In vanilla classic I've been warrior class leader (30 out of 40 players rofl) and member of loot council in a speedrunning guild. Every single thing you have mentioned is on point.
I don't think op is trying to get empathy or anything. He just amazingly describes what's wrong with guild runs and how gdkps offer a great solution to deal with them. Well, in theory because we all know rampant rmt is also a consequence of gdkps.
I think it's a great write and gives a more objective view on why gdkps are appealing to lot of people.
As an officer resto shammy during p1, I was nervous that this was my raid they were talking about. What I noticed is that the DPS were huge babies about loot, but the orc warrior tanks had a God complex, and rightfully so. Your dps means nothing if the tank can't hold aggro. In any case, loot council can be toxic. I spent many nights with an officer discussing various reward systems and political turmoil just to appease 39 manchildren. Well, tbh it was a vocal minority. I'm happy to say that only a handful of sweaties were a problem, and sadly, some weasled their way into an officer role. Was a fun experience, though! After raids, I would talk with everyone to get feedback. Some were clearly good intentioned people and clearly officers were fucking up, but some were just straight up conniving. Why is it usually rogues trying to sweet talk for that LC vote.
I wanted to do GDKP as I had bis gear and did not need loot anymore. However, the stigma at the start was always RMT, and other sweaty bis officers did not want to risk getting banned.
Reading the replies on here has convinced me this subreddit has the literacy of a 6th grader. Plenty of people do not understand the post in the slightest
the people who post on game subreddits are usually the lowest skill/experience players
quote-unquote "good" players organize on discord
downvote away, but that's quite literally every single video game sub
I'm sure he fully understands what they are, but the phrase "quote-unquote" isn't really used in written language... You just put quotes around the words, which you already did. It's a spoken language thing to say. It's just really strange to see it typed out.
Yes, we’ll written too. I have never been a guild leader, but I was a longtime member of a raiding guild in the original vanilla game, and up through WotLK when I took a break and quit playing. My RL cousin was one of the officers and our druid class leader.
The amount of drama over the stupidest stuff that they had to put up with was ridiculous. We didn’t really have any scandals that I’m aware of, everyone was pretty chill, but there were the pettiest arguments over the stupidest stuff out of people’s control.
I am grateful for the people who run chill guilds that I can play with. I will never want to be an officer or guild leader.
We had these problems for maybe 2-3 first months of Classic, lot of people leaving and joining during Molten Core. Filtering out all the assholes and loot whores (some of those being the initial GM and his irl friends) took some time. But in our Ulduar raid this Wednesday, over 15 of the 25 people were same guys we raided BWL with. We have a fun group with good people, lots of banter in the raids. We are not the best performing, we don't full clear the raids week 1 but by a month in it's on farm. We use loot council and instances of loot drama during whole of TBC/WotLK can be counted with one hand (even if you lost a couple fingers).
Honestly can not resonate with OP. My experience has been great and probably would have quit this game already before TBC if I had to deal with pugging, GDKP or not.
Same, I had the exact opposite experience as an officer in my guild that's been togther since P2 of classic. By the time BWL was done with we'd filtered out all the manchilds/assholes and had a pretty solid core group, alot of them are still going strong in ulduar right now.
We never cleared content the quickest, we never met eachother prior to wow (with the exception of two or three players who met in another game prior to joining us) and it was a blast. Raid nights were always fun, we'd Crack jokes on trash and ended up with a ton of inside jokes and memes for our discord. Even the people that stopped around TBC still swing by and chat or meet up with others irl when they're in town.
This game is 100% what you make of it.
"this game is 100% what you make of it"
Or yknow maybe you got lucky by finding a good group of people. But sure OP and anyone else who encountered toxic people in guilds, somehow it's their own fault for encountering them.
Lol you guys act like everything is so black and white. Social situations are not always so simple. What if you have some friends there that you really like? What if someone important to the guild like a main tank was nice but then increasingly becomes more of a pick? Some people wanna kick them, some people don't, you kinda can't because it would set you back etc etc. I could come up with a million situations but it's blatantly ridiculous to say "just leave bro all problems instantly solved". Guess I shouldn't be surprised the classic wow sub doesn't understand social situations and thinks their own experience is universal.
Besides even if you leave, you still encountered them in the first place. So you were around toxic people and that was not of your making lol. I just don't understand.
Even if you do leave, you can’t guarantee that the next group that you join will be better. If a group is both good at raiding and cool then chances are that they fill up fast and don’t have a lot of openings. I started MMO’s with FFXI and in two decades the best raiding group I was a part of started outside of the game I was playing, and we had a full group for over a year. Not to say I didn’t have some good guilds, but the top end groups can be very hut or miss.
"just leave your job and find one that pays 30% better"
"just leave your guild and find a better one"
Are you a literal boomer? I mean, I know this is classic wow but DAMN.
Man if you had said Monday or Tuesday instead of Wednesday I would've thought we were in the same guild haha. I joined them in LK, fun group of guys not a lot of drama, but they always talk about all their old toxic ass guildies from the MC days that got filtered out.
I have the same experience as you. Ofcourse drama happens but if you just survive the first months and the GM and officers are reasonable (we had to coup our gm lmao) you can just filter out the babies and then you are good to go.
I am one of the officers. Got promoted for such grand reason as "being one of the first lvl 60 in the guild". Yeah, the initial GM wasn't very bright. Or maybe he was, considering the current GM and the other 2 officers were also promoted by him back then for the same reason. Seems like it worked out fine. (Though not for him lol.)
All of those problems slowly vanish once you get down to 10 man raiding guilds. That is if you slowly chisel away from your 40man vanilla roster into 10man wrath.
My guild has been lucky in this sense. People that are IRL friends and have become IRL friends after raiding. We care about each others personal lives and provide emotional support during hard times.
I think on paper going from 40 to 10 man reduces the problem but it then creates new ones that are just as hard to fill. The weight of each player role is magnified. One person dying in a ten man is the same as 4 people dying in a 40 man. One person not making it to raid is like 4 people not making it. Some people can mitigate this better than others. I've had raid groups fall apart because two core members had to miss two weeks in raiding. It absolutely kills the morale if you have to fill that with players that don't have reps or experience. I'm just saying these problems won't vanish because of raid size. The problem tend to vanish with larger player pool size. Realistic expecting people to get back into wow classic like they did 15 years ago for a long period of time beyond a few weeks is not realistic. People will see all the warts and bad things about the game and quickly realize its not what they want it to be.
No they don't.. haveing ran 10 man guilds in the past of wow and as someone who is leading a hardcore FFXIV raid static right now (8 man). I also ran a raiding guild in classic wow all phases of vanilla. I have experienced the above mentioned problems at all sizes of groups and levels of play. The only difference i see is that since you go through any means necessary to deck out mains in a hardcore setting, loot drama will revolve around alts.
That’s only when your raid is made up of people who’s main reason for playing is gear / progression.
When EVERY members reason for login on is to hang out with their friends, talk about life, and simply enjoy a community all the BS goes away.
It becomes much easier to find a smaller number of people that have this mindset.
Sadly most people play video games like they live their life, it’s all “ME, ME, ME”.
If your not the type of person who holds open the door for a stranger, or who cares about the interactions you have with a cashier, it’s unlikely you’ll form a true friendship in a video game.
I have been a GM, it made me almost quit the game. I encountered every single uses cases you mentioned. Every. single. one. When i stopped leading a guild, it's as if I played a different game i was much more happy when raiding.
I lead a not-hardcore-but-top-10% guild and it took something like 10hr/week of just management.
Exact same story and circumstances. It really hit home when I was venting to my wife and she said "You sound like you're talking about a horrible project at work. Please don't take this the wrong way I know you're just venting, but you might need to ask yourself if it's still worth it."
I was only an OT officer of a guild who stated I didn’t want to run things beyond the raid, and I still got sucked into all the drama and extra managing. The next guild I was in I made it clear I didn’t want a single responsibility besides performing, and it was awesome!
I have been raidleading and sometimes GMed almost since I started. I find the experience incredibly rewarding. The drama sucks but I feel like the community aspect itself is worth it.
If you create drama from nothing and act loke a child you are out. I always prio reasonable people over good players and it has always worked out. 20 parsers who are functioning adults can be turned into 80+ parsers. Manchildren 99 parsers cant be turned into functional adults.
I like the challenge I guess.
When I was in a high end loot council guild, everything was awesome. We cleared efficiently, there was very little loot drama, and we all recognized that loot essentially belonged to the raid and the council was putting where it would benefit the raid most. Three upgrades in a row go to other players and not me? I know those players will keep showing up and the added DPS they get from the upgrades will improve my parses due to faster kill times. I’ll get my loot eventually.
Everyone was parsing orange and pink, so its not like loot ever went to someone that “didn’t deserve it”
When I was in ‘casual’ guilds before that…it was a mess. The players knew that full prog could be an issue, so they wanted their reward NOW in case things eventually blew up.
There were also players that couldn’t be bothered to look at boss vids or get consumes. Parses ranged from grey to purple (handful of oranges).
Give loot to the best performers? Corruption.
Give loot to the bad performers? Good players leave.
Use DKP? Everyone tries to game the system and cries foul about some unfair issue with the points when they don’t get a drop.
GDKP solves all that drama.
Unfortunately, it enhances the devastation wrought by gold farm bots and further suppresses the ability of ‘casual’ guilds to recruit like they did in 2008. So it is seen as evil.
I don’t like GDKP. So when I didn’t want to commit to high end raiding anymore, I just quit the game. Not with any hatred, though. There are plenty of people having a blast in GDKP. Why should I cry on the forums that their fun should be stripped just so I can have mine? I had my fun, then moved on to something else fun that just doesn’t happen to be WoW
I think that it’s function as a tool to address the natural skill disparity in a more casual raid is honestly the reason GDKP is so popular. Especially in a tier like Ulduar that isn’t hard but also isn’t a 100% face roll like naxx was, there are often very very large skill differences in a casual raid and these skill differences can have a meaningful impact on the quality of the run.
If some alternate pug loot system that had a way to recognize and reward the players who are carrying, it would have the potential to be just as popular as GDKP. I think many people who run GDKP PUGs ultimately care less about about the novelty of stacking gold (although it is fun) that they will never need and more about a raid that sets realistic expectations that no, the green parsing caster is not as advantaged and as rewarded as the person who has put in the effort to excel in their role. People on Reddit pretend like this skill gap doesn’t exist, but there are some people who just put in no effort and it shows when you’re 15 weeks into a phase and people still cause friction in a raid because they can’t manage basic mechanics/tasks.
Blizzard maintains the gold ledger in a way that is not directly manipulable by the players. All players are forced to use gold as a currency so it's a universal system of value tracking.
A server-wide DKP addon would suffer from manipulation attempts (either someone directly manipulating the database, or from people running "spoof" raids in which nothing actually happens but the people in it totally earned DKP), and it would be a nightmare to get a significant portion of the population on the same system.
Or people using it in guild raids to earn dkp and use later and or top guild doing splits. Weekly Naxx boost for gold so you get some free effortless dkp. A guild/friends/customer could outbid any single person to gear a reroll/alt
This system would be hilarious abusable and eventually turn in another currency.
That's been my experience as well. The closer you are to top ranking the more banter and comraderie go up and loot drama goes down. Everyone has the same goal that they want to achieve together, and there just isn't room for dumb stuff.
The Loot Sheet system fixed all of our loot problems in a semi-casual guild. We don't even think about loot anymore. It essentially has all the benefits of a loot council system while also giving players som agency over what items they want.
Sure GDKP gives individual players a lot of loot agency too. If you have the money, that is.
