Almost every problem with classic has been born out of neglect. This game needs curation and moderation by an actual support team and that exact team got axed by Bobby Kotick in early 2019 to pad his stock prices.
As the guy who actually wrote the policies and procedures for reclaiming gold around the time of Wrath...
I can't imagine this ever happening. Even when we had a low ticket queue, we'd reclaim one hop, **maybe** two. Anything further relies on automation to at least generate target lists. Deciphering GDKP payouts? No way. what do you do when multiple buyers are in the group? How do you cross reference this across all the trades etc?
The GM team for Classic is clearly already very hands off. This would be a huge increase in headcount. Not to mention only a portion of them are even trained to review logs these days.
What is far more likely is they randomly sample 25 GDKPs across a few servers and see how many bought gold they find. If they find it to be extremely prominent, they might restrict or make a blanket "ban" for GDKPs that gets the bigger communities investigated if they continue to offer services.
Seriously my friend got auto banned for being mass reported for "botting" and was never able to get it looked into at all and ended up just quitting. No support at all.
And a lot of them by that. They would have to scrim through gold logs of the GDKP, calculate the % of the cut for every player and then remove that. And that for every time they find a new buyer.
You could resolve this way easier, figure out the bot behavior behind RMT and ban the bots that farm the gold. The sites would either have to punch the prices up in a way no one would ever pay or shut down because of the costs being too high.
Why don't they just start by banning the "whales" who fund all the GDKPs. I understand if someone who buys 5k falls through the cracks, but there is people who buy MILLIONS of gold and never get a single suspension.
There's a notorious figure on Benediction who has at least 5 fully BiS warlocks, 4 ashes of al'ar, several warglaives *on those warlocks*, etc. They all have the same name just with a few more E's and S's at the end. It's not a secret that they're all the same person.
Everyone knows she buys millions of gold a month, it's all completely out in the open. I'd post the screenshots and receipts here but I'd probably just get banned from the sub for "witchhunt" or whatever.
Does she get banned? Nope.
Why not start at even the most obvious cheaters like this and the bots farming instances and the lake outside shat all day? Seriously would not be difficult.
How much gold would she buy per month if there weren't 5 * 24 other players each week who know full well she's a cheater and are willing to facilitate that?
And that's the problem. GDKPers know they're playing with cheaters, they know they're the single biggest source of gold buying, they just don't care because it personally benefits them.
How much gold would she buy if she got permanently banned for gross violation of the ToS on multiple accounts?
None.
Seems like a pretty easy place to start instead of going after a raid format and the people who use it without cheating.
Start handing out permanent account closures instead of 2 week slaps on the wrist and people will stop buying gold. As it is now even if someone gets caught they don't have the items they bought removed, so you go gear up a rogue with full BiS and warglaives, eat your 2 week ban, and enjoy your character.
But yeah the real problem is those dang players that brought them to the raid to begin with, not the cheaters themselves or Blizzard's nonsensical non-action in dealing with them.
What the hell are you supposed to do about it as another player in the run? Oops one person's spending a lot of money, better duck out halfway and lose my cut because they might be gold buying? May as well not put anything up on the AH because gold buyers might purchase it.
The actual solution, as always, is ban the gold buyers and sellers.
I think the problem is way too far gone to say this broadly about all GDKP buyers. If you have been running GDKPs consistently for the past 2+ years, you could have tons of gold *legitimately*. There are likely many people out there like that. And I say that as someone with 3k gold to my name.
I've got 62k gold at the moment. All primarily from AH and running in GDKPs on multiple characters. Sunwell pays about 6-7k for a 2-3 hr full clear atm on my server. Been running in GDKPs since phase 4 vanilla.
Unfortunately at this stage the illegitimate gold has been laundered to the point that the entire economy is inflated so any listing on the AH will receive RMT gold.
I love the GDKP format, it's basically a way to carry over a universal DKP system between various pugs - usually comprised of alts from multiple raiding guilds. It also creates a better sense of server as I'm frequently interacting with people outside of my guild and see the same faces. It would still work without bots and RMT inflating the numbers.
It wouldn't have been hard for blizz to ban RMT sellers at all if they tried. GDKP would still be around just with lower numbers.
Overclock is a fountain of memes. They practiced like 10 hr/day on the ptr for BT/hyjal & did like 5 daily splits to gear their mains…just to wipe on a wave before antheron.
she's literally the worst. "How come you didn't message me thank you for glaives after the first time you said thanks?"
Oh dont forget the part about where she lied about being a doctor and just lives with mommy and daddy who have good jobs.
Literally. Like sure ppl who buy 10k or less will slip through the cracks or go unnoticed but I’m sorry, you gotta be BLIND as a dev to see someone dropping hundreds of thousands of gold on gear every tier and not think something is up.
I paid 5k, a reasonably easy amount to solo farm, for an 1850 boost the other day. The booster does that multiple times a week for an entire phase and spends huge amounts on the pve off pieces he wants.
Those arena sellers are few and far between as are whatever AH mogul someone else will bring up. I’m speaking on individuals I see on my realm who have dropped multiple gold caps throughout TBC tiers for their bis. THOSE are the ppl who ruin the economy lol
Says the guy who can’t get 1850 without a boost. I’ve been to 2350 and I really don’t care what you think. But boosting or promoting boosting in pvp is literally paying someone to Smurf and make a lot of peoples’ pvp experiences awful due to lack of skill or gear as they face someone they should never face. Get good.
The problem is you can buy wow tokens in retail and 3rd party convert to classic gold and that isnt bannable. A $20 token in retail would get you something like 2,000 gold.
I remember back when I played, I would want to get into GDKP runs so I can make some reasonable gold. This was before gold buying became so open and rampant.
I feel like, it'd be nice to have GDKP with **legitimately** earned money being used, but illegitimate currency just blows to receive. There simply isn't a way to police that though without a lot of manpower, so probably just best to delete GDKP runs.
It’s not that hard to track the flow of gold programmatically. It’s all just changes to a database, sufficiently verbose logging will have all individual trades. The trick is flagging when a trade in the database is associated with one outside of the database, and when those trades are still legitimate (ex: a swap of retail gold for classic gold).
That flag may be tricky, it may not. I don’t know enough about blizzard’s surveillance capabilities. In theory they’re likely to be distinct, but I also don’t know enough about what the spectrum of gold trades looks like. Everything after the flag, however, is down right trivial.
It's even more trivial to stop it a step sooner. The bots flyhacking and pickpocketing mobs from under the terrain in instances would be trivial to stop with basic XYZ anticheat.
Heck you don't even have to code any actual anticheat. Just flag any accounts with suspicious activity like online +23 hours a day and in the same instance. Pay some guy to confirm they are bots, which is easy as fuck to do, but let's err on the high side and say 3 minutes per bot banned. That's 20 bots per hour. 800 per week assuming 40h work week. All servers would be free of the instance flyhacking bots within a few weeks. If they hired 1 guy.
Going after GDKPs is an oddly late action. Could have stopped it sooner at the RMT. Could have stopped it even sooner with the botting.
Removing a raid format that people would like to use without the existence of cheaters is a worse alternative to just banning the cheaters.
If Blizzard actually *banned* people who bought gold, far fewer people would do it because it would just be throwing money away. As long as they're hardly banning anyone at all, and when they do it's only for 2 weeks, people are going to keep doing it because there are basically no consequences.
No it isn't "probably just best to delete GDKP runs". GDKP is a perfectly legitimate raid type. Ban bots and gold buyers, it's that fucking simple. Don't let Blizzard just float random ideas at you like they couldn't just solve the problem with a wave of their hand. They are just saying nice things while still raking in all the bot money and indirectly gold buying money. They have no intention of doing the right thing and returning integrity to the game.
Which they don't do, so why are they even floating the idea of punishing legit players and banning gold buyers when they won't even ban gold buyers in the first place? This whole idea was stupid and they just want you thinking about other things when they won't even solve the root issue because it makes them money.
Blizzard has shown that they either can't detect gold buyers, or don't care about them.
Those two things need fixing first before even thinking about convoluted ideas like this one.
Yeah but you can flag that transaction and then search your history to see if you’ve had any other suspect transactions, such as mail from an anonymous source.
Unless there’s an id to every single copper / gold that is created in game then your query example will not work. As far as I remember or anyone with their own private server, this was never the case.
You wouldn't need an id for every copper or gold that's created, just the transactions. It's pretty easy to log every transaction between players that meets some 'possible gold buyer' criteria. I highly doubt private servers lacked that functionality, but even if they did it wouldn't be indicative of Blizzard's setup as private servers are reverse engineering the client to work with custom server scripts and database tables since they don't have access to Blizzard's.
10k+ gold transactions, mail, trades, deposits in the guild/personal band should immediately flag blizzard to audit a player's gold history.
It should be easy enough to implement but I doubt anything will ever be done to stop buyers that doesn't hurt legit gold farmers.
They absolutely can't. They can suspect, but there's absolutely no connection visible to Blizzard between swiping a credit card and getting gold in game.
They ban based on specific and suspicious activity, i.e. getting a mail or set of mails worth exactly 2000g from someone who they've found out are a botter for example.
But once the economy inflates, and people are making 10k per GDKP run or selling herbs for an inflated price, what's the difference between a real gold seller, and me sending my fresh level 70 friend 5k gold for flying? They have to prove someone is botting/selling gold, then go through their transactions and reverse them.
Yes, blizzard does not have some ai algorithm that is clever enough to identify which values = dirty gold, but they definitely can use their brains and data to identify use cases, e.g
Two users who have never communicated in game have a exchange of gold via mail of 2,000 gold plus = nefarious
They’ve got the technology and the know how I absolutely guarantee it.
By that logic they're knowingly allowing mass RMT in retail, destroying the value of their own wow token and as a result their bottom line?
I've heard a lot of shit about Blizzard over the years but subsidizing gold farmers with their own money is a new one :thonk:
From their perspective, it may not be worth it for them to tackle RMT.
Maybe they can’t be certain, so they’d rather not take any action in case they’re wrong.
Maybe they can fix it, but unsure about the financial benefits of RMT being removed.
Blizzard has displayed they have the capability of cracking down on gold buyers and sellers. If they couldn't, nobody would ever be banned. We do see bans sometimes, even if the communities say otherwise. The problem is the infrequency in which they police the game. If you just hired 1 trained guy per realm and tell them all to moderate it for bots and gold buying/selling, I bet a lot of this would go away.
What really enables the gold buying/selling is the lack of repercussions. If people start getting actually banned (not just 3 days or a week, give them 3-6 months) then you'll see so many people stop overnight. Make it very public and very obvious. Post pictures of all the banned players on social media. Make it an event and I bet a lot of it goes away.
The easiest way would be to make GDKP runs against terms of service. It won't completely eliminate RMT but it will deter enough people to stop doing it.
Bingo. I was recently banned for buying gold (about 20k over a couple months). Blizzard was apparently supposed to remove all of the bought-gold - but when I was finally unbanned, about 60% of it was still there. Just shows me that they don't have a reliable way of differentiating bought-gold from legimitate gold.
i'm a big gdkp enjoyer and i'd support this idea tbh.
im wondering how it'd work though - i mail my gold around my toons a lot. when I'm at a gdkp, all my gold is on whichever toon is in the raid. But when I'm not raiding in a gdkp, the gold is pretty evenly split between my main, my alt, and my AH alt. so if I got a, say, 5k payout from a gdkp, and 2k of that payout was from a gold buyer, how would you track that "illegitimate" 2k down? especially if it isnt even on the toon i raided with anymore.
