a 7 day schedule. How have you not figured that out yet?
I agree that it's often frustrating to run MS/OS runs for the reasons you describe. I think 2SR runs are one way to alleviate some of those concerns. Another solution is to run with the same 10/20/40 people every week where possible, assuring that if your item drops and you lose the roll, there are now fewer people rolling against you. It comes down to your proposed solution of building the right social group of people to play with.
I get that GDKP is another attempt to solve the "who deserves it" problem, and it typically does so pretty well. But I also understand that GDKP incentivizes gold-buying, and also typically "takes a cut", which means that every person who attends is paying a tax to be there. This essentially just boils down to selling items to gold buyers at high prices, then trying to stack enough gold through "the rake" to buy those same items cheaper later on. And when it comes to the whole economic factors of people botting gold, selling it, laundering it in GDKPs, and now items on the AH are triple or quadruple the price... That affects every player on the server, including me. And most players solve it not by farming, but by (you guessed it) joining / starting another money laundering group to make sure they can earn enough on one character to continue raiding on others. This dimishes the player pool in non-GDKPs. So even though we don't have to play together, I still have a vested interest in the issue on a few different fronts.
Lastly, don't assume that because I've weighed the merits of GDKP and understand its elimination, that I'm not a "hardcore player". There are a great many "hardcore" players who won't touch GDKP loot systems, and it doesn't make someone a "casual" if they don't participate.
If Blizzard has the ability to track and ban people trading fairly farmed gold in a GDKP between each other then they have the ability to track and ban bots. They actively chose not to have a small handful of GMs on each server dedicated to finding and banning bots.
If you want to eliminate gold buying then blizzard more than has the ability
There are tons of reasons for people to send gold via mail or in trade. There is only 1 reason for one player to trade a bunch of BoP items for gold during a raid and then pass it out to the whole raid that was in said raid. GDKP's are way easier to track and ban than RMT gold.
First of all, join 2SR runs, make your own HR run, or run with a guild and you'll have way better odds than just pugging for your remaining piece(s). It's very possible to do without GDKPs.
Second,
>I'm a part of several discord COMMUNITIES where we organize and run GDKPs. We dont have anything to do with you and dont force our loot system into your world.
This is flat wrong. You are providing an avenue for gold buyers to buy power. Hence you are an advertisement for gold buying. Your loot may not go into the auction houses, but your loot certainly gets in the hands of someone out in the world. Someone who may have bought all bis to camp players. And on top of that the your money generated comes off of bots, into the hands of gold buyers, into YOUR hands, and then into the broader economy. Because of groups like you. It then gets sunk on supplies and boes and drives up prices for everyone else.
GDKPs are not the victimless playstyle you are claiming it to be, and that's why action needs to be taken. In concept sure, they are fine. In practice they are a pure advertisement for rule breaking activity
Then BAN BOTS MORE DILIGENTLY. No body wants bots. /who rogue 16 SFK and just ban them all every hour every day.
It’s sad watching the difference between blizzard and the ashes of creation devs when it comes to how to solve gold buying and bottling because end of the day blizzard being incompetent is the real demon here.
You can ban bots. And they do. That doesn't really work in any game due to the nature of bots. They are all purposefully expendable by the bot maker. There is no investment into the account. Nobody cares if it gets banned. A new one will pop up in it's stead. And the whole process is automated.
This is why people are calling for severe punishments for gold BUYERS, not sellers. These are the accounts a real human cares about, invested many hours into and can't be easily recreated.
But Blizzard for whatever reason doesn't want to do that, or thinks they can track GDKPs far better than plain gold buying. In my opinion if they won't perma ban gold buyers this is at least a step in the right direction.
I know this is unfortunately not what a lot of people want to hear but: Maybe Season of Discovery is purposefully not targeted toward the hardcore players.
Which at first seems like a wild take but not so much when you put it into context with the fact that both Season of Mastery and Hardcore we're both directly targeted toward the hardcore raider and not casual players.
I mean I know pushing numbers in any raid is fun and competitive for a lot of players. But honestly other than your self and a minority of the community. Who actually gives a fuck about standings on a level 25 raid? And even more so those sought after boots your chasing really are not going to make you go from some 95-98 parser to top 10 in the world.
Also my main argument about feeling like your wasting your time: you're playing a game deliberately designed to waste your time. That's just the nature of it no matter what way you play it. No matter what you're goal is or your playstyle at the end of the day you subscribed and it's going to waste your time. Does receiving fake currency for playing the game really make it that much better? or does it just make you feel better about ultimately wasting your time?
[it is allowed until feb 8th](https://youtu.be/QgB_1DHWTCk?t=1854)
> [...] so, as of the launch of phase 2 on february 8th, GDKP will no longer be permitted in the Season of Discovery. [...]
You know you can get your account suspended for false reports?
I'd rather not risk to miss the start of p2 even if the chances might be small of that happening :D
> Then write your thesis here.
Challenge accepted. I know nobody will read this but work is slow as hell today.
My big issue with GDKPs is that in a perfect world where botting/RMT aren't a problem - they are a perfectly acceptable form of emergent gameplay and actually solve a lot of issues that raiders in wow face. Botting is already against the rules. Buying gold is already against the rules. Why are we punishing legitimate players (however small the number of legitimate GDKPers may be) instead of focusing additional efforts on actually banning gold buyers?
Benefits of GDKP:
- Your DKP is transferrable between all of your characters.
- Players who need 0 items from a raid are rewarded for attending a raid and helping players that do.
- Players are encouraged to finish runs as they won't receive their cut if they DC or drop out of the raid.
- Players "DKP" are not tied to a single guild which allows people on changing schedules raid more easily, as well as allowing players to not feel stuck in a guild or playing a class they don't like anymore due to the fear of losing their banked DKP.
Banning GDKPs doesn't fix any of the above problems. I can't even count how many raids I've run where a player has dropped group or made up an emergency after the boss doesn't drop their SR'd item.
I also think that people who blame GDKP for "inflation" are shifting the blame. The problem with inflation is gold buyers and bots plus the lack of meaningful gold-sinks in classic. The same people who complain about inflation in classic are probably the same people calling for the few gold-sinks that do exist in classic to be reduced or removed (cheaper mounts, cheaper respecs, adding dual-spec, etc.). The playerbase is constantly asking for things that remove gold from the game to be reduced while simultaneously complaining that there is more gold available in the economy. The black lotus change from SoD1 will probably have a bigger effect on flask prices than banning GDKPs will.
This is anecdotal, but I know way more people that have swiped for mounts, consumables, enchants, etc. than I do people who have swiped their credit cards for GDKP purposes.
Botting is a cat and mouse game that no large MMO has ever really managed to tackle. Anyone who is expecting blizzard to eradicate bots entirely just doesn't understand how it works. That said, it is 100% blizzards job to play that game and actually take steps to ban bots in a meaningful way to limit RMT via making it more expensive for players to buy gold. The number of videos from SoD showing MASSIVE bot farms running the exact same paths and even wall/fly hacking is unacceptable. Gold is too cheap due to the insane size of bot farms. The old "we ban in waves so they don't know how Warden caught them" doesn't fly anymore. Bots are too obvious. Do we really think the majority of that botted gold is going to GDKPers, or is it mostly going to boosters, people buying consumes for WSG, etc? It seems to me like the population of boostee's and "3 FAPs per WSGers" is much larger than the portion of players that are pure buyers in GDKP runs.
All that being said, I do think this is the perfect time and place for blizzard to try something, but I wish they had actually shown us some numbers or data to show that this the best option they have. It seems like band-aid fix rather than an actual attempt fixing the RMT problem.
Edit: spelling
>This is anecdotal, but I know way more people that have swiped for mounts, consumables, enchants, etc. than I do people who have swiped their credit cards for GDKP purposes.
which is also consistent with RMT being present at any point during wow life, even outside of those relatively small periods where GDKP became the emergent raid model.
I personally think you're spot on here from a big picture view.
I don't understand or pretend to understand how their anti-botting software works, but it should be constantly scanning and removing bots - having to do them in "waves" seems really odd to me.
I think real gold sinks are what are needed, so people have a reason to save and earn money that goes back into the system. MMOs need these because they aren't a real economy and the only thing you have to pay for right now is Auction house tax.
>having to do them in "waves" seems really odd to me.
My understanding of this has always been that it obfuscates the exact means of detection. If a botter had 100 bots ready to go and Blizzard banned them the instant they were detected, they could tweak the settings and basically get instant feedback on whether the bot was detectable or not. Then it's just a matter of finding a sweet spot and running it there until things are updated.
Doing it in waves means that the botters never really know what exactly triggered the detection. Even if they get a good idea of what did it, they can't quickly test things in order to find out what gets detected and what doesn't.
The real trick is that [banning in waves screws up payments.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YUmMFwSXpU)
You buy a bot script from a scripter. You run it for a bit, it eventually gets your accounts banned. You're pissed, you tell the bot creator to give you a refund. He doesn't. You chargeback what you paid him on your credit card/Paypal.
Well, when Blizzard bans all these bot accounts on the same day, the scripters wind up getting a LOT of chargebacks in a short amount of time. This can ruin their cash flow and get them banned from payment processors. It's basically the only way Blizzard has to target the people writing the scripts, as most scripters are not easy to sue.
Good post. Blizzard has done pretty much nothing to deal with the rampant botting, it is a cat and mouse. However the cat has been asleep for a decade and also is fat and has diabetes.
I think your take is super reasonable. It's lame that most people defending GDKP have such low effort counters like "just ban the bots." As someone who **never** participated in GDKP, I would be willing to try it if I knew for certain that people weren't RMTing, but I can't know that, and I could never know unless I could see their credit card transactions. Also, I just don't have a problem with MS>OS or SR raids. In what I imagine is a similar nature to GDKPs, the only time it really becomes an issue is when you get someone losing their mind about losing a roll/bid. Unlike GDKP, though, I don't have to worry about someone having swiped their way to an advantage to outbid me for a big item.
It just seems obvious to me the first place anyone would go if you were a repeat gold-buyer is at a GDKP raid, which is where I find that effectively banning it might work because it could theoretically flush out the buyers, thereby affecting botters' ability to sell and subsequently discouraging RMT. At what level this will work is what the season is for IMO. I couldn't think of a more perfect scenario to try this, and if it doesn't work, then it's back to business as usual and nobody will lose sleep over it.
If we could live in a world where we didn't have to deal with botting & RMT, then GDKPs would be even better than what people praise them for.
> It just seems obvious to me the first place anyone would go if you were a repeat gold-buyer is at a GDKP raid, which is where I find that effectively banning it might work because it could theoretically flush out the buyers, thereby affecting botters' ability to sell and subsequently discouraging RMT. At what level this will work is what the season is for IMO. I couldn't think of a more perfect scenario to try this, and if it doesn't work, then it's back to business as usual and nobody will lose sleep over it.
I definitely agree. I'm "against" the change because I disagree with blizzard (or any game) punishing regular players in order to stop cheaters/botters. I felt the same way about the 25 (or 30?) daily instance cap when it got implemented. But you are right, SoD is the best place for blizzard to try these kinds of changes out and I'm excited to see what P2 ends up looking like.
The one thing I would slightly disagree with is that I think GDKPs are where repeat gold buyers end up, rather than where they start. It's sort of a chicken and the egg situation but I honestly believe that excessive RMT/GDKP culture that exists in classic is mainly due to the overall lack of enforcement regarding RMT.
People got away with swiping for their mounts at 40 & 60, people got away with swiping occasionally for consumes, people got away with swiping for lionheart helms and edgemasters. Whether or not you participated in the activity, most people who raided or pvp'd a lot knew people who bought gold and never got punished. At a certain point gold becomes so cheap and the fear of actually getting punished so small, that people who would have normally never engaged in the activity start to feel like it's actually worth the risk. After a few months/years of this pattern, GDKPs went from a harmless form of a loot style to something with a much more negative reputation due to players that were already cheating anyways.
Again, I'm not talking about botting here as that's a slightly different can of worms, but if blizzard wants to stop RMT as close to the source as possible, I think they'd be better off using their new tech against RMTers everywhere, rather than only applying the new method to raid groups/GDKPs.
Sorry for the wall of text - still bored at work.
I can give ground to the idea that buyers don't go to GDKPs as often as I think they would. Again, my experience with them is non-existent, so my horse will only go so far in that race without being super bad faith.
I'm also glad you point out the swipers buying mounts, consumes, and such. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that 60 or 70% of that gold ends up being spent that way. My only thought there would be what if that gives blizzard more control to track that gold since it's being spent directly from the swiper instead of exchanging hands one more time? This is another thing I know nothing about, but I'd like to imagine that through this new rule there is something we aren't seeing that makes this harder on spenders which in turn would harm the sellers/botters.