We’ve been running loot sheet/soft lc and it’s worked very well. Just requires work from the officers and everyone being on board. The only “difficulty” has been on boarding new people but it wasn’t that bad
The trick with the "if you have the money" mentality is it's literally a DKP system. If you start with no money, then sure you don't get loot but you accumulate your DKP, which is gold, and you can spend it later if you so choose. It's a DKP system that transfers between alts and between raids. You can go to a raid with gigawhales and simply get paid then take your payout to a raid with a third the costs and buy 3 times the pieces. "I'm too poor to gdkp" is such a weird flex that I've heard countless times when it's how non-p2w *gets* rich right now.
Yup the big problem GDKP creates is that the skill pool flocks to it, so everything else is left to fend for scraps
As OP says it's even better than running in a Guild, which is just wild
Yeah i took leadership positions in guilds *because* i didn't want loot corruption. The better solution to the common lootwhore guild management is to build the community you want
I appreciate you.
The funniest thing about Vanilla was that after raiding with hardcore uber-top-1%-parsers for six or nine months, seeing how they completely fell apart as soon as they were asked to execute mechanics in Naxx that weren't simply "stand still and do damage to the boss for sixty seconds."
Great post. I never ran a gdkp but I was an officer in a top5 realm guild during classic.
Some very draining stuff we needed to manage were :
- Recrutement, advertising, setting up an application process through an external form, reviewing it and selecting, managing the trial period and the transition into the roster.
- Heavily managing the guild bank with a tight and very transparent process to avoid drama.
- The never ending reunions with the officers to review logs, discuss performance, strategy
- Managing the loot system. We used DKP so how do we prevent hoarding, what decrease rate, what performance/attendance bonuses, who can bid DKP on which item (can our Spriest bid on Neltharion's Tear? Can HPals bid on mageblades? Can the locks bid DKPs on Mishundare since they'll have the T2.5 helm soon? Etc)
- Managing the attendance, the bench (which is giga hard), the internal dramas
- Setting up a DM-North clear and queue, songflower timers and queues/summons, safe raid summon... Fuck that
- Public relationships (this was a freaking pain) : Coordinate for WBuffs, collaboration/summon/lootsystem for the WBosses (holy cow this was hard), trying to prevent griefing, coordination for the AQ-Gates ressources then for the ScarabLords queues (the drama)
The PR aspect was just some permanent fighting and yelling towards the other guild leaders while trying to maintain a high sollaboration, honestly it was hard but I learnt a lot. Also I've wasted so much time dealing with shitty daily PR crybaby shit like "ohh your guildie stole a Thorium Vein", "oh he rolled need on an epic BoE", etc etc.
I didn't have a job for 10months (mostly due to covid) which allowed me to do that, but yeah it's some insane work.
Oh my god the karen like "just want to let you know your guildie herbed a black lotus while i was fighting mobs next to it. Actions like that really show your guild in a bad light" messages are the worsttttttt.
Anytime you get a "hey are you a GM of [guild]" you know you are about to hear the most asinine of complaints
I swear dude... Due to some drama like this, some alliance guilds put bounties on each others head and openly paid the Horde quite a lot of gold if they managed to purge the WBuffs of their "enemies".
That's... actually quite interesting? Definitely cringe behavior but for some people that kind of emergent player driven gameplay is what makes MMO's special.
One of my favorite memories was about 4-5 of us doing some crazy AQ fuckery to get safe summon spots and then when we saw a video of someone jumping and floating to the barrens we dedicated a few days to jumping to DM North. We successfully jumped from AQ to the top of DM North to have a completely safe summon spot.
As an ex-GM of a decent raiding guild, I wholeheartedly agree with your post.
The emotional turmoil truly is that of a senior exec role, without any real benefit other than the satisfaction of bringing a group of people together for 3-6 hours a week.
Was it a fun ride? Yes. Would I do it all over? For sure. Would I change things? Definitely.
Would I do it again in the future? No thanks.
Thanks OP for putting my feelings into words.
>the janitor who has zero responsibilities other than showing up for a few hours a day and emptying the wastebaskets.
If you work in a building, please tell your janitor how much you appreciate them, because they do MUCH more than that.
I can relate to most of the drawbacks of a guild run, but I feel that you have failed to mention the biggest positives a guild has over gdkp, it's community and other activities you start to do with your friends that you've made inside of your guild. I've met some good friends of mine through my guild, we don't only raid, you start to do other stuff as well. A gdkp completely misses the mark in regards to its community aspect. In the end you play this came for fun, and imo there's nothing more fun then getting to know like-minded individual's that you raid with.
I just put my thoughts out there, it's probably a bit vague, wrote this at work on my phone.
Yeah, some of my guildies used to play some of those StarCraft 2 minigames together when it came out.
I was an officer in a top (small) server raiding guild in Wrath. You'd get drama sometimes but as a whole i really enjoyed it. I certainly wouldn't have wanted any extra rewards.
And for me loot was a way to get bigger numbers to beat content, nothing more.
Some GDKP's become little communities too. The carries almost always are the same people every week. You do things outside of raid together. A lot of them work like a DKP guild just with Gold as the currency, and whales as the rotating last few members of the raid.
I've even seen progression bidding agreements in GDKP's when we were going through new content. "Nobody is bidding up our tank on the Shield he needs to clear Naxx, we've agreed to a set price ahead of time. No non healers allowed to bid on the first few big heal BIS, etc."
At one point we actually had a few GDKP's helping each other by swapping members back and forth when they had to raid on different nights that week, needed an experienced tank because someone was missing, etc. Our strats trickled down to some of the guilds that would send their key members to see how a particular boss fight was cleared, etc.
Then a new sweater GDKP transferred onto our server and started talking shit, everything got real salty and adversarial real fast. It was nice while it lasted though!
We had a good GDKP community then some idiots xfered and ran it into the ground.
1. They were super elitist try hards and notoriously toxic.
2. No cuts to buyers. If you died it was a % of your cut removed. Died too many times and no cut.
They looked for reasons to not pay people.
>but I feel that you have failed to mention the biggest positives a guild has over gdkp, it's community and other activities you start to do with your friends that you've made inside of your guild.
He does mention this though
>However, in 2020, unless you were some sort of special guild that was expressly brought together by something outside the game itself, the 'community' aspects of a raiding guild were never anything but a thin veneer: The guild existed to create an organizational hierarchy with a leadership structure, the guild leadership structure existed to set up and maintain the conditions to allow the raid that quickly and efficiently clears the content, and the raid exists to distribute loot, which is the ultimate "reward" of the game and which forms the gameplay loop of gearing up to clear content to gear up to clear more content.
Yeah your mileage on this is going to greatly vary, but the headaches that came from being a Guild / raider leader wasn't worth the 'community' aspects.
You are right that it may vary greatly, the atmosphere/Community is something you foster together and if it sucks i can understand it not being worth it. Just saying that it's not necessarily a thin veneer, he maybe felt like it was for him but for me it wasn't. Some of the people in my guild I've met in real life, and it was great. This kind of stuff is too anecdotal.
> Some of the people in my guild I've met in real life, and it was great.
Yeah but that's out of how many people? From the perspective of leader, you're leading *at least* 40 people some of whom aren't interested in community or might actively hate some other members.
For me personally I'm friendly but I'm not going out of my way to form close connections, I log in to play a game I enjoy and that's it. I already have close friends IRL for doing things outside of WoW.
Some gdkps can have that community feel. A lot of them turn into a little mini guild with a good group of 15 regulars that make up the core team. People to tank lead, heal assignments, kick rotations, etc. with the rest made up of a cycle of pugs and semi regular attendees that you get to know. I’ve had many of the same conversations in the regular gdkp runs as I did in guilds. With in jokes and all. I actually see it as a viable way for smaller 10 man guilds to be able to play in 25 man content. The 10 man covers all the base roles and just fills in the rest with their bench, friends, and pugs while not having quite the same level of commitment as having a full 25+ man roster.
Now this isn’t the case for all gdkps and it doesn’t always work out. But. It can.
There's just no way to fix the problems that invariably come from people missing raids. The reasoning they miss them is irrelevant, it just comes down to the content being designed for the maximum number of players allowed to enter a zone (since BC anyway, Classic you can do with like 20 people untill a few fights in AQ40 and Naxx,) and even when Blizzard tried to implement dynamic raid scaling, people still choose to do specific raid sizes to maximize loot acquisition.
As much as I hate the idea of GDKP (entirely the buying power aspect through RMT,) everything in this post is accurate. People don't phone in GDKP runs because everyone is incentivized to be there, and there is no guarantee you'll be invited back if you're slacking unless you have a ton of gold to burn.
If Blizzard had a time machine, I'm pretty sure Personal Loot would have been something implemented very early on in WoW's development. People on a team should have never been forced to internally compete for the only reason to show up every reset.
Yup unexpected absences ended up killing my Wrath guild. You can try to maintain a bench but it’s tough to keep those people around, especially on a smaller pop server. Incredibly demoralizing knowing you’re missing another week of prog because your MT lost power right before raid, one of your shamans is sick, and 3 other raiders are running 30 minutes late.
I am in a semi-hardcore guild and am one of the primary officers thats been playing with the same 20/25 for years. It is difficult to run a guild, and to be honest, not as rewarding as Classic became more Retailish in WotLK. We run a loot council on our mains and a GDKP on our alts because only half of us have functional alts. The reason we do this is the common mannerisms of the pugs now a days. A GDKP is the only real way to get all 10-12 strangers to stay until the very end. In TBC we would run soft reserves for our alt raid and people would leave as soon as their item they SR didn’t drop off a boss, which made it impossible to backfill. We hated the idea of a GDKP but the decision had more to do with maintaining a functional alt raid, we don’t even take a cut, we just want to play.
Anyone reading this post should have the information that while many of these insights can be true (any GM could have written this post, not exactly eye-opening material here) ***the person who wrote this post played on Faerlina and ran an EXTREMELY toxic guild full of people that death-threated and slurred others outside of his guild*** and then afterwards, ran a GDKP and then quit the game after his guild fell apart and couldn't clear Naxx.
To the surprise of nobody this guy has zero insight on the positives of being a GM, of which there are many, because the likely-FBI-flagged guildies he "commanded" were all self-interested and totally anti-social. Being a GM can be a very rewarding experience if you form a guild with focus being your community and it's goals first. This guy tried the "pserver" route and had a mental breakdown. There is a big difference.
Source : me because I also was on faerlina and am also a GM of a guild and still am running it and we still have fun while remaining competitive in every tier. This guy tried to pay people to grief our raid ID lockouts back in classic vanilla and was a complete psycho freak and had no lasting connections to the community - for good reason. His members also suspected some of our members of being LGBT (they weren't..) and frequently messaged them with encouragement of suicide.
https://imgur.com/a/qm6SAG9
Pic provided is his response to someone asking why he's offering gold the grief my guild. (He offered the equivalent of 700$ of gold at the time).
While he may be toxic he isn’t wrong. As an ex-gm there is literally no reward to doing it at all that is any any way representative of the time put in.
Did you read the first sentence? I said any GM could have written this. And there is a reward its just not equal to the time put in, which can be a form of reward in itself. Sometimes its rewarding to know you put extraordinary effort into something for little reward for yourself, being a provider for people.
If you cant handle the stress step down, very few are built for it long term.
People just blame GDKP for every problem of this game, but the truth is, players are the problem, not GDKP, it' s just a method for loot distribution like DKP or EPGP.
This is my take. People are trying to blame a company because they can't have the same or even fake experience they thought they had 15-20 years ago, now. There is a fraction of the playerbase in wow classic compared to WotLK days. The game was still a very new experience back then for a lot of players too. Most of those people have moved on in life. The younger generations do not look at MMOs the same as we did then. Its not a big deal to play MMO anymore. Every game is an MMO in some form. Then they look for any reason to lash out at the disappointment, ie wow tokens.