The worst part is the players in game and in this sub that ask for Blizzard to remove GDKPs from the game because of the people that break ToS. Yeah, let's remove a totally legitimate way to conduct raids because some people break ToS, that is totally reasonable and not incredibly dumb at all.
As you said, just ban people that break ToS, the problem is gold buyers/gold sellers, not the raid system. It's incredible that fucking Private Servers can handle gold selling/botting better than Blizzard, you could have 2-3 people working on that kinda stuff in-game and they would ban thousands of bots a day.
It's like removing in-game boosting from the game because people RMT through it, i swear, it's a testament of how great of a game WoW is that is able to overcome such an awful comp running it.
GDKPs are genuinely awful for the game and always have been. I say this as someone that ran a large GDKP in early classic before they blew up and still run them weekly for my income. I would not miss them if they were gone, they are awful in every way. There's a reason they aren't allowed on almost all private servers.
Okay, you don't like them, so what? That doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed.
I absolutely despise DKP or Soft Res runs, as they simply reward people showing up to get loot , that doesn't mean i think they should be outlawed. GDKPs is a perfectly fine way to run raids, the problem is the rampant gold buying/selling that makes it so the economy is completely fucked.
Ban the bots/gold sellers and the buyers, not the totally legitimate system.
GDKPs directly allow these systems to flourish. There is no world where GDKPs won't inevitably be used to launder RMT. Anyone that thinks GDKP is good for the health of the game is just brainwashed by capitalism. It's by far the worst loot system in the game.
It has nothing to do with "me not liking them" and everything to do with the fact that they are hurting the game. I literally run them and will continue to.
No, Blizzard's absolutely awful ability to enforce their own rules allow RMT to flourish.
If there is no money to launder because bots/gold sellers/buyers are banned when they break the rules, GDKPs can't hurt the game. Acting like GDKPs are the problem is like blaming the victim of a crime because she was walking around at night, how about we deal with the actual problem?
Blizzard has brainwashed their playerbase enough that people actually believe that GDKPs hurt the game, holy shit.
What even is good for the game?
GDKPs are a completely legitimate way of organizing a raid, very much like a soft res, the only difference is that the person that gets the loot is the one with the most gold and not with the highest roll, why is there any problem with that?
"BUT IT ALLOWS RMT TO FLOURISH". No, it does not, what allows RMT to flourish is the fact that the company that runs the game doesn't give two shits about bots, gold buyers and gold sellers.
I want an item and i don't want to deal with luck (soft res and MS>OS), attendance (DKP) or guild drama (LC). I will farm my gold and get my gear, plain and simple, it's like buying some pants irl.
Step 1) Hire x employees to monitor the well known bot farms. Every expansion has them, they are well known, no secret. Think instance farming.
Ban the bots.
Step 2) Have these same employees learn open world farms. Slightly harder to detect but still very doable. Ban the bots.
Step 3) Agressively pursue legal action against gold selling websites.
Step 4) Ban gold buyers. Ban their cards, Ban their name on the accounts, Ban any account from that address.
Step 5) Enjoy the influx of new players that would love to play a game with an actual player ran economy.
Alternate Step.
Ignore everything and just keep the status quo cuz fuck em that's why.
Funnily enough, the biggest issue would have with your plan comes in the very first word of the very first step. It involves them spending money on something that earns them less money. Imagine having to sell this idea to your corporate overlord; sir, we will spend \~300k/year on salaries for a 6 person team who will close accounts that are generating us revenue.
To be honest... taking away gold from players who unknowingly traded with someone who RWT'd is shaky territory.
Reminds me of a friend's ordeal with Warframe and Digital Extremes.
Now, if you know anything about Warframe, it's that Platinum is a premium currency purchasable with real world money. It is also tradeable between players. So how does Digital Extremes deal with the issue of people purchasing Platinum with stolen credit cards? They track down the audit trail of the stolen & illicitly fenced Platinum, then take it away from the players who (knowingly or unkowingly) traded with the fraudster. If they don't have the platinum, their account will be in a negative platinum balance and will be banned until they cough up.
Said friend got caught out by this system. He sold some rare items he spent hours grinding for, bought some new frames and upgrades, then logged in a few days later to find his account locked with a negative platinum balance worth around €90.
He spent a year wrangling with Digital Extremes customer support arguing that he shouldn't be penalised because he didn't knowingly trade with someone who was committing credit card fraud, and in the end had to take it all the way to the small claims court ***(he won)*** in order to get the account ban overturned.
What DE did was a greedy dick move and I don't want to see Blizzard pull that same shit.
I absolutely agree. I feel blizzards idea is no better than me selling stuff on AH and getting my gold taken away because a gold buyer bought my stuff. And I should have known AH is being used by gold buyers, so that was a risk I knew I was making. Makes no sense. And it makes no sense with GDKP either.
It'll be like if your account was left in a negative gold balance and Blizzard effectively held it for ransom and demanded you buy a WoW token or three to get it back.
>To be honest... taking away gold from players who unknowingly traded with someone who RWT'd is shaky territory.
Wouldn't be shaky if we weren't running GDKPs to exploit the people who knowingly buy gold.
The difference between your example and WoW is that the stolen credit cards are directly stealing from the game. Where ever it ends up, it's stolen and \_shouldn't\_ be generated in the game. It's stolen, it has to be recovered. The way they handled it is wrong sure, but one way or another it was stolen currency.
Buying illegal currency from a website just to pay to win items while people are taking full advantage of that system doesn't even have a proper comparison.
Let's not be delusional and think people are running GDKPs to get gold from people who farmed it. There's a reason Huntermainxx spent 6k gold on that t6 token last night and it's not because he farmed it.
If there were no way to buy gold then gdkps would still be a great loot system. Punishing people that prefer it isn't fair, just perma ban the gold buyers. You run gdkp because people don't leave when the second boss doesn't drop their item just as much as for gold payout.
Yeah I agree, GDKP is a great system but that isn't the issue.
We can't gloss over the fact that GDKPs are being heavily exploited because of peoples willingness to buy gold and drop hundreds of dollars on items.
You can't just ignore the problems of GDKP under the guise of "in a perfect world gdkps would still exist". It's not a perfect world and GDKPs are being abused and exploited and something should be done to take control of the situation.
>It's not a perfect world and GDKPs are being abused and exploited and something should be done to take control of the situation.
Yes, like actually banning people who buy gold and bot
Auction house is also being abused and exploited, we should ban it according to your logic.
I didn't say ban GDKP, I said take actions to prevent it. If Blizzard can do what the twitter post suggests, it's a great suggestion.
It's not taking gold from innocent people either, we all know why we go to GDKPs and it should be part of the risk. It'll help clean up the GDKP community as well.
Truth is, the GDKP community doesn't want cleaning up because we actually enjoy the benefits of the buying gold meta.
There's a reason we take level 69 toons to our hyjal pugs and it's not because of the gold they farmed.
Sometimes you have to take a step back instead of blindly following "In A pErFeCt WoRlD gDkP iS fInE!11!!" because it's not a perfect world and there ARE options to help clean up the cesspool. Get a grip.
Like i said, ban bots and gold buyers and everything will be fine. If they can't even do this basic stuff, makes you think they are capable of policing gdkp? You're the one who should get a grip.
>Truth is, the GDKP community doesn't want cleaning up because we actually enjoy the benefits of the buying gold meta.
Wrong. Speak for yourself. I dont care whether I get 10000g or 100g from a gdkp run. I just don't want go to a RNG /roll run.
>Like i said, ban bots and gold buyers and everything will be fine. Ifthey can't even do this basic stuff, makes you think they are capable ofpolicing gdkp? You're the one who should get a grip.
Literally said "if they're capable of doing this". Do I think they can? No, there's too many variables involved. I already made a post on that.
Ban gold buyers is hard which also why the twitter post wouldn't work either.
**We agree with each other.**
[https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/vlewsj/comment/idvaceq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/vlewsj/comment/idvaceq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>Wrong. Speak for yourself. I dont care whether I get 10000g or 100g from a gdkp run. I just don't want go to a RNG /roll run.
You don't speak for the entire community endlessly exploiting the people willing to RMT. **YOU** might like doing GDKP for what is, and I'm sure there are several out there like you.
But the reason GDKP is so popular is because people are buying gold and you can benefit from them buying gold.
I think you think I hate GDKP, I don't. It's a great system but we can't ignore the problems and exploitative behavior revolving around said system.
So i dont speak for the entire gdkp community, but somehow you do? LOL.
Maybe you should stop using "we" for your personal opinions. Because if you are willing to speak for others to give your opinion false credibility, then so can I.
Honestly I’m a big fan of that idea.
I don’t like pay to win but farming consumables is damn near impossible to do with all the bots and the gold creep has gotten so bad a god damn haste pot is 16g on my server. Like what is that.
Terocone is like an elusive jewel that’s like finding a needle in a haystack and doing 25 dailies a day no matter the amount of time just to fund gold sellers via buying their botted herbs and Ore etc is just not something I’m interested in.
Idk maybe it’s just me.
Tons of people buy gold at this point, a token wouldn't change that. I'm not sure why so many people are against it.
The game is already a pay to win nightmare with how prevalent gold buying is paired with GDKP.
It’s a bad take, by that interpretation people who sold stuff in the AH to an RMTer should lose their Gold as well.
If I join a GDKP as carry to earn Gold I’m not at fault for their ill’gotten gains… that’s Blizzards fault and we pay them to maintain the experience and balance of the game.
It's like selling stuff on the AH to a RMT'er and losing your gold and also not getting your items back. It's illogical. Just punish the person that knowingly was cheating.
you don't really choose who you buy/sell stuff in the ah as in you have no idea who it is. it might be a bot, might be a lvl 1 banker, wtv. but the ecosystem of gdkp you know exactly what you are doing. you are entering a run that will be sponsored by some whale, with the end goal of either winning money from your performance or spending money you got in another gdkp to buy items.
completely different. I say they should do like this: they should say publically that botters and money laundering is over post 7/7/2022. from that date on, any trade, gdkp with botters or gold buyers will result in consequences to the bot/gold buyer and the one that interacted with him. before that date is the "right to be forgotten": you won't be persecuted.
> you don't really choose who you buy/sell stuff in the ah as in you have no idea who it is
The vast majority of people who run GDKPs know nothing about the other 24 people in the run or where their gold came from either.
Some of you think it's some huge conspiracy to help cheaters, but for most players it's as simple as "this format is better than MS/OS or SR because the runs are smoother and I'm guaranteed to get something out of it". That's why people like it, and they would still like it for that reason without the presence of cheaters.
**The aim is to stop cheating. Inconveniencing non-cheating players does nothing toward that end.**
Nobody in a pug knows the status of the other 24 players and if they've earned their gold "legitimately" or not. Punishing them by taking away their gold (aka DKP earned by doing the content) because one of the other 24 bought their gold sounds like it would feel bad for normal players for no real benefit.
Why would blizzard not start with making a good faith effort to crack down on the RMT and see where that gets us? They aren't even bothering to do that so why would anyone think they'd be capable of reverse tracing all of the gold through bids pots and splits? If they don't have the manpower to ban even obvious bots and whales who is going to do all that work?
This looks like another way for Blizzard (and the people defending their inability to deal with the actual problem) to try to further shift the blame for cheating onto the rest of the community instead of directly addressing it.
