My Response to Asmongolds Take About Blizzard's Latest Decision.. 

Honestly, they had Sodapoppin dead to rights, had proof that he had purchased gold, and a lot of it, yet didnt ban him.... they really are not doing everything they could. This just showed that if you have enough influence you can get away with it, which actually incentivized buying gold.

By not banning soda… it sent out the wrong message, regardless of outcome.

Blizzard not doing their job and banning people for botting and buying gold years ago is the reason why GDKP is bad. I see no problem with me running a GDKP run with the gold I earned myself by farming and doing professions. If Blizzard was really harsh back in TBC and Wrath with bans it would have made people today more hesitant about botting and buying gold, but they waited to late to try to fix this problem and now we hear the excuses that we can’t beat them so we might as well join them… AKA wow token.

What streamers don't seem to understand is people BUY gold and GIVE it to them so regardless you are receiving RMT'd Gold and using it in these GDKP's when they beg viewers for gold

The thing about gold buyers is they will find a way to cheat because they've never known a world in which buying something (whether it be time or things) wasn't a possibility.

My god, I don't know why people talk this much about GDKP in SoD. That's not even a thing like in WotLK, you rarely see it spammed in LFG chat and that's fucking people's gold, they can do whatever they want with it. For instance, I never did a GDKP in my entire life, so it's not like I'm trying to defend myself. If they really wanted to address a money buying/spending problems, would be people buying like 150g for 10$ and to be boosted in SFK/Stockade/WC via flying hacking bots. Their main problem is bots, and it will always be. You can choose to be in a GDKP run or you just do it with your guild, nobody is harmed by that, except people that don't wanna be in a guild. This GDKP nonsense is just a palliative to divert attention from the decade-long plague in WoW: bots. Again. GDKPs weren't even a thing in SoD.

I'd argue cybersecurity has less of an impact on anti-botting than game design or the community statements that Asmon mentioned. I wouldn't be surprised if they could cut back botting significantly if given the means to do so, especially in a game like WoW that has an admission fee (sub cost).

I’ve had some good experiences as a carry tank for a Wrath GDKP group. Made good gold. I’ve also seen a lot of sharks driving prices up for items as Xaryu experienced. Ultimately, I had all BIS, was ready to go for my favorite raid Ulduar and realized something. I wasn’t having a lot of fun. The whole GDKP culture on Whitemane was nothing like Wrath of old. My friends tired of the sweatiness and left for DF. Normally I make new friends fast in wow. I had a strong guild and we got along well. But the overall experience was more like a job. The return of things like gearscore (even though my score I was told was very high) just left me wanting something less sweaty. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of SOD. But I’m noticing that same mindset and culture creeping in, destroying the economy every time I find an angle to make gold. Not taking you in a WSG premade without Hydra or BIS. Luckily there’s enough cool people that if you’re patient it’s fine. And I made my own guild this time. But I’ll tell you I’m happy to see the stance on GDKP. It won’t solve all the gold buying, but it’s making a statement to players that it’s just not cool. The culture that GDKP is just a symptom of diminishes the game for 85-90% of us. Bottom line is banning GDKP likely hurts botters. That alone is a W for me.

Lets be real Blizzard is not doing what they could and the reason Asmongold speaks so confidently about it is because he saw all the dumb shit gold buyer and bots get away with with his own 2 eyes people like to shit on him but he has seen basicly everything in wow that exists and plays a different game that has much less of a botting issue with a big economy (PoE). It would be really easy for blizzard to have a small team that combats RMT and u could see the effect instantly also Xaryu actually does get 1 thing wrong Botting/RMT is very much a binary thing if they cant make more money from a bot then its sub/expansion cost they run on a loss and have to stop! And thats a exponential factor the less money they make the closer the RMT scene gets to being forced out. But from plenty of evidence about botting and gold buying we know blizzard does very little to combat the issue they got the logs they could easily track down connected buyer/botter/seller but they dont make enough use of it.

Maybe if every realm had GM checking mails and auctions and zones it would be reduced to such a minimal level that it wouldnt matter.

