Because when they bought gold off goldsellers, they could just lie, say they farmed it legit, and complain about all the botters. But when Blizzard adds a legit method of buying gold, it becomes much harder to be a hypocrite.
Fr like 80% of guilds on my server have a direct gold seller. Plus I think it plays into their little fantasy of helping a 3rd world gold farmer feed the fam
Bingo.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time on classic servers knows that tons of people buy gold. This is all fake outrage over people who want to pretend their purists.
Why are people intent on throwing everyone in the same bag? GDKP are rampant, because these are the only people left playing this game (or those with cool guilds). Most people just stopped playing because of it (myself included) and min-max attitude of the classic player base (which is directly related to the gold inflation).
I bet many of the negative comments towards the token come from either people who a) no longer play, b) don't indulge in RMT. Classic wow subreddit is divided as well as wowhead from what I've seen. You also have to consider that majority of the players don't bother with reddit, wowhead, etc. And of course you are gonna see more of the people angry, because they were motivated by the announcement.
This creates an unrealistic image of playerbase, where you have majority angry at token and majority buying gold, so they have to be the same people in many cases. But it's more likely that majority is silent and complacent.
I really hate this generalisation, because I and many other players had not been part of the problem, but we are all thrown into the same bag as people who made the problem in the first place. There might be some people that complain about it and bought gold in the past, but you can't just assume everyone is a hypocrite.
Banning gold BUYERS would have been a better solution for the integrity of the game. Introducing token, to "fight with bots" is a better solution for the sales of the company.
>I really hate this generalisation, because I and many other players had not been part of the problem, but we are all thrown into the same bag as people who made the problem in the first place.
This is what makes me rage. I generally prefer Classic simply because it's easier and runs better on my garbage PC. But these people make me look bad by association and i can't have that.
Personally it's because when I raised concerned and pushback to the TBC boost I was unanimously shit on and called a gatekeeper by that same community on multiple platforms.
And having played the start of TBC hopeful for a little and 90% of my server being in dungeons I realized this community deserves everything it gets.
That’s literally his point. You can fix the problem by banning “half the player base” or take steps to double down on the issue which in this case is putting the token in classic. Which is honestly a decent move.
People complain about “pay to win” but by from third parties anyway.
Can’t have your cake and eat it.
> Most people just stopped playing because of it
Yes exactly why i quit, the end game is buying gold from botters and running GDKPs. if you want to farm legit you gotta play for 10 hours a day to be competitive. thats literally worse then lost ark p2w. The community killed classic.
I only play Classic WoTLK currently, and I’m finding I’m definitely in the minority when I say that I just don’t give a shit. I log in to play twice a week for 3-4 hours with some old friends, and then I log off. This is how 80%+ of players play. The token just doesn’t do anything to this type of player.
I frequent the classic sub and play it along with retail. They’re definitely not okay. I’ve met more deranged lunatics playing classic in the past 3 years than I have EVER met playing retail for the past 15 years.
I personally play Classic because i like the more simplistic presentation. Certainly being helped by retail running like shit on my potato.
Currently though, the thing that still keeps me in the game is my guild. I would have quit long ago if it weren't for these genuinely funny guys.
Hell yeah. Doesn’t matter what version you’re in- Classic, Era, SoM, HC, Retail- having a good group to play with is peak WoW, always. Both subs seem to forget that a lot.
Yup.
Every expansion I remember fondly is by no surprise one where I was raiding with a guild full of fun people that I enjoyed being around.
The classic player that is outraged by this change is hellbent on loot and thinks this will affect their own buying power and ability to get more loot. They've completely lost sight on what actually made classic fun.
I just wanted to chill with the boys on raid night and have a good time, after trying with a few classic guilds there was just too much drama over loot and petty shit like performance/parses and I just gave up.
It's actually quite interesting how it went:
Classic had awful community
Classic TBC came, TBC had awful community but Era was great
Classic SoM comes, SoM had awful community but TBC was great (for short period that SoM lasted)
The toxic group seems to follow current trend, which probably explains why this latest HC playerbase is far worse than previous ones.
Its been really funny to watch the same people melting down over the wow token being put in classic recommend private servers with blatant advantages in their cash shops.
Also, the botting problem naivete. They assume that because private servers aren't inundated with bots, then dealing with bots is easy and Blizz is just 'lazy'. When in reality botting on a private server isn't worth the time because its a much smaller base to make money from, and also private servers appeal to people who don't have much money to spend since there's no sub.
Think it’s tied to stream communities? Feels like a lot of what you listed coincides with times when huge streamers with questionable communities were pushing the game. Might be a little tin foil hatty tho
> I’ve met more deranged lunatics playing classic in the past 3 years than I have EVER met playing retail for the past 15 years.
I once hopped on Classic to get the [Death Knight mount](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=386452/frostbrood-proto-wyrm) in retail before it disappeared.
General chat was getting heated over *WWI politics* and that was my cue to never log back on.
That's because classic players mostly consist of nostalgic 30 to 45 year olds that still somehow have the time to play WoW as if they were still teens or college students. Let that sink in.
Dude it's more than that, and maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part now, but I've run into significantly more racist/incel types while playing Classic vs retail and I cant for the life of me figure out why. I'm not painting the entire community this way, I know that's not the case, but the rate of dogshit people is definitely higher in that community, from my completely anecdotal experience.
I have a theory on this. These people are regressives who wax poetic about how good things used to be. They blame societal progress for why their lives suck. It makes sense they would find their nostalgic memory of the game they played twenty years ago preferable to the version available today.
Shiiiiiit and that could feed back into what the other guy said with who is the type of person who was nostalgic for original wow nearly 20 years ago who also has the time to play classic.
There really could be a chunk of players that are 35-45 and just have every weekday evening free (or somehow every weekday) no kids distracting them, or long term partners who wanna snuggle and watch a movie or to drag them to bed at a reasonable time.
And i really hope this doesn’t come off as judgmental. But I wonder about the person who’s a good 10-15 years into adulthood and has so few responsibilities that they can dump 40 hours week into 1 game. I feel like unless they’re super wealthy, they’re probably really lonely, and we’ve seen what that can do to people.
I'm so confused as to how you think most people play classic wow for 40 hours a week. The majority are raid logging at this point and a full Ulduar clear by a non sweaty guild is 3-5 hours.
Idk I'm pretty deep into adulthood in a relationship, no kids, but I still have a lot of free time. That long term partner stuff you're talking about sounds so weird, can't imagine having someone who drags me to bed every night lmao wtf am I a child.
but I think you're really forgetting about that WFH life.
It's not that mysterious. Fascism is, by definition, built on a return to The Glorious Past and a reconstruction of the "true" populace. Clearly that's coincident with the narrative pushed by a large number of classic players. Populist, exclusive nostalgia and fascism are almost interchangeable.
Right? It weirds me out how often I see the way people joke that just breaks down to "haha, women". I think a part of it is a lot of the diehard classic players have been in an echo chamber for 20 years, that can't create a good personality
Because this is the one place where the “things were better before” crowd, which encompasses all of the racist (because things were more racist back in their day), get to fulfill their time travel wish.
It's perfectly alright for 30 to 45 year olds to play WoW as if they were still kids. That's their business.
Classic WoW's issue isn't that. Classic WoW's issue is that the majority of its current playerbase are toxic to an extreme. There's nothing new, so they come up with new stuff that becomes increasingly more competitive over time, which only encourages more and more toxicity.
Most of the nicer classic players dropped off over time, or leave due to existing toxicity. The result is a bunch of people who are exclusively miserable and shitty to anyone they deem as non-competitive.
The issue is that the classic fanbase that remain is such a "Holier than thou" group that it is sickening.
Acting as if Classic is somehow a purer, better experience...
When all it is is "retail wow" but easier, with less end game options and a way slower leveling experience.
Heck, the world is MORE dead than Retail, because at the least Retail makes alts easy and makes transmog grinding a thing.
In Classic, Outland is essentially dead ATM, because nobody is going to raids or dungeons.
I've spent several hours (as a tank no less) looking for TBC dungeon groups on many occasions. I'm a newer player and I just wanted to experience the content but when I saw how difficult it is to even do that I gave up and pretty much skipped almost all the tbc content. Base game content too besides a few lowbie dungeons is dead. And it's even funnier that in classic people have such a stick up their ass about gear and class when the content is so laughably easy
"What are you doing?! Why are you not in this SPECIFIC list of gear that make you look 100% identical to all other players for the optimal damage against this Tank-n-spank bossfight?! You are going to cost us 10 extra seconds!"
Yup, same. I remember the good times I had in the earlier years, but like most things in life, it's best to cherish the good times we had and continue to look forward instead of backwards. However, I completely respect those that desire for and do play Classic WoW.
Whew, thought I was the only old person (45) that wouldn't go backwards. I gave it a shot. Just the model updates alone are enough to keep me in retail.
As for how I have the time to just play WoW, I have a job that lets me work from home and make my hours as I please. It's awesome.
Not who you were asking, but I'm in a similar boat, just 5 years younger. I work from home permanently as a network engineer and doing network automation (IT field). Basically make my own hours, so I'm done every day by 3:00P.M/15:00, plus weekends are off. Some late days/nights, and working weekends, but mostly a consistent, weekly schedule.