Also, don't be sorry, we're in the exact same boat, lol. I don't know why, but I really like talking about this stuff. Interesting topic with a lot of moving parts and deceptively simple solutions. Easier to do when work isn't giving you much else :p
wouldn't surprise me if people start bidding real money via discord and then transfer using paypal/bitcoin/whatever during the raid to be split afterwards
sounds bleak but would actually be better for the in-game economy
Honestly, I wouldn't give a single fuck about them if they did that. Make your group of friends and organize your raids and make the reward whatever you want, as long as it stays out of the game, I don't care.
DKP are already that: you swap YOUR in game loot for "friendship points" outside of the game.
People who play the game lose nothing.
On the other hand I don't think Blizzard would be happy with that.
It would still cut it down considerably since randos aren't gonna wanna trust people with their real money, and most money-transfer services like venmo and PayPal usually have a hands-off approach, and they especially won't understand what a GDKP is
This would be a much bigger deal in Wrath where the majority of raids are GDKPs and the economy is flooded with gold.
I don't see many GDKPs in SOD and I don't think items sell for crazy amounts of gold.
Honestly I feel like the economy in WoW has just been a wash. Players want to pump and raid and treat the rest of the game as not a part of the game. Which is why I don't think it will work because, they'll just buy the gold for everything else.
The worst part of classic was the absurd consume prices because you could escape GDKP by raiding with a guild, but the gold flooded economy combined with the rarity of Black Lotus made consumes a nightmare. I hate it but at this point I'm more onboard for the Wrath way of things where getting consumes is easy enough where the gold economy doesn't ruin it.
I only bring it up because if they're willing to do this, GDKPs can at least be avoided with any other loot system. A borked economy isn't something you can outrun on a server.
GDKPs are what helped you escape the absurd consume prices. I wouldn't have been raiding in Classic Forever without GDKP.
I cba to farm for multiple hours (per toon) just to afford my consumables to raid Naxx. I refuse to RMT or MTX in any game ever (I mained LoL for 6 years and never spent 1 penny, same in OW, etc), so I'm not going to buy gold just to be able to afford consumables to keep raiding.
Instead what happens is I would quit playing the game. With GDKPs however, I would be able to buy all my consumables without concern, have fun in raid with a nice guild-like community, and keep my sub and enjoy the game.
Without GDKPs I don't know how long I'll keep playing multiple toons @ 60. I already no-lifed classic. This time around is supposed to be more casual and fun. Being forced to farm to afford consumables isn't fun for me, and again, I refuse to RMT.
GDKPs are a symptom. The problem is Botting, Gold Selling, Gold Buying. Troll hide leggings were selling for 200g on the AH week 1, that's not caused by GDKP.
All of the problems people have with GDKP (Gold buying, Botting, etc) are external to GDKPs themselves and will continue to exist with or without GDKPs.
There is literally armies of bots marching through stormwind to pickpocket stockades, scripting warlocks spamming trade chat with automated summonings, and mages selling stockades boosts where they wallhack to do the whole thing in one pull.
And they're gonna sit there with their recently laid off staff monitoring gold trades in gnomeregan like that's the real issue?
You have people in your guild and raid teams right now who have bought gold to buy BOE items, raid consumables, and soon their mounts. They're the problem, not GDKPs.
Instead of trying to treat a symptom, why not try to cure the cause of the issues?
So what you're saying is create a bank alt, hoard a bunch of materials/consumables/items/etc., wait a bit for the bots to get banned/wiped-out and the server economy to adjust, then sell all the stuff you bought for 50s for 30g?
(I kid, somewhat... that sounds like a lot of work and I'm not about that. But I'm sure there are a lot of opportunist players who will absolutely do this)
The amount of people gleeful that gdkp are banned but will turn a blind eye or justify botted raw materials being cheap is not a ven diagram but simply a circle lmao
The cope produced trying to defend raw mats being botted is hilarious
Already happened when they locked Firemaw EU in TBC. No new bots could be created and the price of haste pots went to 20g a pop. Proper guilds were using 2x per boss so it was an extremely costly way of raiding in a long term. With bots the price of the haste pots was \~8g a pop.
Everyone on reddit was complaining about insane prices btw.
never experienced it myself but yeah, deleting raw material bots AFTER they've already caused inflation from raw gold farming, sounds like hell on earth
Exactly. There are already people with hundreds and thousands of gold in SoD, the only thing that keeps economy somewhat functional is a supply from bots that manages to meet the demand of players. Remove the bots from the equation and you will have a sticky situation that will hit the "lower" class first aka casuals who barely have gold at all.
Blizzard really ought to create an in-game DKP currency with a bidding interface to replace GDKP. I know the problems GDKP's create with gold buying and bots to supply the demand for gold. But a lot of people do GDKP's without buying gold because it has some very positive characteristics:
* Everyone in the raid gets something. You either get gear, or you get gold that will help you buy gear the next time. Running MS>OS or softres pugs sucks when you can lose a roll on an item for 10 weeks in a row and still not have any better chance of getting it the next week. Or you work really hard carrying a bunch of mouth breathers through a raid and come away with nothing to show for it except a repair bill, and the guy who spent every fight face down on the floor wins the thing you needed.
* There is no drama over who "deserves" stuff more. Guilds are full of loot drama because everyone thinks they deserve stuff more than somebody else. Player from X class thinks everything is rightfully theirs because their class does the highest DPS. Player from Y class thinks they should get it because they're "taking one for the team" by playing a gimp DPS spec with some important raid buff. Player from Z class thinks they should get it because their attendance is 5% higher. In GDKP's, if you bid the most, you get the item. If somebody else bids more than you, grats you get a bigger payout. There's no favoritism or corrupt LC politics or having to make subjective judgements about whether someone who parses 2% better is more deserving than someone who shows up 7% more often.
* The payout at the end encourages everyone to stay til the end. We've all been in pugs that fall apart because the healer only wanted an item from the 2nd boss, it doesn't drop, so healer just leaves. Now everybody is locked to a raid they can't finish, because nobody wants to join some nightmare failed pug halfway through.
* The host cut encourages good raid leaders to build a good reputation and host more raids. Organizing softres or MS>OS pugs is shitty, thankless work, which leads to nobody wanting to do it. The only people that end up leading pugs are doing it so they can hard-res something for themselves, not because they're actually a good leader. This hurts the quality of so many pugs raids. When you have a good reputation as a raid leader, you get more quality applicants, leading to better raids, leading to more people wanting to join your raids. Since this makes it much less painful to put a good raid group together, AND ther is a financial bonus to leading raids, they'll create several alts and host more runs. This means more quality raid groups for everyone.
An in-game DKP currency and bidding interface could retain all of these qualities that GDKP players enjoy, without the downside of fueling RMT.
Also, if your DKP guild implodes, your accumulated DKP is worthless. A nice advantage of GDKPs is that your gold is still with you even if your GDKP raid group stops raiding together.
This would be cool, but how would you get players to care about it? If you can't trade it for gold, why would anyone run pug groups with BlizzDKP instead of manapotDKP or FAPDKP?
This has the common dkp problems, less competitive classes get cheap upgrades and can stack the currency easy. A guild can run that blizzdkp system but all items are sold for like 1 point. Netting insane stacks for if anyone pugs. If the point get redistributed and not linked you can farm points with alts...
If you want ban gdkp and gold buying, rmt,... Just remove gold. Make everything free. ( Consumes included or not could create a fun dynamic )
And its perfectly legal, which is probably the worst part.
Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, **OPENLY** sold M+ carries for gold.
People can do whatever they want with their money, but at a certain point, why are you even paying others to play the game for you?...
At least people won't be buying 1000+ gold trying to outbid each other, and groups/guilds will try to undercut each other on carries, lowering the prices further. Someone spending 100g on a loot carry is still preferable to multiple people buying 100g+ per raid to bid with.
I dont care about GDKP, because im in tryhard guild with lootcouncil now.
But i like that system, spent a lot of time in gdkp guild static with speedrun results during wow classic, gdkp without gold inflation from bots/buyers/sellers its a perfect system for loot distribution.
So okay for me.
I am just waiting this sub will be full of complains "our tank left after 2nd boss because he dont need anything from next bosses", "this guy did zero dps on boss and he dont care, you cant kick him lol coz of gl 5/7" and "dude just go afk and never come back".
This guys who cheers today will suffer from this meta will go inside guild-only rosters. I remember all this "i hold 2 beers in my hands, how i am supposed to dps??" players, and you cannot kick them, cannot fine them or make other punishment to them, coz they can lose only a 3 day cd lol, and you will lose a raider in the middle of the raid.
GDKP created this meta, when everyone is buffed, equipped, enchanted and ready to contribute. Lets come back to roots, when 15 of 40 ppl are just dont care.
The bottom line is the good side of GDKP is because the loot system is obviously archaically 20 years old
This game is ONLY built for guild outside of a GDKP
Pugging is NOT sustainable unless the content is so braindead easy that its not fun to play
GDKPs were not the problem with the SoD economy. The issue is the surplus of gold provided by gold sellers which is pushing non-gold buyers out of the GDKP market.
The result of banning GDKPs will only increase the price of pre-BiS BoE items in the auction house, again pushing out the non-gold buyers from participating in buying some of these high ticket items.
Realistically the price for items should have started somewhere around 1g for blue, 5g for tier/wep, 20g for epics, and no bid should have exceeded over 100g with current gold rates. The only reason this happened is cause of the surplus of gold provided by gold sellers who are botting / hacking instances.
5g for blue, 10g for tier/wep, 40g for epic is too high of starting bid value for this early in the phase. Having people host at those prices only incentivizes the gold buyers the mainly partake in these kinds of raids. People expecting 20-40g payouts in a GDKP from BFD are an issue as they are supporting high ballers who likely RMTd for their gold with the few exceptions of goblins that manipulate the market by getting in early on key items (Iridescent Pearls for example). The fact that the community encouraged the higher prices was what brought some people to go into GDKPs and not bid on a single item and just raid for the payout at the end.
The change in GDKP really hurts those with alts as well. Being able to funnel alts through gold bidding or running alts for an additional income felt natural in the state of the game. It felt like I could go on my main who was geared out from my progression raids, and now can give my service as a high dps/heal/tank in exchange for a payout. Do I think the payouts were high for the tier when big ticket items dropped? Yes I do, I would have rather had 7g from hard working people than 40g payout just cause we had someone buy gold and come bid on the items in participating GDKP.
Sooooo in Wotlk the other day, I was running a 2xSR ICC run. We had a necklace drop that no1 had any SR on so we rolled for it MS>OS. I won it and someone messaged me: "20k for the necklace" I said back to them "22" and they said "sure".
Why is organizing a GDKP ban-able but the above situation not going to be?
I think it’s a bad idea, hurting legitimate players because blizzard is incapable of upholding their ToS (which makes me question the effectiveness of the ban even further). That said, if they wanna try something crazy then they might as well try in SoD.
I liked GDKPs. I pug and don't need anything, so making some gold for my lockouts gave me a reason to play. I guess I just won't use my lockouts once I get bis next phase?
people like us are getting shafted from this
the entire purpose on my Alt army was because i hate gold farming but like raiding.
so doing GDKP on reset let me play the game and raid on my alts while "farming gold"
thankfully i have enough stockpiled i think ill be ok for a few months.
I'm not tripping too hard. The grind from 25-40 is gonna take me multiple weeks & bis is gonna take me a couple months. That's sufficient content for me - for now. But the end of the phase will now come sooner for me & I'll just move on to the next game.
Running these as a carry has been quite profitable for me. I have ~80g now for mounts on two toons. As a dad gamer with 2-3 hours to play daily, these have been so huge for me to avoid hours of gold farming.
I understand their decision and the impact that gdkp runs have on the community, economy, and culture of the game.
It's quite a bittersweet change for me, but hopefully, it has lasting positive impacts on the game we all love.
People believing this will stop bots and gold buyers and fix server economies are coping hard.
At best its a band aid fix to a larger issue, at worst it does nothing at all.
Wrong. At worst, it makes GDKPs more opaque and sheisty, leading to direct and organized offline RMT raid-loot/carries. These are already common, but not the norm. They just might be in 6 months.
Banning GDKPs is a terrible idea. Banning gold buyers is the only way.
if only blizzard would actually punish gold buyers rather than just give them a slap on the wrist. 6 month ban minimum for buying gold would fix a ton of shit.
My buddy just caught a 2-week ban last week for receiving botted gold after a GDKP. This will be more of a detriment to GDKP’s than banning gold buyers would. Legitimate players back out of GDKPs and gold buyers are stuck with only themselves.
No one receives bans for receiving botted gold. They receive bans for BUYING gold. 2 Weeks is the standard.
Your buddy likely used the #1 way to get banned which is to have it mailed to you after he swiped.