Both sides are correct so its just going to be a political alignment issue tbh. You are either for more "freedom" or you believe that its best to just take away things if the wrong people can abuse it even if its unfair to the good people who use them (guns for example but obviously thats extreme) I am leaning more towards Asmons opinion here though just because I do think the solution is to work harder banning bots (I dont even really mean the hidden ones that are really well programmed. I literally mean the ones that are traveling in large packs together that are obviously botting/flyhacking ect. its forsure a bigger issue just because you can SEE the problem for most people. if bots were more secretive it wouldnt be as annoying for players or feel like they arent doing anything) I also feel like people are just overall more okay with buying gold (including me btw) just because blizzard as incentivized it because of the wow token so we just see gold as a $ value rather than just in game currency. So the only solution to that is banning more people and making the more afraid of buying it similar to runescape where people are genuinely scared when they buy gold from big seller websites because they do such a good job tracking it

Blizzard is trying to ban gold sellers with the same effort I try to look busy when my boss walks by during a slow day at work.

Think about it like this: tons of incentives to buy gold=tons of g buyers, some incentives to buy gold=some g buyers, no incentives to buy gold=no gold buyers. So it makes sense if incentives are lowered then the amount of buyers will lower too.

One argument I have not heard anyone mention yet is gold sellers are using a gdkp to hand over the gold they have sold to the player. Makes it hard for blizzard to differentiate legit runs vs gold seller runs.

Not just ban them. Ban that account, ban every other wow account linked to that account and every other blizzard game as well. Close their account permanently and if they want to appeal, they can do it through the website and they have to provide their account name when writing the ticket. If they lose the appeal the account stays banned and the data gets permanently deleted. That is how harsh the punishment should be for buying ANY amount of gold.

I like how he's surprised by a 30min asmon video also get ready for his 90min response

GDKPs are singlehandedly keeping me away from playing classic. Buying gold is one thing. But GDKPs (almost) directly allow you to buy raid gear with real money. It makes wow literally pay to win, and I dont want to have to compete with whales. Secondly, yeah this punishes honest GDKPers, but the honest GDKPers were benefitting off of gold buyers. The same shit happened when boosting organizations got squashed from retail. In a GDKP, the gold which is used to buy gear is put into a pot and distributed to the rest of the raid. If that gold was bought illicitly, the GDKP literally functions as an in game money laundering scheme.

Didn’t blizz ban boosting at the end of vanilla classic/tbc classic for the same reason “it promotes gold buying?”

I'm sorry but reading Xaryus chat made my eyes burn and head hurt

Gdkp isn’t inherently bad.. but it’s a melting pot for gold farmers and buyers.. even tho there are legit gdkp I don’t hate the idea of putting a stop to it and analyzing the results.

I think this is a good change but it's just gonna make people pivot into boosting. You're gonna have raids boost gold buyers, distribute the gold between legitimate players, those players take the gold and buy boosts for their alts or buy slots on boosted raids with reserved items. It's gonna cause more friction, it's harder to grind enough gold through boosting to get boosted than to just keep running GDKPs, but just banning GDKPs is not going to stop the inflation crisis.

Cyber security has nothing to do with buy/sell gold situation, its simple financial problem. They have to invest more money for GMs and DEVs for detection scripts and the result will be less subscribers... when they ban most of the bots, sellers and buyers. So yeh big corporation don't want to invest more money to get less returns... shocking.

Im a tos abiding player, and I did join 4 gkdps. I farmed my own gold, around 100 or so. Thing is, you can say "wow 100g isnt alot", yes it is, the reason its not alot by your standard is cause the economy is inflated by bots, which exist due to RMT which is WAY more popular due to GDKP. I love the idea of GDKP if it was impossible to buy gold, that sounds awesome. But again, the reality of the situation is that, this isn't the case. The moment I tried to join a gdkp and the guy demanded budget of 400+ gold I knew it was over. He even told me that it was the standard now due to inflation. 400g, is not normal. Idc if you farmed gold for 12 days straight doing something obscure n maybe exploitative, 400g is alot, you can ask 100 people in thunderbluff, I can guarantee you combined they probably dont even have 400g. Your perspective doesn't make it the truth, you're the outlier. demanding 400g for budget screams that they just want RMT whales. If you told anyone to get 400g right now they would say "Oh just make 2-3 alts n lvl to 25 n do quests" or "just flip auction house for a few days" but its like saying "oh to make a rocket you just have to understand rocket science and have a budget of 80 billion" just because you can say "oh you just need/do X Y Z" doesn't make it normal, normal people dont flip auction house, normal people dont do 2-3 alts for gold, and guess what the majority of buyers in gdkp are? Exactly, those people that do these things, its boomer dads with money and no time/experience.