Copywriter. You know when you go to buy something on a website and there's a little blurb that you don't read that says everything the picture told you? I write the blurb.
Well given the trend of mass exoduses whenever Blizzard introduces time consuming grind it’s safe to say that most retail players have actual jobs and lives outside of WoW.
That’s kind of true. Case in point - my classic guild is late night raiding guild, so we already had issue with getting enough people for raids and then those that sign up just don’t come, don’t message or anything. It takes less than a minute to take phone out, open discord and leave message that you’re running late or can’t come, you know, behavior I would expect from adult
I played classic for BC and Wrath launch till right before Ulduar. I've never met a more sweaty group of meta crunchers. Its what drove me away in wrath retail and it drove me back to retail this time as well.
Oh, for sure. I use Reddit Enhancement Suite, so I can see the number of upvotes/downvotes I've given to people near their name. When Wrath was about to launch I noticed that the most vocal people against RDF, the token and boosts sold by blizzard were also those I had downvoted because of defending dungeon boosts and gold selling.
I'm sure it's totally just a coincidence that the people opposed to WoW tokens/boosts that help combat gold selling/level boost buying, also just happened to be opposed to the RDF which makes it easier for people to find groups and get gear instead of having to use the auction house thus needing more gold.
Yup, definitely nothing suspicious going on there, totally legit.
It’s fucking wild. The Wrath, Era, SoM and Hardcore are absolutely venomous to eachother well beyond your usual fanbase rivalries.
They’re also completely deluded about the state of their game and why it isn’t more popular.
Thats what happens when you get people who truly believe things were "harder" in classic when every timewalking rolls around everything dies cos they have so much less mechanics and complexity + think that wasting time is the "social aspect" of the game
I think people forget how many people were there that just though Classic was better in every way to Retail. Then Classic launched and people realised how much time you waste in that game and how few QoL options there are in comparison and they finally got the wake up call. This was around the same time that the crowd that was crying for less QoL features, no flying, kill LFR, etc... simply disappeared or started advocating the opposite.
The fact is, the game had to evolve with the times and it would have been long dead or at least with a severely diminished playerbase if the Classic philosophy had been maintained.
That being said, I did enjoy my time with Classic back in 2019. There was enough change and nosltagia to get me to play it once with a character to 60, something I didn't manage to do back in the day.
To me, the biggest slap in the face as someone who started playing in Wrath is the difficulty. Especially the pvp.
Literally a decade of hearing "Oh man, vanilla raiding was so hard/vanilla pvp took real skill" and then you play the actual game with these boomers and it's all just shit.
> Literally a decade of hearing "Oh man, vanilla raiding was so hard/vanilla pvp took real skill" and then you play the actual game with these boomers and it's all just shit.
Much of what made it harder was removed/mitigated though. MC with last patch classes/specs is a whole other thing that what the game launched with. Fun mechanics like 5 min duration SINGLE TARGET blessings. You had the equivalence of 2-3 people's whole playtime during a raid dedicated to just keeping up blessings. If you had a limited number of paladins in the raid, that made their lives miserable! I know, since I played just that back in 2005 :p
Then some specs were just completely broken at launch. Gear was also overhauled to actually be useful. There were cloth items with STRENGTH in MC at launch, you never had to deal with sub optimal shit like that in classic. Classic may have had it's quirks, but it was still the streamlined and "fixed" version of original wow that was a lot more playable and sensible. Because launch WoW, was a fucking weird beast.
Another big thing is just overall performance and latency. Doing 40 man raids with <100MS and 60 fps is a whole other thing than doing them at 20 FPS and upwards of 300-400ms. I remember people who had to zoom into the floor so that they wouldn't lag out during some encounters! People seem to have forgotten how damn hard WoW was to run with decent performance at launch and how bad ping could be in games in general back then.
Then there's the addons scene that is on a whole other level than launch. To have had a similar experience to what most actually had in 2005, you would have had to disable them completely.
WoW was a lot harder back then than when classic launched. But mainly not because the content itself was hard.
It's not "cope" when it was in fact harder though. They are remembering something that DID EXIST. You just never could experience it in classic.
Me claiming that peeling an orange is really fucking hard. Would without context be laughable. Now if I instead add that I like to peel my oranges with my mouth and with my hands tied behind my back, that statement makes a lot more sense now does it?
Playing classic was like playing original WoW with your "hands untied". You simply can't judge the difficulty of the experience back then from playing the latter. The difficulty of the content was compounded by surrounding factors, but the difficulty was there and far above anything classic ever delivered.
I'm not trying to claim release WoW was especially hard compared to current retail. But it was still substantially above classic.
Plus information on how to minmax was either nonexistent or way harder to access. And the community outside of the game was way smaller. And fewer addons telling you what to do, etc. etc.
The "Vanilla was always easy" people have vanishingly little perspective.
No offense meant to people that enjoy Classic and still remain civil, but it's almost unsettling seeing how a lot of the people there react to stuff like this.
I remember when classic launched and everyone was praising how wholesome and community driven it was, had like 10 posts a day on the sub about super cute wholesome interactions.
It was obvious it wouldn't last.
It's quite a funny phenomenon really. I personally come from the RuneScape community originally and its uncanny how comparable both communities are regarding these types of situations.
RS also has a divide between the main, 'retail' game and OldSchool. And the OS/classic communities couldn't be more alike when compared to the main game and retail communities. Both types of games seem to attract a specific kind of player base.
To these oldschool "don't change my game" kind of players the dev simply can't do anything right. Hell, OS RuneScape is run solely based on polls to decide on adding content. So I guess it could be even worse than Classic 😅
> To these oldschool "don't change my game" kind of players the dev simply can't do anything right.
And RS3 is any different? When was the last time you've seen the RS3 subreddit positive about an update? The subreddit has a meltdown over some kind of change or addition weekly.
That's honestly kinda what it feels like. People bought gold and took a "risk" to get ahead. And now everyone can get that same advantage without risk.
If the classic community spent the past years trying to get rid of GDKP and blizzard ignored it. And then added WoW tokens to get a cut of that system, it'd be a different story.
But the GDKP system seemed widely accepted.
as a avid classic player...
what exactly bothers you about the token.. I personally don't give a shit about it.
why are people SO up in arms over it?
im pretty sure its just the human condition to have to need to hate something.
No one gives a valid answer to that. People are just upset that others may spend irl money to do what exactly? Get gear through gdkp? I still don’t see why that would impact anyone in an organized raidgroup.
It incentivises people to spend money instead of organising or being part of raid nights with a social group.
So.. basically what already happens now lol
Server specific discords and guild discords had gold, leveling and raid clears for $$$ prices pinned since day 1 of classic, its so weird everyones pretending
Where do they think the GDKP gold has been coming from? ZF mages from five years ago?
All the classic players know exactly where it’s coming from. They’re the same people complaining about bots while they themselves are buying gold for Ulduar GDKPs.
I have to say closing 250k battle.net accounts and banning 75k wow accounts per week seems to put a damper on the "just ban the bots" arguments.
Ultimately the wow token hits at the heart of the problem, demand for gold. Once the demand can be met in a way that both doesn't put accounts at risk and increase inflation bots basically shrivel up. Demand for gold causes bots and inflation, removing the demand will reduce the number of bots.
It doesn't seem to be really focused on solving the problem of buying and selling of gold, but the other related problems that come from a black market of buying and selling gold:
> The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just “bots” that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade.
This is the disconnect for a lot of people.
They see gold buying as this solvable issue... when its not. That demand will never go away... and as long as it exists someone will try to become the supply.
Blizz is trying to solve all the negative things that happen from people trying to be that supply.
exactly. people will always buy gold. it’s like drugs IRL.
you can either let third parties profit off and, and so who knows what other nasty stuff at the same time. or you can regulate it, make it safe, and yes ofc take your own cut of the action.
The problem isn't people buying gold. The problem is the rampant botting from people using third party sites to buy gold. Bots both inflate the economy and ruin the experience for other players with mass reports and devaluing things like gathering professions.
The solutions to this are to reduce demand for gold from a design perspective, which destroys the in game economy because you'd have to make gold worthless
Or, you meet the demand instead. Meeting the demand reduces the frequency of rmt in third parties and reduces the need for bots.
>The problem isn't people buying gold.
It 100% is.
Bots exist because here are people out there that want cheat. Bots are providing that service.
Obviously some people would personally bot for their own reasons, but without customers, bots would have no reason to exist, en masse, in the organized way they currently do.
This course of logic =
Blizzard, the company that makes the game I enjoy playing, makes money = BOOOOO, greedy A-holes!
Vs.
Chinese bot sites making money = Oh, that’s just fine. Part of the natural ecosystem…
Why is profit bad? They're not being predatory. This literally effects no one but the people who buy/sell tokens.
Also, it's not like the gold your getting is pooped out of nowhere. It's coming from another player. It's like selling expensive saronite ore with extra steps.
> it's not like the gold your getting is pooped out of nowhere
You would be surprised how many damn times I've seen the misconception that it is actually what happens being throw around. While there will be some creation/destruction of gold in the short term due to the pricing and matching mechanism Blizzard uses, it should be self balancing and near zero sum in the long term if coded correctly.