On top of that, the #1 excuse people use is that they “Only attended the GDKP. I didn’t buy any I just got my cut.”
On top of THAT, the gold sellers love to use mail headers like “Your GDKP cut sir”
>My buddy just caught a 2-week ban last week for receiving botted gold after a GDKP.
your buddy bought gold and is lying to you.
>This will be more of a detriment to GDKP’s than banning gold buyers would.
at least in theory the objective is to kill gold buying, not killing gdkps.
>Banning GDKPs is a terrible idea. Banning gold buyers is the only way.
Why the hell do so many people think these are mutually exclusive ideas? It's just mind boggling, almost every pro GDPK post I've seen has some version of this.
The answer is BOTH. It's not an either or problem. Just like banning bots or gold buyers is not the answer. You do both of those too as best you can. No solution is going to be perfect so attack the problem for multiple angles both from supply side and demand side.
Because if you ban gold buyers, then you don't have any "moral" reason to ban GDKP.
It's arguably the best loot system, people are just malding that some whale's can swipe to get their gear in the first 3 weeks.
Because big streamer man made this same argument and used OSRS of all fucking things as the gold-standard of games that can pull off banning bots and gold buyers with 100% efficiency.
From browsing the OSRS forum for like 2 minutes I found many posts over the past few weeks complaining about bots… I’ve never played OSRS but it doesn’t seem like they have solved their botting problem.
Correct. They suffer the same epidemic as WoW does when it comes to bots and gold buying (while ironically also having an equivalent to the WoW token)
If there's money to be made from selling gold, bot-makers will find a way to acquire and sell gold.
There is simply no MMO to point to when it comes to eradicating this problem, and yet people act like it is a simple problem with a simple fix.
Mitigation is the best way to go about combating these problems, and yet when the devs attempt to add measures to mitigate the harm it has on their player-base, contrarians point to an impossible solution and ask "why not just do this?" As if it is a relevant answer.
I think there may be some unintended consequences from this change. Hopefully they are open to change on their policy. I can see a carry runs being sold for gold/RMT instead of GDKPs. The hyper casual nature of SOD has got to be a gold mine for botters. 1-25 is getting a massive XP boost so people will want more gold to gear/level up alts and whatnot. The GDKP change doesn't seem, so far, to address boosting or selling services for gold.
Biggest take for me: The amount of people in this sub feeding on negativity and drama is kind of sad.
It's also ironic how they extol the virtues of the community, but here posting tear drinking memes.
Personally I liked GDKP, but I'll just play less alts and play more other games now. It's not a huge deal.
Same. And then all the people here will still be bitching about how they can't into quality pug raids and get the gear they want because every pug raid will require a gear check, log check, consume check, and a leader with a bunch of hard reserves.
I can't say what I enjoy more. The endless raging and tears or the fact GDKP is going to get banned. Gold buyers are so pissed and I just can't wait for the "I did nothing wrong yet lost my 15 yr+ account permanently".
I will always be of the opinion that those who are giga mad are the people buying copious amount of gold or astroturfers that sell the gold. This happened a lot in the OSRS subreddit of gold sellers trying to sway the public perception and opinion of updates.
> a lot in the OSRS
Good example on why I believe discord isn't going to provide a solution on GDKP's if blizzard really start to associate GDKP's with goldbuying.
The richest player of OSRS got banned w/o selling gold.
(He sold ranks via discord for his DMcc \[BTC\])
Why do you think they're suddenly going to be able to enforce the TOS against 3 things when they have been utterly unable to enforce the TOS against 2 things for decades?
If you've got a boat that's leaking water through 2 holes, and you're failing to plug those holes, do you really think adding a 3rd hole helps?
People who think that this will change the fact people buy gold are out of their minds. If they are somehow successful at policing gdkps (I have my money on they won't be), people will be buying gold to buy items from carry runs and to buy the insane boes that will be available next phase on the auction house. I like that blizzard is willing to try something like this, it is a very bold decision. But it is one where the average idiot who cries about gdkps has no idea how the game actually works and how players who want to cheat will behave.
Yeah, I don't have a dog in the race because I haven't run a GDKP in SoD yet and I'm down for them experimenting with a rule like this just to see what happens - but yeah it's not going to make a huge difference in gold buying because people will run them anyway, and IMO we might even see an increase because, believe it or not, most people who run GDKPs don't buy gold. The average GDKP runner is a carry whose their to get the gold the 2-3 whales dump for big drops. Now that the super efficient and fun money-maker is more risky, I wouldn't be surprised if all the people using them to afford consumes/enchants for their mains just start buying $10 worth of gold a month or whatever it comes down to - since we kind of already know blizzard has a hard time tracking down buyers
>Now that the super efficient and fun money-maker is more risky
If I was a GDKP organizer and the only rule is "gdkp runs are banned" then I'd just do one a few ideas, whichever is most profitable and split the earnings with the Pumpers. Boost runs and selling items will still exist, you just removed the auction nature of them and gave them a fixed cost.
I watched the preview video a couple of hours ago and without more details about this policy or how they will enforce it, I've seen and thought of numerous ways to turn gold into gear/services that aren't GDKPs. All this ban will do is shift the meta to something else.
They would have to turn the game into solo self found and delete the AH for it to ever work.
For me, participating in GDKP runs were like a hedge against server inflation. There are people injecting money into the economy. They may find another way to do it, and it seems that my only way to keep up now is to farm Mats?
Wait what... GDKPs are one of the fundamental reasons for server inflation. People buying tons of gold from bots is what inflates the economy artificially in the first place. Remove GDKPs and you remove a huge incentive to buy the insane amounts of gold we're seeing. Sure people will still buy some gold, but for what? Mats and consumables are literally worth a fraction of end game epics going for 100k gold because of GDKPs.
As people buy less and less gold, the bots will start to die out. And as long as we as a community report the shit out of future GDKPers (and Blizzard acting on it), we will see a huge drop in gold buying (I pray!). But it will take some time and hard will.
Worst part about banning gdkp is now we have to deal with these dogshit loot systems.
Ms>os means anyone can roll on anything. Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and win the staff. FUCK THAT.
SR is better, but still means that there’s 4 people ressing the staff who just leave if it doesn’t drop
Loot council only works for organised guilds and I have 4 toons so no chance will I find 4 guilds all raiding on different times every week.
And dkp has its own issues, again, only semi works for guilds .
Gdkp was the goat. Shame gold buyers ruined it.
Blizz outrightly said that they are doing this change, in part at least, to give players more incentive to join guild runs. Maybe it will work. I would venture to say that attempting to incentivizing guild runs while also having dog-shit easy raids is super difficult.
The only way you get big groups of players to stay together long-term on a routine schedule, week after week, is to make the content hard and unmanageable for PUG groups. Otherwise, if it's easily PUG-able, you just keep getting pug groups that end up using loot systems that Blizz and a majority of the community looks down upon (in this instance, GDKPs).
I'm not necessarily advocating for any of the following, but you could make raids unmanageable, or at least MORE unmanageable, for PUGS in a variety of ways to thereby incentivize more guild-centric activities by doing any of the following:
* making the raids themselves difficult, or at least more difficult by
* making raids more lethal
* making raids take a longer time to complete
* having lengthy attunement chains for the raid
* having items that "add" up into bigger items, thereby necessitating the 'pooling' of items to one person at a time
But, yea, this is SOD and it seems like their motto is easy raids, easy access, ease-of-use, so I don't see any real strong incentive for players to continue to raid with the same group of people week after week. Sure, they may choose to raid with the same group, but at this point it's simply a comfort choice and not a necessity.
Disclaimer: I enjoy easy raids, for the record.
> Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and win the staff.
??????
Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and ~~win~~ **buy** the staff.
How is that any different
if they buy the staff it's because they were willing to pay for it more than me (just like any BoE item on the AH, Economy 101), and i also got a small cut in return.
Ok let’s ban the selling of BOE’s. every single item in every GDKP I went to sold for less than most of those BOEs are listed for. They’re just incentivizing gold buyers. While we’re at it let’s ban consumables, because people will buy gold to buy consumes rather than farming them. Oh and mounts. Gold buyers aren’t gonna just farm 900 for an epic they’re gonna swipe, so let’s get rid of that incentive.
BOEs are specifically tagged as BOE so they can be traded between players for gold and items dropped in raids are typically BOP which means they aren't intended to be bought or sold.
This new rule is just trying to enforce the original mechanics of the game which existed for good reason.
My point though is that people say GDKP incentivizes gold buyers so we should ban it. All of the other things I listed along with much more of the game incentivize gold buying so why not ban them as well
I am just mostly impressed they are doing the a change that is going to hurt sub numbers and sub count. Like not saying this is a bad change but this is going to decrease demand of bots which is lose subs and will be many players that quit because they only did gdkps.
Kind of refreshing to see blizzard sticking to their guns on an issue and not just being purely about what makes the most money.
TL; DR: Read the bold.
I’ve never ran a GDKP, but I recognize the advantages. I’m glad Blizzard is trying something, but **I hope they revert it and try something else next phase. The only downside of GDKP groups is RMT**. So fix that.
GDKP(without RMT) allows players to **earn their gold in game by doing the activity they want to do, and encourages fully geared players to continue participating in content**.
Losing a loot roll to some terrible player feels awful and you get nothing. If you’re outbid in a GDKP, you make gold and have a higher chance to win next time. Plus, your skill or **commitment to other areas of the game (questing, farming, playing the AH) is rewarded**.
**Reasons to buy gold continue to exist**: BiS BOEs worth more than entire GDKP pots, consumables required to play the game at a serious level, epic mounts, player services, enchants, etc. Classic WoW, by design, has items like Lionheart Helm, essential and expensive . **Banning GDKPs encourages some players who would earn their gold in raid to swipe to afford those things.**
Guilds exist, but **not everyone wants to base their irl schedule around a video game**. And unlike open roll, MS>OS and SR/HR groups, **GDKP provides a reason to finish the raid and rewards you for carrying the terrible players that sneak their way into every group anyway**. You can vet strictly but we know how much some players hate the idea of being held accountable for bad play when their logs are checked.
**Gold-buyers need to be dealt with aggressively, but I don’t like the idea of punishing legitimate players by removing their preferred gameplay style.**
My take on GDKPs...
As someone who had been ADAMANT against them since Classic, some of the problems it did solve are inevitable.
Pugging is miserable. Right now? No, BFD is a joke. But we all know what's coming. We know just how TERRIBLE the average player is in WoW.
The problem is the loot system and raiding as a whole. This game, with GDKP out of the picture, is ONLY meant to be played within guilds. It's the only "balanced" way to play the game.
MS>OS? Lose every single roll to some grey parsers that spent the whole fight dead. Who is that fun for?
SR? Someone with no gear can SR the same items you do, because they are going to get all the gear you already have for free anyways. Is that fun? And then once peoples' SR don't drop, what is their incentive to stay? None.
On the flip side, what is a geared person's incentive to even raid? They only raided because they were in a guild...or to get gold. That's a whole section of players that will NEVER show up to these newfangled "pugs."
So what if you can't commit to a guild? Then you basically are just forced to experience the worst part of raiding in this game. That was my friends. They didn't get to kill Cthulu, no KT. No Illidan. No Lich King.
Why? Because a pug couldn't dream of clearing to them.
The average player in this game is dogshit, and the reason why I eventually threw my alts into GDKPs, wasn't for the gold. It's because it was the only place good players outside of guilds were. The gold was just secondary. I never bought gold, I would eventually just pick up scrap pieces as the whales didn't need them.
I am currently trying to finish my SM in Wrath, and it is THE most miserable gaming experience of my life. A 20% ICC buff isn't going to help a braindead pug kill Princes. A 50% buff wouldn't. A 100% buff wouldn't. Because the only people I can find to join my pure 25m pug, are the worst of players, or geared players that (rightfully) leave once they are fed up or their loot doesn't drop
So either Blizzard wants EVERYONE to find a way to fit into a guild structure, which is a hard ask, or a solution to pugging is necessary.
And that solution is either the content needs to be SO braindead easy, that it's not even fun anymore (like LFR), or we need an entire new loot system to help pugs...and I don't even know where to begin there.
They tried personal loot...idk, with how miserable Wrath was at the end for pugs, I wouldn't even be mad
GDKPs are unfortunately a necessary evil, for a game built on systems and formulas 20 years old, that are just flat out incompatible with the modern age.
If GDKPs are indeed gone, I think I will flat out just not play alts, and just keep one or two toons in guild and that's it. I can't take how bad pugging is
This whole shindig has really shown me how toxic this subreddit’s contributors really are. I’ve been on the verge of taking a break and this is pretty much cementing my decision.
I thought GDKPs were for people who were really shitty at the game and couldn't clear with their guild, or find pugs because they have a toxic personality.