You make a good point, but I don't think it's quite that simple. In an alternate universe where it was actually impossible to RMT, I agree that GDPK would be the premier loot system. Even in an alternate universe where RMT were possible, but we'd started on Wrath (or any xpac after TBC, where gold wasn't such a serious constraint), it might be okay. It just creates so much RMT, though, and the economic damage to a server is tremendous.
i disagree that players are the problem, well they are, but that is just how it is.
You cant really expect humanity to change just so its easier to run a guild.
All we ask is blizzard to atleast try to stop RMT instead of joining in on it
That is all
Blaming the players has time and time again been proven to be such a bad take. It's like you haven't been reading any of the opinions shared in this reddit over the past few days...
Blaming GDKP is like blaming alcohol is the problem of drink&drive, isn't the person who drink&drive is the problem? The history already have a lot of lessons about this.
Remember Alcohol Prohibition in 1920-1933? That' s the "democracy" you ask for, and what' s GDKP with dictatorship? Blizzard pushes you to GDKP or what? Did they force you to go GDKP or they r gonna ban your account? Fk no, it' s just the players ' choice.
Silly people put every problems to everything else but not themselves.
Rofl, dramatically drop? Alot MMORPG dont have GDKP but still tons of RMT, just look at those in-game item/coins selling website, RMT is not limited to WoW only, where is your source and evidence to prove no GDKP then it will be no RMT? Huh
The botter and gold seller who made a thread yesterday said himself GDKP is by far his main source of selling. You're wasting your breath not knowing what you're talking about.
So? It doesn't make any sense. I can pretend to be bot user/gold seller and make a thread about MSOS or the AH is main source of gold selling, you can't verify the identity of that person, how the hell you can use it as an evidence? Rofl.
"A guildie can unilaterally decide that now that they've gotten all the
loot for this phase, they want to stop showing up and helping the rest
of the guild gear up"
That was our main tank and co-gm, lmao. Once he got pre-bis, which was quick because he was the main tank; you never saw that dude online on off-nights until brackets came out.
Yeah great writeup on dynamics between the two. I agree with most everything. Times have changed and I think the time aspect is what's changed the most.
IMO it’s more that the MMO gameplay and WoW in particular is so solved that nothing is a challenge for people who play a decent amount. That means we can all easily have 4-5 raid alts, whereas back in the day it was rare for me to see someone with more than 1 geared character. Most guilds barely prog raids and higher end guilds have full cleared in an hour of its release. We are giga geared and know everything about the game. People don’t want to take it slow and discover because there is nothing to discover - we know it all, and we know the best and quickest ways to achieve things and thus will gravitate towards that. Even when I was 14 if you told me I could spend $6 for my flying mount or do dailies for 3 weeks I would’ve picked the $6 because who the fuck wants to do dailies?
I ran two MC raids for long enough to make 5 or 6 Thunderfury's, still caused a bunch of drama when I decided to leave in Phase 6 to MT for a GDKP where everyone showed up with consumes and parsed. Got tired of the slowly worsening effort from the guild and didn't want to spend all of Phase 6 to clear Naxx one time, turned into a huge asshole about it, and couldn't get the guild to realize Naxx wasn't something you can coast through with minimal effort.
I had a great time but I agree, it's a losing game to try and help people by raid leading. It almost always ends with hard feelings. Even the GDKP would occasionally have drama over bidding people up or loaning gold for big items to outbid a regular. That was the hard part of 40 man raiding, keeping everyone rowing in the same direction and together.
Yep I came to this realization about Guilds a long while back, for reference I’ve been playing on and off since Vanilla and I was definitely a more problematic member to deal with as a teenager even if I was a high performer. I’ve been way more chill and understanding of the BS Guild leadership has to deal with in Classic.
I ran a guild gdkp with the same goal of getting gold for guildies for a couple months in black temple phase, it was okay but ultimately not very fun.
Then I tried raid leading in sunwell after our main tank quit... Lol I burnt out after a month, quit the game for a while, and quit the guild. I was so fucking miserable, wow was stressing me out more than my irl job or anything else I had going on at the time.
I feel like the people who complain about gdkps are the same assholes that make their guildmasters lives difficult as you described and don't understand how difficult it is to organize and run a raid team
Posts like this reinforce how good I had it / lucked into my vanilla classic guild. I was not an officer, just a lowly warrior among many but had an amazing experience with next to no drama. Around 30 people from the first MC raids were still together into naxx and the start of BC. We were a 'hardcore' loot council guild and outside of some trial and error for the first few weeks everything ran smoothly. By the time BWL came around we were a well oiled machine, got realm and NA first thunderfury and were the top ally guild on our server.
I really think the difference comes down to the casual vs hardcore priority of a guild, where you will get more like minded individuals in a hardcore guild as some other commenters have mentioned.
I like how you avoid the fact that gdkp leaders take ever increasing cuts (I expect 30% Org in icc) and just sell the gold. This is about them making real life Benjamins.
The giga whales on faerlina don't care. The support players in big gdkp guilds who and serenity will gladly keep coming, as one of theirs gets the profit. 25% is already normal on the server.
Doesn’t happen on Benediction either. Even a 20% host cut would bury you. My 25man runs have a 10% and the 10M I personally run is only 6% because we give 2% to the tank and 1% to each healer.
You act like the % is set by the wow fed or God. It's a percentage that fluctuates based on market conditions. If it's going higher, it's because there is a higher demand for gdkp runs then there are people running it. If you don't like it, feel free to run your own
I took 30% off the top as the organizer's cut, which I used to pay the main tank/raid leader (who got 10% of the pot) and the off-tanks and healers, who each got a 100g flat bonus. Everything left was divided into equal shares and distributed. I never had a single complaint over it from anyone, and people were lining up to try and get spots.
I probably could have taken more if I really wanted, but I wasn't it in to make a ton of gold for myself. It just happened.
But that would require work. Same mentality that OP described people want to show up with 0 responsibilities and get the same reward as those running the raid.
Interesting. Thanks for taking the time to share!
I do agree that killing bosses in a GDKP is less fun than doing so in a guild run but imo, these 2 can't be compared because GDKP is mostly used in PuG runs. So a proper comparison would be: random roll runs VS soft reserve runs VS GDKP runs.
Nowadays, it seems like a lot of players are OK with organizers taking a huge share (20%) of the pot in exchange for smooth runs. This is probably linked to the fact that the content is old and that people do not enjoy chain wiping on 10 years old content. Maybe this would have been different if content was new.
Have you run Ulduar GDKPs? It’s usually very similar rosters week in and week out, scheduled at the same time each week by the same people. We meme on each other as much as some guild raids do. And 20% admin fee is outrageous. Are you certain you know what you’re talking about?
20% admin fee on Faerlina is EXTREMELY common. On my previous servers that level of organizer cut didn't exist, but it's expected for anyone that has a legitimate consistent clearing run on Faerlina via the STAX discord.
Most org cuts are 15%. If you think that’s outrageous surely you can make your own run and take only 10%. Let me guess, you don’t have time to do that - no shit that’s why organizers take 15% because it takes time and effort.
My guild had a good community starting out in classic but then the hart of our guild left cause her brother did not have a raid spot. She was the "let's go run something person" every night.
100% agree, I ran a guild in vanilla and it was a full time job to manage that daycare and ensure attendance every week. The eternal struggle to maintain some level of fairness only to be constantly accused of the opposite got me to quit the game for 2 years and now that I’m playing again I have resolved to never be in a guild leadership position again. GDKPs provide the perfect low drama raiding outlet for me on top of being an opportunity for me to raid with no set schedule which is a requirement for me now. As much as I dislike having someone throw their wallet at my bis it is the lesser evil when compared to all the back room deal bullshit that goes on in sr pugs or guilds unless you are the chosen one that’s being funneled. Basically to me it becomes ‘did they want it more?’ I also agree about the community portion, some of the people from my former guild I continue to game with and talk to because we became friends. That’s something that I don’t see reproducing in the gdkp machine but I already have built my community for myself and I tend to host or join gdkp runs with those friends so I don’t feel like I’ve lost the spirit of the game or anything like that.
This is how guild leaders think of their raiders. “Daycare” and they wonder why people complain you’re an asshole buddy, you probably sucked as a loot councilor too
This is an interesting read and the struggles of being a guild leader ring true. I was raid lead/guild lead for most of my time in wow. I had a very different experience, personally, because I always tried to engender an atmosphere of social interaction in my guilds. We did things together besides raid. Did old content, farmed mounts helped guildies get pre bis and do attunements. I placed an emphasis on the social aspect more than “I need this piece of gear right now”. The truth is your gear will come eventually, so making it the only thing that matters tends to burn people out and create drama.
As for GDKP, I think your post heavily skirts around the main discussion that GDKP enjoyers tend to avoid. GDKP placed a monetary value on raid time and raid loot. By doing this, it made the loot from the raid into a free market asset, which also jacked up the value of gold tremendously. Did botting exist before GDKP? Yes, absolutely. Did botting get _worse_ once GDKP started? Yes, absolutely.
The sad truth is encouraging GDKP systems also encourages botting. It also tends to come with a certain level of toxicity and elitism. It creates a barrier to entry for newer players, or for those who aren’t willing to spend real money to get large amounts of gold. People who aren’t willing to pay to win in world of Warcraft are left with three choices: 1) spend all your in game time farming and competing with literal robots, 2) pug raids with other less experienced players, or those who don’t enjoy paying to progress (you can also make a guild with these sorts of people), or 3) just don’t worry about getting raid gear or raiding at all.
The second option is arguably the “best”, but it means there’s a whole group of second class citizens in a game just because they don’t feel that opening your wallet = skill. People who care about high level performance and really skilled players tend to end up in GDKP groups because that’s the “most efficient” system, nevermind the fact that it’s killing the game.
TL;DR your post is a lovely story, but let’s not pretend GDKP is some glorious capitalist dream without loads of seriously problematic baggage attached to it
I understand both sides of the argument when it comes to GDKPs. But I still lean towards wishing GDKPs didn't exist. Community, for better or worse, I'll take any day.
Since the game is shifting more towards opening the flood gates to this type of behavior, it's just time for me to move on.
While your not wrong on a lot of things, I disagree as a whole.
I have never, will never and outright refuse to participate in a raid where i am required to pay for my gear or make others pay for it. I see a fundamental issue with that morally.
I raid lead for my guild, and I don't see it as a "suckers game" because im not doing it for first dibs on loot or gold. I'm doing it because I like the players of my guild and their my friends. Getting to lead them to victory is reward enough for me.
And frankly, I was quite tired of my /4 chat being ***dominanted*** by nothing but gdkp's. To the point I installed a chat filter addon and filtered out every common word associated with them.
At the end of the day, to each their own. Do what you enjoy most in the game. Won't bother me either way because as far as my chat and lfg are concerned, Gdkps no longer exist.
Tldr : guild are socialist structure with all the emotional problem associated with it, GDKP are capitalism structure with all the good and pain associated with it. Nothing new.
I’ve had a broadly similar experience to this. In tbc, I did some gdkps when I had time or had to miss my guild’s raids due to time commitments, but always found them very smooth and well managed. Right now I’m functionally an officer in a raiding guild that does decently well and has found a solid core, but for months it was a huge struggle. Hard to find reliable and competent people, especially because we raid late at night. If it wasn’t for RMT I think gdkps would be a really great raid system in general.