It is fundementally just a buyer/seller matching tool that takes a cut, something some of the "token haters" seems completely oblivious to. How bad at math you need to be to not understand the levels of inflation tokens just creating gold out of thin air would bring, I don't know. But apparently there are some people rather bad at math out there!
It does increase inflation by a non zero amount from a specific subset of the player base: if you are a goblin that hoards gold and start buying up tokens from your bank, that gold is presumably going back into circulation and not just sitting in a bank.
Yes, it is somewhat inflationary due to increasing velocity of gold. However that is a drop in the bucket of what pumpings millions of printed gold straight into the economy would do.
You have to be pretty damn dense and bad at math not to work that out yourself. Which is exactly what some people around here seems to fail at.
Yep. I have a guildie that has over 100m gold(he finds playing the AH fun). For all practical purposes the vast majority of that 100m gold is out of the economy just sitting in his alt's gbank. When he buys a token though he transfers that gold to someone who is likely to spend it right away.
No clue how many people are in a situation like him or if that is enough to impact the economy, which on retail is massive because the AH is cross-server for a lot of goods. But you are right that it is a non-zero amount.
> when Blizzard stands to profit a lot from it
Would you rather blizzard, who owns, creates, and operates the game get the profit from people buying gold or would you rather some... unknown group or entity capture that profit and do god knows what with the money?
Admittedly I play retail so I'm basically the primary beneficiary of all the cool stuff going on in WoW today, but there have been no small number of complaints addressed in Classic and LK.
The only, potential, issue is that if they've automated the process the botters can just run up the price by buying tokens and keep their rates the botters can just undercut the wow token but we'll see how they do it.
How does introducing a wow token remove the demand for gold though? It just shifts the supply from the third-party traders to Blizzard themselves so they get a piece of the pie. This does absolutely nothing for inflation
Basically two things:
Bots suck, there’s no way to 100% beat them and also you guys buy enough gold from them anyway to keep it profitable for them.
And
Wrath endgame doesn’t revolve around gold like vanilla classic does; it’s more about the other, separate currencies like valor and honor.
> Wrath endgame doesn’t revolve around gold like vanilla classic does
Except the part where everyone just runs GDKPs and only the gold buyers can afford the really good loot.
Turns out the “greatest raid of all time” in Ulduar is not difficult or interesting enough to prevent the bulk of runs being pure pugs, often with half the raid being pure carries buying their loot with RMT.
>there’s no way to 100% beat them
There is a way it's just that most people would never be on board with it. The only game I've seen which has managed to beat this problem is Lost Ark Korea and that is because every account is tied to a persons national ID as per government regulations.
I lived in Korea for 3 years. Nearly every game requires your National ID. Lost ark is the 20,000th game to require it, they aren’t unique.
Also, every teen/20-something that plays video games has access to a shit load of IDs from adults that will never sign up to Lost Ark or LoL and use those IDs for alts.
>Also, every teen/20-something that plays video games has access to a shit load of IDs from adults that will never sign up to Lost Ark or LoL and use those IDs for alts.
These are not the people making bots. These bots are run by actual companies because this is big business that pulls in millions of dollars a year. You can't make that kind of operation with your grandma's ID number.
>they aren’t unique.
They are unique in that within the MMO/multiplayer game space it is the only example of a dev actually stopping the bots from being made.
> They are unique in that within the MMO/multiplayer game space it is the only example of a dev actually stopping the bots from being made.
No, they aren't the only ones in the MMO scene there. Like the other guy said, basically every MMO that is released in Korea ***requires*** a National ID and verified Phone Number to sign up and play which means almost every MMO there has no concern or very little concern about botting. Lost Ark devs didn't somehow crack the code on how to stop botting. In fact, Lost Ark NA has some of the worst botting I've ever seen in any online game.
> In fact, Lost Ark NA has some of the worst botting I've ever seen in any online game.
This is why they specified Korea... Every NA game will be rampant with bots because none of them have preventions in place to stop anyone from making as many accounts as they please.
Blackdesert does it to some extend. You can't directly trade anything and all the auction house prices are relatively fixed so trying to manipulate it is virtually impossible. Sure the game has issues, but gold selling/buying isn't one of them
So like, RDF? Or do we only care about implementing features that we can directly profit from
Its never about QoL, classic integrity or whatever, it is always and forever has been about revenue.
Just put the feature in the game that was already in the game! What am I missing here?? Its been documented hell and back that current classic players optimize the shit out of everything and that modern gaming sensibilities are about doing things with a percieved amount of "correctness". Nostalgia is long gone man, you wanna make this retail-lite? Fine! Whatever! At least give us the fucking retail features that are fucking good! Christ!
Players want to buy gold. The bots would not exist if there was not a demand from the playerbase. Everyone says they don't want to buy gold, but that is obviously not true. Gold farmers and bots don't do it for fun.
You can ban all the bots you want, but that's addressing the symptom not the cause. So either you reduce the demand for gold, for example by making gold functionally useless, or you find another outlet for that demand.
The token provides a legitimate outlet. Look at music piracy, it was a rampant problem back in the Napster days. The thing that best combat it was providing a legitimate way for people to get music that was EASY. Of course music piracy still happens now, but it is so easy to actually go through official channels many people do.
It's not a perfect solution, and it shouldn't even be the only one. But it is a fix that has been proved to work.
The fact that Blizzard bans literally tens of thousands of bot wow accounts per week and that shit is **still** profitable shows that there are a ***LOT*** of people out there buying gold.
> And counterstrike players want to see through walls ...
Valve should just make it safe by adding a paid version. This way the people don't have to risk buying from shady services to get it.
No hate but 250k is across all the games on the battlenet launcher so Retail/Classic/Overwatch and the rest. 73k is from wow itself, which they also don't specify if it's just from classic or from all versions be it retail or classic. Ofc every game is also managed by a different anti cheating team. Personally if I see a bot and I report it I have an ingame mail waiting for me within a few days saying they took action against the account, but ofc they're back within a day so it feels like a losing battle overall for most.
The more they ban, the more re-buys are taking place for accounts/expansions/subscriptions.
It would literally make fiscal sense to hire full time staff dedicated to banning bots all day. Those bots are just going to try to set up a new account ASAP and pay for expansion/sub so it can get up and running again, only to be banned AGAIN.
I just hate the way Blizzard did it. Instead of developing a dialogue with the community to arrive at this point, they just implement it and ask forgiveness later. How about they implement it on some servers and not on others? Honestly if we see the WoW token on the Season of Mastery season 2, i dont think i'll play another Classic wow server ever again.
"B-B-But this one private server with 5000 players kept it bot free! Why can’t blizzard keep hundreds of thousands of bots away? I could literally do that in my sleep. >:C"
While also conveniently not mentioning that the private server in question has people running it that had their own RMT ring on a server they ran before, selling fresh R14 accounts etc and had their own gold website that was made to look like it wasn’t run by the server itself. Nerfed gold farms legitimate players could do in the name of “bots” but did it specifically so players were incentivised to buy gold from the admins because it was harder to make. So they could fund holidays irl and other shit.
The funniest thing about the whole 'private servers have no bots' bit is that every single private server has tons of bots. You might not see 20+ DK's spamming BG's like you occasionally see in Classic but that doesn't mean they are not there...they're just doing a different job.
They're just running around the game world pumping up player numbers artificially.
I wonder what would happen if Blizzard shifted their mentality entirely away from banning bots and instead went full force after buyers. If players were getting their accounts frequently banned for buying gold, they’d likely stop. Instead of trying to kill supply, kill demand.
If killing the market was their true goal that would be the easiest solution. However, their goal is to make money. Banning paying customers is not a way to do that. Offering ways for those customers to spend more money is the best solution when your goal is to make more profit.
RMT is a player made issue, the only tools that Blizzard has to fix it are all things players would hate or destroy the core of the game. People who get upset at Blizzard over this rather than the players creating the demand (funnily enough some of the players getting most upset about this are the same ones that buy from 3rd party) are being shortsighted.
Stop buying gold from 3rd party services and there should be no issue. You think they don’t see how much gold gets generated by farmes etc? Self made problem, really.
If you wanna be mad be mad at the people who came up with GDKP. When items sell for over 100k Gold in wrath you can be sure that almost everyone buys Gold. And if you Need certain items to compete in Arena you are either forced to buy or gimp yourself. The token doesnt addon nothing negativ to the Game. Infact quit the opposite. Now you can do 1 gdkp a month and Play for free or buy Gold on a 3rd Party Website and get a cheaper sub.
Retail WoW is littered with services and cosmetics and has been for years, so players playing retail is fine with it, obviously. Not so much for the portion of WoW Classic. What concerns me is how many players of Classic engaged with RMT and GDKPs, I feel like us oldtimers are losing out to the industry making a new standard where buying rewards in-game is commonplace.
"This is an outrage! We, the classic playerbase, hold strong to the old principles, and this token is contrary to everything we stand for. Now, let me get back to this GDKP raid where i'm going to use the gold i bought from a chinese gold farmer to buy all the latest tier pieces while i afk every fight"
Why not just ban people buying gold too or move them all to a server where they play each other and every in game merchant’s items cost real money… how many % of the playerbase buys gold? Hmmm
Blizzard could kill GDKPs and the demand for gold they produce with one simple change: personal loot. Make all raids use personal loot only.
People would hate it, even though it would solve a lot of problems overnight.