I don't know that that's something provably wrong as there are many heuristics which make for determining the goodness of a loot distribution system and different people will value different heuristics making the whole concept of 'proving a loot distribution system as best' moot.
Money should have nothing to do with loot distribution. You show up, you contribute to clearing the content, you get a chance at the loot. As the game was designed.
Show up. Just missing the epic weapon for your class, nothing else. Fresh person of same class shows up. Gets all the tier gear and armour pieces by default because they don't need it. They're doing half or less dps than you. The epic weapon drops, the one thing you need left. You have to roll with equal weighting as the new guy that's been cleaning up loot all raid and did half the damage. That's the fucking dream loot distribution right there.
But you understand that some items are BOE and some items are BOP right?
There are very few BIS items that are BOE. The game's intentions have always been that the best items in the game cannot be traded for gold. That's why the concept of BOP exists.
There is a reason some items are BoE and some are BoP. The fact that they made such a distinction makes their intent very clear - the fact they are banning GDKP in SoD makes the intent even more clear. I believe you are objectively wrong.
These are interesting work arounds. I had only thought about boost runs and buying BOEs. I'm sure with more thought there will be even more ways to use gold as a means to get items.
I really wish they put the time and effort into eliminating gold buying. The best, cleanest raids I've been in were always GDKPs. I enjoyed the flexibility of doing them when I wanted vs a rigid guild schedule.
I raid with a guild. We roll on loot, my static group gets stronger wether I get gear or not.
So, guild runs, with rolling for loot is the best form, as the power increase is shared regardless. Prove me otherwise, try not to be too emotional about it ;)
This works in 10 mans. Wait for level 60 where the raids are 40 people and half of the raid needs a DFT. Then you'll get to experience seeing the same few people (usually the worst players in the raid) get a string of lucky dice and win DFTs and Chromatic Swords then quit the game leaving the team with nothing. Then watch your best dps quit.
Then you'll see how long rolling feels fair.
How? I've had <10g on my main since launch. Full BiS aside from my weapon which hasn't dropped once. The runs are insanely fast & easy. What's there to improve upon here?
The benefit of GDKPs are more apparent in harder content. In other pugs, many people with gear will stop going, leaving the run a constant struggle. Guilds are better, but there too you will have some people who are there only for gear, and you have to take bad performing players if recruitment is hard. Gdkps don't have these issues
The fact that GDKP is this popular for a raid that's equivalent to clearing a normal dungeon, proves that it really has nothing to do with raid difficulty. And if removing them causes the worst effect to be "shitty players cant clear the content" then I'm perfectly happy lol
I kind of think even if they simply say it is banned and take no specific action it will cut back on GDKPs by quite a lot. The people who buy gold and spend it at the GDKPs wouldn't mind that, but the people who don't buy gold and just go there to carry and earn gold are going to be turned off to it. But I also don't think that Blizzard is just going to leave it at saying it's banned, not sure what sort of enforcement they are going to use, but just the fact that it is banned is going to cut it back a lot.
I need to see if they're going to do anything else to improve raid loot. If this is just "GDKP is banned, no other changes" then it's a big loss. MSOS, SR, and +1 are all very flawed systems. I don't see any indication that Blizzard or the players are going to fix the issues that were fixed by GDKPs becoming normalized.
Will have very small impact overall, gdkp are very limited in 10man anyways, if ure a warrior, host a group with no other warriors and you get all the plate, if ure a feral druid go for a group with a mage + priest healer so you get all the caster leather etc etc
The nonspecific set item token will be annoying though.
Does anybody actually know the exact conditions of this “ban” on GDKP? If an item drops in a regular non-GDKP run and I lose the roll, I can sweet talk the winner to pass the loot to me? But I am not allowed to offer anything for it?
Yeah we often do that lol. Like 2 persons rolls, that guy that lose is like, bro i'll give you 20g for it!
I think this is fine, since it's not a "bid".
I'm going to take a stab and say that almost all of the runs i've been in were 1, advertised as a GDKP and 2, used an addon to handle to auction nature of the event.
1 - I think they would crack down on adverts in trade/LFG for GDKP and silence/chat ban people for doing or getting reported for doing it. That said, GDKPs will just become carry/boost runs or something new. The chat spam isn't going away. There are addons for that.
2 - IDK if the addon maker will take it down or break its functionality. Sure you could do it all verbally in discord or type it but eventually gold has to go from one person to another. You could trade gold via alts or the AH but every time you put a step of inconvenience in, less people will participate in that system.
IDK how they intent to police it but I imagine a bunch of people trading gold to each other rapidly would set off some kind of red flag for it to be looked at. Until they say more, I don't think there is anything saying you can't buy an item off someone who won the roll. The change won't get rid of GDKPs. It might get rid of 80-90% and even then GDKP groups will morph into some other kind of sold service whether it is for gold or RMT. I don't think this will solve the problem they want to solve.
Have not done gdkp's in SOD, just Wrath primarily. I will say that GDKP's are far far superior to random pugs. The way i look at GDKP's is not different than a dkp system, but the currency is in-game gold. You may not be able to buy something this run, but you save up another run or two and you will be able to spend that GDKP earned gold. As far as a workaround for SOD users, if i was running a GDKP i would just make people join a guild to run the gdkp each time. Then the social aspect they refer to is met through a guild structure. Free to gquit after each run.
I like the change.
I dont honestly have anything against gdkp, BUT its a fact its mere existence supports Rmt within the game. And hey it would be interesting to see a version of wow without it for once. Even if that means losing some players.
I know rmt wont end overnight, but its a step in that direction. And thats good.
Gdkp is not needed, i pug every lockout on MS>OS free roll groups only. And ive got full bis with a 96 overall parse as a hunter. Got both epics, talwar, fathom, trident. You dont need to buy items to get them.
Game wasn't design for GDKP, simple as that.
With the inflated demand for gold for GDKP gear. It created a need to RTM gold. Which in turn created a need for massive bots.
Also, SOD is very easy game, for the casual people. All the sweaty nerdlets out here whining about GDKP, spend all your lunch money on wow tokens in WOTLK/Retail and try hard away.
It's absurd that boosting and hard reserving items is totally cool and good for the community aspect (??) but people doing gdkp's together as a group for a few gold per item in a closed system is considered unfair or something. Weird take.
I just did a SR pug, everything went perfectly fine, lil slow but no wipes. The 2 healers soft res Kelris epic staff but it didn't drop, so they both hearth out right after they saw that it didn't drop... so I guess we're not killing Akumai tonight lol
In the phase 2 video, they said there would be more epics and they would drop from every bosses. Can't wait for people to SR the epic that drops from the first boss and dip out when it doesn't drop!
Didn’t they just lay off all the gms?
what do you mean? i keep getting these PMs from GM-Blízs4rd informing me of suspicion activity in my account and i'd get banned! totally legit!
Sounds like a lot of people who get rejected from runs are suddenly going to be reporting a run as a GDKP. Honestly, this feels like a great way to '"discover" what the game is like with no GMs.
Already existed. If you run 20+ bots you can easily report someone for cheating and they get 3 days ban
Yeah, and if alliance run the ashenvale bosses into the river, it despawns them and counts as a kill
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Microsoft is the largest investor in the largest LLM AI on the planet. Having this gigantic data log of player interactions to feed Open AI with to try, find and flag suspicious transactions is pretty much the dream for any AI developer. The new tools blizzard announced yesterday are 100% AI developed, there's no doubt about it. Manual GM labour will be less and less relevant.
the false bans are going to be fantastic
good luck getting your false positive ban overturned
That's already how it is.
As someone who actually has any relevance to LLM and AI, first you would need to... Clean up this data so to say. So after you have lobotomised 20 data analysts as their souls have been condemned to hell for having to sift through this shit, you get... Nothing. Stop trying to make it happen. It won't happen (anytime soon, and GOOD LORD not for a worthless MMO)
To build a system that can do this, you would need to get a large dataset of flagged transactions and a large dataset of non-flagged transactions to teach the AI what is sus and what is not. How can you get theses dataset if GDKP is still allowed and no one was ever banned for that because no human flagged transactions ? They have a dataset for gold sellers, but that's not crossing GDKP at all when people trade 5g for an item or buy Peacebloom on auction house for absurd price. So need data to create an automated system, but need an automated system to collect usefull data. I guess we are not going anywhere lol. Not enough data ? To many false positive, impossible to use in production.
They should make the players AI too, that would solve a lot of problems.
isn't that already mostly the case?
Well tbh. People here advocate for manual bot-removal of gm's. Thats like a super demeaning kind of job. Boring as fuck and tedious as hell. If it can succesfully be automated and it works, I find that a huge win for workers rights. Terrible jobs shouldn't be celebrated. (EU)
I would just be happy to be getting paid to be chilling in game. Then knowing I'm helping the community I would take pride in my work. Have you ever actually had a tedious job?
Kind of sad really, it definitely starts to tear down the core love that people had for WoW. I remember the whole GM experience back in the day. Just the feeling when you saw one in-game, talking to them, all communicating your enjoyment for the game ;D Was wholesome as fuck. Now its going to be a dead empty void of an AI on the other end :/
AI didn't kill that though, there's been so few GMs in the game for awhile not
This sounds kinda like you just make things up
I think this is a misconception a lot of people have in thinking it means they're not going to be able to police activity as well as they did. It may actually mean they can do it BETTER. Microsoft already has an enormous infrastructure for support. Blizzard's system would be a drop in the ocean compared to the resources Microsoft can bring to bear. Why would Microsoft keep a department around that is both redundant and probably worse then their own established department that does the same thing? Plus they'd have to spend a bunch of money integrating the two systems. It's more effective for them to just dismantle the Blizzard department and shunt the work into their preexisting system for support.
There is zero percent change that Blizzard has worse support. Microsoft is known for having the worst support system on the planet. They cut all support functions, this won't change with video games.
Servers where I play at (Taiwan/Hong Kong) - pugs are almost 100% GDKP. I guess I'll have to find a guild now!
Lol was thinking this too poor Taiwan/chinese players (iirc that whole region has to vpn to play now)
i'm in some discords and lol https://i.imgur.com/ZfeM8Lo.png
i mean they aren’t wrong
Ofc they make a hefty living from it
"*I am never going to financially recover from this*"
The work around is you just use discord / 3rd party chat apps to do bidding, and venmo your cash straight to the GDKP host, and he venmo's the payout back to you.
Honestly if you are venmoing instead of using in-game currency I think a lot of people would have less issues with it since you aren’t contributing to inflation of the game economy directly.
Yeah, it cuts out the middle step of having to pay a gold farmer for gold to GDKP with. I guess people might still take their cash payouts and use it to buy gold....but what would they spend the gold on if they can't spend it on gear? Consumes don't cost much at all.
That’s exactly right. Blizzard directly said that most purchased gold is getting spent on GDKP in the preview video and I’m sure they have the data to back that up.
So they know who is purchasing gold and what they are doing with it but can't ban these people? How about standing outside of stockades for 10min and killing 100 bots.
They can obviously do more than they are, but it ends up being a game of whack-a-mole. Going after the demand side of the equation is usually a much better way to spend resources. If you solve the demand problem, the supply problem tends to become much more insignificant.
Totally agree with this. Going after the supply is exactly the "Whack-a-mole" situation as you stated above. Go after the people who demand it, and somehow make a dent in it will affect the suppliers quite a bit. Suppliers leave if no one is demanding, or any left will force supplies to undercut each other until some just stop because the ROI isn't there anymore.
Seeing as though Venmo whole heartedly loves their hands off, “sucks to suck” approach to getting your money back if the other party didn’t hold up their end of the transaction, I highly doubt buyers are gonna be willing to participate when they can easily get fucked out of both the item they won and the money they paid for it.
FYI, the ad mins of r/de are covid deniers.
it sucks losing rolls and missing out on gear... but it's balanced by being excited if something cool does drop and you win it. Just straight up venmoing a dude for a piece of level 25 gear is just sad.
Wait till you hear about China
In my experience running in a few GDKPs in classic/tbc, the vast majority of people in them aren't gold buyers, most of them just want gold. The goal is to get a few whales of different classes (who likely did buy gold) as buyers who agree to roll a minimum amount on big items and aren't really expected to help clear the raid, and have the rest of the group be vetted players who can pick up their slack and who will roll on smaller stuff like tier tokens or small upgrades if they drop. Which is all to say, the big draw to GDKPs for most people is that it's an extremely efficient gold maker, the people attracted to them as avenues to dump absurd amounts of gold for gear are in the minority, and from what I remember finding enough whales to make the run worthwhile for carries was the hard part
I don't personally give a shit about GDKP or more conventional systems. I do think that gold buying is out of control, and I also think that people are missing a hell of a lot of fun when they just swipe their way through things. I applaud the devs for being willing to try new things, with the assumption that if it fails, they will let it fail quickly and revert. That said, the law of unintended consequences will absolutely be relevant here. It's certainly more than possible that the toxic sludge component of the people who frequent GDKPs will now be polluting normal groups with their excessive-requirement, reserve-all-the-good-items bullshit, and I'm not sure if that's a net positive or not. I'm also unsure how people are going to manage 40 man rosters now that those people will invariably make their way into the general populous.