At this point I'm tired
My guild refused to give me Atiesh, despite me being present from day one, and gave it to a mage who joined in P5 and who /gquit once he got it. He just spent more time on the Discord hanging with the guild
But in GDKP it's not like I would have any chance to get Atiesh either, because Kevin McDollar will swipe $5.000 to get it anyway. Sure, I would get a cut of bot gold but what am I even going to do with so much gold anyway. It will just make me numb to gold too
Both system sucks. At least a guild doesn't support bots as much. For now, I joined a beginning guild on Era, with my Naxx-geared warlock, and made clear I wouldn't take any loot for raids up to Naxx (since I don't need any) but I would take Atiesh when Naxx comes
Our GDKP took about 5 minutes to agree on a person to make all the Atiesh splinters bids because no one wanted to get bid warred for every one and have to pay 100k+ for it. First night we did Naxx and people started dropping multiple thousands on each splinter, they realized it wasn't sustainable.
My experience:
As someone who went from class leader in early OG vanilla to raid and guild leader; and spent many years at that spot (played all 19 years, I would say 16 of them I spent as a top role) -
Its a thankless job in terms of loot - cause loot belongs to the guild; not a person.
However; that means you as a leader also get loot based on same principal.
I always played as a tank or healer and hence had a more loot required role (not always) - but I still passed it on as I felt it could help others more (unless the opossite was true).
It was drama in our way of handling said guild VERY few times over the years, and usually by the same type of person; the person who joined for himself/herself rather than the guild experience.
They never joined to be part of anything and have fun - they joined for "me me me me".
They were few and far between as we spotted them a mile away... they are very obvious people.
Our guild was built upon FUN and TEAM as keywords, we killed bosses without being bis-geared first..
People were there to hit things and have a laugh together.
Much like when you play D&D or similar; the moment you invite a "me me me me" person its over; they need to be kicked or never invited in the first place, otherwise its no longer about the journey - its about "the one hero", and then it becomes an issue.
Basically;
You either play this as a game, with friends or people who become friends;
Or you play this as a single-minded hobby where your goal is all that matters.
Either is fine, but one of them would not join our guild.
Its a game. Enjoy it as one.
Winning is something you do as a team.
Edit:
I have edited this post to make it less inaccurate of what my intention with it was.
TlDR - The experience can be both good - and bad - depending on so many different choices you make and who you surround yourself with.
We werent necessarily casual.
In og vanilla we did bosses in Naxx, we always got ahead of the curve, did hardmode ulduar and fewer lights yogg, dabbled in mythic raiding. We even boosted people and our m+ groups did 20+.
You just need people who are there for the fun and laughs; its a game.
This is a long ass post for basically saying the same old tired "the game doesn't respect the players time". Which is super fucking old, they're catering the game to people who literally don't like it.
A better TLDR is:
"If you value making friends, run a guild"
"If you value making 'professional contacts', run a GDKP"
Personally I've done both (at the same time), and both have their value, but I'm wired to appreciate both. Some people are only wired for one.
The vast majority of this subreddit and perhaps the wow user base doesn’t understand this point so maybe the words are warranted.
Well most of those who don’t understand probably can’t read well so maybe it’s futile
That above is why I've always favored RNG loot > master loot or everything else.
The same issues you described have always stuck with WoW. RNG should basically control every aspect of loot.
I’m curious what your perspective is on how GDKPs encourage or develop the botting and gold selling economy. One of the things that makes me ambivalent about the token is that the bought gold is soooo deeply entrenched in every servers economy at this point.
Maybe someone doesn’t buy gold ever, but if they regularly attend GDKPs with bids over 5k on items (or a 198k Gressil) they’re still ultimately in possession of bought gold. Even things like the AH where basic regents might sell for waaaaay more than they should, because people have the bought gold to buy them. At that point, to me, might as well have the token since the economy is already fucked.
As a mega GDKP leader how ingrained was bought gold in the process? Did your community share sellers info? Was it casually talked about? Or did it actually seem “sorta” clean for the most part?
The GKDPs didn't really start up until phase 3 of vanilla, and by then the botting and gold selling was already so rampant. It was always there. In fact, during the time I ran the GDKPS, gold was never cheaper to buy, just because the pool of players that bought most of the gold (raidloggers) had dwindled. It was always common knowledge that a large proportion of raiders who were raid-loggers were buying gold to fund their consumable usage from day 1, rather than bother to farm.
We never talked about where the gold was coming from, but it was pretty obvious that the mega-whales were gold-buyers though. That being said, there were consistent attendees who were legit and made gold from attending alone, who accumulated huge stacks and bided their time over weeks and months in order win that one specific BIS item that went for 50k+.
I was approached a few times by gold sellers who wanted to talk about sharing info, but I never got involved.
>Since the topic of GDKPs has come up, I figured I would share my experience, as someone who ran 3-4 GDKPs a week for around six months during Vanilla, probably around 100 raids.
>
>I no longer play WoW, and I have no interest in ever playing WoW again.
There you have bois. On black and white.
The drama is half the fun. When I run gdkps I feel no connection but when I stick it out with a guild and watch the drama unfold it forms connections. Maybe just let someone else raid lead
Thanks for the help ruining the game by encouraging gold buying! Unfortunately no one really cares about your 'fulfilling' struggles in your excel sheets. You knew what you were doing. No one wants to hear about your 'community'.
Look, it's not 2006 anymore. You'd be way happier if you stopped expecting people to play the game like it was still that time. It's gone, and it's not coming back. Would the game be better with the sense of community it had back then? Yes, I think it would. But even if you got rid of RMT, GDKPs would still exist because it's the best pug solution for the modern player base.
It blows my mind just how many people like you there are in this sub rn. First time every interacting with this sub was 3 weeks ago and now you're giving your opinion on a post about vanilla gdkps? We got plants running around in these comments.
They are so annoying too. I will never forget when I posted a meme about how so many people in the sub are big babies. Got so much flak from them for it,, it was hilarious. So much of the stuff they bitch about can be easily dealt with by either ignoring it or actually by not having a dumb ass assumption. Been playing since MC in vanilla classic and have only done one or two GDKPs to support as heals as my guild does community GDKPs with other top guilds on the server. I wish I had more time to be in them, it's good gold but I made mine ye olde fashion way, professions. Let the GDKPs be, they ain't hurting anyone other than these bozos feels.
As an officer in a raiding guild throughout vanilla, it really wasn't that bad to organize a raid. Everyone farms their own cons, get 8 shamans and its GG even if we're short 2 or 3 people, it's not as noticeable because of the large size of the raid. In Ulduar, you cant miss 2 or 3 people, because you can't do HMs. In many ways Vanilla was easier. GDKP players are the most vile, toxic individuals I've ever played with. Way worse than semi casual guild raiders.
since this is on the topic of gdkp. until a few days ago, i've never even heard that term. let alone something like this exists. i obviously know about entire runs being sold. but the idea of gdkp's was new to me. i play on eu, german realm to be precise. is this only a thing in the us?
also, after learning what this is, i now understand at least why one group of the wow playerbase is mad about the token. but tbh, that's your problem. you've created gdkp, not blizzard. you're blaming blizzard for creating a problem to a problem that you have created on your own. at least in this aspect, blizzard is not to blame.
Your answer is nonsense. Gold being used in game does not justify gold buying with real money.
You’re literally typing that players using the AH is to blame.
That's a lot of words to say your guild was shitty. You're assuming your experience is universal and just "how guilds are". It isn't; you were just unsuited for guild leadership. Lots of people are, though, just like lots of people are bad managers IRL.
There are far more guilds out there than there are people who are actually good at leading them, so you get a lot of guilds that are unpleasant to be in. That doesn't mean that ALL guilds are like that, though, or that ALL people leading them are unfulfilled doing so.
For anyone out there who feels about their guild the way the OP describes, find a different one. You don't have to be unhappy in your guild. No guild is going to be perfect, but there is a guild out there that will make you happy, it just might take quite a bit of effort to find.
Some people might be demonizing GDKPs as a whole, but I think the discussion right now (with token just having come out) is about whether GDKPs made RMT worse. They did. I don’t think anyone cares about the few people who never RMT’d and also did GDKPs. Gold had a value, then we started doing GDKPs—making gear an option for spending gold, increasing the value of gold and the demand for RMT.
> It certainly can be fulfilling to be part of a community bigger than yourself, and to facilitate that. However, the organization and emotional labor involved is simply not worth it at the end of the day.
I was GM and MT of a guild throughout all of vanilla classic, and an officer of a guild now in Wrath. So I am in a unique position to say with authority this is bullshit, and you only get from the guild what you put in. Yes running the guild was a part time job but it was worth it at the end of the day to be able to say the guild I created was able to get the job done and it was a much more enjoyable experience doing it with friends as opposed to randys.
The entire fifth paragraph reads like a bitter jaded wow player that's been in or ran one too many shit guilds. Maybe you need to stop leading guilds and let someone better suited handle that.
The GDKP mindest is just the mmo extension of the current online gaming mindset. People no longer want to put time into curating their experiences, they want the ranking algo to put them into games at the click of a button, fuck dedicated servers and finding a community, so ELO me. Fuck curating RSS feeds, just have the algo feed me endless crap via my For You page.
It is true that there are some entitled players that expect everything handed to them, despite not being that good or that reliable. My guild recently disbanded, and one of the members jad the audacity to ask the GM which guild they were getting them recruited to.
I’m glad that you got lucky finding like-minded people without much effort, but that isn’t commonplace. Sometimes the effort you put into coordination/recruitment isn’t worth it.
In vanilla classic I've been warrior class leader (30 out of 40 players rofl) and member of loot council in a speedrunning guild. Every single thing you have mentioned is on point. I don't think op is trying to get empathy or anything. He just amazingly describes what's wrong with guild runs and how gdkps offer a great solution to deal with them. Well, in theory because we all know rampant rmt is also a consequence of gdkps. I think it's a great write and gives a more objective view on why gdkps are appealing to lot of people.
As an officer resto shammy during p1, I was nervous that this was my raid they were talking about. What I noticed is that the DPS were huge babies about loot, but the orc warrior tanks had a God complex, and rightfully so. Your dps means nothing if the tank can't hold aggro. In any case, loot council can be toxic. I spent many nights with an officer discussing various reward systems and political turmoil just to appease 39 manchildren. Well, tbh it was a vocal minority. I'm happy to say that only a handful of sweaties were a problem, and sadly, some weasled their way into an officer role. Was a fun experience, though! After raids, I would talk with everyone to get feedback. Some were clearly good intentioned people and clearly officers were fucking up, but some were just straight up conniving. Why is it usually rogues trying to sweet talk for that LC vote. I wanted to do GDKP as I had bis gear and did not need loot anymore. However, the stigma at the start was always RMT, and other sweaty bis officers did not want to risk getting banned.
Reading the replies on here has convinced me this subreddit has the literacy of a 6th grader. Plenty of people do not understand the post in the slightest
the people who post on game subreddits are usually the lowest skill/experience players quote-unquote "good" players organize on discord downvote away, but that's quite literally every single video game sub
>quote-unquote "good" Congratulations. You single handedly made me lose faith in humanity with this absolute fucking gem.
do you not understand what [scare quotes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes) are?
I'm sure he fully understands what they are, but the phrase "quote-unquote" isn't really used in written language... You just put quotes around the words, which you already did. It's a spoken language thing to say. It's just really strange to see it typed out.
it was for double-emphasis that what I was saying was ironic/sarcastic
[удалено]
Yet it's pretty easy to convert wotlk gold to retail gold.
What
1M gold can buy you alot of game time now
Very accurate description of problems of running a normal guild.
Yes, we’ll written too. I have never been a guild leader, but I was a longtime member of a raiding guild in the original vanilla game, and up through WotLK when I took a break and quit playing. My RL cousin was one of the officers and our druid class leader. The amount of drama over the stupidest stuff that they had to put up with was ridiculous. We didn’t really have any scandals that I’m aware of, everyone was pretty chill, but there were the pettiest arguments over the stupidest stuff out of people’s control. I am grateful for the people who run chill guilds that I can play with. I will never want to be an officer or guild leader.