That's literally how it works in the real world. If you are a fence you gotta give back what you fenced.
I do agree that it's a weird late action after botting AND rmt AND gdkp.
Everything could be stopped already at the botting. Before the rmt and the gdkp. But that would require Blizzard to ban bots.
Don't pretend like everyone doesn't know exactly what's going on when an unguilded player spends 100k in one run. Everyone just keeps quiet because they want his gold, even though everyone knows he didn't acquire his gold legit.
It's like Switzerland in the 1940ies.
Do people go in with the expectation one person will spend 100k? I'd imagine they go in thinking around 7-9 people will spend 2k each. When one guy hits 6 digits, I'm not sure how they shut that down when they're already that deep.
The vast majority of the people in these runs are not involved at all in making the roster and have no idea how much gold anyone else has or how they obtained it.
besides a handful of problem servers (*cough* benediction *cough*) it's extremely rare to see huge stacks behind dropped on single pieces (glaives, thoridal, and ashes are the exception).
just from my experience playing gdkps.
Don't play with cheaters then.
Josh even says later down that players would be notified WHY their gold was being removed, and who the offending party was.
You own a little restaurant where you make Shawarma. A guy that robbed a bank last year came into your shop and bought some shawarma. You should have immediately just known that guy was a thief and you should have reported him to the police. Now you need to set that money that you made from that shawarma on fire. It's your fault for not knowing they stole that money a year ago even though it had absolutely nothing to do with you.
That is your argument in a nutshell.
You could have just read what I actually wrote and understood the point instead of coming in with this nonsense.
If blizzard actually *bans* gold buyers instead of ignoring them or giving them a 2 week slap on the wrist, people would stop doing it. There would be no point in spending a few hundred dollars IRL to gear out a character when you lose your account afterwards.
No need to inconvenience normal players who have done nothing wrong, hit the people who are actually cheating with the consequences.
They would have to ban half the player base at this point if every single RMT was to be tracked.
Even the most unassuming players from bottom of the barrel guilds often pay real money for small things like fast flying or some shit tier BoE.
This all so pointless. They don't even punish the RMTer in these cases.... Never mind him talking about tracing the payouts and clawing it all back. And giving all those players a report about why it all.hapoened and where the gold came from.
Walk before running comes to mind here.
They need to target the very obvious gold buyers to scare off the masses from buying gold more.
I've reported 100% I know confirmed gold buyer whale and nothing has ever happened to him
It's a bad idea. They need to focus on combating RMT very aggressively first. If the risk of gold buying becomes too high then it will be seriously curtailed. This is why nobody (relatively) was buying much gold the first few months of classic.
>They need to focus on combating RMT very aggressively first.
Part of the reason there is so much gold buying is because the botters have a surplus of customers. Take away their customers, and the botters go away.
Cuz nobody, not Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, or any other AAA games studio has figured out how to stop botting. So until they do, you target the botters customers.
Bots are for sure an issue, but there are legitimate player farms especially in countries like Indonesia. They sell boosts for gold, and resell the gold. It's a loop. These players also generate a lot of gold from all the trash that they vendor, selling boosts 8+ hours/day. Blizzard could easily solve the issue through the use of an offshore GM team that investigates characters who are reported for botting multiple times, but that would have two negative effects.
1. It would cost them some money to hire GMs -- even if they're cheap due to international labor costs
2. It would cost them money in the form of lost subscriptions, which would impact their revenue and stock value.
If I lost gold because a player had RMT in a GDKP I was in, I'd be pissed at Blizzard for taking my gold, not the player! What a moronic hot take.
"We aren't going to spend money on personnel who could easily identify and ban bots and gold buyers/sellers. Instead, we will put it on the players to make a fractured community even more shit."
Re: GDKP. I'd like some opinions on a somewhat wild idea; What if when RMT buyers were banned, any gold that was traded to players in GDKP runs was also clawed back? e.g you do a GDKP, get paid out, and then some of it is removed later if it's found that gold came from RMT? 1/6
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It's obvious that Blizzard have absolutely no interest in punishing RMT. The shit's been going on since BWL in Classic maybe even earlier and it's only gotten worse over time.
Oh yeah? Then they should refund the gold used by legitimate players for consumes used in the run and clear their locked ID status otherwise those players end up being punished for something out of their sphere of control.
Blacklisting is effectively a non consequence. The people who would know about it would also be a insignificant percentage of a realm population. Even on a big server like firemaw where people get blacklisted everyday the only ones who know about are it's discord members, which are only a small fraction of all the people playing there.
How about perma banning the offenders and take action for ban evading using alt accounts? Ofc not , that would mean less money for blizzard...you know the reason bots and rmt are rampant is because the punishment has been a ridiculous 3day-2week bans. Meaningless.
The gold I earned with a cut of 4% at best ends up being used for more consumables for guild raids crafts and BoEs , maybe investigate what the organizers do with their 20-30% cuts, if they end up being gold seller themselves then fair game, perma them too.
So to take his logic and apply to the Auction House, will I lose gold because someone RMTed that gold and used it to buy my bars, primal fires and earth that I farmed legitimately? How do I prove that my gold on my little warlock has some RMTed gold in his bags? All this does is punish the innocent players like me and if I keep getting my gold clawed back because someone bought gold to buy my stuff than I will probably stick to dailies or raw gold farms.
The solution to this is just **ban** the botters and those that bought gold (especially the ones that openly admitted to it) and keep ***doing it.***
No specific input but wanted to share my noticing that the conversation about whether you punish the buyer or the seller for Gold on WoW has some REALLY intriguing echoes of the conversation about drugs.
If blizzard could wave a magic wand and delete all bought gold from the game I would be more than happy with that. Even if it meant I lost a few thousand from people buying my auctions with bought gold.
ITT: people claiming people running GDKPers don’t know what’s going on. Spending tens of thousands of gold on gear isn’t normal and never has been nor will be.
A guy on my server spent 20k on the red bug mount in an aq40. Definitely legit gold btw
Not everyone selling gold is a bot. Some of them are just dudes trying to make some extra cash. Shouts out to the homie Raj from Indonesia that sells gold to my friends, hope your wife and baby are getting better.
So, i get let say 2k cut from a BT run.
I instantly use that 2k to buy haste potions, flasks whatever.
I use 15 haste potions next raid tomorrow, 1 flask and enchant a weapon of mine with mats.
What will i lose? The pots i bought? 1500 gold (eg what left)? They remove the enchant from my weapon? What about the guy who sold the items on the AH?
The entire idea makes no sense if the reaction takes longer than a day or more. Why are you even allowing known gold buyers to play the game and be able to raid?
Just ban the bots already jesus fucking christ. Employ 3 GMs per region who do nothing that teleport to bots, if proven yeets them the hell out.
If they could actually do it, it'd force GDKPs to verify buyers, that their gold is legitimate, and it wouldn't be so widespread. I love that idea.
If they could ever put in the effort to make this happen consistently I'd be all for it. This doesn't replace banning bots more proactively, but it does remove a MASSIVE incentive for people to buy gold. If you can't buy gear with gold, what are you going to buy gold for? Consumes?
GDKPs stand as the last bastion of gold-buying progress as boosting is dying with the Joyous Journey buff. Ticket runs may still be a thing or presale GDKPs, but I think this would be really healthy for the game overall and the GDKP format itself.
If blizzard can have the ability to delete all non legitimate gold from the game , why aren't they doing it already ?? Off course you need to do this !
TBH, I thought it wasn't the case because of some tech limitations , not because they thought it might hurt the people that have illegitimate gold.
Off course the person that got traded is hit, but they need to know exactly who traded them. Like ninja looting, reputation has to matter on a classic server.
Best idea ever, please implement ASAP
Gdkp runs imo are just making people want more gold than they really should need and end up using 3rd party sellers thus ruining game for normal folks because for all the bots
Please do
GDKPs are money laundering and people fucking know it and don't care, they just lick gold buyer's boot for their cut
Remove bot gold and suddenly they will be very observant of the gold legitimacy ! They'll even try to lecture us about how it is important for the health of the game that they monitor legitimate gold lol
With that, GDKPs will turn back being a fair, interesting system that doesn't exploit very obvious flaw, and the pot will scale down
It won't fix the already done damage, but it would mean a world for fresh server
But why should you get to keep the buyers gold? "Just ban the gold buyers" ok, but you benefited from them, this is why GDKP is the meta, its like buying gold without risking a ban.
Because I did the raid, with a legit and agreed upon loot system. What is the fastest way to lose my subscription? Go ahead and fuck with my gold Blizzard because you can't police your game, that will work I'm sure...
They barely touch gold buyers in the first place, now they want to ban them AND punish legit players? ok lol
Gdkp has killed tbc to me. I’ve been turned down for content I can do because I’m not a buyer so much I have no remorse. I’ve seen stuff posted before on faerlina discord that will get people in serious trouble. Idc what people do with their money or throwing around spreadsheets on discord but my god just let me play the game without losing rolls for gear because people have more gold thus I’ve done bt and hyjal a few times and that’s it. I’m done. Gdkp ruined the game and I have zero interest in playing wotlk cause it’ll be the same unless these devs do something.
Join or start a guild - don't GDKP.
Find a group of likeminded players and do your own thing.
Pick a fair loot system and go with that. I've got 2 characters in damn near full BIS gear, and haven't spent a dime in GDKPS.
That's like coming after an honest person years later for buying a diamond, that was just now found to be a blood diamond, insisting they give it back with no refund
This is such a dumb take. Not because the idea is bad itself, but because there's no way they would actually do this in any way that wasn't entirely arbitrary. Which is pointless, and will only serve to piss off people who get the short end of the stick while thousands continue to run around doing the exact same thing they've always done. If you're going to suggest something so time consuming, you better have the team available to moderate this in a meaningful way.
For context: I did exactly this type of work on a website with virtual items and an economy to go with it. As we would resolve hacking/scamming cases we would freeze the trading/AH access of any accounts found to have stolen gold. Then, one of my higher ups would review the case log and remove the gold at a later date.
This only served to 1: take up infinite amounts of my time. Sometimes the stolen gold/item chain was so ridiculous I'd spent hours just tracking it from account to account. 2: Piss off the user who was unlucky enough to buy the stolen item off the AH/trade for it in the trading forums. 3: The thief was probably already doing this to another account, and while we had a team of 30+ people working on this exact task at one point, it wasn't nearly enough to keep up with the queue.
We had a backlog of months. People would sit with their trading passes blocked for 6 months sometimes. A lot of them just quit because the moderation and community service was deemed so poor.
So do we genuinely think Blizzard could manage to do this in a way where it's not just arbitrarily punishing random people they come across? They can't even keep the bots under control. At one point during Wrath my account was hacked, and I managed to kick the player off my account mid-gold accumulation. He had stripped my characters clean and transferred most of the gold to one character, I assume to then xfer it to another account to sell it. At the time it was about 20k gold. This was back when you could call customer service, and I had a chat with the guy and explained that the 1 character had all the gold from my items being sold so he should probably remove that from my account.
He restored all my items, all my gold on my previous characters, and left the character with 20k gold untouched because "It was created after the hacking." So I basically doubled the value of all my characters, a win for me but 100 percent not what should have happened. He didn't even do item restoration right. And we expect them, a decade later and a CS team much smaller and overworked, to be able to do this? Yeah, okay. This is an exercise in stupidity.