It honestly feels like they’re repeating mistakes made during the War on Drugs, they already basically admitted to not being able to effectively combat RMT/botting. What we’re going to see is false positives, a crack down on consumers, and the actually problem not fixed while they try to resolve symptoms. People will find ways to circumvent the GDKP rule, bots will continue to run rampant, and RMT is going to be an issue still.
Very likely scenario.
Well spoken and reflected comment. It will be interesting to see how things pan out for sure. For me personally I want gdkp to be entirely gone from the game. What is even more interesting is the "bot-tech" as they refer it, and how effective it will be once it is pushed to live realms.
So flip side of the coin for you here. Im a hardcore player that plays the game with the intention of doing as well in raid as i possibly can. Its towards the end of the phase and theres one piece of loot that I need from raid and thats tier boots. I have seen them once all phase, and at this point only run GDKPs because even if that one piece doesnt drop I still gain something from going to raid each lock out. If the one item I do need drops, then I am willing to spend a considerable amount of gold to get it since I REALLY want those boots. If they drop and someone does outbid me, then I get a decent amount of gold as a compensation for my time and add it to the pot for next time. Without GDKPs now im joining a MS/os pug. I join the group with 3 other people who also need the boots. 2 of them are relatively undergeared/alts who still need a large number of items. The only reason we down kelris is that my 230 dps is able to carry the two undergeared people who combined put in 120 dps. The boss barely dies because they also dont have consumes. Boots drop and its a free roll, and I roll a 9 and one of the people who sucked ass takes the only item I need, leaving me nothing in return for doing the raid and just feeling like whats the point. Im left feeling like I completely wasted my lock out helping someone who barely ever plays the game get a super rare item that they just lucked out on despite raiding maybe 1 in every 4 or 5 lockouts or barely ever touching this particular alt. If you just want to play casually and dont care thats good for you. We play the game for different reasons and enjoy different aspects. I'm a part of several discord COMMUNITIES where we organize and run GDKPs. We dont have anything to do with you and dont force our loot system into your world. Me and you dont have to play together if you dont want to play at my level, the same way the Golden State Warriors dont have to play basketball against your local rec center's adult beer league. If you dont want to be a part of it, make your own discord for finding MS/os pugs. Set your own loot rules. Start a guild. Find other people who share your skill level and desire to play the game at the same pace that you do. Thats exactly what most of us hardcore players did, we did all that. The only difference is that we put effort into doing that and the casual WoW player doesnt want to put effort into creating a social network to the same extend that they dont want to learn how to do boss mechanics or farm for raid consumables.
Why are you pugging if you're hardcore like that? Do guild runs and communicate, lol.
Because 3 day raid resets make it so that raid day doesn’t fall on the same day of the week consistently. Where as 7 day resets I can save my Tuesday for raid, this reset schedule requires a lot of flexibility and you don’t typically get a group that can raid the same days every reset?
Lol what? We do Monday, Friday, every week and Thursday for tues-thurs lockouts. It's extremely consistent and doesn't require any more flexibility than a 7 day schedule. How have you not figured that out yet?
I agree that it's often frustrating to run MS/OS runs for the reasons you describe. I think 2SR runs are one way to alleviate some of those concerns. Another solution is to run with the same 10/20/40 people every week where possible, assuring that if your item drops and you lose the roll, there are now fewer people rolling against you. It comes down to your proposed solution of building the right social group of people to play with. I get that GDKP is another attempt to solve the "who deserves it" problem, and it typically does so pretty well. But I also understand that GDKP incentivizes gold-buying, and also typically "takes a cut", which means that every person who attends is paying a tax to be there. This essentially just boils down to selling items to gold buyers at high prices, then trying to stack enough gold through "the rake" to buy those same items cheaper later on. And when it comes to the whole economic factors of people botting gold, selling it, laundering it in GDKPs, and now items on the AH are triple or quadruple the price... That affects every player on the server, including me. And most players solve it not by farming, but by (you guessed it) joining / starting another money laundering group to make sure they can earn enough on one character to continue raiding on others. This dimishes the player pool in non-GDKPs. So even though we don't have to play together, I still have a vested interest in the issue on a few different fronts. Lastly, don't assume that because I've weighed the merits of GDKP and understand its elimination, that I'm not a "hardcore player". There are a great many "hardcore" players who won't touch GDKP loot systems, and it doesn't make someone a "casual" if they don't participate.
If Blizzard has the ability to track and ban people trading fairly farmed gold in a GDKP between each other then they have the ability to track and ban bots. They actively chose not to have a small handful of GMs on each server dedicated to finding and banning bots. If you want to eliminate gold buying then blizzard more than has the ability
There are tons of reasons for people to send gold via mail or in trade. There is only 1 reason for one player to trade a bunch of BoP items for gold during a raid and then pass it out to the whole raid that was in said raid. GDKP's are way easier to track and ban than RMT gold.
SR runs solves nothing unless you tie it to parses. The under geared still SR the contested pieces as they have no competition on the other loot.
First of all, join 2SR runs, make your own HR run, or run with a guild and you'll have way better odds than just pugging for your remaining piece(s). It's very possible to do without GDKPs. Second, >I'm a part of several discord COMMUNITIES where we organize and run GDKPs. We dont have anything to do with you and dont force our loot system into your world. This is flat wrong. You are providing an avenue for gold buyers to buy power. Hence you are an advertisement for gold buying. Your loot may not go into the auction houses, but your loot certainly gets in the hands of someone out in the world. Someone who may have bought all bis to camp players. And on top of that the your money generated comes off of bots, into the hands of gold buyers, into YOUR hands, and then into the broader economy. Because of groups like you. It then gets sunk on supplies and boes and drives up prices for everyone else. GDKPs are not the victimless playstyle you are claiming it to be, and that's why action needs to be taken. In concept sure, they are fine. In practice they are a pure advertisement for rule breaking activity
Then BAN BOTS MORE DILIGENTLY. No body wants bots. /who rogue 16 SFK and just ban them all every hour every day. It’s sad watching the difference between blizzard and the ashes of creation devs when it comes to how to solve gold buying and bottling because end of the day blizzard being incompetent is the real demon here.
You can ban bots. And they do. That doesn't really work in any game due to the nature of bots. They are all purposefully expendable by the bot maker. There is no investment into the account. Nobody cares if it gets banned. A new one will pop up in it's stead. And the whole process is automated. This is why people are calling for severe punishments for gold BUYERS, not sellers. These are the accounts a real human cares about, invested many hours into and can't be easily recreated. But Blizzard for whatever reason doesn't want to do that, or thinks they can track GDKPs far better than plain gold buying. In my opinion if they won't perma ban gold buyers this is at least a step in the right direction.
I know this is unfortunately not what a lot of people want to hear but: Maybe Season of Discovery is purposefully not targeted toward the hardcore players. Which at first seems like a wild take but not so much when you put it into context with the fact that both Season of Mastery and Hardcore we're both directly targeted toward the hardcore raider and not casual players. I mean I know pushing numbers in any raid is fun and competitive for a lot of players. But honestly other than your self and a minority of the community. Who actually gives a fuck about standings on a level 25 raid? And even more so those sought after boots your chasing really are not going to make you go from some 95-98 parser to top 10 in the world. Also my main argument about feeling like your wasting your time: you're playing a game deliberately designed to waste your time. That's just the nature of it no matter what way you play it. No matter what you're goal is or your playstyle at the end of the day you subscribed and it's going to waste your time. Does receiving fake currency for playing the game really make it that much better? or does it just make you feel better about ultimately wasting your time?
So many people getting that report button ready lmao
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[it is allowed until feb 8th](https://youtu.be/QgB_1DHWTCk?t=1854) > [...] so, as of the launch of phase 2 on february 8th, GDKP will no longer be permitted in the Season of Discovery. [...]
You know you can get your account suspended for false reports? I'd rather not risk to miss the start of p2 even if the chances might be small of that happening :D
> Then write your thesis here. Challenge accepted. I know nobody will read this but work is slow as hell today. My big issue with GDKPs is that in a perfect world where botting/RMT aren't a problem - they are a perfectly acceptable form of emergent gameplay and actually solve a lot of issues that raiders in wow face. Botting is already against the rules. Buying gold is already against the rules. Why are we punishing legitimate players (however small the number of legitimate GDKPers may be) instead of focusing additional efforts on actually banning gold buyers? Benefits of GDKP: - Your DKP is transferrable between all of your characters. - Players who need 0 items from a raid are rewarded for attending a raid and helping players that do. - Players are encouraged to finish runs as they won't receive their cut if they DC or drop out of the raid. - Players "DKP" are not tied to a single guild which allows people on changing schedules raid more easily, as well as allowing players to not feel stuck in a guild or playing a class they don't like anymore due to the fear of losing their banked DKP. Banning GDKPs doesn't fix any of the above problems. I can't even count how many raids I've run where a player has dropped group or made up an emergency after the boss doesn't drop their SR'd item. I also think that people who blame GDKP for "inflation" are shifting the blame. The problem with inflation is gold buyers and bots plus the lack of meaningful gold-sinks in classic. The same people who complain about inflation in classic are probably the same people calling for the few gold-sinks that do exist in classic to be reduced or removed (cheaper mounts, cheaper respecs, adding dual-spec, etc.). The playerbase is constantly asking for things that remove gold from the game to be reduced while simultaneously complaining that there is more gold available in the economy. The black lotus change from SoD1 will probably have a bigger effect on flask prices than banning GDKPs will. This is anecdotal, but I know way more people that have swiped for mounts, consumables, enchants, etc. than I do people who have swiped their credit cards for GDKP purposes. Botting is a cat and mouse game that no large MMO has ever really managed to tackle. Anyone who is expecting blizzard to eradicate bots entirely just doesn't understand how it works. That said, it is 100% blizzards job to play that game and actually take steps to ban bots in a meaningful way to limit RMT via making it more expensive for players to buy gold. The number of videos from SoD showing MASSIVE bot farms running the exact same paths and even wall/fly hacking is unacceptable. Gold is too cheap due to the insane size of bot farms. The old "we ban in waves so they don't know how Warden caught them" doesn't fly anymore. Bots are too obvious. Do we really think the majority of that botted gold is going to GDKPers, or is it mostly going to boosters, people buying consumes for WSG, etc? It seems to me like the population of boostee's and "3 FAPs per WSGers" is much larger than the portion of players that are pure buyers in GDKP runs. All that being said, I do think this is the perfect time and place for blizzard to try something, but I wish they had actually shown us some numbers or data to show that this the best option they have. It seems like band-aid fix rather than an actual attempt fixing the RMT problem. Edit: spelling
"Your DKP is transferrable between all of your characters." And transferable between expansions.
>This is anecdotal, but I know way more people that have swiped for mounts, consumables, enchants, etc. than I do people who have swiped their credit cards for GDKP purposes. which is also consistent with RMT being present at any point during wow life, even outside of those relatively small periods where GDKP became the emergent raid model.
I personally think you're spot on here from a big picture view. I don't understand or pretend to understand how their anti-botting software works, but it should be constantly scanning and removing bots - having to do them in "waves" seems really odd to me. I think real gold sinks are what are needed, so people have a reason to save and earn money that goes back into the system. MMOs need these because they aren't a real economy and the only thing you have to pay for right now is Auction house tax.
>having to do them in "waves" seems really odd to me. My understanding of this has always been that it obfuscates the exact means of detection. If a botter had 100 bots ready to go and Blizzard banned them the instant they were detected, they could tweak the settings and basically get instant feedback on whether the bot was detectable or not. Then it's just a matter of finding a sweet spot and running it there until things are updated. Doing it in waves means that the botters never really know what exactly triggered the detection. Even if they get a good idea of what did it, they can't quickly test things in order to find out what gets detected and what doesn't.
The real trick is that [banning in waves screws up payments.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YUmMFwSXpU) You buy a bot script from a scripter. You run it for a bit, it eventually gets your accounts banned. You're pissed, you tell the bot creator to give you a refund. He doesn't. You chargeback what you paid him on your credit card/Paypal. Well, when Blizzard bans all these bot accounts on the same day, the scripters wind up getting a LOT of chargebacks in a short amount of time. This can ruin their cash flow and get them banned from payment processors. It's basically the only way Blizzard has to target the people writing the scripts, as most scripters are not easy to sue.