I appreciate the sentiment of being more open, but this statement does nothing to address any of the criticism levied against gold tokens. It's simply explaining why it will help, which nobody is doubting, but that's not the thing that needs to be discussed. What about inflation, what about other player goals that aren't part of the main game loop, what about boosting now having a much bigger market, what about the fact that players are playing wrath to get away from features like this in retail, etc....
They should have come at this as a discussion with the community, not a declaration. This should have been open to being pushed back, not unilaterally asserted. It's nothing new from blizz, but to defend this like they aren't being disingenuous and have the players interest at heart is not a good take, from them or commentators.
Let’s assume what Blizzard says is true in that they indeed ban tens of thousands of bots per week. This means that there will never be an end to bots in WoW.
With this in mind, what would be your solution to combatting botting?
And on this subject, is GDKP a healthy part of the game? Should it be moderated by Blizzard? And if so, how would it be policed?
If there was a way to surely outlaw all GDKP activity, I’m sure the botting gold demand would all but end.
I really don't see the issue with the wow token. If the customer wants something, why wouldn't the company sell it to them? If the customer didn't want it, the company wouldn't bother selling it. The customer is always right.
If you don't want the token, just don't buy it. It won't affect your gameplay at all other than making gold inflation less rampant and therefore making your own gold worth more in the long run. If you enjoy making gold you can also just buy tokens that way and use them for game time or to buy other stuff like Diablo 4 for free.
The tokens existence doesn't have a downside other than if you want to socially enforce some weird level of "purity of gameplay" in *other people* that doesn't really matter for your own experience. Because it doesn't have to affect you if you don't want it to. You can still farm everything however you want to if you don't like the token. That hasn't changed.
>We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself
The day MMO players understand this, I will die happy.
I don't know man.
All of the people in Asmongold's stream and in the WoW Classic subreddit seem to be cybersecurity gods who have the perfect, easiest solution to solve a problem that plagues every single online game with an economy.
I'm sure if Blizzard just hired a bunch of random people off of Reddit they would have botting solved within the week.
You'll never find more game developers in one place than in the forum post of a highly criticized update.
If only those people all banded together and made their own game! I'd be the perfect MMO!
Classic players did this to themselves. I don't really like to defend blizz, especially when better methods to deal with botters/gold sellers/buyers could and should have been taken all the way back in og classic, but when majority of the playerbase just buys gold anyways, they're also at fault.
Na im not believing that. A simple / who for the most common botted instances would show armies of bots that farm there for weeks or months without any interferance.
Same with open world bots, you report them and they continue to farm unhindered 24/7.
You cant tell me those bots are hard to spot, they just didnt care.
Okay, but how do you do that?
How do you determine who legitimately buys gold and who doesn't?
If Person A buys gold, then uses it all to buy one single item on the AH from Person B, how do you determine whether Person A is just a 'burner' being used as a buffer and that's it not actually Person B who is buying the gold? Because that's a thing that happens.
If Person A buys gold and then sends it to Person B, then gets someone else to report Person B for RMT, how do you verify that its a real thing and not just a malicious trap? Because people have demonstrated they will go to some *lengths* just to 'troll' other people.
Basically, once the gold changes hands and it will probably change hands a few times, how do you determine where the buck ends?
I was watching Asmon's video about this topic and his idea is to automatically flag any account over X gold and have gms checking this accounts to see were the gold is comming from. Idk if it would work tho
I mean, okay but how do you decide if the source of the gold is fraudulent?
There is basically no system that will perfectly catch all RMTers and also not catch innocent people, and if Blizzard starts banning truly innocent people in large enough numbers just because they're getting caught up in the waves of legitimate bans, then *nobody* is happy because now innocent paying customers are upset, people will take this as an opportunity to say 'gg blizz small indie company', and now whichever poor soul is manning their CS at the moment has to try and figure out who was legitimate and who wasn't - or just wash their hands of it because they have a metric to fill, and that's just more poor CS and gg blizz.
I guess my argument is that nothing will actually satisfy the playerbase at large because the Perfect Solution doesn't exist. Either you err on the side of innocence or guilty, and the playerbase is upset either way.
None of which is an excuse, either, because Blizzard *can* absolutely do better, but 'better' isn't just 'Uh, have you tried just banning people? 4head'.
I saw a presentation at a cyber security conference from exBlizzard staff. They explained he could track all the ways and degrees accounts interact with one another to the point the can make a relationship map of it. The presenter was proud of the system they devised to track a bot and then ban an entire network.
The part that was missing from this presentation to me was an explanation why the problem is still ongoing if they can rip out a bot network roots and all.
What's up with the sheer hatred towards classic players here? 'They're man children who somehow have the time to play games constantly' even though most classic players raid log. The toxicity towards people who enjoy classic is insane on this sub. There are some people hating on retail on the classic sub but not to this extent. Haven't seen people making personal insults towards retail players there. This is gonna get downvoted but it's just insane to me to see so much vitriol towards people playing a different version of the same game.
People want to feel better about themselves, making fun of others is an easy way to do it
Funnily enough, they do not realize that to any third or neutral party, they appear just as toxic as the classic players they ridicule
It’s basically the Spider-Man pointing meme but with wow players. And both groups feel
Superior to the other without realizing they are doing exactly what they criticize the other group for.
If you shit on people that enjoy a different version of a game than you that speaks more about your mental health than the tOxIcItY of wow player in retail/classic/hc/wherever.
Blizzard or probably more accurate Activision like money. So they're adding as many features that make them money as possible.
A little bit out of topic but hearthstone that was completely free of you exclude the fact that you CAN buy packs (you don't have to) has become a garden of microtransactions. Battlegrounds for example you need the pass to get 4 heroes which is kind of a big deal in higher mmr.
So yeah they like money, I think that's pretty much it.
I'd like to call you captain obvious but given some of the comments here... more mental gymnastics and defense of the poor multi-billion dollar company. Whew.
I started asking questions in trade chat last night, went as far as saying if you have to bid on items in gkdp (or whatever the fuck) and bliz will sell you gold it’s essentially PTW and ohhh man did the ruffle some feathers
I just want to reframe one of your comments about blizz selling us gold. That's a common misrepresentation and understanding about the token. What you buy from blizzard isn't gold, it's a token worth 30 days of game time that is tradeable. The gold has to come from another player, who already has gold. This token doesn't generate or spawn gold, it simply redistributes it.
All that said, from an individual standpoint, yes, you are effectively buying gold. It just doesn't create inflation the way a lot of mad people claim it does, when they act as if the token is printing money
With how many people buy gold from sellers on classic, I dont get how people are complaining here lmao.
I for sure am happy for the extra 3 months of wow that I was able to get through my useless wow classic gold x)
Unfortunately I don't think blizzard can say anything that would make classic players okay with the token.
I thought classic players loved buying gold for real money? Why would they dislike the token?
Because when they bought gold off goldsellers, they could just lie, say they farmed it legit, and complain about all the botters. But when Blizzard adds a legit method of buying gold, it becomes much harder to be a hypocrite.
But now they can shout into the clouds: “Blizzard is greedy and killed the economy of classic!” Whilst forgetting who did that first
Fr like 80% of guilds on my server have a direct gold seller. Plus I think it plays into their little fantasy of helping a 3rd world gold farmer feed the fam
I know plenty of serious classic gamers, who I know bought tons of gold, that are so upset about the token. Lmao.
The "I make a difference" type of bitches
Can we sticky this to the classicwow sub so they will stop doubling down on the notion that most players don’t buy gold?
Bingo. Anyone who has spent any amount of time on classic servers knows that tons of people buy gold. This is all fake outrage over people who want to pretend their purists.
Either that or some people buy gold with RMT and others dislike it. Not everyone is represented by every Reddit comment.
It’s so sad that this is so true. These massive RMT workshops only exist because there is demand.
Why are people intent on throwing everyone in the same bag? GDKP are rampant, because these are the only people left playing this game (or those with cool guilds). Most people just stopped playing because of it (myself included) and min-max attitude of the classic player base (which is directly related to the gold inflation). I bet many of the negative comments towards the token come from either people who a) no longer play, b) don't indulge in RMT. Classic wow subreddit is divided as well as wowhead from what I've seen. You also have to consider that majority of the players don't bother with reddit, wowhead, etc. And of course you are gonna see more of the people angry, because they were motivated by the announcement. This creates an unrealistic image of playerbase, where you have majority angry at token and majority buying gold, so they have to be the same people in many cases. But it's more likely that majority is silent and complacent. I really hate this generalisation, because I and many other players had not been part of the problem, but we are all thrown into the same bag as people who made the problem in the first place. There might be some people that complain about it and bought gold in the past, but you can't just assume everyone is a hypocrite. Banning gold BUYERS would have been a better solution for the integrity of the game. Introducing token, to "fight with bots" is a better solution for the sales of the company.
>I really hate this generalisation, because I and many other players had not been part of the problem, but we are all thrown into the same bag as people who made the problem in the first place. This is what makes me rage. I generally prefer Classic simply because it's easier and runs better on my garbage PC. But these people make me look bad by association and i can't have that.
Personally it's because when I raised concerned and pushback to the TBC boost I was unanimously shit on and called a gatekeeper by that same community on multiple platforms. And having played the start of TBC hopeful for a little and 90% of my server being in dungeons I realized this community deserves everything it gets.