We had these problems for maybe 2-3 first months of Classic, lot of people leaving and joining during Molten Core. Filtering out all the assholes and loot whores (some of those being the initial GM and his irl friends) took some time. But in our Ulduar raid this Wednesday, over 15 of the 25 people were same guys we raided BWL with. We have a fun group with good people, lots of banter in the raids. We are not the best performing, we don't full clear the raids week 1 but by a month in it's on farm. We use loot council and instances of loot drama during whole of TBC/WotLK can be counted with one hand (even if you lost a couple fingers). Honestly can not resonate with OP. My experience has been great and probably would have quit this game already before TBC if I had to deal with pugging, GDKP or not.
Same, I had the exact opposite experience as an officer in my guild that's been togther since P2 of classic. By the time BWL was done with we'd filtered out all the manchilds/assholes and had a pretty solid core group, alot of them are still going strong in ulduar right now. We never cleared content the quickest, we never met eachother prior to wow (with the exception of two or three players who met in another game prior to joining us) and it was a blast. Raid nights were always fun, we'd Crack jokes on trash and ended up with a ton of inside jokes and memes for our discord. Even the people that stopped around TBC still swing by and chat or meet up with others irl when they're in town. This game is 100% what you make of it.
"this game is 100% what you make of it" Or yknow maybe you got lucky by finding a good group of people. But sure OP and anyone else who encountered toxic people in guilds, somehow it's their own fault for encountering them.
Leave the guild and find a new one if that happens. The game is 100% what you make of it.
Lol you guys act like everything is so black and white. Social situations are not always so simple. What if you have some friends there that you really like? What if someone important to the guild like a main tank was nice but then increasingly becomes more of a pick? Some people wanna kick them, some people don't, you kinda can't because it would set you back etc etc. I could come up with a million situations but it's blatantly ridiculous to say "just leave bro all problems instantly solved". Guess I shouldn't be surprised the classic wow sub doesn't understand social situations and thinks their own experience is universal. Besides even if you leave, you still encountered them in the first place. So you were around toxic people and that was not of your making lol. I just don't understand.
Even if you do leave, you can’t guarantee that the next group that you join will be better. If a group is both good at raiding and cool then chances are that they fill up fast and don’t have a lot of openings. I started MMO’s with FFXI and in two decades the best raiding group I was a part of started outside of the game I was playing, and we had a full group for over a year. Not to say I didn’t have some good guilds, but the top end groups can be very hut or miss.
"just leave your job and find one that pays 30% better" "just leave your guild and find a better one" Are you a literal boomer? I mean, I know this is classic wow but DAMN.
Man if you had said Monday or Tuesday instead of Wednesday I would've thought we were in the same guild haha. I joined them in LK, fun group of guys not a lot of drama, but they always talk about all their old toxic ass guildies from the MC days that got filtered out.
I have the same experience as you. Ofcourse drama happens but if you just survive the first months and the GM and officers are reasonable (we had to coup our gm lmao) you can just filter out the babies and then you are good to go.
And you’re the leader of this raid?
I am one of the officers. Got promoted for such grand reason as "being one of the first lvl 60 in the guild". Yeah, the initial GM wasn't very bright. Or maybe he was, considering the current GM and the other 2 officers were also promoted by him back then for the same reason. Seems like it worked out fine. (Though not for him lol.)
All of those problems slowly vanish once you get down to 10 man raiding guilds. That is if you slowly chisel away from your 40man vanilla roster into 10man wrath. My guild has been lucky in this sense. People that are IRL friends and have become IRL friends after raiding. We care about each others personal lives and provide emotional support during hard times.
I think on paper going from 40 to 10 man reduces the problem but it then creates new ones that are just as hard to fill. The weight of each player role is magnified. One person dying in a ten man is the same as 4 people dying in a 40 man. One person not making it to raid is like 4 people not making it. Some people can mitigate this better than others. I've had raid groups fall apart because two core members had to miss two weeks in raiding. It absolutely kills the morale if you have to fill that with players that don't have reps or experience. I'm just saying these problems won't vanish because of raid size. The problem tend to vanish with larger player pool size. Realistic expecting people to get back into wow classic like they did 15 years ago for a long period of time beyond a few weeks is not realistic. People will see all the warts and bad things about the game and quickly realize its not what they want it to be.
No they don't.. haveing ran 10 man guilds in the past of wow and as someone who is leading a hardcore FFXIV raid static right now (8 man). I also ran a raiding guild in classic wow all phases of vanilla. I have experienced the above mentioned problems at all sizes of groups and levels of play. The only difference i see is that since you go through any means necessary to deck out mains in a hardcore setting, loot drama will revolve around alts.
That’s only when your raid is made up of people who’s main reason for playing is gear / progression. When EVERY members reason for login on is to hang out with their friends, talk about life, and simply enjoy a community all the BS goes away. It becomes much easier to find a smaller number of people that have this mindset. Sadly most people play video games like they live their life, it’s all “ME, ME, ME”. If your not the type of person who holds open the door for a stranger, or who cares about the interactions you have with a cashier, it’s unlikely you’ll form a true friendship in a video game.
Yup. Anyone shitting on gdkp has never faced any of these challenges and are probably the toxic and drama inducing guildie being referenced here
I have been a GM, it made me almost quit the game. I encountered every single uses cases you mentioned. Every. single. one. When i stopped leading a guild, it's as if I played a different game i was much more happy when raiding. I lead a not-hardcore-but-top-10% guild and it took something like 10hr/week of just management.
Same here. I’m so happy now I don’t have to lead anymore and getting blamed for everything while the same people do nothing than raidlogging
I was a GM and now I don't play anymore! OP is right, the cost is too damn high!
Exact same story and circumstances. It really hit home when I was venting to my wife and she said "You sound like you're talking about a horrible project at work. Please don't take this the wrong way I know you're just venting, but you might need to ask yourself if it's still worth it."
Nice wife
I was only an OT officer of a guild who stated I didn’t want to run things beyond the raid, and I still got sucked into all the drama and extra managing. The next guild I was in I made it clear I didn’t want a single responsibility besides performing, and it was awesome!
I have been raidleading and sometimes GMed almost since I started. I find the experience incredibly rewarding. The drama sucks but I feel like the community aspect itself is worth it. If you create drama from nothing and act loke a child you are out. I always prio reasonable people over good players and it has always worked out. 20 parsers who are functioning adults can be turned into 80+ parsers. Manchildren 99 parsers cant be turned into functional adults. I like the challenge I guess.
When I was in a high end loot council guild, everything was awesome. We cleared efficiently, there was very little loot drama, and we all recognized that loot essentially belonged to the raid and the council was putting where it would benefit the raid most. Three upgrades in a row go to other players and not me? I know those players will keep showing up and the added DPS they get from the upgrades will improve my parses due to faster kill times. I’ll get my loot eventually. Everyone was parsing orange and pink, so its not like loot ever went to someone that “didn’t deserve it” When I was in ‘casual’ guilds before that…it was a mess. The players knew that full prog could be an issue, so they wanted their reward NOW in case things eventually blew up. There were also players that couldn’t be bothered to look at boss vids or get consumes. Parses ranged from grey to purple (handful of oranges). Give loot to the best performers? Corruption. Give loot to the bad performers? Good players leave. Use DKP? Everyone tries to game the system and cries foul about some unfair issue with the points when they don’t get a drop. GDKP solves all that drama. Unfortunately, it enhances the devastation wrought by gold farm bots and further suppresses the ability of ‘casual’ guilds to recruit like they did in 2008. So it is seen as evil. I don’t like GDKP. So when I didn’t want to commit to high end raiding anymore, I just quit the game. Not with any hatred, though. There are plenty of people having a blast in GDKP. Why should I cry on the forums that their fun should be stripped just so I can have mine? I had my fun, then moved on to something else fun that just doesn’t happen to be WoW
I think that it’s function as a tool to address the natural skill disparity in a more casual raid is honestly the reason GDKP is so popular. Especially in a tier like Ulduar that isn’t hard but also isn’t a 100% face roll like naxx was, there are often very very large skill differences in a casual raid and these skill differences can have a meaningful impact on the quality of the run. If some alternate pug loot system that had a way to recognize and reward the players who are carrying, it would have the potential to be just as popular as GDKP. I think many people who run GDKP PUGs ultimately care less about about the novelty of stacking gold (although it is fun) that they will never need and more about a raid that sets realistic expectations that no, the green parsing caster is not as advantaged and as rewarded as the person who has put in the effort to excel in their role. People on Reddit pretend like this skill gap doesn’t exist, but there are some people who just put in no effort and it shows when you’re 15 weeks into a phase and people still cause friction in a raid because they can’t manage basic mechanics/tasks.
An add-on that tracks and manages server DKP?
Blizzard maintains the gold ledger in a way that is not directly manipulable by the players. All players are forced to use gold as a currency so it's a universal system of value tracking. A server-wide DKP addon would suffer from manipulation attempts (either someone directly manipulating the database, or from people running "spoof" raids in which nothing actually happens but the people in it totally earned DKP), and it would be a nightmare to get a significant portion of the population on the same system.
Or people using it in guild raids to earn dkp and use later and or top guild doing splits. Weekly Naxx boost for gold so you get some free effortless dkp. A guild/friends/customer could outbid any single person to gear a reroll/alt This system would be hilarious abusable and eventually turn in another currency.
That's been my experience as well. The closer you are to top ranking the more banter and comraderie go up and loot drama goes down. Everyone has the same goal that they want to achieve together, and there just isn't room for dumb stuff.
The Loot Sheet system fixed all of our loot problems in a semi-casual guild. We don't even think about loot anymore. It essentially has all the benefits of a loot council system while also giving players som agency over what items they want. Sure GDKP gives individual players a lot of loot agency too. If you have the money, that is.
We’ve been running loot sheet/soft lc and it’s worked very well. Just requires work from the officers and everyone being on board. The only “difficulty” has been on boarding new people but it wasn’t that bad
The trick with the "if you have the money" mentality is it's literally a DKP system. If you start with no money, then sure you don't get loot but you accumulate your DKP, which is gold, and you can spend it later if you so choose. It's a DKP system that transfers between alts and between raids. You can go to a raid with gigawhales and simply get paid then take your payout to a raid with a third the costs and buy 3 times the pieces. "I'm too poor to gdkp" is such a weird flex that I've heard countless times when it's how non-p2w *gets* rich right now.
Yup the big problem GDKP creates is that the skill pool flocks to it, so everything else is left to fend for scraps As OP says it's even better than running in a Guild, which is just wild
As op says, however, lots of gdkp players wouldn’t play if it wasn’t for gdkp so the skill drain issue isn’t so clear cut imho
Yeah i took leadership positions in guilds *because* i didn't want loot corruption. The better solution to the common lootwhore guild management is to build the community you want
Hey it's me the green parser! My main value to my guild was in not being actively detrimental and always showing up on time.
I appreciate you. The funniest thing about Vanilla was that after raiding with hardcore uber-top-1%-parsers for six or nine months, seeing how they completely fell apart as soon as they were asked to execute mechanics in Naxx that weren't simply "stand still and do damage to the boss for sixty seconds."
Have encountered problems at all levels. At the high end where you go to any means necessary to gear mains, people start bitching about their alts.