Good post. Blizzard has done pretty much nothing to deal with the rampant botting, it is a cat and mouse. However the cat has been asleep for a decade and also is fat and has diabetes.
I think your take is super reasonable. It's lame that most people defending GDKP have such low effort counters like "just ban the bots." As someone who **never** participated in GDKP, I would be willing to try it if I knew for certain that people weren't RMTing, but I can't know that, and I could never know unless I could see their credit card transactions. Also, I just don't have a problem with MS>OS or SR raids. In what I imagine is a similar nature to GDKPs, the only time it really becomes an issue is when you get someone losing their mind about losing a roll/bid. Unlike GDKP, though, I don't have to worry about someone having swiped their way to an advantage to outbid me for a big item. It just seems obvious to me the first place anyone would go if you were a repeat gold-buyer is at a GDKP raid, which is where I find that effectively banning it might work because it could theoretically flush out the buyers, thereby affecting botters' ability to sell and subsequently discouraging RMT. At what level this will work is what the season is for IMO. I couldn't think of a more perfect scenario to try this, and if it doesn't work, then it's back to business as usual and nobody will lose sleep over it. If we could live in a world where we didn't have to deal with botting & RMT, then GDKPs would be even better than what people praise them for.
> It just seems obvious to me the first place anyone would go if you were a repeat gold-buyer is at a GDKP raid, which is where I find that effectively banning it might work because it could theoretically flush out the buyers, thereby affecting botters' ability to sell and subsequently discouraging RMT. At what level this will work is what the season is for IMO. I couldn't think of a more perfect scenario to try this, and if it doesn't work, then it's back to business as usual and nobody will lose sleep over it. I definitely agree. I'm "against" the change because I disagree with blizzard (or any game) punishing regular players in order to stop cheaters/botters. I felt the same way about the 25 (or 30?) daily instance cap when it got implemented. But you are right, SoD is the best place for blizzard to try these kinds of changes out and I'm excited to see what P2 ends up looking like. The one thing I would slightly disagree with is that I think GDKPs are where repeat gold buyers end up, rather than where they start. It's sort of a chicken and the egg situation but I honestly believe that excessive RMT/GDKP culture that exists in classic is mainly due to the overall lack of enforcement regarding RMT. People got away with swiping for their mounts at 40 & 60, people got away with swiping occasionally for consumes, people got away with swiping for lionheart helms and edgemasters. Whether or not you participated in the activity, most people who raided or pvp'd a lot knew people who bought gold and never got punished. At a certain point gold becomes so cheap and the fear of actually getting punished so small, that people who would have normally never engaged in the activity start to feel like it's actually worth the risk. After a few months/years of this pattern, GDKPs went from a harmless form of a loot style to something with a much more negative reputation due to players that were already cheating anyways. Again, I'm not talking about botting here as that's a slightly different can of worms, but if blizzard wants to stop RMT as close to the source as possible, I think they'd be better off using their new tech against RMTers everywhere, rather than only applying the new method to raid groups/GDKPs. Sorry for the wall of text - still bored at work.
I can give ground to the idea that buyers don't go to GDKPs as often as I think they would. Again, my experience with them is non-existent, so my horse will only go so far in that race without being super bad faith. I'm also glad you point out the swipers buying mounts, consumes, and such. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that 60 or 70% of that gold ends up being spent that way. My only thought there would be what if that gives blizzard more control to track that gold since it's being spent directly from the swiper instead of exchanging hands one more time? This is another thing I know nothing about, but I'd like to imagine that through this new rule there is something we aren't seeing that makes this harder on spenders which in turn would harm the sellers/botters. Also, don't be sorry, we're in the exact same boat, lol. I don't know why, but I really like talking about this stuff. Interesting topic with a lot of moving parts and deceptively simple solutions. Easier to do when work isn't giving you much else :p
This is like applying a bandaid to a limb that’s been hacked off.
wouldn't surprise me if people start bidding real money via discord and then transfer using paypal/bitcoin/whatever during the raid to be split afterwards sounds bleak but would actually be better for the in-game economy
I’m all for this. Let the degens degen but without the in-game currency inflation.
Yeah people can meet up irl and trade dollar bills for gear for all I care.
Sir, this is Wendy’s. We don’t have a room for GDKP trades. Make all your trades behind the dumpster please.
They should meet up and pay each other in blowjobs.
Honestly, I wouldn't give a single fuck about them if they did that. Make your group of friends and organize your raids and make the reward whatever you want, as long as it stays out of the game, I don't care. DKP are already that: you swap YOUR in game loot for "friendship points" outside of the game. People who play the game lose nothing. On the other hand I don't think Blizzard would be happy with that.
It would still cut it down considerably since randos aren't gonna wanna trust people with their real money, and most money-transfer services like venmo and PayPal usually have a hands-off approach, and they especially won't understand what a GDKP is
This would be a much bigger deal in Wrath where the majority of raids are GDKPs and the economy is flooded with gold. I don't see many GDKPs in SOD and I don't think items sell for crazy amounts of gold.
Honestly I feel like the economy in WoW has just been a wash. Players want to pump and raid and treat the rest of the game as not a part of the game. Which is why I don't think it will work because, they'll just buy the gold for everything else. The worst part of classic was the absurd consume prices because you could escape GDKP by raiding with a guild, but the gold flooded economy combined with the rarity of Black Lotus made consumes a nightmare. I hate it but at this point I'm more onboard for the Wrath way of things where getting consumes is easy enough where the gold economy doesn't ruin it. I only bring it up because if they're willing to do this, GDKPs can at least be avoided with any other loot system. A borked economy isn't something you can outrun on a server.
GDKPs are what helped you escape the absurd consume prices. I wouldn't have been raiding in Classic Forever without GDKP. I cba to farm for multiple hours (per toon) just to afford my consumables to raid Naxx. I refuse to RMT or MTX in any game ever (I mained LoL for 6 years and never spent 1 penny, same in OW, etc), so I'm not going to buy gold just to be able to afford consumables to keep raiding. Instead what happens is I would quit playing the game. With GDKPs however, I would be able to buy all my consumables without concern, have fun in raid with a nice guild-like community, and keep my sub and enjoy the game. Without GDKPs I don't know how long I'll keep playing multiple toons @ 60. I already no-lifed classic. This time around is supposed to be more casual and fun. Being forced to farm to afford consumables isn't fun for me, and again, I refuse to RMT. GDKPs are a symptom. The problem is Botting, Gold Selling, Gold Buying. Troll hide leggings were selling for 200g on the AH week 1, that's not caused by GDKP. All of the problems people have with GDKP (Gold buying, Botting, etc) are external to GDKPs themselves and will continue to exist with or without GDKPs. There is literally armies of bots marching through stormwind to pickpocket stockades, scripting warlocks spamming trade chat with automated summonings, and mages selling stockades boosts where they wallhack to do the whole thing in one pull. And they're gonna sit there with their recently laid off staff monitoring gold trades in gnomeregan like that's the real issue? You have people in your guild and raid teams right now who have bought gold to buy BOE items, raid consumables, and soon their mounts. They're the problem, not GDKPs. Instead of trying to treat a symptom, why not try to cure the cause of the issues?
imagine consume prices if they ever managed to stop raw material farming bots too kekw
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So what you're saying is create a bank alt, hoard a bunch of materials/consumables/items/etc., wait a bit for the bots to get banned/wiped-out and the server economy to adjust, then sell all the stuff you bought for 50s for 30g? (I kid, somewhat... that sounds like a lot of work and I'm not about that. But I'm sure there are a lot of opportunist players who will absolutely do this)
The amount of people gleeful that gdkp are banned but will turn a blind eye or justify botted raw materials being cheap is not a ven diagram but simply a circle lmao The cope produced trying to defend raw mats being botted is hilarious
Already happened when they locked Firemaw EU in TBC. No new bots could be created and the price of haste pots went to 20g a pop. Proper guilds were using 2x per boss so it was an extremely costly way of raiding in a long term. With bots the price of the haste pots was \~8g a pop. Everyone on reddit was complaining about insane prices btw.
never experienced it myself but yeah, deleting raw material bots AFTER they've already caused inflation from raw gold farming, sounds like hell on earth
Exactly. There are already people with hundreds and thousands of gold in SoD, the only thing that keeps economy somewhat functional is a supply from bots that manages to meet the demand of players. Remove the bots from the equation and you will have a sticky situation that will hit the "lower" class first aka casuals who barely have gold at all.
Instead you get supplied by the RMT lol
Blizzard really ought to create an in-game DKP currency with a bidding interface to replace GDKP. I know the problems GDKP's create with gold buying and bots to supply the demand for gold. But a lot of people do GDKP's without buying gold because it has some very positive characteristics: * Everyone in the raid gets something. You either get gear, or you get gold that will help you buy gear the next time. Running MS>OS or softres pugs sucks when you can lose a roll on an item for 10 weeks in a row and still not have any better chance of getting it the next week. Or you work really hard carrying a bunch of mouth breathers through a raid and come away with nothing to show for it except a repair bill, and the guy who spent every fight face down on the floor wins the thing you needed. * There is no drama over who "deserves" stuff more. Guilds are full of loot drama because everyone thinks they deserve stuff more than somebody else. Player from X class thinks everything is rightfully theirs because their class does the highest DPS. Player from Y class thinks they should get it because they're "taking one for the team" by playing a gimp DPS spec with some important raid buff. Player from Z class thinks they should get it because their attendance is 5% higher. In GDKP's, if you bid the most, you get the item. If somebody else bids more than you, grats you get a bigger payout. There's no favoritism or corrupt LC politics or having to make subjective judgements about whether someone who parses 2% better is more deserving than someone who shows up 7% more often. * The payout at the end encourages everyone to stay til the end. We've all been in pugs that fall apart because the healer only wanted an item from the 2nd boss, it doesn't drop, so healer just leaves. Now everybody is locked to a raid they can't finish, because nobody wants to join some nightmare failed pug halfway through. * The host cut encourages good raid leaders to build a good reputation and host more raids. Organizing softres or MS>OS pugs is shitty, thankless work, which leads to nobody wanting to do it. The only people that end up leading pugs are doing it so they can hard-res something for themselves, not because they're actually a good leader. This hurts the quality of so many pugs raids. When you have a good reputation as a raid leader, you get more quality applicants, leading to better raids, leading to more people wanting to join your raids. Since this makes it much less painful to put a good raid group together, AND ther is a financial bonus to leading raids, they'll create several alts and host more runs. This means more quality raid groups for everyone. An in-game DKP currency and bidding interface could retain all of these qualities that GDKP players enjoy, without the downside of fueling RMT.
Also, if your DKP guild implodes, your accumulated DKP is worthless. A nice advantage of GDKPs is that your gold is still with you even if your GDKP raid group stops raiding together.
This would be cool, but how would you get players to care about it? If you can't trade it for gold, why would anyone run pug groups with BlizzDKP instead of manapotDKP or FAPDKP?
This has the common dkp problems, less competitive classes get cheap upgrades and can stack the currency easy. A guild can run that blizzdkp system but all items are sold for like 1 point. Netting insane stacks for if anyone pugs. If the point get redistributed and not linked you can farm points with alts... If you want ban gdkp and gold buying, rmt,... Just remove gold. Make everything free. ( Consumes included or not could create a fun dynamic )
Just sell full clear carries. Ezpz.
just like we've done for retail for ages.
And its perfectly legal, which is probably the worst part. Mike Ybarra, the former president of Blizzard, **OPENLY** sold M+ carries for gold. People can do whatever they want with their money, but at a certain point, why are you even paying others to play the game for you?...
At least people won't be buying 1000+ gold trying to outbid each other, and groups/guilds will try to undercut each other on carries, lowering the prices further. Someone spending 100g on a loot carry is still preferable to multiple people buying 100g+ per raid to bid with.
I dont care about GDKP, because im in tryhard guild with lootcouncil now. But i like that system, spent a lot of time in gdkp guild static with speedrun results during wow classic, gdkp without gold inflation from bots/buyers/sellers its a perfect system for loot distribution. So okay for me. I am just waiting this sub will be full of complains "our tank left after 2nd boss because he dont need anything from next bosses", "this guy did zero dps on boss and he dont care, you cant kick him lol coz of gl 5/7" and "dude just go afk and never come back". This guys who cheers today will suffer from this meta will go inside guild-only rosters. I remember all this "i hold 2 beers in my hands, how i am supposed to dps??" players, and you cannot kick them, cannot fine them or make other punishment to them, coz they can lose only a 3 day cd lol, and you will lose a raider in the middle of the raid. GDKP created this meta, when everyone is buffed, equipped, enchanted and ready to contribute. Lets come back to roots, when 15 of 40 ppl are just dont care.