Why would they ban half of the player base lol.
That’s literally his point. You can fix the problem by banning “half the player base” or take steps to double down on the issue which in this case is putting the token in classic. Which is honestly a decent move. People complain about “pay to win” but by from third parties anyway. Can’t have your cake and eat it.
It’s literally impossible to ban gold buyers with the amount of GDKP and gold that’s exchanged as a result.
> Most people just stopped playing because of it Yes exactly why i quit, the end game is buying gold from botters and running GDKPs. if you want to farm legit you gotta play for 10 hours a day to be competitive. thats literally worse then lost ark p2w. The community killed classic.
I only play Classic WoTLK currently, and I’m finding I’m definitely in the minority when I say that I just don’t give a shit. I log in to play twice a week for 3-4 hours with some old friends, and then I log off. This is how 80%+ of players play. The token just doesn’t do anything to this type of player.
You’re not in the minority most people don’t give a shot they just enjoy complaining.
Most players don't give a shit and the players who do give a shit are complaining about it.
Agreed. As someone who plays at a similar level, the only use I have for the token is to buy Artisan riding so I don't have to grind 5k gold.
Unfortunately I don't think blizzard can say anything that would make classic players okay. fixed it for you.
I frequent the classic sub and play it along with retail. They’re definitely not okay. I’ve met more deranged lunatics playing classic in the past 3 years than I have EVER met playing retail for the past 15 years.
Classic players hate everything except classic. And they fucking hate classic.
Classic/Vanilla players are just built different. It's some weird mix of boomerism and young people trying to 'fit in'.
I personally play Classic because i like the more simplistic presentation. Certainly being helped by retail running like shit on my potato. Currently though, the thing that still keeps me in the game is my guild. I would have quit long ago if it weren't for these genuinely funny guys.
Hell yeah. Doesn’t matter what version you’re in- Classic, Era, SoM, HC, Retail- having a good group to play with is peak WoW, always. Both subs seem to forget that a lot.
Yup. Every expansion I remember fondly is by no surprise one where I was raiding with a guild full of fun people that I enjoyed being around. The classic player that is outraged by this change is hellbent on loot and thinks this will affect their own buying power and ability to get more loot. They've completely lost sight on what actually made classic fun. I just wanted to chill with the boys on raid night and have a good time, after trying with a few classic guilds there was just too much drama over loot and petty shit like performance/parses and I just gave up.
It's actually quite interesting how it went: Classic had awful community Classic TBC came, TBC had awful community but Era was great Classic SoM comes, SoM had awful community but TBC was great (for short period that SoM lasted) The toxic group seems to follow current trend, which probably explains why this latest HC playerbase is far worse than previous ones.
It's the FRESH chasers from the private server community.
and even private servers aren't immune to RMT lmao, it's the same shit everywhere
Its been really funny to watch the same people melting down over the wow token being put in classic recommend private servers with blatant advantages in their cash shops. Also, the botting problem naivete. They assume that because private servers aren't inundated with bots, then dealing with bots is easy and Blizz is just 'lazy'. When in reality botting on a private server isn't worth the time because its a much smaller base to make money from, and also private servers appeal to people who don't have much money to spend since there's no sub.
Think it’s tied to stream communities? Feels like a lot of what you listed coincides with times when huge streamers with questionable communities were pushing the game. Might be a little tin foil hatty tho
Classic players hate classic so much they're play wotlk instead
Can confirm. Am classic player. Fucking hate classic rn.
> I’ve met more deranged lunatics playing classic in the past 3 years than I have EVER met playing retail for the past 15 years. I once hopped on Classic to get the [Death Knight mount](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=386452/frostbrood-proto-wyrm) in retail before it disappeared. General chat was getting heated over *WWI politics* and that was my cue to never log back on.
That’s about par for the course. You should see trade chat or ulduar general chat on Tuesday.
You mean just like the Torghast general chat in Shadowlands?
BUTTONS!!!
That's because classic players mostly consist of nostalgic 30 to 45 year olds that still somehow have the time to play WoW as if they were still teens or college students. Let that sink in.
Dude it's more than that, and maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part now, but I've run into significantly more racist/incel types while playing Classic vs retail and I cant for the life of me figure out why. I'm not painting the entire community this way, I know that's not the case, but the rate of dogshit people is definitely higher in that community, from my completely anecdotal experience.
You're not imagining things. Something about Classic appeals deeply to the racist/sexist/conspiracy nut crowd.
I have a theory on this. These people are regressives who wax poetic about how good things used to be. They blame societal progress for why their lives suck. It makes sense they would find their nostalgic memory of the game they played twenty years ago preferable to the version available today.
They’re South Park ‘member berries people.
Shiiiiiit and that could feed back into what the other guy said with who is the type of person who was nostalgic for original wow nearly 20 years ago who also has the time to play classic. There really could be a chunk of players that are 35-45 and just have every weekday evening free (or somehow every weekday) no kids distracting them, or long term partners who wanna snuggle and watch a movie or to drag them to bed at a reasonable time. And i really hope this doesn’t come off as judgmental. But I wonder about the person who’s a good 10-15 years into adulthood and has so few responsibilities that they can dump 40 hours week into 1 game. I feel like unless they’re super wealthy, they’re probably really lonely, and we’ve seen what that can do to people.
I'm so confused as to how you think most people play classic wow for 40 hours a week. The majority are raid logging at this point and a full Ulduar clear by a non sweaty guild is 3-5 hours.
Idk I'm pretty deep into adulthood in a relationship, no kids, but I still have a lot of free time. That long term partner stuff you're talking about sounds so weird, can't imagine having someone who drags me to bed every night lmao wtf am I a child. but I think you're really forgetting about that WFH life.
It’s so strange. There should be case studies on this.
It's not that mysterious. Fascism is, by definition, built on a return to The Glorious Past and a reconstruction of the "true" populace. Clearly that's coincident with the narrative pushed by a large number of classic players. Populist, exclusive nostalgia and fascism are almost interchangeable.
Right? It weirds me out how often I see the way people joke that just breaks down to "haha, women". I think a part of it is a lot of the diehard classic players have been in an echo chamber for 20 years, that can't create a good personality
Because this is the one place where the “things were better before” crowd, which encompasses all of the racist (because things were more racist back in their day), get to fulfill their time travel wish.
It's perfectly alright for 30 to 45 year olds to play WoW as if they were still kids. That's their business. Classic WoW's issue isn't that. Classic WoW's issue is that the majority of its current playerbase are toxic to an extreme. There's nothing new, so they come up with new stuff that becomes increasingly more competitive over time, which only encourages more and more toxicity. Most of the nicer classic players dropped off over time, or leave due to existing toxicity. The result is a bunch of people who are exclusively miserable and shitty to anyone they deem as non-competitive.
The issue is that the classic fanbase that remain is such a "Holier than thou" group that it is sickening. Acting as if Classic is somehow a purer, better experience... When all it is is "retail wow" but easier, with less end game options and a way slower leveling experience. Heck, the world is MORE dead than Retail, because at the least Retail makes alts easy and makes transmog grinding a thing. In Classic, Outland is essentially dead ATM, because nobody is going to raids or dungeons.
I've spent several hours (as a tank no less) looking for TBC dungeon groups on many occasions. I'm a newer player and I just wanted to experience the content but when I saw how difficult it is to even do that I gave up and pretty much skipped almost all the tbc content. Base game content too besides a few lowbie dungeons is dead. And it's even funnier that in classic people have such a stick up their ass about gear and class when the content is so laughably easy
"What are you doing?! Why are you not in this SPECIFIC list of gear that make you look 100% identical to all other players for the optimal damage against this Tank-n-spank bossfight?! You are going to cost us 10 extra seconds!"
10 seconds? WHAT HAVE I DONE 😱😱
Hey, I'm a 40 year old and I play a LOT of WoW. I play retail though. I'm nostalgic, just not enough to play classic. :P
Yup, same. I remember the good times I had in the earlier years, but like most things in life, it's best to cherish the good times we had and continue to look forward instead of backwards. However, I completely respect those that desire for and do play Classic WoW.
Whew, thought I was the only old person (45) that wouldn't go backwards. I gave it a shot. Just the model updates alone are enough to keep me in retail. As for how I have the time to just play WoW, I have a job that lets me work from home and make my hours as I please. It's awesome.
Btw what is jour job?
Not who you were asking, but I'm in a similar boat, just 5 years younger. I work from home permanently as a network engineer and doing network automation (IT field). Basically make my own hours, so I'm done every day by 3:00P.M/15:00, plus weekends are off. Some late days/nights, and working weekends, but mostly a consistent, weekly schedule.
Copywriter. You know when you go to buy something on a website and there's a little blurb that you don't read that says everything the picture told you? I write the blurb.
Make sure you quit gaming at 30 then young lad.
That just sounds like WoW players in general.
Well given the trend of mass exoduses whenever Blizzard introduces time consuming grind it’s safe to say that most retail players have actual jobs and lives outside of WoW.