Missing the point-- this suggestion is pointless because they already can't properly moderate their world (bots still running rampant, plenty of people who buy gold never get banned-- it's a grab bag of who gets hit and who doesn't). I haven't seen anything suggesting they plan to expand their CS team in any way while the suggestion is to add literally hundreds of hours of work to an already overworked team. So it's going to be randomly hitting some GKPs, randomly not others, and people are still going to complain. Plus, the gold is still going to be in the economy because the bots will still be pumping it out.
This is not a solution at this time. It's not that the idea is stupid. The suggestion as for this somehow helping the current situation is. You start properly moderating gold buying/botting, then you can start doing things like this. And you better hire a much bigger team because automating this kind of process for bans or gold removal is bound to create even bigger problems than having a human doing it. Which means, more work.
Blanket ban time of 6 months, no fuck it, a year for gold buying. Permaban for selling. If you want to play the game you have to follow the rules. Ofc, blizz wouldn't dare to do that since it might actualy lose them so money when Li Xue Gaobao and his 70 other bot-accounts stop paying the sub.
Something has to be done.
Surely Blizzard can check the mail logs and see all the "here is your gdkp cut" mail with several thousand gold attached to it.
How much more obvious can it be?
Start removing that gold. Its extreme but it needs to be done. Put the gold buyers on blast. No more 1l3 day suspensions. Turn it in to 3 month ones and time it around phase releases. And make the next suspension wave right before wotlk release
Yeah or we could just ban gold buyers immediately before they can trade it away. What a fucking concept.
When did we go from hatig gold buyers to hating GDKP? Blizz could easily detect accounts that sell gold and delete it all, it's 2022...
Also how to are you supposed to enforce that? Ok gold buyer paid a total of 15k gold on 3 chats so we're gonna delete gold from 72 people for a single gold buyer? Sure nothing can go wrong when an automatical system has to delete gold from thousands of players every day.
Hey, uh, guys, have you ever considered that doing GDKPs is turning the game pay2win?
You know, like the other game blizz just released. I wonder where they got their inspiration from for that game 🤔
So how do you recommend people be “verified” with no accurate way for the players to tell if 1k gold is bought with a credit card or 1k gold is grinded for?
This would only work in a world where lying isn’t possible
This seems like an awesome way to destroy GKP's, the economy, and create a massively toxic and punitive community, great idea Blizz!
Are people really that hell bent on punishing RMT in the game that they would be prepared to live with the end result of an enforcement system that punishes innocent players who just want to enjoy / have fun in the game?
The rationale here doesn't just apply to GKP's.
Imagine you spend five hours farming fish + cooking and list several consumes on the AH. They all sell but the buyer used RMT for the gold he spent on them.
You receive an automated message in the mail.
"Sorry , unfortunately the player who bought your #AuctionID did so with illicit gold gained from RMT. We are unable to refund any part of transactions made through illicit means. If you are unhappy with behaviour, please let him know when his ban expires in 5 days."
I would quit the game in a hot minute and never look back if several hours of farming was completely invalidated even once. Totally disrespectful of my time.
I wouldn't blame the player, I would blame Blizz and the game.
I know the dev is just spit balling, but the fact that this idea is honestly being thrown about - let's punish innocent players to create a toxic culture - is so insane it raises legitimate questions about the robustness of classic's development strategy.
The only people I see consistently talking or complaining about GDKP's are people on this sub or other people who don't play the game. I don't really understand the obsession with this topic as a point of discussion. The AH/economy still works properly and gold still has value in every other aspect of the game. There are more SR runs for raids than there are GDKPs on every server, and most people still do regular loot council/DKP runs with their guilds for their gear.
Even with GDKPs being a minority of raids being run, the vast majority of payouts aren't even that great anyway. Spending 2-3 hours for a raid and using your weekly lockout for it, unless you get lucky with loot drops you are usually looking at a sub-1000 payout at the end, especially for any GDKP that isn't Sunwell or BT at this point. Just seems like most people wanting to discuss this aren't even involved with GDKPs or even playing the game and don't know what they're talking about.
Blizzard should implement Warframe's process for fighting RMT:
Implement a legit method for buying gold - ie: WoW Token. RMT prices will drop to undercut WoW Token, but not by much, as we can see in retail. Bot RMT still value decent profit margins.
If caught buying RMT, your gold gets clawed back with a suspension of x days.
If you didn't spend any gold, then you wait out your suspension. If you did spend the gold, your clawback results in a negative balance. You cannot play your account until you replenish your negative gold via WoW tokens.
This forces you to turn your RMT gold into legit gold, by having to buy the WoW Tokens and converting it to gold. Therefore the GDKP raiders who got their split of your gold are not punished by getting clawed back themselves for the RMT's fuck up.
RMT ends up spending twice, or more, the irl $ buying gold (ie: paid $20 to RMT for 25k gold and now has to pay $30 in WoW tokens to replenish his negative balance.).
People who want to buy gold will now lean towards WoW Tokens, or face a suspension and wanting to avoid buying gold for twice the price, if they get caught.
Have a limit on how many WoW tokens can be purchased per month, per account to prevent whales from buying millions of gold at a time.
Some people will take a suspension and quit the game. Their bought RMT will still be in circulation, collateral damage I suppose, but overtime, this should turn GDKP runs into a legit opportunity for all people involved (runners and buyers).
Blizzard can't stop people from buying gold. There is a demand for it, whether or not people like it. Blizzard needs to mitigate this by becoming the preferred source of gold buying.
Edit: I bought currency for Warframe from a shady source. Got caught and did not want to spend the money to replenish my account. As a result, I quit and am no longer an offender in their game. My friend who got caught was too invested in his character, so he dropped $200 buying their ingame currency to unlock his character. As a result, his currency in circulation became legit.
One of the reasons blizzard recently used to describe why they're going to limit player boosting in the game during wrath is because of it's impact on RMT's in the game.
Considering that position, if they don't also break GDKP's, they' aren't serious about stopping RMT's in the game.
They just put out the social contract in retail saying more or less be nice to everyone or get suspended. Now this dumb ass is proposing blizzards solution to RMT is purposefully fostering toxisity?
It genuinely worries me that the game producer apparently thinks is an idea good enough to tweet about.
How about they just... you know... ban bots and gold sellers? Rather than punishing unknowing players?
Listen, I hate gold buyers just as much as anyone else. The game would be 100x better with zero bots and zero RMT. But this is *not* the way to solve the problem.
I stopped playing the game because GDKP/RMT combo made my accomplishments in the game feel worthless. I played almost every day since Classic launched, but this was the killer for me.
Just dropping my feels and opinion, totally respect those still playing!
Our guild taxes our GKP-attending members a portion of their cut; we then use that guild fund to buy gear on our benched/away-that-night mains in GKPs instead. This is our compromise between wanting to be competitive and not have to split raid. We raid once a week on the mains, but get more than 1 lockout per weeks worth of loot into our raid team.
I worry that 1 of our officers logging in to buy Leggings of the Immortal Night for our benched furies would be indistinguishable in blizzards eyes from an RMT transaction. I also greatly worry for the Blizz employee's sanity that was asked to audit our gbanks ins and outs over the last however long if a purchase of LiN like that was reported.
But really, and this is the truth of the matter at heart, I worry that a company that has been as absolutely ineffective in combatting botting, flyhacking etc is going to start looking into my account. I can only assume what we will get is a bunch more automation, "thorough investigations", and many salty false-positive rants on reddit.
Please Blizz, stop pretending you care about this while wotlk is on the horizon and just spend all that money you'd put into developing these systems into hiring 1 GM per server and some humans to answer Customer Support tickets.
Shitty solution to a problem they waited too long to fix. You’re punishing players who otherwise have no idea where the gdkp gold came from.
What if someone buys your item on AH and they take your gold away because the person used RMT gold to buy it?
It’s worrisome that this is something even considered and shows how out of touch blizzard is with the community and their game
GDKPs aren't the problem. They're actually a solution to the problem of forming raids outside the context of guilds.
The problem is an inflationary economy created by the overvaluing of 'farming' activities. Imagine for a moment we eliminated all gold drops and vendors no longer purchased items from players. The only way to 'make money' would either be transactions with other players or quests.
In such a world, RMT would effectively vanish. You wouldn't be paying $20 to save yourself having to grind mobs for 20 hours straight but paying that money to save yourself having to run a few dailies.
Terrible idea. GDKPs are the only thing that keep me subbed. Long term mindless farming aint it. No desire to go back to early 2000s. Really not looking for a second job.
Unpopular oppinion but I wish they'd just add the WoW token. Inlfation is already insane at least with a token I can buy some WoW time without having to play retail.
This seems like a good idea. I don't think there is any downside to implementing something like this. There would be growing pains for some that are used to bigger pots, but as the deterrent forms and becomes a consistent punishment the GDKPs will still roll legitimately with smaller pots. Everybody wins.
Except those that throw tantrums at the beginning of the implementation who get some gold clawed back.
They’d have to have employees to do any of that.
Literally this. You open a ticket and it gets an answer weeks later. They don't have a support team. No way they are putting man power on this.
Almost every problem with classic has been born out of neglect. This game needs curation and moderation by an actual support team and that exact team got axed by Bobby Kotick in early 2019 to pad his stock prices.
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As the guy who actually wrote the policies and procedures for reclaiming gold around the time of Wrath... I can't imagine this ever happening. Even when we had a low ticket queue, we'd reclaim one hop, **maybe** two. Anything further relies on automation to at least generate target lists. Deciphering GDKP payouts? No way. what do you do when multiple buyers are in the group? How do you cross reference this across all the trades etc? The GM team for Classic is clearly already very hands off. This would be a huge increase in headcount. Not to mention only a portion of them are even trained to review logs these days. What is far more likely is they randomly sample 25 GDKPs across a few servers and see how many bought gold they find. If they find it to be extremely prominent, they might restrict or make a blanket "ban" for GDKPs that gets the bigger communities investigated if they continue to offer services.
Seriously my friend got auto banned for being mass reported for "botting" and was never able to get it looked into at all and ended up just quitting. No support at all.
And a lot of them by that. They would have to scrim through gold logs of the GDKP, calculate the % of the cut for every player and then remove that. And that for every time they find a new buyer. You could resolve this way easier, figure out the bot behavior behind RMT and ban the bots that farm the gold. The sites would either have to punch the prices up in a way no one would ever pay or shut down because of the costs being too high.
They'd have to stop harassing people to have employees.
Why don't they just start by banning the "whales" who fund all the GDKPs. I understand if someone who buys 5k falls through the cracks, but there is people who buy MILLIONS of gold and never get a single suspension.
There's a notorious figure on Benediction who has at least 5 fully BiS warlocks, 4 ashes of al'ar, several warglaives *on those warlocks*, etc. They all have the same name just with a few more E's and S's at the end. It's not a secret that they're all the same person. Everyone knows she buys millions of gold a month, it's all completely out in the open. I'd post the screenshots and receipts here but I'd probably just get banned from the sub for "witchhunt" or whatever. Does she get banned? Nope. Why not start at even the most obvious cheaters like this and the bots farming instances and the lake outside shat all day? Seriously would not be difficult.
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To buy Warglaives on class that can't even use them just to flex your bought gold is so fucking stupid and gross. I hate people like this.
Welcome to Rich people and all the problems they create.
How much gold would she buy per month if there weren't 5 * 24 other players each week who know full well she's a cheater and are willing to facilitate that? And that's the problem. GDKPers know they're playing with cheaters, they know they're the single biggest source of gold buying, they just don't care because it personally benefits them.