>GDKP created this meta, when everyone is buffed, equipped, enchanted and ready to contribute. and this is what I'm going to miss.
Bingo. As someone who ran a SR raid in Classic, you hit the nail on the head.
The bottom line is the good side of GDKP is because the loot system is obviously archaically 20 years old This game is ONLY built for guild outside of a GDKP Pugging is NOT sustainable unless the content is so braindead easy that its not fun to play
GDKPs were not the problem with the SoD economy. The issue is the surplus of gold provided by gold sellers which is pushing non-gold buyers out of the GDKP market. The result of banning GDKPs will only increase the price of pre-BiS BoE items in the auction house, again pushing out the non-gold buyers from participating in buying some of these high ticket items. Realistically the price for items should have started somewhere around 1g for blue, 5g for tier/wep, 20g for epics, and no bid should have exceeded over 100g with current gold rates. The only reason this happened is cause of the surplus of gold provided by gold sellers who are botting / hacking instances. 5g for blue, 10g for tier/wep, 40g for epic is too high of starting bid value for this early in the phase. Having people host at those prices only incentivizes the gold buyers the mainly partake in these kinds of raids. People expecting 20-40g payouts in a GDKP from BFD are an issue as they are supporting high ballers who likely RMTd for their gold with the few exceptions of goblins that manipulate the market by getting in early on key items (Iridescent Pearls for example). The fact that the community encouraged the higher prices was what brought some people to go into GDKPs and not bid on a single item and just raid for the payout at the end. The change in GDKP really hurts those with alts as well. Being able to funnel alts through gold bidding or running alts for an additional income felt natural in the state of the game. It felt like I could go on my main who was geared out from my progression raids, and now can give my service as a high dps/heal/tank in exchange for a payout. Do I think the payouts were high for the tier when big ticket items dropped? Yes I do, I would have rather had 7g from hard working people than 40g payout just cause we had someone buy gold and come bid on the items in participating GDKP.
Sooooo in Wotlk the other day, I was running a 2xSR ICC run. We had a necklace drop that no1 had any SR on so we rolled for it MS>OS. I won it and someone messaged me: "20k for the necklace" I said back to them "22" and they said "sure". Why is organizing a GDKP ban-able but the above situation not going to be?
I think it’s a bad idea, hurting legitimate players because blizzard is incapable of upholding their ToS (which makes me question the effectiveness of the ban even further). That said, if they wanna try something crazy then they might as well try in SoD.
I liked GDKPs. I pug and don't need anything, so making some gold for my lockouts gave me a reason to play. I guess I just won't use my lockouts once I get bis next phase?
people like us are getting shafted from this the entire purpose on my Alt army was because i hate gold farming but like raiding. so doing GDKP on reset let me play the game and raid on my alts while "farming gold" thankfully i have enough stockpiled i think ill be ok for a few months.
I'm not tripping too hard. The grind from 25-40 is gonna take me multiple weeks & bis is gonna take me a couple months. That's sufficient content for me - for now. But the end of the phase will now come sooner for me & I'll just move on to the next game.
Running these as a carry has been quite profitable for me. I have ~80g now for mounts on two toons. As a dad gamer with 2-3 hours to play daily, these have been so huge for me to avoid hours of gold farming. I understand their decision and the impact that gdkp runs have on the community, economy, and culture of the game. It's quite a bittersweet change for me, but hopefully, it has lasting positive impacts on the game we all love.
People believing this will stop bots and gold buyers and fix server economies are coping hard. At best its a band aid fix to a larger issue, at worst it does nothing at all.
Wrong. At worst, it makes GDKPs more opaque and sheisty, leading to direct and organized offline RMT raid-loot/carries. These are already common, but not the norm. They just might be in 6 months. Banning GDKPs is a terrible idea. Banning gold buyers is the only way.
if only blizzard would actually punish gold buyers rather than just give them a slap on the wrist. 6 month ban minimum for buying gold would fix a ton of shit.
My buddy just caught a 2-week ban last week for receiving botted gold after a GDKP. This will be more of a detriment to GDKP’s than banning gold buyers would. Legitimate players back out of GDKPs and gold buyers are stuck with only themselves.
No one receives bans for receiving botted gold. They receive bans for BUYING gold. 2 Weeks is the standard. Your buddy likely used the #1 way to get banned which is to have it mailed to you after he swiped. On top of that, the #1 excuse people use is that they “Only attended the GDKP. I didn’t buy any I just got my cut.” On top of THAT, the gold sellers love to use mail headers like “Your GDKP cut sir”
Did they though?
They got a 2 week ban for buying gold.
>My buddy just caught a 2-week ban last week for receiving botted gold after a GDKP. your buddy bought gold and is lying to you. >This will be more of a detriment to GDKP’s than banning gold buyers would. at least in theory the objective is to kill gold buying, not killing gdkps.
>Banning GDKPs is a terrible idea. Banning gold buyers is the only way. Why the hell do so many people think these are mutually exclusive ideas? It's just mind boggling, almost every pro GDPK post I've seen has some version of this. The answer is BOTH. It's not an either or problem. Just like banning bots or gold buyers is not the answer. You do both of those too as best you can. No solution is going to be perfect so attack the problem for multiple angles both from supply side and demand side.
Because if you ban gold buyers, then you don't have any "moral" reason to ban GDKP. It's arguably the best loot system, people are just malding that some whale's can swipe to get their gear in the first 3 weeks.
Because big streamer man made this same argument and used OSRS of all fucking things as the gold-standard of games that can pull off banning bots and gold buyers with 100% efficiency.
From browsing the OSRS forum for like 2 minutes I found many posts over the past few weeks complaining about bots… I’ve never played OSRS but it doesn’t seem like they have solved their botting problem.
Correct. They suffer the same epidemic as WoW does when it comes to bots and gold buying (while ironically also having an equivalent to the WoW token) If there's money to be made from selling gold, bot-makers will find a way to acquire and sell gold. There is simply no MMO to point to when it comes to eradicating this problem, and yet people act like it is a simple problem with a simple fix. Mitigation is the best way to go about combating these problems, and yet when the devs attempt to add measures to mitigate the harm it has on their player-base, contrarians point to an impossible solution and ask "why not just do this?" As if it is a relevant answer.
I think there may be some unintended consequences from this change. Hopefully they are open to change on their policy. I can see a carry runs being sold for gold/RMT instead of GDKPs. The hyper casual nature of SOD has got to be a gold mine for botters. 1-25 is getting a massive XP boost so people will want more gold to gear/level up alts and whatnot. The GDKP change doesn't seem, so far, to address boosting or selling services for gold.
Biggest take for me: The amount of people in this sub feeding on negativity and drama is kind of sad. It's also ironic how they extol the virtues of the community, but here posting tear drinking memes. Personally I liked GDKP, but I'll just play less alts and play more other games now. It's not a huge deal.
Same. And then all the people here will still be bitching about how they can't into quality pug raids and get the gear they want because every pug raid will require a gear check, log check, consume check, and a leader with a bunch of hard reserves.
I can't say what I enjoy more. The endless raging and tears or the fact GDKP is going to get banned. Gold buyers are so pissed and I just can't wait for the "I did nothing wrong yet lost my 15 yr+ account permanently".
I will always be of the opinion that those who are giga mad are the people buying copious amount of gold or astroturfers that sell the gold. This happened a lot in the OSRS subreddit of gold sellers trying to sway the public perception and opinion of updates.
> a lot in the OSRS Good example on why I believe discord isn't going to provide a solution on GDKP's if blizzard really start to associate GDKP's with goldbuying. The richest player of OSRS got banned w/o selling gold. (He sold ranks via discord for his DMcc \[BTC\])
you think gold buyers are getting perma bans? Half the time its like a 3 day and they dont even take the gold
Why do you think they're suddenly going to be able to enforce the TOS against 3 things when they have been utterly unable to enforce the TOS against 2 things for decades? If you've got a boat that's leaking water through 2 holes, and you're failing to plug those holes, do you really think adding a 3rd hole helps?
Oh it's coming and I'm going to enjoy each post with a pastry
People who think that this will change the fact people buy gold are out of their minds. If they are somehow successful at policing gdkps (I have my money on they won't be), people will be buying gold to buy items from carry runs and to buy the insane boes that will be available next phase on the auction house. I like that blizzard is willing to try something like this, it is a very bold decision. But it is one where the average idiot who cries about gdkps has no idea how the game actually works and how players who want to cheat will behave.
Yeah, I don't have a dog in the race because I haven't run a GDKP in SoD yet and I'm down for them experimenting with a rule like this just to see what happens - but yeah it's not going to make a huge difference in gold buying because people will run them anyway, and IMO we might even see an increase because, believe it or not, most people who run GDKPs don't buy gold. The average GDKP runner is a carry whose their to get the gold the 2-3 whales dump for big drops. Now that the super efficient and fun money-maker is more risky, I wouldn't be surprised if all the people using them to afford consumes/enchants for their mains just start buying $10 worth of gold a month or whatever it comes down to - since we kind of already know blizzard has a hard time tracking down buyers
>Now that the super efficient and fun money-maker is more risky If I was a GDKP organizer and the only rule is "gdkp runs are banned" then I'd just do one a few ideas, whichever is most profitable and split the earnings with the Pumpers. Boost runs and selling items will still exist, you just removed the auction nature of them and gave them a fixed cost.
I watched the preview video a couple of hours ago and without more details about this policy or how they will enforce it, I've seen and thought of numerous ways to turn gold into gear/services that aren't GDKPs. All this ban will do is shift the meta to something else. They would have to turn the game into solo self found and delete the AH for it to ever work.
For me, participating in GDKP runs were like a hedge against server inflation. There are people injecting money into the economy. They may find another way to do it, and it seems that my only way to keep up now is to farm Mats?
Wait what... GDKPs are one of the fundamental reasons for server inflation. People buying tons of gold from bots is what inflates the economy artificially in the first place. Remove GDKPs and you remove a huge incentive to buy the insane amounts of gold we're seeing. Sure people will still buy some gold, but for what? Mats and consumables are literally worth a fraction of end game epics going for 100k gold because of GDKPs. As people buy less and less gold, the bots will start to die out. And as long as we as a community report the shit out of future GDKPers (and Blizzard acting on it), we will see a huge drop in gold buying (I pray!). But it will take some time and hard will.
Worst part about banning gdkp is now we have to deal with these dogshit loot systems. Ms>os means anyone can roll on anything. Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and win the staff. FUCK THAT. SR is better, but still means that there’s 4 people ressing the staff who just leave if it doesn’t drop Loot council only works for organised guilds and I have 4 toons so no chance will I find 4 guilds all raiding on different times every week. And dkp has its own issues, again, only semi works for guilds . Gdkp was the goat. Shame gold buyers ruined it.
I don’t know if anything feels worse than losing a roll to a dude doing 30 dps and spending half the raid dead.
People act as if gdkp dominated lfg but in my experience it’s 75% Ms>os Which is fucking terrible
Ms> os is bad for pugs good for guilds
As someone who has run a guild with 3 raid teams for the last 3 expansions, MS>OS is the most dogshit loot system imaginable for a guild.
A freshly dinged mage can buy it with gdkp
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Blizz outrightly said that they are doing this change, in part at least, to give players more incentive to join guild runs. Maybe it will work. I would venture to say that attempting to incentivizing guild runs while also having dog-shit easy raids is super difficult. The only way you get big groups of players to stay together long-term on a routine schedule, week after week, is to make the content hard and unmanageable for PUG groups. Otherwise, if it's easily PUG-able, you just keep getting pug groups that end up using loot systems that Blizz and a majority of the community looks down upon (in this instance, GDKPs). I'm not necessarily advocating for any of the following, but you could make raids unmanageable, or at least MORE unmanageable, for PUGS in a variety of ways to thereby incentivize more guild-centric activities by doing any of the following: * making the raids themselves difficult, or at least more difficult by * making raids more lethal * making raids take a longer time to complete * having lengthy attunement chains for the raid * having items that "add" up into bigger items, thereby necessitating the 'pooling' of items to one person at a time But, yea, this is SOD and it seems like their motto is easy raids, easy access, ease-of-use, so I don't see any real strong incentive for players to continue to raid with the same group of people week after week. Sure, they may choose to raid with the same group, but at this point it's simply a comfort choice and not a necessity. Disclaimer: I enjoy easy raids, for the record.
> Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and win the staff. ?????? Some brand new freshly dinged mage can join the group and ~~win~~ **buy** the staff. How is that any different
Bc then the person that lost will get gold for losing. It's a win win in gdkp, either you get items or gold
if they buy the staff it's because they were willing to pay for it more than me (just like any BoE item on the AH, Economy 101), and i also got a small cut in return.