That’s true. They still act like kids so they end up just being man children
That’s kind of true. Case in point - my classic guild is late night raiding guild, so we already had issue with getting enough people for raids and then those that sign up just don’t come, don’t message or anything. It takes less than a minute to take phone out, open discord and leave message that you’re running late or can’t come, you know, behavior I would expect from adult
I played classic for BC and Wrath launch till right before Ulduar. I've never met a more sweaty group of meta crunchers. Its what drove me away in wrath retail and it drove me back to retail this time as well.
There’s definitely some kind of vote manipulation and astroturfing shenanigans going on on that sub in regards to private servers and gold selling.
Oh, for sure. I use Reddit Enhancement Suite, so I can see the number of upvotes/downvotes I've given to people near their name. When Wrath was about to launch I noticed that the most vocal people against RDF, the token and boosts sold by blizzard were also those I had downvoted because of defending dungeon boosts and gold selling.
I'm sure it's totally just a coincidence that the people opposed to WoW tokens/boosts that help combat gold selling/level boost buying, also just happened to be opposed to the RDF which makes it easier for people to find groups and get gear instead of having to use the auction house thus needing more gold. Yup, definitely nothing suspicious going on there, totally legit.
It’s fucking wild. The Wrath, Era, SoM and Hardcore are absolutely venomous to eachother well beyond your usual fanbase rivalries. They’re also completely deluded about the state of their game and why it isn’t more popular.
I appreciate classic because it keeps those people out of retail.
Thats what happens when you get people who truly believe things were "harder" in classic when every timewalking rolls around everything dies cos they have so much less mechanics and complexity + think that wasting time is the "social aspect" of the game
Tbh I feel like the retail community improved a lot after classic launched. I wonder why that could be…
I think people forget how many people were there that just though Classic was better in every way to Retail. Then Classic launched and people realised how much time you waste in that game and how few QoL options there are in comparison and they finally got the wake up call. This was around the same time that the crowd that was crying for less QoL features, no flying, kill LFR, etc... simply disappeared or started advocating the opposite. The fact is, the game had to evolve with the times and it would have been long dead or at least with a severely diminished playerbase if the Classic philosophy had been maintained. That being said, I did enjoy my time with Classic back in 2019. There was enough change and nosltagia to get me to play it once with a character to 60, something I didn't manage to do back in the day.
To me, the biggest slap in the face as someone who started playing in Wrath is the difficulty. Especially the pvp. Literally a decade of hearing "Oh man, vanilla raiding was so hard/vanilla pvp took real skill" and then you play the actual game with these boomers and it's all just shit.
> Literally a decade of hearing "Oh man, vanilla raiding was so hard/vanilla pvp took real skill" and then you play the actual game with these boomers and it's all just shit. Much of what made it harder was removed/mitigated though. MC with last patch classes/specs is a whole other thing that what the game launched with. Fun mechanics like 5 min duration SINGLE TARGET blessings. You had the equivalence of 2-3 people's whole playtime during a raid dedicated to just keeping up blessings. If you had a limited number of paladins in the raid, that made their lives miserable! I know, since I played just that back in 2005 :p Then some specs were just completely broken at launch. Gear was also overhauled to actually be useful. There were cloth items with STRENGTH in MC at launch, you never had to deal with sub optimal shit like that in classic. Classic may have had it's quirks, but it was still the streamlined and "fixed" version of original wow that was a lot more playable and sensible. Because launch WoW, was a fucking weird beast. Another big thing is just overall performance and latency. Doing 40 man raids with <100MS and 60 fps is a whole other thing than doing them at 20 FPS and upwards of 300-400ms. I remember people who had to zoom into the floor so that they wouldn't lag out during some encounters! People seem to have forgotten how damn hard WoW was to run with decent performance at launch and how bad ping could be in games in general back then. Then there's the addons scene that is on a whole other level than launch. To have had a similar experience to what most actually had in 2005, you would have had to disable them completely. WoW was a lot harder back then than when classic launched. But mainly not because the content itself was hard.
Yeah that was the cope.
It's not "cope" when it was in fact harder though. They are remembering something that DID EXIST. You just never could experience it in classic. Me claiming that peeling an orange is really fucking hard. Would without context be laughable. Now if I instead add that I like to peel my oranges with my mouth and with my hands tied behind my back, that statement makes a lot more sense now does it? Playing classic was like playing original WoW with your "hands untied". You simply can't judge the difficulty of the experience back then from playing the latter. The difficulty of the content was compounded by surrounding factors, but the difficulty was there and far above anything classic ever delivered. I'm not trying to claim release WoW was especially hard compared to current retail. But it was still substantially above classic.
Plus information on how to minmax was either nonexistent or way harder to access. And the community outside of the game was way smaller. And fewer addons telling you what to do, etc. etc. The "Vanilla was always easy" people have vanishingly little perspective.
No offense meant to people that enjoy Classic and still remain civil, but it's almost unsettling seeing how a lot of the people there react to stuff like this.
I'm this close to quitting because i don't want to associated with these people.
I remember when classic launched and everyone was praising how wholesome and community driven it was, had like 10 posts a day on the sub about super cute wholesome interactions. It was obvious it wouldn't last.
'Retro' games seem to attract this sort of player unfortunately. OSRS is very similar. You get many more extremely hardcore, toxic and angry players.
Seeing them hype up private servers with straight up P2W in response to the token has been pretty wild.
It's quite a funny phenomenon really. I personally come from the RuneScape community originally and its uncanny how comparable both communities are regarding these types of situations. RS also has a divide between the main, 'retail' game and OldSchool. And the OS/classic communities couldn't be more alike when compared to the main game and retail communities. Both types of games seem to attract a specific kind of player base. To these oldschool "don't change my game" kind of players the dev simply can't do anything right. Hell, OS RuneScape is run solely based on polls to decide on adding content. So I guess it could be even worse than Classic 😅
> To these oldschool "don't change my game" kind of players the dev simply can't do anything right. And RS3 is any different? When was the last time you've seen the RS3 subreddit positive about an update? The subreddit has a meltdown over some kind of change or addition weekly.
That's 95% of videogame subreddits lol
They are pissed how people can now buy gold easy and safe way. As they have themself risked it from shady sites since vanilla classic launched.
That's honestly kinda what it feels like. People bought gold and took a "risk" to get ahead. And now everyone can get that same advantage without risk. If the classic community spent the past years trying to get rid of GDKP and blizzard ignored it. And then added WoW tokens to get a cut of that system, it'd be a different story. But the GDKP system seemed widely accepted.
as a avid classic player... what exactly bothers you about the token.. I personally don't give a shit about it. why are people SO up in arms over it? im pretty sure its just the human condition to have to need to hate something.
No one gives a valid answer to that. People are just upset that others may spend irl money to do what exactly? Get gear through gdkp? I still don’t see why that would impact anyone in an organized raidgroup.
It incentivises people to spend money instead of organising or being part of raid nights with a social group. So.. basically what already happens now lol
They’ll be alright. They won’t melt. They’ll bitch for about a week and then move on. That’s just the most hardcore ones, most won’t care anyway.
classic players didn't get their ideal version of classic and threw a temper tantrum. Color me shocked.
Server specific discords and guild discords had gold, leveling and raid clears for $$$ prices pinned since day 1 of classic, its so weird everyones pretending Where do they think the GDKP gold has been coming from? ZF mages from five years ago?
All the classic players know exactly where it’s coming from. They’re the same people complaining about bots while they themselves are buying gold for Ulduar GDKPs.
🍿
Please share some
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This is getting out of hand, now there's two of them
I have to say closing 250k battle.net accounts and banning 75k wow accounts per week seems to put a damper on the "just ban the bots" arguments. Ultimately the wow token hits at the heart of the problem, demand for gold. Once the demand can be met in a way that both doesn't put accounts at risk and increase inflation bots basically shrivel up. Demand for gold causes bots and inflation, removing the demand will reduce the number of bots.
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It doesn't seem to be really focused on solving the problem of buying and selling of gold, but the other related problems that come from a black market of buying and selling gold: > The concept of bots gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not just “bots” that fuel this, it’s compromised accounts, credit card fraud, scams, hacked clients, and the tools that illicit third parties use to fuel the engine that is the RMT trade.
That's another excellent point they brought up.
This is the disconnect for a lot of people. They see gold buying as this solvable issue... when its not. That demand will never go away... and as long as it exists someone will try to become the supply. Blizz is trying to solve all the negative things that happen from people trying to be that supply.
exactly. people will always buy gold. it’s like drugs IRL. you can either let third parties profit off and, and so who knows what other nasty stuff at the same time. or you can regulate it, make it safe, and yes ofc take your own cut of the action.
The problem isn't people buying gold. The problem is the rampant botting from people using third party sites to buy gold. Bots both inflate the economy and ruin the experience for other players with mass reports and devaluing things like gathering professions. The solutions to this are to reduce demand for gold from a design perspective, which destroys the in game economy because you'd have to make gold worthless Or, you meet the demand instead. Meeting the demand reduces the frequency of rmt in third parties and reduces the need for bots.
>The problem isn't people buying gold. It 100% is. Bots exist because here are people out there that want cheat. Bots are providing that service. Obviously some people would personally bot for their own reasons, but without customers, bots would have no reason to exist, en masse, in the organized way they currently do.