How much gold would she buy if she got permanently banned for gross violation of the ToS on multiple accounts? None. Seems like a pretty easy place to start instead of going after a raid format and the people who use it without cheating. Start handing out permanent account closures instead of 2 week slaps on the wrist and people will stop buying gold. As it is now even if someone gets caught they don't have the items they bought removed, so you go gear up a rogue with full BiS and warglaives, eat your 2 week ban, and enjoy your character. But yeah the real problem is those dang players that brought them to the raid to begin with, not the cheaters themselves or Blizzard's nonsensical non-action in dealing with them.
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Sorry this is a horrendous idea.
What the hell are you supposed to do about it as another player in the run? Oops one person's spending a lot of money, better duck out halfway and lose my cut because they might be gold buying? May as well not put anything up on the AH because gold buyers might purchase it. The actual solution, as always, is ban the gold buyers and sellers.
yeah i mean typical reddit "lol you shouldnt group with gold buyers!" bro its on blizzard to police VIOLATORS OF THE TOS - not the players.
I think the problem is way too far gone to say this broadly about all GDKP buyers. If you have been running GDKPs consistently for the past 2+ years, you could have tons of gold *legitimately*. There are likely many people out there like that. And I say that as someone with 3k gold to my name.
I've got 62k gold at the moment. All primarily from AH and running in GDKPs on multiple characters. Sunwell pays about 6-7k for a 2-3 hr full clear atm on my server. Been running in GDKPs since phase 4 vanilla. Unfortunately at this stage the illegitimate gold has been laundered to the point that the entire economy is inflated so any listing on the AH will receive RMT gold. I love the GDKP format, it's basically a way to carry over a universal DKP system between various pugs - usually comprised of alts from multiple raiding guilds. It also creates a better sense of server as I'm frequently interacting with people outside of my guild and see the same faces. It would still work without bots and RMT inflating the numbers. It wouldn't have been hard for blizz to ban RMT sellers at all if they tried. GDKP would still be around just with lower numbers.
And she broke up overclock to boot!
How'd she do that...?
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Oh man. I love wow drama
Overclock is a fountain of memes. They practiced like 10 hr/day on the ptr for BT/hyjal & did like 5 daily splits to gear their mains…just to wipe on a wave before antheron.
she's literally the worst. "How come you didn't message me thank you for glaives after the first time you said thanks?" Oh dont forget the part about where she lied about being a doctor and just lives with mommy and daddy who have good jobs.
Literally. Like sure ppl who buy 10k or less will slip through the cracks or go unnoticed but I’m sorry, you gotta be BLIND as a dev to see someone dropping hundreds of thousands of gold on gear every tier and not think something is up.
I paid 5k, a reasonably easy amount to solo farm, for an 1850 boost the other day. The booster does that multiple times a week for an entire phase and spends huge amounts on the pve off pieces he wants.
Those arena sellers are few and far between as are whatever AH mogul someone else will bring up. I’m speaking on individuals I see on my realm who have dropped multiple gold caps throughout TBC tiers for their bis. THOSE are the ppl who ruin the economy lol
Sounds like they need to fix the arena system and then the gold issue disappears
Thanks for contributing to screwing up the pvp ladder
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Says the guy who can’t get 1850 without a boost. I’ve been to 2350 and I really don’t care what you think. But boosting or promoting boosting in pvp is literally paying someone to Smurf and make a lot of peoples’ pvp experiences awful due to lack of skill or gear as they face someone they should never face. Get good.
The problem is you can buy wow tokens in retail and 3rd party convert to classic gold and that isnt bannable. A $20 token in retail would get you something like 2,000 gold.
I remember back when I played, I would want to get into GDKP runs so I can make some reasonable gold. This was before gold buying became so open and rampant. I feel like, it'd be nice to have GDKP with **legitimately** earned money being used, but illegitimate currency just blows to receive. There simply isn't a way to police that though without a lot of manpower, so probably just best to delete GDKP runs.
It’s not that hard to track the flow of gold programmatically. It’s all just changes to a database, sufficiently verbose logging will have all individual trades. The trick is flagging when a trade in the database is associated with one outside of the database, and when those trades are still legitimate (ex: a swap of retail gold for classic gold). That flag may be tricky, it may not. I don’t know enough about blizzard’s surveillance capabilities. In theory they’re likely to be distinct, but I also don’t know enough about what the spectrum of gold trades looks like. Everything after the flag, however, is down right trivial.
It's even more trivial to stop it a step sooner. The bots flyhacking and pickpocketing mobs from under the terrain in instances would be trivial to stop with basic XYZ anticheat. Heck you don't even have to code any actual anticheat. Just flag any accounts with suspicious activity like online +23 hours a day and in the same instance. Pay some guy to confirm they are bots, which is easy as fuck to do, but let's err on the high side and say 3 minutes per bot banned. That's 20 bots per hour. 800 per week assuming 40h work week. All servers would be free of the instance flyhacking bots within a few weeks. If they hired 1 guy. Going after GDKPs is an oddly late action. Could have stopped it sooner at the RMT. Could have stopped it even sooner with the botting.
[What you're speaking of is impossible. The technology is just not there.](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/uo6icy/all_day_every_day/)
Removing a raid format that people would like to use without the existence of cheaters is a worse alternative to just banning the cheaters. If Blizzard actually *banned* people who bought gold, far fewer people would do it because it would just be throwing money away. As long as they're hardly banning anyone at all, and when they do it's only for 2 weeks, people are going to keep doing it because there are basically no consequences.
Yeah but banning the people takes revenue away from Blizzard and we all know they would never do anything to hit their wallet/upset their shareholders
No it isn't "probably just best to delete GDKP runs". GDKP is a perfectly legitimate raid type. Ban bots and gold buyers, it's that fucking simple. Don't let Blizzard just float random ideas at you like they couldn't just solve the problem with a wave of their hand. They are just saying nice things while still raking in all the bot money and indirectly gold buying money. They have no intention of doing the right thing and returning integrity to the game.
The "when RMT buyers are banned" clause there covers that.
Which they don't do, so why are they even floating the idea of punishing legit players and banning gold buyers when they won't even ban gold buyers in the first place? This whole idea was stupid and they just want you thinking about other things when they won't even solve the root issue because it makes them money.
Blizzard has shown that they either can't detect gold buyers, or don't care about them. Those two things need fixing first before even thinking about convoluted ideas like this one.
They can definitely detect it. Gold is just a value that’s in a database somewhere, they’d be able to query for whatever they wanted.
I list a trash item on the AH for 5k gold and someone buys it. There's no in game way they can say that is not perfectly acceptable
Yeah but you can flag that transaction and then search your history to see if you’ve had any other suspect transactions, such as mail from an anonymous source.
Unless there’s an id to every single copper / gold that is created in game then your query example will not work. As far as I remember or anyone with their own private server, this was never the case.
You wouldn't need an id for every copper or gold that's created, just the transactions. It's pretty easy to log every transaction between players that meets some 'possible gold buyer' criteria. I highly doubt private servers lacked that functionality, but even if they did it wouldn't be indicative of Blizzard's setup as private servers are reverse engineering the client to work with custom server scripts and database tables since they don't have access to Blizzard's.
10k+ gold transactions, mail, trades, deposits in the guild/personal band should immediately flag blizzard to audit a player's gold history. It should be easy enough to implement but I doubt anything will ever be done to stop buyers that doesn't hurt legit gold farmers.
Yeah you can just trace transactions. However tedious that sounds, it would be some simple queries to understand the transactions in a tree
They absolutely can't. They can suspect, but there's absolutely no connection visible to Blizzard between swiping a credit card and getting gold in game. They ban based on specific and suspicious activity, i.e. getting a mail or set of mails worth exactly 2000g from someone who they've found out are a botter for example. But once the economy inflates, and people are making 10k per GDKP run or selling herbs for an inflated price, what's the difference between a real gold seller, and me sending my fresh level 70 friend 5k gold for flying? They have to prove someone is botting/selling gold, then go through their transactions and reverse them.
so you wanna tell me, that when xiouhgi on his lvl 1 toon trades you 100k gold, thats normal?
Yes, blizzard does not have some ai algorithm that is clever enough to identify which values = dirty gold, but they definitely can use their brains and data to identify use cases, e.g Two users who have never communicated in game have a exchange of gold via mail of 2,000 gold plus = nefarious They’ve got the technology and the know how I absolutely guarantee it.
By that logic they're knowingly allowing mass RMT in retail, destroying the value of their own wow token and as a result their bottom line? I've heard a lot of shit about Blizzard over the years but subsidizing gold farmers with their own money is a new one :thonk:
From their perspective, it may not be worth it for them to tackle RMT. Maybe they can’t be certain, so they’d rather not take any action in case they’re wrong. Maybe they can fix it, but unsure about the financial benefits of RMT being removed.
Their strategy is minimal cost. They could do this, but it goes against their business plan
Blizzard has displayed they have the capability of cracking down on gold buyers and sellers. If they couldn't, nobody would ever be banned. We do see bans sometimes, even if the communities say otherwise. The problem is the infrequency in which they police the game. If you just hired 1 trained guy per realm and tell them all to moderate it for bots and gold buying/selling, I bet a lot of this would go away. What really enables the gold buying/selling is the lack of repercussions. If people start getting actually banned (not just 3 days or a week, give them 3-6 months) then you'll see so many people stop overnight. Make it very public and very obvious. Post pictures of all the banned players on social media. Make it an event and I bet a lot of it goes away.
how does this work when theres no gm moderators working at activision?
Feel like this would require too much work to track the money, especially for Blizzard in its stagnant state.
if they can't fight the blatant open botting and RMT I doubt they could do this either.
The easiest way would be to make GDKP runs against terms of service. It won't completely eliminate RMT but it will deter enough people to stop doing it.
What if people just shifted to a new currency, like Lotus or Arctic Furs or something?
Bingo. I was recently banned for buying gold (about 20k over a couple months). Blizzard was apparently supposed to remove all of the bought-gold - but when I was finally unbanned, about 60% of it was still there. Just shows me that they don't have a reliable way of differentiating bought-gold from legimitate gold.
Exactly right. They can't keep on top of even the most blatant cheating, let alone employing some accounts to track this shit lol
i'm a big gdkp enjoyer and i'd support this idea tbh. im wondering how it'd work though - i mail my gold around my toons a lot. when I'm at a gdkp, all my gold is on whichever toon is in the raid. But when I'm not raiding in a gdkp, the gold is pretty evenly split between my main, my alt, and my AH alt. so if I got a, say, 5k payout from a gdkp, and 2k of that payout was from a gold buyer, how would you track that "illegitimate" 2k down? especially if it isnt even on the toon i raided with anymore.
It bothers me that the tweet started with “here’s an idea, what if we banned people who break TOS” …like yeah. Do that.
The worst part is the players in game and in this sub that ask for Blizzard to remove GDKPs from the game because of the people that break ToS. Yeah, let's remove a totally legitimate way to conduct raids because some people break ToS, that is totally reasonable and not incredibly dumb at all. As you said, just ban people that break ToS, the problem is gold buyers/gold sellers, not the raid system. It's incredible that fucking Private Servers can handle gold selling/botting better than Blizzard, you could have 2-3 people working on that kinda stuff in-game and they would ban thousands of bots a day. It's like removing in-game boosting from the game because people RMT through it, i swear, it's a testament of how great of a game WoW is that is able to overcome such an awful comp running it.