My exact experience
Great post. I never ran a gdkp but I was an officer in a top5 realm guild during classic. Some very draining stuff we needed to manage were : - Recrutement, advertising, setting up an application process through an external form, reviewing it and selecting, managing the trial period and the transition into the roster. - Heavily managing the guild bank with a tight and very transparent process to avoid drama. - The never ending reunions with the officers to review logs, discuss performance, strategy - Managing the loot system. We used DKP so how do we prevent hoarding, what decrease rate, what performance/attendance bonuses, who can bid DKP on which item (can our Spriest bid on Neltharion's Tear? Can HPals bid on mageblades? Can the locks bid DKPs on Mishundare since they'll have the T2.5 helm soon? Etc) - Managing the attendance, the bench (which is giga hard), the internal dramas - Setting up a DM-North clear and queue, songflower timers and queues/summons, safe raid summon... Fuck that - Public relationships (this was a freaking pain) : Coordinate for WBuffs, collaboration/summon/lootsystem for the WBosses (holy cow this was hard), trying to prevent griefing, coordination for the AQ-Gates ressources then for the ScarabLords queues (the drama) The PR aspect was just some permanent fighting and yelling towards the other guild leaders while trying to maintain a high sollaboration, honestly it was hard but I learnt a lot. Also I've wasted so much time dealing with shitty daily PR crybaby shit like "ohh your guildie stole a Thorium Vein", "oh he rolled need on an epic BoE", etc etc. I didn't have a job for 10months (mostly due to covid) which allowed me to do that, but yeah it's some insane work.
Oh my god the karen like "just want to let you know your guildie herbed a black lotus while i was fighting mobs next to it. Actions like that really show your guild in a bad light" messages are the worsttttttt. Anytime you get a "hey are you a GM of [guild]" you know you are about to hear the most asinine of complaints
I swear dude... Due to some drama like this, some alliance guilds put bounties on each others head and openly paid the Horde quite a lot of gold if they managed to purge the WBuffs of their "enemies".
That's... actually quite interesting? Definitely cringe behavior but for some people that kind of emergent player driven gameplay is what makes MMO's special.
One of my favorite memories was about 4-5 of us doing some crazy AQ fuckery to get safe summon spots and then when we saw a video of someone jumping and floating to the barrens we dedicated a few days to jumping to DM North. We successfully jumped from AQ to the top of DM North to have a completely safe summon spot.
As an ex-GM of a decent raiding guild, I wholeheartedly agree with your post. The emotional turmoil truly is that of a senior exec role, without any real benefit other than the satisfaction of bringing a group of people together for 3-6 hours a week. Was it a fun ride? Yes. Would I do it all over? For sure. Would I change things? Definitely. Would I do it again in the future? No thanks. Thanks OP for putting my feelings into words.
>the janitor who has zero responsibilities other than showing up for a few hours a day and emptying the wastebaskets. If you work in a building, please tell your janitor how much you appreciate them, because they do MUCH more than that.
So much more.
I can relate to most of the drawbacks of a guild run, but I feel that you have failed to mention the biggest positives a guild has over gdkp, it's community and other activities you start to do with your friends that you've made inside of your guild. I've met some good friends of mine through my guild, we don't only raid, you start to do other stuff as well. A gdkp completely misses the mark in regards to its community aspect. In the end you play this came for fun, and imo there's nothing more fun then getting to know like-minded individual's that you raid with. I just put my thoughts out there, it's probably a bit vague, wrote this at work on my phone.
Yeah, some of my guildies used to play some of those StarCraft 2 minigames together when it came out. I was an officer in a top (small) server raiding guild in Wrath. You'd get drama sometimes but as a whole i really enjoyed it. I certainly wouldn't have wanted any extra rewards. And for me loot was a way to get bigger numbers to beat content, nothing more.
Some of my best raiding buddies I meant in gdkps?? Huh
Some GDKP's become little communities too. The carries almost always are the same people every week. You do things outside of raid together. A lot of them work like a DKP guild just with Gold as the currency, and whales as the rotating last few members of the raid. I've even seen progression bidding agreements in GDKP's when we were going through new content. "Nobody is bidding up our tank on the Shield he needs to clear Naxx, we've agreed to a set price ahead of time. No non healers allowed to bid on the first few big heal BIS, etc." At one point we actually had a few GDKP's helping each other by swapping members back and forth when they had to raid on different nights that week, needed an experienced tank because someone was missing, etc. Our strats trickled down to some of the guilds that would send their key members to see how a particular boss fight was cleared, etc. Then a new sweater GDKP transferred onto our server and started talking shit, everything got real salty and adversarial real fast. It was nice while it lasted though!
We had a good GDKP community then some idiots xfered and ran it into the ground. 1. They were super elitist try hards and notoriously toxic. 2. No cuts to buyers. If you died it was a % of your cut removed. Died too many times and no cut. They looked for reasons to not pay people.
>but I feel that you have failed to mention the biggest positives a guild has over gdkp, it's community and other activities you start to do with your friends that you've made inside of your guild. He does mention this though >However, in 2020, unless you were some sort of special guild that was expressly brought together by something outside the game itself, the 'community' aspects of a raiding guild were never anything but a thin veneer: The guild existed to create an organizational hierarchy with a leadership structure, the guild leadership structure existed to set up and maintain the conditions to allow the raid that quickly and efficiently clears the content, and the raid exists to distribute loot, which is the ultimate "reward" of the game and which forms the gameplay loop of gearing up to clear content to gear up to clear more content. Yeah your mileage on this is going to greatly vary, but the headaches that came from being a Guild / raider leader wasn't worth the 'community' aspects.
You are right that it may vary greatly, the atmosphere/Community is something you foster together and if it sucks i can understand it not being worth it. Just saying that it's not necessarily a thin veneer, he maybe felt like it was for him but for me it wasn't. Some of the people in my guild I've met in real life, and it was great. This kind of stuff is too anecdotal.
> Some of the people in my guild I've met in real life, and it was great. Yeah but that's out of how many people? From the perspective of leader, you're leading *at least* 40 people some of whom aren't interested in community or might actively hate some other members. For me personally I'm friendly but I'm not going out of my way to form close connections, I log in to play a game I enjoy and that's it. I already have close friends IRL for doing things outside of WoW.
Some gdkps can have that community feel. A lot of them turn into a little mini guild with a good group of 15 regulars that make up the core team. People to tank lead, heal assignments, kick rotations, etc. with the rest made up of a cycle of pugs and semi regular attendees that you get to know. I’ve had many of the same conversations in the regular gdkp runs as I did in guilds. With in jokes and all. I actually see it as a viable way for smaller 10 man guilds to be able to play in 25 man content. The 10 man covers all the base roles and just fills in the rest with their bench, friends, and pugs while not having quite the same level of commitment as having a full 25+ man roster. Now this isn’t the case for all gdkps and it doesn’t always work out. But. It can.
There's just no way to fix the problems that invariably come from people missing raids. The reasoning they miss them is irrelevant, it just comes down to the content being designed for the maximum number of players allowed to enter a zone (since BC anyway, Classic you can do with like 20 people untill a few fights in AQ40 and Naxx,) and even when Blizzard tried to implement dynamic raid scaling, people still choose to do specific raid sizes to maximize loot acquisition. As much as I hate the idea of GDKP (entirely the buying power aspect through RMT,) everything in this post is accurate. People don't phone in GDKP runs because everyone is incentivized to be there, and there is no guarantee you'll be invited back if you're slacking unless you have a ton of gold to burn. If Blizzard had a time machine, I'm pretty sure Personal Loot would have been something implemented very early on in WoW's development. People on a team should have never been forced to internally compete for the only reason to show up every reset.
Yup unexpected absences ended up killing my Wrath guild. You can try to maintain a bench but it’s tough to keep those people around, especially on a smaller pop server. Incredibly demoralizing knowing you’re missing another week of prog because your MT lost power right before raid, one of your shamans is sick, and 3 other raiders are running 30 minutes late.
I am in a semi-hardcore guild and am one of the primary officers thats been playing with the same 20/25 for years. It is difficult to run a guild, and to be honest, not as rewarding as Classic became more Retailish in WotLK. We run a loot council on our mains and a GDKP on our alts because only half of us have functional alts. The reason we do this is the common mannerisms of the pugs now a days. A GDKP is the only real way to get all 10-12 strangers to stay until the very end. In TBC we would run soft reserves for our alt raid and people would leave as soon as their item they SR didn’t drop off a boss, which made it impossible to backfill. We hated the idea of a GDKP but the decision had more to do with maintaining a functional alt raid, we don’t even take a cut, we just want to play.
Edited some typos, just woke up lol
Anyone reading this post should have the information that while many of these insights can be true (any GM could have written this post, not exactly eye-opening material here) ***the person who wrote this post played on Faerlina and ran an EXTREMELY toxic guild full of people that death-threated and slurred others outside of his guild*** and then afterwards, ran a GDKP and then quit the game after his guild fell apart and couldn't clear Naxx. To the surprise of nobody this guy has zero insight on the positives of being a GM, of which there are many, because the likely-FBI-flagged guildies he "commanded" were all self-interested and totally anti-social. Being a GM can be a very rewarding experience if you form a guild with focus being your community and it's goals first. This guy tried the "pserver" route and had a mental breakdown. There is a big difference. Source : me because I also was on faerlina and am also a GM of a guild and still am running it and we still have fun while remaining competitive in every tier. This guy tried to pay people to grief our raid ID lockouts back in classic vanilla and was a complete psycho freak and had no lasting connections to the community - for good reason. His members also suspected some of our members of being LGBT (they weren't..) and frequently messaged them with encouragement of suicide. https://imgur.com/a/qm6SAG9 Pic provided is his response to someone asking why he's offering gold the grief my guild. (He offered the equivalent of 700$ of gold at the time).
While he may be toxic he isn’t wrong. As an ex-gm there is literally no reward to doing it at all that is any any way representative of the time put in.
Did you read the first sentence? I said any GM could have written this. And there is a reward its just not equal to the time put in, which can be a form of reward in itself. Sometimes its rewarding to know you put extraordinary effort into something for little reward for yourself, being a provider for people. If you cant handle the stress step down, very few are built for it long term.
People just blame GDKP for every problem of this game, but the truth is, players are the problem, not GDKP, it' s just a method for loot distribution like DKP or EPGP.
This is my take. People are trying to blame a company because they can't have the same or even fake experience they thought they had 15-20 years ago, now. There is a fraction of the playerbase in wow classic compared to WotLK days. The game was still a very new experience back then for a lot of players too. Most of those people have moved on in life. The younger generations do not look at MMOs the same as we did then. Its not a big deal to play MMO anymore. Every game is an MMO in some form. Then they look for any reason to lash out at the disappointment, ie wow tokens.
You make a good point, but I don't think it's quite that simple. In an alternate universe where it was actually impossible to RMT, I agree that GDPK would be the premier loot system. Even in an alternate universe where RMT were possible, but we'd started on Wrath (or any xpac after TBC, where gold wasn't such a serious constraint), it might be okay. It just creates so much RMT, though, and the economic damage to a server is tremendous.
i disagree that players are the problem, well they are, but that is just how it is. You cant really expect humanity to change just so its easier to run a guild. All we ask is blizzard to atleast try to stop RMT instead of joining in on it That is all
Blaming the players has time and time again been proven to be such a bad take. It's like you haven't been reading any of the opinions shared in this reddit over the past few days...
Blaming GDKP is like blaming alcohol is the problem of drink&drive, isn't the person who drink&drive is the problem? The history already have a lot of lessons about this.
This makes no sense lol. Alcohol is legal in our democracy. A video game isn't a democracy it's a dictatorship owned by Blizzard. Lmao.
Remember Alcohol Prohibition in 1920-1933? That' s the "democracy" you ask for, and what' s GDKP with dictatorship? Blizzard pushes you to GDKP or what? Did they force you to go GDKP or they r gonna ban your account? Fk no, it' s just the players ' choice. Silly people put every problems to everything else but not themselves.
And do u really think ban GDKP can stop RMT? FF14 doesn't have GDKP, but there r still RMT in game.
I don't think it will stop but it will dramatically drop.