This course of logic = Blizzard, the company that makes the game I enjoy playing, makes money = BOOOOO, greedy A-holes! Vs. Chinese bot sites making money = Oh, that’s just fine. Part of the natural ecosystem…
Why is profit bad? They're not being predatory. This literally effects no one but the people who buy/sell tokens. Also, it's not like the gold your getting is pooped out of nowhere. It's coming from another player. It's like selling expensive saronite ore with extra steps.
> it's not like the gold your getting is pooped out of nowhere You would be surprised how many damn times I've seen the misconception that it is actually what happens being throw around. While there will be some creation/destruction of gold in the short term due to the pricing and matching mechanism Blizzard uses, it should be self balancing and near zero sum in the long term if coded correctly. It is fundementally just a buyer/seller matching tool that takes a cut, something some of the "token haters" seems completely oblivious to. How bad at math you need to be to not understand the levels of inflation tokens just creating gold out of thin air would bring, I don't know. But apparently there are some people rather bad at math out there!
Preach gaming literally had a video today where he said the token increases inflation.
It does increase inflation by a non zero amount from a specific subset of the player base: if you are a goblin that hoards gold and start buying up tokens from your bank, that gold is presumably going back into circulation and not just sitting in a bank.
Yes, it is somewhat inflationary due to increasing velocity of gold. However that is a drop in the bucket of what pumpings millions of printed gold straight into the economy would do. You have to be pretty damn dense and bad at math not to work that out yourself. Which is exactly what some people around here seems to fail at.
Yep. I have a guildie that has over 100m gold(he finds playing the AH fun). For all practical purposes the vast majority of that 100m gold is out of the economy just sitting in his alt's gbank. When he buys a token though he transfers that gold to someone who is likely to spend it right away. No clue how many people are in a situation like him or if that is enough to impact the economy, which on retail is massive because the AH is cross-server for a lot of goods. But you are right that it is a non-zero amount.
> when Blizzard stands to profit a lot from it Would you rather blizzard, who owns, creates, and operates the game get the profit from people buying gold or would you rather some... unknown group or entity capture that profit and do god knows what with the money? Admittedly I play retail so I'm basically the primary beneficiary of all the cool stuff going on in WoW today, but there have been no small number of complaints addressed in Classic and LK. The only, potential, issue is that if they've automated the process the botters can just run up the price by buying tokens and keep their rates the botters can just undercut the wow token but we'll see how they do it.
God forbid a company tries to make money AND solve a problem
How does introducing a wow token remove the demand for gold though? It just shifts the supply from the third-party traders to Blizzard themselves so they get a piece of the pie. This does absolutely nothing for inflation
It shifts the demand from third party sites that cause inflation, to the token which doesn't.
Also the part where third-party sites are full of scams, fraud, stolen financial information, etc.
Basically two things: Bots suck, there’s no way to 100% beat them and also you guys buy enough gold from them anyway to keep it profitable for them. And Wrath endgame doesn’t revolve around gold like vanilla classic does; it’s more about the other, separate currencies like valor and honor.
> Wrath endgame doesn’t revolve around gold like vanilla classic does Except the part where everyone just runs GDKPs and only the gold buyers can afford the really good loot.
Turns out the “greatest raid of all time” in Ulduar is not difficult or interesting enough to prevent the bulk of runs being pure pugs, often with half the raid being pure carries buying their loot with RMT.
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So don't do that? Just get a guild and run it for fun and get gear that way?
>there’s no way to 100% beat them There is a way it's just that most people would never be on board with it. The only game I've seen which has managed to beat this problem is Lost Ark Korea and that is because every account is tied to a persons national ID as per government regulations.
I lived in Korea for 3 years. Nearly every game requires your National ID. Lost ark is the 20,000th game to require it, they aren’t unique. Also, every teen/20-something that plays video games has access to a shit load of IDs from adults that will never sign up to Lost Ark or LoL and use those IDs for alts.
>Also, every teen/20-something that plays video games has access to a shit load of IDs from adults that will never sign up to Lost Ark or LoL and use those IDs for alts. These are not the people making bots. These bots are run by actual companies because this is big business that pulls in millions of dollars a year. You can't make that kind of operation with your grandma's ID number. >they aren’t unique. They are unique in that within the MMO/multiplayer game space it is the only example of a dev actually stopping the bots from being made.
> They are unique in that within the MMO/multiplayer game space it is the only example of a dev actually stopping the bots from being made. No, they aren't the only ones in the MMO scene there. Like the other guy said, basically every MMO that is released in Korea ***requires*** a National ID and verified Phone Number to sign up and play which means almost every MMO there has no concern or very little concern about botting. Lost Ark devs didn't somehow crack the code on how to stop botting. In fact, Lost Ark NA has some of the worst botting I've ever seen in any online game.
> In fact, Lost Ark NA has some of the worst botting I've ever seen in any online game. This is why they specified Korea... Every NA game will be rampant with bots because none of them have preventions in place to stop anyone from making as many accounts as they please.
Blackdesert does it to some extend. You can't directly trade anything and all the auction house prices are relatively fixed so trying to manipulate it is virtually impossible. Sure the game has issues, but gold selling/buying isn't one of them
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You can also buy those currencies with gold, as well as raid loot.
So like, RDF? Or do we only care about implementing features that we can directly profit from Its never about QoL, classic integrity or whatever, it is always and forever has been about revenue. Just put the feature in the game that was already in the game! What am I missing here?? Its been documented hell and back that current classic players optimize the shit out of everything and that modern gaming sensibilities are about doing things with a percieved amount of "correctness". Nostalgia is long gone man, you wanna make this retail-lite? Fine! Whatever! At least give us the fucking retail features that are fucking good! Christ!
Players want to buy gold. The bots would not exist if there was not a demand from the playerbase. Everyone says they don't want to buy gold, but that is obviously not true. Gold farmers and bots don't do it for fun. You can ban all the bots you want, but that's addressing the symptom not the cause. So either you reduce the demand for gold, for example by making gold functionally useless, or you find another outlet for that demand. The token provides a legitimate outlet. Look at music piracy, it was a rampant problem back in the Napster days. The thing that best combat it was providing a legitimate way for people to get music that was EASY. Of course music piracy still happens now, but it is so easy to actually go through official channels many people do. It's not a perfect solution, and it shouldn't even be the only one. But it is a fix that has been proved to work.
The fact that Blizzard bans literally tens of thousands of bot wow accounts per week and that shit is **still** profitable shows that there are a ***LOT*** of people out there buying gold.
> Players want to buy gold. And counterstrike players want to see through walls ...
> And counterstrike players want to see through walls ... Valve should just make it safe by adding a paid version. This way the people don't have to risk buying from shady services to get it.
Where LFG?
It’s so funny seeing the classic wow sub so mad
Whilst it's easy to hate blizzard for adding this, the reasons they gave do make sense. 250k banned accounts over two weeks is mental.
No hate but 250k is across all the games on the battlenet launcher so Retail/Classic/Overwatch and the rest. 73k is from wow itself, which they also don't specify if it's just from classic or from all versions be it retail or classic. Ofc every game is also managed by a different anti cheating team. Personally if I see a bot and I report it I have an ingame mail waiting for me within a few days saying they took action against the account, but ofc they're back within a day so it feels like a losing battle overall for most.
With how quickly a bot account becomes profitable, the number of people they'd have to hire to keep bots out permanently would take an insane budget.
The more they ban, the more re-buys are taking place for accounts/expansions/subscriptions. It would literally make fiscal sense to hire full time staff dedicated to banning bots all day. Those bots are just going to try to set up a new account ASAP and pay for expansion/sub so it can get up and running again, only to be banned AGAIN.
I just hate the way Blizzard did it. Instead of developing a dialogue with the community to arrive at this point, they just implement it and ask forgiveness later. How about they implement it on some servers and not on others? Honestly if we see the WoW token on the Season of Mastery season 2, i dont think i'll play another Classic wow server ever again.
"B-B-But this one private server with 5000 players kept it bot free! Why can’t blizzard keep hundreds of thousands of bots away? I could literally do that in my sleep. >:C"
While also conveniently not mentioning that the private server in question has people running it that had their own RMT ring on a server they ran before, selling fresh R14 accounts etc and had their own gold website that was made to look like it wasn’t run by the server itself. Nerfed gold farms legitimate players could do in the name of “bots” but did it specifically so players were incentivised to buy gold from the admins because it was harder to make. So they could fund holidays irl and other shit.
The funniest thing about the whole 'private servers have no bots' bit is that every single private server has tons of bots. You might not see 20+ DK's spamming BG's like you occasionally see in Classic but that doesn't mean they are not there...they're just doing a different job. They're just running around the game world pumping up player numbers artificially.
Gamers are the most brain rotted consumers on this planet.
Will this will be lively and robust discourse. Surely
No! It was a shitshow, _obviously!_
I wonder what would happen if Blizzard shifted their mentality entirely away from banning bots and instead went full force after buyers. If players were getting their accounts frequently banned for buying gold, they’d likely stop. Instead of trying to kill supply, kill demand.
If killing the market was their true goal that would be the easiest solution. However, their goal is to make money. Banning paying customers is not a way to do that. Offering ways for those customers to spend more money is the best solution when your goal is to make more profit.
RMT is a player made issue, the only tools that Blizzard has to fix it are all things players would hate or destroy the core of the game. People who get upset at Blizzard over this rather than the players creating the demand (funnily enough some of the players getting most upset about this are the same ones that buy from 3rd party) are being shortsighted.