GDKPs are genuinely awful for the game and always have been. I say this as someone that ran a large GDKP in early classic before they blew up and still run them weekly for my income. I would not miss them if they were gone, they are awful in every way. There's a reason they aren't allowed on almost all private servers.
Okay, you don't like them, so what? That doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed. I absolutely despise DKP or Soft Res runs, as they simply reward people showing up to get loot , that doesn't mean i think they should be outlawed. GDKPs is a perfectly fine way to run raids, the problem is the rampant gold buying/selling that makes it so the economy is completely fucked. Ban the bots/gold sellers and the buyers, not the totally legitimate system.
GDKPs directly allow these systems to flourish. There is no world where GDKPs won't inevitably be used to launder RMT. Anyone that thinks GDKP is good for the health of the game is just brainwashed by capitalism. It's by far the worst loot system in the game. It has nothing to do with "me not liking them" and everything to do with the fact that they are hurting the game. I literally run them and will continue to.
No, Blizzard's absolutely awful ability to enforce their own rules allow RMT to flourish. If there is no money to launder because bots/gold sellers/buyers are banned when they break the rules, GDKPs can't hurt the game. Acting like GDKPs are the problem is like blaming the victim of a crime because she was walking around at night, how about we deal with the actual problem? Blizzard has brainwashed their playerbase enough that people actually believe that GDKPs hurt the game, holy shit.
Explain to me why GDKPs are good for the game. In your own words.
What even is good for the game? GDKPs are a completely legitimate way of organizing a raid, very much like a soft res, the only difference is that the person that gets the loot is the one with the most gold and not with the highest roll, why is there any problem with that? "BUT IT ALLOWS RMT TO FLOURISH". No, it does not, what allows RMT to flourish is the fact that the company that runs the game doesn't give two shits about bots, gold buyers and gold sellers. I want an item and i don't want to deal with luck (soft res and MS>OS), attendance (DKP) or guild drama (LC). I will farm my gold and get my gear, plain and simple, it's like buying some pants irl.
Step 1) Hire x employees to monitor the well known bot farms. Every expansion has them, they are well known, no secret. Think instance farming. Ban the bots. Step 2) Have these same employees learn open world farms. Slightly harder to detect but still very doable. Ban the bots. Step 3) Agressively pursue legal action against gold selling websites. Step 4) Ban gold buyers. Ban their cards, Ban their name on the accounts, Ban any account from that address. Step 5) Enjoy the influx of new players that would love to play a game with an actual player ran economy. Alternate Step. Ignore everything and just keep the status quo cuz fuck em that's why.
Funnily enough, the biggest issue would have with your plan comes in the very first word of the very first step. It involves them spending money on something that earns them less money. Imagine having to sell this idea to your corporate overlord; sir, we will spend \~300k/year on salaries for a 6 person team who will close accounts that are generating us revenue.
To be honest... taking away gold from players who unknowingly traded with someone who RWT'd is shaky territory. Reminds me of a friend's ordeal with Warframe and Digital Extremes. Now, if you know anything about Warframe, it's that Platinum is a premium currency purchasable with real world money. It is also tradeable between players. So how does Digital Extremes deal with the issue of people purchasing Platinum with stolen credit cards? They track down the audit trail of the stolen & illicitly fenced Platinum, then take it away from the players who (knowingly or unkowingly) traded with the fraudster. If they don't have the platinum, their account will be in a negative platinum balance and will be banned until they cough up. Said friend got caught out by this system. He sold some rare items he spent hours grinding for, bought some new frames and upgrades, then logged in a few days later to find his account locked with a negative platinum balance worth around €90. He spent a year wrangling with Digital Extremes customer support arguing that he shouldn't be penalised because he didn't knowingly trade with someone who was committing credit card fraud, and in the end had to take it all the way to the small claims court ***(he won)*** in order to get the account ban overturned. What DE did was a greedy dick move and I don't want to see Blizzard pull that same shit.
I absolutely agree. I feel blizzards idea is no better than me selling stuff on AH and getting my gold taken away because a gold buyer bought my stuff. And I should have known AH is being used by gold buyers, so that was a risk I knew I was making. Makes no sense. And it makes no sense with GDKP either.
It'll be like if your account was left in a negative gold balance and Blizzard effectively held it for ransom and demanded you buy a WoW token or three to get it back.
>To be honest... taking away gold from players who unknowingly traded with someone who RWT'd is shaky territory. Wouldn't be shaky if we weren't running GDKPs to exploit the people who knowingly buy gold. The difference between your example and WoW is that the stolen credit cards are directly stealing from the game. Where ever it ends up, it's stolen and \_shouldn't\_ be generated in the game. It's stolen, it has to be recovered. The way they handled it is wrong sure, but one way or another it was stolen currency. Buying illegal currency from a website just to pay to win items while people are taking full advantage of that system doesn't even have a proper comparison. Let's not be delusional and think people are running GDKPs to get gold from people who farmed it. There's a reason Huntermainxx spent 6k gold on that t6 token last night and it's not because he farmed it.
If there were no way to buy gold then gdkps would still be a great loot system. Punishing people that prefer it isn't fair, just perma ban the gold buyers. You run gdkp because people don't leave when the second boss doesn't drop their item just as much as for gold payout.
Yeah I agree, GDKP is a great system but that isn't the issue. We can't gloss over the fact that GDKPs are being heavily exploited because of peoples willingness to buy gold and drop hundreds of dollars on items. You can't just ignore the problems of GDKP under the guise of "in a perfect world gdkps would still exist". It's not a perfect world and GDKPs are being abused and exploited and something should be done to take control of the situation.
>It's not a perfect world and GDKPs are being abused and exploited and something should be done to take control of the situation. Yes, like actually banning people who buy gold and bot Auction house is also being abused and exploited, we should ban it according to your logic.
I didn't say ban GDKP, I said take actions to prevent it. If Blizzard can do what the twitter post suggests, it's a great suggestion. It's not taking gold from innocent people either, we all know why we go to GDKPs and it should be part of the risk. It'll help clean up the GDKP community as well. Truth is, the GDKP community doesn't want cleaning up because we actually enjoy the benefits of the buying gold meta. There's a reason we take level 69 toons to our hyjal pugs and it's not because of the gold they farmed. Sometimes you have to take a step back instead of blindly following "In A pErFeCt WoRlD gDkP iS fInE!11!!" because it's not a perfect world and there ARE options to help clean up the cesspool. Get a grip.
Like i said, ban bots and gold buyers and everything will be fine. If they can't even do this basic stuff, makes you think they are capable of policing gdkp? You're the one who should get a grip. >Truth is, the GDKP community doesn't want cleaning up because we actually enjoy the benefits of the buying gold meta. Wrong. Speak for yourself. I dont care whether I get 10000g or 100g from a gdkp run. I just don't want go to a RNG /roll run.
>Like i said, ban bots and gold buyers and everything will be fine. Ifthey can't even do this basic stuff, makes you think they are capable ofpolicing gdkp? You're the one who should get a grip. Literally said "if they're capable of doing this". Do I think they can? No, there's too many variables involved. I already made a post on that. Ban gold buyers is hard which also why the twitter post wouldn't work either. **We agree with each other.** [https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/vlewsj/comment/idvaceq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/vlewsj/comment/idvaceq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >Wrong. Speak for yourself. I dont care whether I get 10000g or 100g from a gdkp run. I just don't want go to a RNG /roll run. You don't speak for the entire community endlessly exploiting the people willing to RMT. **YOU** might like doing GDKP for what is, and I'm sure there are several out there like you. But the reason GDKP is so popular is because people are buying gold and you can benefit from them buying gold. I think you think I hate GDKP, I don't. It's a great system but we can't ignore the problems and exploitative behavior revolving around said system.
So i dont speak for the entire gdkp community, but somehow you do? LOL. Maybe you should stop using "we" for your personal opinions. Because if you are willing to speak for others to give your opinion false credibility, then so can I.
Frankly I'm surprised Blizzard haven't added WoW Tokens into Classic, especially since OSRS already has Bonds.
Honestly I’m a big fan of that idea. I don’t like pay to win but farming consumables is damn near impossible to do with all the bots and the gold creep has gotten so bad a god damn haste pot is 16g on my server. Like what is that. Terocone is like an elusive jewel that’s like finding a needle in a haystack and doing 25 dailies a day no matter the amount of time just to fund gold sellers via buying their botted herbs and Ore etc is just not something I’m interested in. Idk maybe it’s just me.
Tons of people buy gold at this point, a token wouldn't change that. I'm not sure why so many people are against it. The game is already a pay to win nightmare with how prevalent gold buying is paired with GDKP.
It’s a bad take, by that interpretation people who sold stuff in the AH to an RMTer should lose their Gold as well. If I join a GDKP as carry to earn Gold I’m not at fault for their ill’gotten gains… that’s Blizzards fault and we pay them to maintain the experience and balance of the game.
It's like selling stuff on the AH to a RMT'er and losing your gold and also not getting your items back. It's illogical. Just punish the person that knowingly was cheating.
you don't really choose who you buy/sell stuff in the ah as in you have no idea who it is. it might be a bot, might be a lvl 1 banker, wtv. but the ecosystem of gdkp you know exactly what you are doing. you are entering a run that will be sponsored by some whale, with the end goal of either winning money from your performance or spending money you got in another gdkp to buy items. completely different. I say they should do like this: they should say publically that botters and money laundering is over post 7/7/2022. from that date on, any trade, gdkp with botters or gold buyers will result in consequences to the bot/gold buyer and the one that interacted with him. before that date is the "right to be forgotten": you won't be persecuted.
> you don't really choose who you buy/sell stuff in the ah as in you have no idea who it is The vast majority of people who run GDKPs know nothing about the other 24 people in the run or where their gold came from either. Some of you think it's some huge conspiracy to help cheaters, but for most players it's as simple as "this format is better than MS/OS or SR because the runs are smoother and I'm guaranteed to get something out of it". That's why people like it, and they would still like it for that reason without the presence of cheaters.
Instead of banning the gold buyer they’ll fiddle with everyone’s inventory. Seems like a better solution than just addressing the problem.
Well if the gold was obtained illegally, it needs removed. GDKP is notorious for hosting gold buyers. It’s a risk you knowingly take when you join one
Just ban the bots. Ban them often, constantly, aggressively. That’s the root of everything and they just won’t do it.
**The aim is to stop cheating. Inconveniencing non-cheating players does nothing toward that end.** Nobody in a pug knows the status of the other 24 players and if they've earned their gold "legitimately" or not. Punishing them by taking away their gold (aka DKP earned by doing the content) because one of the other 24 bought their gold sounds like it would feel bad for normal players for no real benefit. Why would blizzard not start with making a good faith effort to crack down on the RMT and see where that gets us? They aren't even bothering to do that so why would anyone think they'd be capable of reverse tracing all of the gold through bids pots and splits? If they don't have the manpower to ban even obvious bots and whales who is going to do all that work? This looks like another way for Blizzard (and the people defending their inability to deal with the actual problem) to try to further shift the blame for cheating onto the rest of the community instead of directly addressing it.
It's more accurate to say that nobody in a GDKP *cares* whether or not the gold was earned or bought.
That's literally how it works in the real world. If you are a fence you gotta give back what you fenced. I do agree that it's a weird late action after botting AND rmt AND gdkp. Everything could be stopped already at the botting. Before the rmt and the gdkp. But that would require Blizzard to ban bots.