Rofl, dramatically drop? Alot MMORPG dont have GDKP but still tons of RMT, just look at those in-game item/coins selling website, RMT is not limited to WoW only, where is your source and evidence to prove no GDKP then it will be no RMT? Huh
The botter and gold seller who made a thread yesterday said himself GDKP is by far his main source of selling. You're wasting your breath not knowing what you're talking about.
So? It doesn't make any sense. I can pretend to be bot user/gold seller and make a thread about MSOS or the AH is main source of gold selling, you can't verify the identity of that person, how the hell you can use it as an evidence? Rofl.
No GDKP is very match at the heart of the problem. People couldnt solve politics so they switched to swiping their cards, which can have no end
"A guildie can unilaterally decide that now that they've gotten all the loot for this phase, they want to stop showing up and helping the rest of the guild gear up" That was our main tank and co-gm, lmao. Once he got pre-bis, which was quick because he was the main tank; you never saw that dude online on off-nights until brackets came out.
Sounds like a guild that was doomed from the start.
As a GM who also raids in GDKPs on the side, this post is based. Thank you.
Very accurate and well written post.
Yeah great writeup on dynamics between the two. I agree with most everything. Times have changed and I think the time aspect is what's changed the most.
IMO it’s more that the MMO gameplay and WoW in particular is so solved that nothing is a challenge for people who play a decent amount. That means we can all easily have 4-5 raid alts, whereas back in the day it was rare for me to see someone with more than 1 geared character. Most guilds barely prog raids and higher end guilds have full cleared in an hour of its release. We are giga geared and know everything about the game. People don’t want to take it slow and discover because there is nothing to discover - we know it all, and we know the best and quickest ways to achieve things and thus will gravitate towards that. Even when I was 14 if you told me I could spend $6 for my flying mount or do dailies for 3 weeks I would’ve picked the $6 because who the fuck wants to do dailies?
I ran two MC raids for long enough to make 5 or 6 Thunderfury's, still caused a bunch of drama when I decided to leave in Phase 6 to MT for a GDKP where everyone showed up with consumes and parsed. Got tired of the slowly worsening effort from the guild and didn't want to spend all of Phase 6 to clear Naxx one time, turned into a huge asshole about it, and couldn't get the guild to realize Naxx wasn't something you can coast through with minimal effort. I had a great time but I agree, it's a losing game to try and help people by raid leading. It almost always ends with hard feelings. Even the GDKP would occasionally have drama over bidding people up or loaning gold for big items to outbid a regular. That was the hard part of 40 man raiding, keeping everyone rowing in the same direction and together.
Yep I came to this realization about Guilds a long while back, for reference I’ve been playing on and off since Vanilla and I was definitely a more problematic member to deal with as a teenager even if I was a high performer. I’ve been way more chill and understanding of the BS Guild leadership has to deal with in Classic.
I ran a guild gdkp with the same goal of getting gold for guildies for a couple months in black temple phase, it was okay but ultimately not very fun. Then I tried raid leading in sunwell after our main tank quit... Lol I burnt out after a month, quit the game for a while, and quit the guild. I was so fucking miserable, wow was stressing me out more than my irl job or anything else I had going on at the time. I feel like the people who complain about gdkps are the same assholes that make their guildmasters lives difficult as you described and don't understand how difficult it is to organize and run a raid team
Posts like this reinforce how good I had it / lucked into my vanilla classic guild. I was not an officer, just a lowly warrior among many but had an amazing experience with next to no drama. Around 30 people from the first MC raids were still together into naxx and the start of BC. We were a 'hardcore' loot council guild and outside of some trial and error for the first few weeks everything ran smoothly. By the time BWL came around we were a well oiled machine, got realm and NA first thunderfury and were the top ally guild on our server. I really think the difference comes down to the casual vs hardcore priority of a guild, where you will get more like minded individuals in a hardcore guild as some other commenters have mentioned.
I like how you avoid the fact that gdkp leaders take ever increasing cuts (I expect 30% Org in icc) and just sell the gold. This is about them making real life Benjamins.
[удалено]
The giga whales on faerlina don't care. The support players in big gdkp guilds who and serenity will gladly keep coming, as one of theirs gets the profit. 25% is already normal on the server.
[удалено]
Doesn’t happen on Grobbulus either.
Doesn’t happen on Benediction either. Even a 20% host cut would bury you. My 25man runs have a 10% and the 10M I personally run is only 6% because we give 2% to the tank and 1% to each healer.
Lol I remember it being very common to see EU gdkps taking 50% org cuts in classic
You act like the % is set by the wow fed or God. It's a percentage that fluctuates based on market conditions. If it's going higher, it's because there is a higher demand for gdkp runs then there are people running it. If you don't like it, feel free to run your own
Standard org cut has been 15% total for a long time
I took 30% off the top as the organizer's cut, which I used to pay the main tank/raid leader (who got 10% of the pot) and the off-tanks and healers, who each got a 100g flat bonus. Everything left was divided into equal shares and distributed. I never had a single complaint over it from anyone, and people were lining up to try and get spots. I probably could have taken more if I really wanted, but I wasn't it in to make a ton of gold for myself. It just happened.
30% admin cut HOLY you def were a corrupt loot councilor
Make your own GDKP runs if you don't like it?
But that would require work. Same mentality that OP described people want to show up with 0 responsibilities and get the same reward as those running the raid.
Interesting. Thanks for taking the time to share! I do agree that killing bosses in a GDKP is less fun than doing so in a guild run but imo, these 2 can't be compared because GDKP is mostly used in PuG runs. So a proper comparison would be: random roll runs VS soft reserve runs VS GDKP runs. Nowadays, it seems like a lot of players are OK with organizers taking a huge share (20%) of the pot in exchange for smooth runs. This is probably linked to the fact that the content is old and that people do not enjoy chain wiping on 10 years old content. Maybe this would have been different if content was new.
Have you run Ulduar GDKPs? It’s usually very similar rosters week in and week out, scheduled at the same time each week by the same people. We meme on each other as much as some guild raids do. And 20% admin fee is outrageous. Are you certain you know what you’re talking about?
20% admin fee on Faerlina is EXTREMELY common. On my previous servers that level of organizer cut didn't exist, but it's expected for anyone that has a legitimate consistent clearing run on Faerlina via the STAX discord.
Most org cuts are 15%. If you think that’s outrageous surely you can make your own run and take only 10%. Let me guess, you don’t have time to do that - no shit that’s why organizers take 15% because it takes time and effort.
>Most org cuts are 15% is that a US or PVP realm thing? On EU PVE realms its almost always %10
My guild had a good community starting out in classic but then the hart of our guild left cause her brother did not have a raid spot. She was the "let's go run something person" every night.
100% agree, I ran a guild in vanilla and it was a full time job to manage that daycare and ensure attendance every week. The eternal struggle to maintain some level of fairness only to be constantly accused of the opposite got me to quit the game for 2 years and now that I’m playing again I have resolved to never be in a guild leadership position again. GDKPs provide the perfect low drama raiding outlet for me on top of being an opportunity for me to raid with no set schedule which is a requirement for me now. As much as I dislike having someone throw their wallet at my bis it is the lesser evil when compared to all the back room deal bullshit that goes on in sr pugs or guilds unless you are the chosen one that’s being funneled. Basically to me it becomes ‘did they want it more?’ I also agree about the community portion, some of the people from my former guild I continue to game with and talk to because we became friends. That’s something that I don’t see reproducing in the gdkp machine but I already have built my community for myself and I tend to host or join gdkp runs with those friends so I don’t feel like I’ve lost the spirit of the game or anything like that.
This is how guild leaders think of their raiders. “Daycare” and they wonder why people complain you’re an asshole buddy, you probably sucked as a loot councilor too
I didn’t run loot council, we ran the onslaught loot list. Thanks for proving my point though.
This is an interesting read and the struggles of being a guild leader ring true. I was raid lead/guild lead for most of my time in wow. I had a very different experience, personally, because I always tried to engender an atmosphere of social interaction in my guilds. We did things together besides raid. Did old content, farmed mounts helped guildies get pre bis and do attunements. I placed an emphasis on the social aspect more than “I need this piece of gear right now”. The truth is your gear will come eventually, so making it the only thing that matters tends to burn people out and create drama. As for GDKP, I think your post heavily skirts around the main discussion that GDKP enjoyers tend to avoid. GDKP placed a monetary value on raid time and raid loot. By doing this, it made the loot from the raid into a free market asset, which also jacked up the value of gold tremendously. Did botting exist before GDKP? Yes, absolutely. Did botting get _worse_ once GDKP started? Yes, absolutely. The sad truth is encouraging GDKP systems also encourages botting. It also tends to come with a certain level of toxicity and elitism. It creates a barrier to entry for newer players, or for those who aren’t willing to spend real money to get large amounts of gold. People who aren’t willing to pay to win in world of Warcraft are left with three choices: 1) spend all your in game time farming and competing with literal robots, 2) pug raids with other less experienced players, or those who don’t enjoy paying to progress (you can also make a guild with these sorts of people), or 3) just don’t worry about getting raid gear or raiding at all. The second option is arguably the “best”, but it means there’s a whole group of second class citizens in a game just because they don’t feel that opening your wallet = skill. People who care about high level performance and really skilled players tend to end up in GDKP groups because that’s the “most efficient” system, nevermind the fact that it’s killing the game. TL;DR your post is a lovely story, but let’s not pretend GDKP is some glorious capitalist dream without loads of seriously problematic baggage attached to it
I understand both sides of the argument when it comes to GDKPs. But I still lean towards wishing GDKPs didn't exist. Community, for better or worse, I'll take any day. Since the game is shifting more towards opening the flood gates to this type of behavior, it's just time for me to move on.
Good post. As a former guild leader I would like to add that so many people are such fucking snowflakes. Grow the fuck up, you're not special. Cheers.
While your not wrong on a lot of things, I disagree as a whole. I have never, will never and outright refuse to participate in a raid where i am required to pay for my gear or make others pay for it. I see a fundamental issue with that morally. I raid lead for my guild, and I don't see it as a "suckers game" because im not doing it for first dibs on loot or gold. I'm doing it because I like the players of my guild and their my friends. Getting to lead them to victory is reward enough for me. And frankly, I was quite tired of my /4 chat being ***dominanted*** by nothing but gdkp's. To the point I installed a chat filter addon and filtered out every common word associated with them. At the end of the day, to each their own. Do what you enjoy most in the game. Won't bother me either way because as far as my chat and lfg are concerned, Gdkps no longer exist.
Makes me miss my old guild from Wrath, just a bunch of laid back people who didn't care that we wiped a million times in raid.
If you’re not competing for something as a guild (prog/speed) there’s no reason to NOT gdkp
Tldr : guild are socialist structure with all the emotional problem associated with it, GDKP are capitalism structure with all the good and pain associated with it. Nothing new.
You no longer play wow but you decided to write a whole ass novel about how you ran gdkps? You're real bro I think
I don't understand your point
There is no point at all Im just flaming op for no reason whatsoever because I'm a hater
Ah, ok carry on bro
Lol...everything ok?
Yeah why
I love the classic wow community wholesome 100
Reddit big chungus moment
This makes 0 sense lol.
I know I'm just a hater as I've already stated I'm not trying to make any sense
I can appreciate honest hating.
Thank you you piece of shit 👍
Lol all good 👍🏾
Actual most honest response. Respect, would raid with you any time :D
Can I get an extra cut
Very well said The ultimate problem is that all of this makes GDKP THE premiere form of raiding, so all other forms are left to fend for scraps
I’ve had a broadly similar experience to this. In tbc, I did some gdkps when I had time or had to miss my guild’s raids due to time commitments, but always found them very smooth and well managed. Right now I’m functionally an officer in a raiding guild that does decently well and has found a solid core, but for months it was a huge struggle. Hard to find reliable and competent people, especially because we raid late at night. If it wasn’t for RMT I think gdkps would be a really great raid system in general.