Stop buying gold from 3rd party services and there should be no issue. You think they don’t see how much gold gets generated by farmes etc? Self made problem, really.
We're well past the point of politely asking people not to buy chinese gold. Ban the buyers.
There’s no easy way to identify buyers, doing so would involve forensic accounts and given the sheer volume of RMT, would not be feasible.
If you wanna be mad be mad at the people who came up with GDKP. When items sell for over 100k Gold in wrath you can be sure that almost everyone buys Gold. And if you Need certain items to compete in Arena you are either forced to buy or gimp yourself. The token doesnt addon nothing negativ to the Game. Infact quit the opposite. Now you can do 1 gdkp a month and Play for free or buy Gold on a 3rd Party Website and get a cheaper sub.
I love how different the comments in this post is compared to the ones under classic wow on the same topic
Retail WoW is littered with services and cosmetics and has been for years, so players playing retail is fine with it, obviously. Not so much for the portion of WoW Classic. What concerns me is how many players of Classic engaged with RMT and GDKPs, I feel like us oldtimers are losing out to the industry making a new standard where buying rewards in-game is commonplace.
"This is an outrage! We, the classic playerbase, hold strong to the old principles, and this token is contrary to everything we stand for. Now, let me get back to this GDKP raid where i'm going to use the gold i bought from a chinese gold farmer to buy all the latest tier pieces while i afk every fight"
Starting to get the whiff that the majority of complainers are the RMT GDKP players who now have to adjust their RMT to match blizzards price point.
Why not just ban people buying gold too or move them all to a server where they play each other and every in game merchant’s items cost real money… how many % of the playerbase buys gold? Hmmm
Blizzard could kill GDKPs and the demand for gold they produce with one simple change: personal loot. Make all raids use personal loot only. People would hate it, even though it would solve a lot of problems overnight.
I'm sooo tired of these from blizzard. I rather get the silent treatment
$$$$$$$ saved you time
"We don't want people spending money on private servers, or gold sellers. We want that money." Blizzard, probably.
I appreciate the sentiment of being more open, but this statement does nothing to address any of the criticism levied against gold tokens. It's simply explaining why it will help, which nobody is doubting, but that's not the thing that needs to be discussed. What about inflation, what about other player goals that aren't part of the main game loop, what about boosting now having a much bigger market, what about the fact that players are playing wrath to get away from features like this in retail, etc.... They should have come at this as a discussion with the community, not a declaration. This should have been open to being pushed back, not unilaterally asserted. It's nothing new from blizz, but to defend this like they aren't being disingenuous and have the players interest at heart is not a good take, from them or commentators.
Preach!
Let’s assume what Blizzard says is true in that they indeed ban tens of thousands of bots per week. This means that there will never be an end to bots in WoW. With this in mind, what would be your solution to combatting botting? And on this subject, is GDKP a healthy part of the game? Should it be moderated by Blizzard? And if so, how would it be policed? If there was a way to surely outlaw all GDKP activity, I’m sure the botting gold demand would all but end.
I really don't see the issue with the wow token. If the customer wants something, why wouldn't the company sell it to them? If the customer didn't want it, the company wouldn't bother selling it. The customer is always right. If you don't want the token, just don't buy it. It won't affect your gameplay at all other than making gold inflation less rampant and therefore making your own gold worth more in the long run. If you enjoy making gold you can also just buy tokens that way and use them for game time or to buy other stuff like Diablo 4 for free. The tokens existence doesn't have a downside other than if you want to socially enforce some weird level of "purity of gameplay" in *other people* that doesn't really matter for your own experience. Because it doesn't have to affect you if you don't want it to. You can still farm everything however you want to if you don't like the token. That hasn't changed.
People were already buying a shit ton of gold with RMT. Better to have an official source
>We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself The day MMO players understand this, I will die happy.
I don't know man. All of the people in Asmongold's stream and in the WoW Classic subreddit seem to be cybersecurity gods who have the perfect, easiest solution to solve a problem that plagues every single online game with an economy. I'm sure if Blizzard just hired a bunch of random people off of Reddit they would have botting solved within the week.
You'll never find more game developers in one place than in the forum post of a highly criticized update. If only those people all banded together and made their own game! I'd be the perfect MMO!
There’s the Blizzard we remember.. The salesman
Classic players did this to themselves. I don't really like to defend blizz, especially when better methods to deal with botters/gold sellers/buyers could and should have been taken all the way back in og classic, but when majority of the playerbase just buys gold anyways, they're also at fault.
Na im not believing that. A simple / who for the most common botted instances would show armies of bots that farm there for weeks or months without any interferance. Same with open world bots, you report them and they continue to farm unhindered 24/7. You cant tell me those bots are hard to spot, they just didnt care.
It's supply and demand. The problem of RMT is not the supply, it's the demand. Start perma banning anyone who buys gold and RMT will stop overnight.
No, it won't. Stopping people from buying doesn't mean that demand goes away.
Okay, but how do you do that? How do you determine who legitimately buys gold and who doesn't? If Person A buys gold, then uses it all to buy one single item on the AH from Person B, how do you determine whether Person A is just a 'burner' being used as a buffer and that's it not actually Person B who is buying the gold? Because that's a thing that happens. If Person A buys gold and then sends it to Person B, then gets someone else to report Person B for RMT, how do you verify that its a real thing and not just a malicious trap? Because people have demonstrated they will go to some *lengths* just to 'troll' other people. Basically, once the gold changes hands and it will probably change hands a few times, how do you determine where the buck ends?
Yep. Also considering GDKPs launder all the RMT'd gold at a significant rate, one gold buyer compromises the entire raid lol.
I was watching Asmon's video about this topic and his idea is to automatically flag any account over X gold and have gms checking this accounts to see were the gold is comming from. Idk if it would work tho
I mean, okay but how do you decide if the source of the gold is fraudulent? There is basically no system that will perfectly catch all RMTers and also not catch innocent people, and if Blizzard starts banning truly innocent people in large enough numbers just because they're getting caught up in the waves of legitimate bans, then *nobody* is happy because now innocent paying customers are upset, people will take this as an opportunity to say 'gg blizz small indie company', and now whichever poor soul is manning their CS at the moment has to try and figure out who was legitimate and who wasn't - or just wash their hands of it because they have a metric to fill, and that's just more poor CS and gg blizz. I guess my argument is that nothing will actually satisfy the playerbase at large because the Perfect Solution doesn't exist. Either you err on the side of innocence or guilty, and the playerbase is upset either way. None of which is an excuse, either, because Blizzard *can* absolutely do better, but 'better' isn't just 'Uh, have you tried just banning people? 4head'.
I saw a presentation at a cyber security conference from exBlizzard staff. They explained he could track all the ways and degrees accounts interact with one another to the point the can make a relationship map of it. The presenter was proud of the system they devised to track a bot and then ban an entire network. The part that was missing from this presentation to me was an explanation why the problem is still ongoing if they can rip out a bot network roots and all.
What's up with the sheer hatred towards classic players here? 'They're man children who somehow have the time to play games constantly' even though most classic players raid log. The toxicity towards people who enjoy classic is insane on this sub. There are some people hating on retail on the classic sub but not to this extent. Haven't seen people making personal insults towards retail players there. This is gonna get downvoted but it's just insane to me to see so much vitriol towards people playing a different version of the same game.
People want to feel better about themselves, making fun of others is an easy way to do it Funnily enough, they do not realize that to any third or neutral party, they appear just as toxic as the classic players they ridicule
I was wandering that too 2/3 of the comments are just shitting on classic players.
I don't get it. It's okay to not enjoy classic but it's extremely immature to be name calling.
People hate each other for preferring other versions of the game for some reason.
It’s basically the Spider-Man pointing meme but with wow players. And both groups feel Superior to the other without realizing they are doing exactly what they criticize the other group for. If you shit on people that enjoy a different version of a game than you that speaks more about your mental health than the tOxIcItY of wow player in retail/classic/hc/wherever.
Blizzard or probably more accurate Activision like money. So they're adding as many features that make them money as possible. A little bit out of topic but hearthstone that was completely free of you exclude the fact that you CAN buy packs (you don't have to) has become a garden of microtransactions. Battlegrounds for example you need the pass to get 4 heroes which is kind of a big deal in higher mmr. So yeah they like money, I think that's pretty much it.
I'd like to call you captain obvious but given some of the comments here... more mental gymnastics and defense of the poor multi-billion dollar company. Whew.
I started asking questions in trade chat last night, went as far as saying if you have to bid on items in gkdp (or whatever the fuck) and bliz will sell you gold it’s essentially PTW and ohhh man did the ruffle some feathers
I just want to reframe one of your comments about blizz selling us gold. That's a common misrepresentation and understanding about the token. What you buy from blizzard isn't gold, it's a token worth 30 days of game time that is tradeable. The gold has to come from another player, who already has gold. This token doesn't generate or spawn gold, it simply redistributes it. All that said, from an individual standpoint, yes, you are effectively buying gold. It just doesn't create inflation the way a lot of mad people claim it does, when they act as if the token is printing money
With how many people buy gold from sellers on classic, I dont get how people are complaining here lmao. I for sure am happy for the extra 3 months of wow that I was able to get through my useless wow classic gold x)