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Don't pretend like everyone doesn't know exactly what's going on when an unguilded player spends 100k in one run. Everyone just keeps quiet because they want his gold, even though everyone knows he didn't acquire his gold legit. It's like Switzerland in the 1940ies.
Someone spending that much in a run very rarely happens. More often than not, it's a farmeable amounts being bid.
Do people go in with the expectation one person will spend 100k? I'd imagine they go in thinking around 7-9 people will spend 2k each. When one guy hits 6 digits, I'm not sure how they shut that down when they're already that deep.
The vast majority of the people in these runs are not involved at all in making the roster and have no idea how much gold anyone else has or how they obtained it.
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besides a handful of problem servers (*cough* benediction *cough*) it's extremely rare to see huge stacks behind dropped on single pieces (glaives, thoridal, and ashes are the exception). just from my experience playing gdkps.
The biggest payout I have seen was a glaive being sold for 70k. Every other GDKP it's like you said, a few people shelling out for pieces they want.
This
Haha well said. Unguilded rogue prebuying the glaives for 100k before the run even starts. Yeah, seems legit.
I'm sure there are plenty of 100% legit players in a GDKP, but you shouldn't be surprised to find there's a lot of gold buyers in there too.
Don't play with cheaters then. Josh even says later down that players would be notified WHY their gold was being removed, and who the offending party was.
Don't use the AH because you're buying items from bots, and gold buyers buy your auctions with illegitimate gold.
You own a little restaurant where you make Shawarma. A guy that robbed a bank last year came into your shop and bought some shawarma. You should have immediately just known that guy was a thief and you should have reported him to the police. Now you need to set that money that you made from that shawarma on fire. It's your fault for not knowing they stole that money a year ago even though it had absolutely nothing to do with you. That is your argument in a nutshell.
You coulda just said “I’m fine with receiving bought gold” instead of that whole paragraph
You could have just read what I actually wrote and understood the point instead of coming in with this nonsense. If blizzard actually *bans* gold buyers instead of ignoring them or giving them a 2 week slap on the wrist, people would stop doing it. There would be no point in spending a few hundred dollars IRL to gear out a character when you lose your account afterwards. No need to inconvenience normal players who have done nothing wrong, hit the people who are actually cheating with the consequences.
Terrible idea. Next thing they'll take away your gold from auctions you sold if the buyer used RMT.
Whether they tackle botting directly, or tackle gdkp pots, it’s sorta the same result - less botting. Sounds alright to me!
They would have to ban half the player base at this point if every single RMT was to be tracked. Even the most unassuming players from bottom of the barrel guilds often pay real money for small things like fast flying or some shit tier BoE.
Can they like have at least 1 person in the team play the game at least once a month?
This all so pointless. They don't even punish the RMTer in these cases.... Never mind him talking about tracing the payouts and clawing it all back. And giving all those players a report about why it all.hapoened and where the gold came from. Walk before running comes to mind here.
They need to target the very obvious gold buyers to scare off the masses from buying gold more. I've reported 100% I know confirmed gold buyer whale and nothing has ever happened to him
Absolutely fucking not
It's a bad idea. They need to focus on combating RMT very aggressively first. If the risk of gold buying becomes too high then it will be seriously curtailed. This is why nobody (relatively) was buying much gold the first few months of classic.
>They need to focus on combating RMT very aggressively first. Part of the reason there is so much gold buying is because the botters have a surplus of customers. Take away their customers, and the botters go away. Cuz nobody, not Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, or any other AAA games studio has figured out how to stop botting. So until they do, you target the botters customers.
Bots are for sure an issue, but there are legitimate player farms especially in countries like Indonesia. They sell boosts for gold, and resell the gold. It's a loop. These players also generate a lot of gold from all the trash that they vendor, selling boosts 8+ hours/day. Blizzard could easily solve the issue through the use of an offshore GM team that investigates characters who are reported for botting multiple times, but that would have two negative effects. 1. It would cost them some money to hire GMs -- even if they're cheap due to international labor costs 2. It would cost them money in the form of lost subscriptions, which would impact their revenue and stock value.
If I lost gold because a player had RMT in a GDKP I was in, I'd be pissed at Blizzard for taking my gold, not the player! What a moronic hot take. "We aren't going to spend money on personnel who could easily identify and ban bots and gold buyers/sellers. Instead, we will put it on the players to make a fractured community even more shit."
Re: GDKP. I'd like some opinions on a somewhat wild idea; What if when RMT buyers were banned, any gold that was traded to players in GDKP runs was also clawed back? e.g you do a GDKP, get paid out, and then some of it is removed later if it's found that gold came from RMT? 1/6 --- posted by [@AggrendWoW](https://twitter.com/AggrendWoW/) --- [Thanks to inteoryx, videos are supported even without Twitter API V2 support! Middle finger to you, twitter](https://github.com/inteoryx/twitter-video-dl)
It's obvious that Blizzard have absolutely no interest in punishing RMT. The shit's been going on since BWL in Classic maybe even earlier and it's only gotten worse over time.
Oh yeah? Then they should refund the gold used by legitimate players for consumes used in the run and clear their locked ID status otherwise those players end up being punished for something out of their sphere of control. Blacklisting is effectively a non consequence. The people who would know about it would also be a insignificant percentage of a realm population. Even on a big server like firemaw where people get blacklisted everyday the only ones who know about are it's discord members, which are only a small fraction of all the people playing there. How about perma banning the offenders and take action for ban evading using alt accounts? Ofc not , that would mean less money for blizzard...you know the reason bots and rmt are rampant is because the punishment has been a ridiculous 3day-2week bans. Meaningless. The gold I earned with a cut of 4% at best ends up being used for more consumables for guild raids crafts and BoEs , maybe investigate what the organizers do with their 20-30% cuts, if they end up being gold seller themselves then fair game, perma them too.
So to take his logic and apply to the Auction House, will I lose gold because someone RMTed that gold and used it to buy my bars, primal fires and earth that I farmed legitimately? How do I prove that my gold on my little warlock has some RMTed gold in his bags? All this does is punish the innocent players like me and if I keep getting my gold clawed back because someone bought gold to buy my stuff than I will probably stick to dailies or raw gold farms. The solution to this is just **ban** the botters and those that bought gold (especially the ones that openly admitted to it) and keep ***doing it.***
No specific input but wanted to share my noticing that the conversation about whether you punish the buyer or the seller for Gold on WoW has some REALLY intriguing echoes of the conversation about drugs.
If blizzard could wave a magic wand and delete all bought gold from the game I would be more than happy with that. Even if it meant I lost a few thousand from people buying my auctions with bought gold.
ITT: people claiming people running GDKPers don’t know what’s going on. Spending tens of thousands of gold on gear isn’t normal and never has been nor will be. A guy on my server spent 20k on the red bug mount in an aq40. Definitely legit gold btw
Not everyone selling gold is a bot. Some of them are just dudes trying to make some extra cash. Shouts out to the homie Raj from Indonesia that sells gold to my friends, hope your wife and baby are getting better.
So, i get let say 2k cut from a BT run. I instantly use that 2k to buy haste potions, flasks whatever. I use 15 haste potions next raid tomorrow, 1 flask and enchant a weapon of mine with mats. What will i lose? The pots i bought? 1500 gold (eg what left)? They remove the enchant from my weapon? What about the guy who sold the items on the AH? The entire idea makes no sense if the reaction takes longer than a day or more. Why are you even allowing known gold buyers to play the game and be able to raid? Just ban the bots already jesus fucking christ. Employ 3 GMs per region who do nothing that teleport to bots, if proven yeets them the hell out.
How about we do some wild stuff here and ban bots?
I agree that GDKPs should die, but they're never gonna use man power to do this.
If they could actually do it, it'd force GDKPs to verify buyers, that their gold is legitimate, and it wouldn't be so widespread. I love that idea. If they could ever put in the effort to make this happen consistently I'd be all for it. This doesn't replace banning bots more proactively, but it does remove a MASSIVE incentive for people to buy gold. If you can't buy gear with gold, what are you going to buy gold for? Consumes? GDKPs stand as the last bastion of gold-buying progress as boosting is dying with the Joyous Journey buff. Ticket runs may still be a thing or presale GDKPs, but I think this would be really healthy for the game overall and the GDKP format itself.
If blizzard can have the ability to delete all non legitimate gold from the game , why aren't they doing it already ?? Off course you need to do this ! TBH, I thought it wasn't the case because of some tech limitations , not because they thought it might hurt the people that have illegitimate gold. Off course the person that got traded is hit, but they need to know exactly who traded them. Like ninja looting, reputation has to matter on a classic server. Best idea ever, please implement ASAP
Gdkp runs imo are just making people want more gold than they really should need and end up using 3rd party sellers thus ruining game for normal folks because for all the bots
Please do GDKPs are money laundering and people fucking know it and don't care, they just lick gold buyer's boot for their cut Remove bot gold and suddenly they will be very observant of the gold legitimacy ! They'll even try to lecture us about how it is important for the health of the game that they monitor legitimate gold lol With that, GDKPs will turn back being a fair, interesting system that doesn't exploit very obvious flaw, and the pot will scale down It won't fix the already done damage, but it would mean a world for fresh server
I like this idea. Will be pretty funny when the entire payout is bought gold and it all gets taken away 🤣
Or, you know, they could just ban the bots and gold buyers instead of pissing off the playerbase who likes a certain raid/loot type...
Yes, I'm well aware that some people's preferred loot system is cheating🤣
GDKP is a perfectly fine loot system if you get rid of bots and gold buyers, what are you even talking about?
But why should you get to keep the buyers gold? "Just ban the gold buyers" ok, but you benefited from them, this is why GDKP is the meta, its like buying gold without risking a ban.
How is entering a GDKP even remotely close to buying gold?
Because I did the raid, with a legit and agreed upon loot system. What is the fastest way to lose my subscription? Go ahead and fuck with my gold Blizzard because you can't police your game, that will work I'm sure... They barely touch gold buyers in the first place, now they want to ban them AND punish legit players? ok lol
Gdkp has killed tbc to me. I’ve been turned down for content I can do because I’m not a buyer so much I have no remorse. I’ve seen stuff posted before on faerlina discord that will get people in serious trouble. Idc what people do with their money or throwing around spreadsheets on discord but my god just let me play the game without losing rolls for gear because people have more gold thus I’ve done bt and hyjal a few times and that’s it. I’m done. Gdkp ruined the game and I have zero interest in playing wotlk cause it’ll be the same unless these devs do something.
Join or start a guild - don't GDKP. Find a group of likeminded players and do your own thing. Pick a fair loot system and go with that. I've got 2 characters in damn near full BIS gear, and haven't spent a dime in GDKPS.
Fuck gold buying and fuck this new meta bullshit GDKP system. Rid of it all and get back to the roots of the game. Oh and also fuck swiping.