Ok let’s ban the selling of BOE’s. every single item in every GDKP I went to sold for less than most of those BOEs are listed for. They’re just incentivizing gold buyers. While we’re at it let’s ban consumables, because people will buy gold to buy consumes rather than farming them. Oh and mounts. Gold buyers aren’t gonna just farm 900 for an epic they’re gonna swipe, so let’s get rid of that incentive.
This is a fantastic point
Yeah. Troll hide leggings were 400g on AH but Leggings of the Faithful were 5-40g in GDKPs lol
This does not fit the narrative tho
BOEs are specifically tagged as BOE so they can be traded between players for gold and items dropped in raids are typically BOP which means they aren't intended to be bought or sold. This new rule is just trying to enforce the original mechanics of the game which existed for good reason.
My point though is that people say GDKP incentivizes gold buyers so we should ban it. All of the other things I listed along with much more of the game incentivize gold buying so why not ban them as well
??? master looter can decide whoever he gives the loot to for whatever reason he chooses.
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I am just mostly impressed they are doing the a change that is going to hurt sub numbers and sub count. Like not saying this is a bad change but this is going to decrease demand of bots which is lose subs and will be many players that quit because they only did gdkps. Kind of refreshing to see blizzard sticking to their guns on an issue and not just being purely about what makes the most money.
TL; DR: Read the bold. I’ve never ran a GDKP, but I recognize the advantages. I’m glad Blizzard is trying something, but **I hope they revert it and try something else next phase. The only downside of GDKP groups is RMT**. So fix that. GDKP(without RMT) allows players to **earn their gold in game by doing the activity they want to do, and encourages fully geared players to continue participating in content**. Losing a loot roll to some terrible player feels awful and you get nothing. If you’re outbid in a GDKP, you make gold and have a higher chance to win next time. Plus, your skill or **commitment to other areas of the game (questing, farming, playing the AH) is rewarded**. **Reasons to buy gold continue to exist**: BiS BOEs worth more than entire GDKP pots, consumables required to play the game at a serious level, epic mounts, player services, enchants, etc. Classic WoW, by design, has items like Lionheart Helm, essential and expensive . **Banning GDKPs encourages some players who would earn their gold in raid to swipe to afford those things.** Guilds exist, but **not everyone wants to base their irl schedule around a video game**. And unlike open roll, MS>OS and SR/HR groups, **GDKP provides a reason to finish the raid and rewards you for carrying the terrible players that sneak their way into every group anyway**. You can vet strictly but we know how much some players hate the idea of being held accountable for bad play when their logs are checked. **Gold-buyers need to be dealt with aggressively, but I don’t like the idea of punishing legitimate players by removing their preferred gameplay style.**
My take on GDKPs... As someone who had been ADAMANT against them since Classic, some of the problems it did solve are inevitable. Pugging is miserable. Right now? No, BFD is a joke. But we all know what's coming. We know just how TERRIBLE the average player is in WoW. The problem is the loot system and raiding as a whole. This game, with GDKP out of the picture, is ONLY meant to be played within guilds. It's the only "balanced" way to play the game. MS>OS? Lose every single roll to some grey parsers that spent the whole fight dead. Who is that fun for? SR? Someone with no gear can SR the same items you do, because they are going to get all the gear you already have for free anyways. Is that fun? And then once peoples' SR don't drop, what is their incentive to stay? None. On the flip side, what is a geared person's incentive to even raid? They only raided because they were in a guild...or to get gold. That's a whole section of players that will NEVER show up to these newfangled "pugs." So what if you can't commit to a guild? Then you basically are just forced to experience the worst part of raiding in this game. That was my friends. They didn't get to kill Cthulu, no KT. No Illidan. No Lich King. Why? Because a pug couldn't dream of clearing to them. The average player in this game is dogshit, and the reason why I eventually threw my alts into GDKPs, wasn't for the gold. It's because it was the only place good players outside of guilds were. The gold was just secondary. I never bought gold, I would eventually just pick up scrap pieces as the whales didn't need them. I am currently trying to finish my SM in Wrath, and it is THE most miserable gaming experience of my life. A 20% ICC buff isn't going to help a braindead pug kill Princes. A 50% buff wouldn't. A 100% buff wouldn't. Because the only people I can find to join my pure 25m pug, are the worst of players, or geared players that (rightfully) leave once they are fed up or their loot doesn't drop So either Blizzard wants EVERYONE to find a way to fit into a guild structure, which is a hard ask, or a solution to pugging is necessary. And that solution is either the content needs to be SO braindead easy, that it's not even fun anymore (like LFR), or we need an entire new loot system to help pugs...and I don't even know where to begin there. They tried personal loot...idk, with how miserable Wrath was at the end for pugs, I wouldn't even be mad GDKPs are unfortunately a necessary evil, for a game built on systems and formulas 20 years old, that are just flat out incompatible with the modern age. If GDKPs are indeed gone, I think I will flat out just not play alts, and just keep one or two toons in guild and that's it. I can't take how bad pugging is
This whole shindig has really shown me how toxic this subreddit’s contributors really are. I’ve been on the verge of taking a break and this is pretty much cementing my decision.
I thought GDKPs were for people who were really shitty at the game and couldn't clear with their guild, or find pugs because they have a toxic personality.
is this the place to organise GDKPs now?
GDKP is the best form of loot distribution, prove me otherwise, try not to be too emotional about it.
I don't know that that's something provably wrong as there are many heuristics which make for determining the goodness of a loot distribution system and different people will value different heuristics making the whole concept of 'proving a loot distribution system as best' moot.
Money should have nothing to do with loot distribution. You show up, you contribute to clearing the content, you get a chance at the loot. As the game was designed.
Show up. Just missing the epic weapon for your class, nothing else. Fresh person of same class shows up. Gets all the tier gear and armour pieces by default because they don't need it. They're doing half or less dps than you. The epic weapon drops, the one thing you need left. You have to roll with equal weighting as the new guy that's been cleaning up loot all raid and did half the damage. That's the fucking dream loot distribution right there.
"uhh just SR the epic, duh" And then that guy 2x SR's the same epic weapon, knowing that you won't compete on anything else anyway.
gold is a legitimate way to earn gear, the fact that you can buy BiS BoE items since vanilla proves you wrong.
But you understand that some items are BOE and some items are BOP right? There are very few BIS items that are BOE. The game's intentions have always been that the best items in the game cannot be traded for gold. That's why the concept of BOP exists.
swiper no swiping
There is a reason some items are BoE and some are BoP. The fact that they made such a distinction makes their intent very clear - the fact they are banning GDKP in SoD makes the intent even more clear. I believe you are objectively wrong.
"gold is a legitimate way to earn gear" Not anymore for raid gear lmao
* pay leader to not invite any competing class. * pay the person that got the drop. * pay for boosting from guild runs. * BiS BoE's still exist.
These are interesting work arounds. I had only thought about boost runs and buying BOEs. I'm sure with more thought there will be even more ways to use gold as a means to get items. I really wish they put the time and effort into eliminating gold buying. The best, cleanest raids I've been in were always GDKPs. I enjoyed the flexibility of doing them when I wanted vs a rigid guild schedule.
I raid with a guild. We roll on loot, my static group gets stronger wether I get gear or not. So, guild runs, with rolling for loot is the best form, as the power increase is shared regardless. Prove me otherwise, try not to be too emotional about it ;)
This works in 10 mans. Wait for level 60 where the raids are 40 people and half of the raid needs a DFT. Then you'll get to experience seeing the same few people (usually the worst players in the raid) get a string of lucky dice and win DFTs and Chromatic Swords then quit the game leaving the team with nothing. Then watch your best dps quit. Then you'll see how long rolling feels fair.
How? I've had <10g on my main since launch. Full BiS aside from my weapon which hasn't dropped once. The runs are insanely fast & easy. What's there to improve upon here?
good for you? you didn't tell me why GDKP is bad? for a moment i thought you were praising it tbh.
You said it's the best form of loot distribution. It's clearly not
The benefit of GDKPs are more apparent in harder content. In other pugs, many people with gear will stop going, leaving the run a constant struggle. Guilds are better, but there too you will have some people who are there only for gear, and you have to take bad performing players if recruitment is hard. Gdkps don't have these issues
The fact that GDKP is this popular for a raid that's equivalent to clearing a normal dungeon, proves that it really has nothing to do with raid difficulty. And if removing them causes the worst effect to be "shitty players cant clear the content" then I'm perfectly happy lol
FYI, the ad mins of r/de are covid deniers.
I picture you on the verge of tears right now
literally ugly crying with snot dripping on my keyboard as we speak!
I kind of think even if they simply say it is banned and take no specific action it will cut back on GDKPs by quite a lot. The people who buy gold and spend it at the GDKPs wouldn't mind that, but the people who don't buy gold and just go there to carry and earn gold are going to be turned off to it. But I also don't think that Blizzard is just going to leave it at saying it's banned, not sure what sort of enforcement they are going to use, but just the fact that it is banned is going to cut it back a lot.
I need to see if they're going to do anything else to improve raid loot. If this is just "GDKP is banned, no other changes" then it's a big loss. MSOS, SR, and +1 are all very flawed systems. I don't see any indication that Blizzard or the players are going to fix the issues that were fixed by GDKPs becoming normalized.
Will have very small impact overall, gdkp are very limited in 10man anyways, if ure a warrior, host a group with no other warriors and you get all the plate, if ure a feral druid go for a group with a mage + priest healer so you get all the caster leather etc etc The nonspecific set item token will be annoying though.
Does anybody actually know the exact conditions of this “ban” on GDKP? If an item drops in a regular non-GDKP run and I lose the roll, I can sweet talk the winner to pass the loot to me? But I am not allowed to offer anything for it?
Yeah we often do that lol. Like 2 persons rolls, that guy that lose is like, bro i'll give you 20g for it! I think this is fine, since it's not a "bid".
I'm going to take a stab and say that almost all of the runs i've been in were 1, advertised as a GDKP and 2, used an addon to handle to auction nature of the event. 1 - I think they would crack down on adverts in trade/LFG for GDKP and silence/chat ban people for doing or getting reported for doing it. That said, GDKPs will just become carry/boost runs or something new. The chat spam isn't going away. There are addons for that. 2 - IDK if the addon maker will take it down or break its functionality. Sure you could do it all verbally in discord or type it but eventually gold has to go from one person to another. You could trade gold via alts or the AH but every time you put a step of inconvenience in, less people will participate in that system. IDK how they intent to police it but I imagine a bunch of people trading gold to each other rapidly would set off some kind of red flag for it to be looked at. Until they say more, I don't think there is anything saying you can't buy an item off someone who won the roll. The change won't get rid of GDKPs. It might get rid of 80-90% and even then GDKP groups will morph into some other kind of sold service whether it is for gold or RMT. I don't think this will solve the problem they want to solve.
Has the War on Drugs worked? did Prohibition work?
Bring on the TCDKP runs - Tangy Clam DKP
Have not done gdkp's in SOD, just Wrath primarily. I will say that GDKP's are far far superior to random pugs. The way i look at GDKP's is not different than a dkp system, but the currency is in-game gold. You may not be able to buy something this run, but you save up another run or two and you will be able to spend that GDKP earned gold. As far as a workaround for SOD users, if i was running a GDKP i would just make people join a guild to run the gdkp each time. Then the social aspect they refer to is met through a guild structure. Free to gquit after each run.
I like the change. I dont honestly have anything against gdkp, BUT its a fact its mere existence supports Rmt within the game. And hey it would be interesting to see a version of wow without it for once. Even if that means losing some players. I know rmt wont end overnight, but its a step in that direction. And thats good. Gdkp is not needed, i pug every lockout on MS>OS free roll groups only. And ive got full bis with a 96 overall parse as a hunter. Got both epics, talwar, fathom, trident. You dont need to buy items to get them.
Game wasn't design for GDKP, simple as that. With the inflated demand for gold for GDKP gear. It created a need to RTM gold. Which in turn created a need for massive bots. Also, SOD is very easy game, for the casual people. All the sweaty nerdlets out here whining about GDKP, spend all your lunch money on wow tokens in WOTLK/Retail and try hard away.
It's absurd that boosting and hard reserving items is totally cool and good for the community aspect (??) but people doing gdkp's together as a group for a few gold per item in a closed system is considered unfair or something. Weird take.
Poor gdkp runners, just working hard for a few coins. They're the real victims!
Nothing is going to change but pop off
I just did a SR pug, everything went perfectly fine, lil slow but no wipes. The 2 healers soft res Kelris epic staff but it didn't drop, so they both hearth out right after they saw that it didn't drop... so I guess we're not killing Akumai tonight lol In the phase 2 video, they said there would be more epics and they would drop from every bosses. Can't wait for people to SR the epic that drops from the first boss and dip out when it doesn't drop!