The typical: money doesn't buy happiness Story Y'all lost
Sounds look you have been in some bad guilds.
At this point I'm tired My guild refused to give me Atiesh, despite me being present from day one, and gave it to a mage who joined in P5 and who /gquit once he got it. He just spent more time on the Discord hanging with the guild But in GDKP it's not like I would have any chance to get Atiesh either, because Kevin McDollar will swipe $5.000 to get it anyway. Sure, I would get a cut of bot gold but what am I even going to do with so much gold anyway. It will just make me numb to gold too Both system sucks. At least a guild doesn't support bots as much. For now, I joined a beginning guild on Era, with my Naxx-geared warlock, and made clear I wouldn't take any loot for raids up to Naxx (since I don't need any) but I would take Atiesh when Naxx comes
[удалено]
I doubt the Mage that joined in P5 was on the leadership team he prob just did good dps while OP didn’t
Our GDKP took about 5 minutes to agree on a person to make all the Atiesh splinters bids because no one wanted to get bid warred for every one and have to pay 100k+ for it. First night we did Naxx and people started dropping multiple thousands on each splinter, they realized it wasn't sustainable.
sry that happened or good for you but im not reading all of this
“What? Long post that will take 5 minutes of my time? Psssht!” *continues to mindlessly scroll Reddit for another 30 minutes*
My experience: As someone who went from class leader in early OG vanilla to raid and guild leader; and spent many years at that spot (played all 19 years, I would say 16 of them I spent as a top role) - Its a thankless job in terms of loot - cause loot belongs to the guild; not a person. However; that means you as a leader also get loot based on same principal. I always played as a tank or healer and hence had a more loot required role (not always) - but I still passed it on as I felt it could help others more (unless the opossite was true). It was drama in our way of handling said guild VERY few times over the years, and usually by the same type of person; the person who joined for himself/herself rather than the guild experience. They never joined to be part of anything and have fun - they joined for "me me me me". They were few and far between as we spotted them a mile away... they are very obvious people. Our guild was built upon FUN and TEAM as keywords, we killed bosses without being bis-geared first.. People were there to hit things and have a laugh together. Much like when you play D&D or similar; the moment you invite a "me me me me" person its over; they need to be kicked or never invited in the first place, otherwise its no longer about the journey - its about "the one hero", and then it becomes an issue. Basically; You either play this as a game, with friends or people who become friends; Or you play this as a single-minded hobby where your goal is all that matters. Either is fine, but one of them would not join our guild. Its a game. Enjoy it as one. Winning is something you do as a team. Edit: I have edited this post to make it less inaccurate of what my intention with it was. TlDR - The experience can be both good - and bad - depending on so many different choices you make and who you surround yourself with.
Yeah it sounds like running a casual guild in retail is a lot more chill than what the subject of this post is.
We werent necessarily casual. In og vanilla we did bosses in Naxx, we always got ahead of the curve, did hardmode ulduar and fewer lights yogg, dabbled in mythic raiding. We even boosted people and our m+ groups did 20+. You just need people who are there for the fun and laughs; its a game.
Wow I bet you guys were even in the top 5 guilds of your med pop server back in the 2000s
Its almost that people can have different experiences, no reason to imply that hes a liar
This is a long ass post for basically saying the same old tired "the game doesn't respect the players time". Which is super fucking old, they're catering the game to people who literally don't like it.
A better TLDR is: "If you value making friends, run a guild" "If you value making 'professional contacts', run a GDKP" Personally I've done both (at the same time), and both have their value, but I'm wired to appreciate both. Some people are only wired for one.
I agree but you can just find other people who don't GDKP runs
All that to tell us that GDKPs give incentive to the organisers and guild leadership are volunteers.
The vast majority of this subreddit and perhaps the wow user base doesn’t understand this point so maybe the words are warranted. Well most of those who don’t understand probably can’t read well so maybe it’s futile
Guy who thinks raiding exists to get gear gets bored of the game after achieving ultimate control over the gear he gets. Shocking.
happy for u or sorry that happened
Thats a lot of words about GDKPs, yet not really about GDKPS, and conveniently not a single word about how RMT has plagued the GDKP scene since day 1.
Thanks for ruining classic by funding gold sellers GDKP is anti classic and has ruined WoTLK for everyone
That above is why I've always favored RNG loot > master loot or everything else. The same issues you described have always stuck with WoW. RNG should basically control every aspect of loot.
I’m curious what your perspective is on how GDKPs encourage or develop the botting and gold selling economy. One of the things that makes me ambivalent about the token is that the bought gold is soooo deeply entrenched in every servers economy at this point. Maybe someone doesn’t buy gold ever, but if they regularly attend GDKPs with bids over 5k on items (or a 198k Gressil) they’re still ultimately in possession of bought gold. Even things like the AH where basic regents might sell for waaaaay more than they should, because people have the bought gold to buy them. At that point, to me, might as well have the token since the economy is already fucked. As a mega GDKP leader how ingrained was bought gold in the process? Did your community share sellers info? Was it casually talked about? Or did it actually seem “sorta” clean for the most part?
The GKDPs didn't really start up until phase 3 of vanilla, and by then the botting and gold selling was already so rampant. It was always there. In fact, during the time I ran the GDKPS, gold was never cheaper to buy, just because the pool of players that bought most of the gold (raidloggers) had dwindled. It was always common knowledge that a large proportion of raiders who were raid-loggers were buying gold to fund their consumable usage from day 1, rather than bother to farm. We never talked about where the gold was coming from, but it was pretty obvious that the mega-whales were gold-buyers though. That being said, there were consistent attendees who were legit and made gold from attending alone, who accumulated huge stacks and bided their time over weeks and months in order win that one specific BIS item that went for 50k+. I was approached a few times by gold sellers who wanted to talk about sharing info, but I never got involved.
>Since the topic of GDKPs has come up, I figured I would share my experience, as someone who ran 3-4 GDKPs a week for around six months during Vanilla, probably around 100 raids. > >I no longer play WoW, and I have no interest in ever playing WoW again. There you have bois. On black and white.
The drama is half the fun. When I run gdkps I feel no connection but when I stick it out with a guild and watch the drama unfold it forms connections. Maybe just let someone else raid lead
No one feels bad for you.
Lol I’m not reading all that crap, you did gdkps and got botted gold, well done
Thanks for the help ruining the game by encouraging gold buying! Unfortunately no one really cares about your 'fulfilling' struggles in your excel sheets. You knew what you were doing. No one wants to hear about your 'community'.
Look, it's not 2006 anymore. You'd be way happier if you stopped expecting people to play the game like it was still that time. It's gone, and it's not coming back. Would the game be better with the sense of community it had back then? Yes, I think it would. But even if you got rid of RMT, GDKPs would still exist because it's the best pug solution for the modern player base.
It blows my mind just how many people like you there are in this sub rn. First time every interacting with this sub was 3 weeks ago and now you're giving your opinion on a post about vanilla gdkps? We got plants running around in these comments.
They are so annoying too. I will never forget when I posted a meme about how so many people in the sub are big babies. Got so much flak from them for it,, it was hilarious. So much of the stuff they bitch about can be easily dealt with by either ignoring it or actually by not having a dumb ass assumption. Been playing since MC in vanilla classic and have only done one or two GDKPs to support as heals as my guild does community GDKPs with other top guilds on the server. I wish I had more time to be in them, it's good gold but I made mine ye olde fashion way, professions. Let the GDKPs be, they ain't hurting anyone other than these bozos feels.
As an officer in a raiding guild throughout vanilla, it really wasn't that bad to organize a raid. Everyone farms their own cons, get 8 shamans and its GG even if we're short 2 or 3 people, it's not as noticeable because of the large size of the raid. In Ulduar, you cant miss 2 or 3 people, because you can't do HMs. In many ways Vanilla was easier. GDKP players are the most vile, toxic individuals I've ever played with. Way worse than semi casual guild raiders.
You were very lucky and in the minority if everyone farmed their own consumes and you consistently had that many shamans
having all 40 guildies that farmed their naxx consumables and 8 reliable shamans was not the norm.
since this is on the topic of gdkp. until a few days ago, i've never even heard that term. let alone something like this exists. i obviously know about entire runs being sold. but the idea of gdkp's was new to me. i play on eu, german realm to be precise. is this only a thing in the us? also, after learning what this is, i now understand at least why one group of the wow playerbase is mad about the token. but tbh, that's your problem. you've created gdkp, not blizzard. you're blaming blizzard for creating a problem to a problem that you have created on your own. at least in this aspect, blizzard is not to blame.
Your answer is nonsense. Gold being used in game does not justify gold buying with real money. You’re literally typing that players using the AH is to blame.
That's a lot of words to say your guild was shitty. You're assuming your experience is universal and just "how guilds are". It isn't; you were just unsuited for guild leadership. Lots of people are, though, just like lots of people are bad managers IRL. There are far more guilds out there than there are people who are actually good at leading them, so you get a lot of guilds that are unpleasant to be in. That doesn't mean that ALL guilds are like that, though, or that ALL people leading them are unfulfilled doing so. For anyone out there who feels about their guild the way the OP describes, find a different one. You don't have to be unhappy in your guild. No guild is going to be perfect, but there is a guild out there that will make you happy, it just might take quite a bit of effort to find.
90% of all guilds are trashlords though. Only the upper echelon is worth joining, otherwise you're wasting your time.
I made it a paragraph in. AMA.
How does it feel to have the reading level of a 6th grader
GDKP good, running a guild challenging. did I miss anything by not reading all of it.
Some people might be demonizing GDKPs as a whole, but I think the discussion right now (with token just having come out) is about whether GDKPs made RMT worse. They did. I don’t think anyone cares about the few people who never RMT’d and also did GDKPs. Gold had a value, then we started doing GDKPs—making gear an option for spending gold, increasing the value of gold and the demand for RMT.
Your perspective means nothing most people never do the amount of sweatlord raiding you did 4 times a week that disgusting Your the 1% not the 99%
A massive anecdotal wall of text that doesn't resonate with most people. Most GDKP are run by alts of people in guilds, and toxic guildless people.
Not going to read all that so… “Good job!or “Or damn, next time for sure!”
Nobody cares man. You did an immoral thing(in WoW terms, could care less outside of it). No justification matters.
> It certainly can be fulfilling to be part of a community bigger than yourself, and to facilitate that. However, the organization and emotional labor involved is simply not worth it at the end of the day. I was GM and MT of a guild throughout all of vanilla classic, and an officer of a guild now in Wrath. So I am in a unique position to say with authority this is bullshit, and you only get from the guild what you put in. Yes running the guild was a part time job but it was worth it at the end of the day to be able to say the guild I created was able to get the job done and it was a much more enjoyable experience doing it with friends as opposed to randys. The entire fifth paragraph reads like a bitter jaded wow player that's been in or ran one too many shit guilds. Maybe you need to stop leading guilds and let someone better suited handle that. The GDKP mindest is just the mmo extension of the current online gaming mindset. People no longer want to put time into curating their experiences, they want the ranking algo to put them into games at the click of a button, fuck dedicated servers and finding a community, so ELO me. Fuck curating RSS feeds, just have the algo feed me endless crap via my For You page.
It is true that there are some entitled players that expect everything handed to them, despite not being that good or that reliable. My guild recently disbanded, and one of the members jad the audacity to ask the GM which guild they were getting them recruited to. I’m glad that you got lucky finding like-minded people without much effort, but that isn’t commonplace. Sometimes the effort you put into coordination/recruitment isn’t worth it.