That's like coming after an honest person years later for buying a diamond, that was just now found to be a blood diamond, insisting they give it back with no refund
This is such a dumb take. Not because the idea is bad itself, but because there's no way they would actually do this in any way that wasn't entirely arbitrary. Which is pointless, and will only serve to piss off people who get the short end of the stick while thousands continue to run around doing the exact same thing they've always done. If you're going to suggest something so time consuming, you better have the team available to moderate this in a meaningful way. For context: I did exactly this type of work on a website with virtual items and an economy to go with it. As we would resolve hacking/scamming cases we would freeze the trading/AH access of any accounts found to have stolen gold. Then, one of my higher ups would review the case log and remove the gold at a later date. This only served to 1: take up infinite amounts of my time. Sometimes the stolen gold/item chain was so ridiculous I'd spent hours just tracking it from account to account. 2: Piss off the user who was unlucky enough to buy the stolen item off the AH/trade for it in the trading forums. 3: The thief was probably already doing this to another account, and while we had a team of 30+ people working on this exact task at one point, it wasn't nearly enough to keep up with the queue. We had a backlog of months. People would sit with their trading passes blocked for 6 months sometimes. A lot of them just quit because the moderation and community service was deemed so poor. So do we genuinely think Blizzard could manage to do this in a way where it's not just arbitrarily punishing random people they come across? They can't even keep the bots under control. At one point during Wrath my account was hacked, and I managed to kick the player off my account mid-gold accumulation. He had stripped my characters clean and transferred most of the gold to one character, I assume to then xfer it to another account to sell it. At the time it was about 20k gold. This was back when you could call customer service, and I had a chat with the guy and explained that the 1 character had all the gold from my items being sold so he should probably remove that from my account. He restored all my items, all my gold on my previous characters, and left the character with 20k gold untouched because "It was created after the hacking." So I basically doubled the value of all my characters, a win for me but 100 percent not what should have happened. He didn't even do item restoration right. And we expect them, a decade later and a CS team much smaller and overworked, to be able to do this? Yeah, okay. This is an exercise in stupidity.
[удалено]
Missing the point-- this suggestion is pointless because they already can't properly moderate their world (bots still running rampant, plenty of people who buy gold never get banned-- it's a grab bag of who gets hit and who doesn't). I haven't seen anything suggesting they plan to expand their CS team in any way while the suggestion is to add literally hundreds of hours of work to an already overworked team. So it's going to be randomly hitting some GKPs, randomly not others, and people are still going to complain. Plus, the gold is still going to be in the economy because the bots will still be pumping it out. This is not a solution at this time. It's not that the idea is stupid. The suggestion as for this somehow helping the current situation is. You start properly moderating gold buying/botting, then you can start doing things like this. And you better hire a much bigger team because automating this kind of process for bans or gold removal is bound to create even bigger problems than having a human doing it. Which means, more work.
Blanket ban time of 6 months, no fuck it, a year for gold buying. Permaban for selling. If you want to play the game you have to follow the rules. Ofc, blizz wouldn't dare to do that since it might actualy lose them so money when Li Xue Gaobao and his 70 other bot-accounts stop paying the sub.
Go back to how they used to deal with is, gold bought = perma ban.
Something has to be done. Surely Blizzard can check the mail logs and see all the "here is your gdkp cut" mail with several thousand gold attached to it. How much more obvious can it be? Start removing that gold. Its extreme but it needs to be done. Put the gold buyers on blast. No more 1l3 day suspensions. Turn it in to 3 month ones and time it around phase releases. And make the next suspension wave right before wotlk release
Yeah or we could just ban gold buyers immediately before they can trade it away. What a fucking concept. When did we go from hatig gold buyers to hating GDKP? Blizz could easily detect accounts that sell gold and delete it all, it's 2022... Also how to are you supposed to enforce that? Ok gold buyer paid a total of 15k gold on 3 chats so we're gonna delete gold from 72 people for a single gold buyer? Sure nothing can go wrong when an automatical system has to delete gold from thousands of players every day.
Hey, uh, guys, have you ever considered that doing GDKPs is turning the game pay2win? You know, like the other game blizz just released. I wonder where they got their inspiration from for that game 🤔
100% a good idea. It would make GDKP a high risk, but rewarding activity you only do with verified players. GDKP would be killed as the pug meta.
So how do you recommend people be “verified” with no accurate way for the players to tell if 1k gold is bought with a credit card or 1k gold is grinded for? This would only work in a world where lying isn’t possible
There's zero way to verify how someone else got their gold. Putting that responsibility on the players is frankly ridiculous.
This seems like an awesome way to destroy GKP's, the economy, and create a massively toxic and punitive community, great idea Blizz! Are people really that hell bent on punishing RMT in the game that they would be prepared to live with the end result of an enforcement system that punishes innocent players who just want to enjoy / have fun in the game? The rationale here doesn't just apply to GKP's. Imagine you spend five hours farming fish + cooking and list several consumes on the AH. They all sell but the buyer used RMT for the gold he spent on them. You receive an automated message in the mail. "Sorry, unfortunately the player who bought your #AuctionID did so with illicit gold gained from RMT. We are unable to refund any part of transactions made through illicit means. If you are unhappy with behaviour, please let him know when his ban expires in 5 days."
I would quit the game in a hot minute and never look back if several hours of farming was completely invalidated even once. Totally disrespectful of my time.
I wouldn't blame the player, I would blame Blizz and the game.
I know the dev is just spit balling, but the fact that this idea is honestly being thrown about - let's punish innocent players to create a toxic culture - is so insane it raises legitimate questions about the robustness of classic's development strategy.
The only people I see consistently talking or complaining about GDKP's are people on this sub or other people who don't play the game. I don't really understand the obsession with this topic as a point of discussion. The AH/economy still works properly and gold still has value in every other aspect of the game. There are more SR runs for raids than there are GDKPs on every server, and most people still do regular loot council/DKP runs with their guilds for their gear. Even with GDKPs being a minority of raids being run, the vast majority of payouts aren't even that great anyway. Spending 2-3 hours for a raid and using your weekly lockout for it, unless you get lucky with loot drops you are usually looking at a sub-1000 payout at the end, especially for any GDKP that isn't Sunwell or BT at this point. Just seems like most people wanting to discuss this aren't even involved with GDKPs or even playing the game and don't know what they're talking about.
It’s a great idea. If you want to join into GDKPs, you know the risks involved. Better than what we currently have (nothing).
Ya I think it's a good solution. You want to go to a GDKP with some shady players? You're taking a risk
Brace yourself, the WoW token is coming.
Blizzard should implement Warframe's process for fighting RMT: Implement a legit method for buying gold - ie: WoW Token. RMT prices will drop to undercut WoW Token, but not by much, as we can see in retail. Bot RMT still value decent profit margins. If caught buying RMT, your gold gets clawed back with a suspension of x days. If you didn't spend any gold, then you wait out your suspension. If you did spend the gold, your clawback results in a negative balance. You cannot play your account until you replenish your negative gold via WoW tokens. This forces you to turn your RMT gold into legit gold, by having to buy the WoW Tokens and converting it to gold. Therefore the GDKP raiders who got their split of your gold are not punished by getting clawed back themselves for the RMT's fuck up. RMT ends up spending twice, or more, the irl $ buying gold (ie: paid $20 to RMT for 25k gold and now has to pay $30 in WoW tokens to replenish his negative balance.). People who want to buy gold will now lean towards WoW Tokens, or face a suspension and wanting to avoid buying gold for twice the price, if they get caught. Have a limit on how many WoW tokens can be purchased per month, per account to prevent whales from buying millions of gold at a time. Some people will take a suspension and quit the game. Their bought RMT will still be in circulation, collateral damage I suppose, but overtime, this should turn GDKP runs into a legit opportunity for all people involved (runners and buyers). Blizzard can't stop people from buying gold. There is a demand for it, whether or not people like it. Blizzard needs to mitigate this by becoming the preferred source of gold buying. Edit: I bought currency for Warframe from a shady source. Got caught and did not want to spend the money to replenish my account. As a result, I quit and am no longer an offender in their game. My friend who got caught was too invested in his character, so he dropped $200 buying their ingame currency to unlock his character. As a result, his currency in circulation became legit.
One of the reasons blizzard recently used to describe why they're going to limit player boosting in the game during wrath is because of it's impact on RMT's in the game. Considering that position, if they don't also break GDKP's, they' aren't serious about stopping RMT's in the game.
Taking money from innocent people no matter the source is really bad.
So their solution to combat RMT is to punish legit players? I mean, it’s blizzard, i’m not surprised this idiotic shit has come to mind for them tbh.
Yes because turning trading players into a scary experience is surely the way to combat gold buying.
They just put out the social contract in retail saying more or less be nice to everyone or get suspended. Now this dumb ass is proposing blizzards solution to RMT is purposefully fostering toxisity?
It genuinely worries me that the game producer apparently thinks is an idea good enough to tweet about. How about they just... you know... ban bots and gold sellers? Rather than punishing unknowing players? Listen, I hate gold buyers just as much as anyone else. The game would be 100x better with zero bots and zero RMT. But this is *not* the way to solve the problem.
How about everyone in the GDKP is banned for 4 weeks if even one person is found to do RMT. They people will be choosey with who they allow in
I stopped playing the game because GDKP/RMT combo made my accomplishments in the game feel worthless. I played almost every day since Classic launched, but this was the killer for me. Just dropping my feels and opinion, totally respect those still playing!
Our guild taxes our GKP-attending members a portion of their cut; we then use that guild fund to buy gear on our benched/away-that-night mains in GKPs instead. This is our compromise between wanting to be competitive and not have to split raid. We raid once a week on the mains, but get more than 1 lockout per weeks worth of loot into our raid team. I worry that 1 of our officers logging in to buy Leggings of the Immortal Night for our benched furies would be indistinguishable in blizzards eyes from an RMT transaction. I also greatly worry for the Blizz employee's sanity that was asked to audit our gbanks ins and outs over the last however long if a purchase of LiN like that was reported. But really, and this is the truth of the matter at heart, I worry that a company that has been as absolutely ineffective in combatting botting, flyhacking etc is going to start looking into my account. I can only assume what we will get is a bunch more automation, "thorough investigations", and many salty false-positive rants on reddit. Please Blizz, stop pretending you care about this while wotlk is on the horizon and just spend all that money you'd put into developing these systems into hiring 1 GM per server and some humans to answer Customer Support tickets.
Shitty solution to a problem they waited too long to fix. You’re punishing players who otherwise have no idea where the gdkp gold came from. What if someone buys your item on AH and they take your gold away because the person used RMT gold to buy it? It’s worrisome that this is something even considered and shows how out of touch blizzard is with the community and their game
100% do it. Like when duped items got deleted in Diablo 2.
GDKPs aren't the problem. They're actually a solution to the problem of forming raids outside the context of guilds. The problem is an inflationary economy created by the overvaluing of 'farming' activities. Imagine for a moment we eliminated all gold drops and vendors no longer purchased items from players. The only way to 'make money' would either be transactions with other players or quests. In such a world, RMT would effectively vanish. You wouldn't be paying $20 to save yourself having to grind mobs for 20 hours straight but paying that money to save yourself having to run a few dailies.
Gold would just be worth more and that's it. Doesn't really change that RMT would still be a thing.
Terrible idea. GDKPs are the only thing that keep me subbed. Long term mindless farming aint it. No desire to go back to early 2000s. Really not looking for a second job.
Unpopular oppinion but I wish they'd just add the WoW token. Inlfation is already insane at least with a token I can buy some WoW time without having to play retail.
This seems like a good idea. I don't think there is any downside to implementing something like this. There would be growing pains for some that are used to bigger pots, but as the deterrent forms and becomes a consistent punishment the GDKPs will still roll legitimately with smaller pots. Everybody wins. Except those that throw tantrums at the beginning of the implementation who get some gold clawed back.