Love your comments on this and couldn't agree more that they need to do this because it combats it from both sides. My GDKP experience was not from me personally joining but someone who joined our progression classic guild. We watched him hit 60, brought him to our raids and started to gear him up. (We are clearing AQ40 and jumping into Naxx soon) 2 weeks went by and he was wearing 6-piece T3 warrior gear along with a Naxx DPS warrior set all from going to GDKP's. It doesn't matter if its legit or not, GDKP's are now mostly ran simply because gold buyers bring lots of gold to them and the carries are getting paid tons and not because someone worked hard to be able to outbid the others. Even seen a screen shot from a delivery of a gold purchase that sates... GDKP cut.... gold sellers are using them as delivery methods.

I know someone who buys gold actively, even botted before. He recently just got a 2 week ban and was told "This is your last temp ban, your next ban is permanent" (Paraphrased) for buying. He has been told his next ban will be permanent 3 or 4 times now. I do have to agree with Asmon here, its Blizzard's fault. They are not making permanent actions against users, they are giving exceptions to streamers and slapping them on the wrists which sets the precedent that "Streamers/Popular folks get special treatment", and I will say that things will only get worse now that Microsoft laid off much of Blizzard's CS/GM teams. Blizzard can absolutely do better but they don't because if they did they would lose money. There is a reason my friend can keep breaking the rules and get a two week slap on the wrist and a threat that "Next time will be the last" but that never happens because then Blizzard loses a player and thus income. The situation will never improve because if it were to be fixed it would cut into profits.

Banning GDKPS = cutting off the hand that feeds it (good buying/sellers) In a ‘perfect’ world yes gdkps are a cool/niche dynamic to raiding but anyone who thinks their okay in the current state of the game hasn’t been around long enough or is an extreme minority of the player base e.g a streamer, which asmongold acknowledges he is. Gdkps are without a doubt a cesspool full to the brim with gold buyers and big gold sellers, good riddance and props to the dev team for trying a new strategy.

Asmon is 100% referring to real time, physical monitoring and manually banning individual bots/accounts as they're observed in-game at hot spots. Which he's not wrong, it would work. But it would be ridiculously time intensive and expensive.

I feel like a good way to combat both sides is to make the raids harder. Harder raids means its not as easy to carry dead weight players meaning you can't just hit 25 and immediately swipe your card into a raid.

They are punishing Raids. Also buying gold , you cant care, its like hacking, always a way around it, ban me, you make new account, get hardcore and ban hwid etc, you spoof it... Like I said, You cant care....Asmon your wasting your breath

I know that Blizzard talks a lot about how to combat bots, which is very important, but I’d argue what’s more important is finding people who buy gold and making an example out of them. I’d like to see Blizzard start posting “We found this many people buying gold, they have been permanently banned.” instead of “We banned this many bots”. If you make people TERRIFIED to buy gold, then the bots have nobody to sell to and their entire market crashes.

Blizzard are not doing everything they could. They didnt ban streamers buying gold, and they're actively firing employees. They dont give a fuck about fixing the problem because it requires a genuine effort. Saying "Well we ban in waves because then they dont know how they got caught!!" doesn't work when those accounts are getting value for their sub fee, every day that they're active. They need more active moderation, GM's sitting in known botting spots and watching them, actively cutting them off, and quicker trigger pulls on ban waves, for both bots and gold buyers. A hyperbolic example of what they're doing would be like saying they're magnetizing all players feet to the ground so it's easier to catch fly hackers. Why do ANYTHING that impacts regular player gameplay negatively, when the real solution is just hiring more people willing to work on the problem directly. Huge L from blizzard, and a huge L from everybody celebrating it. You can talk about reality all you want, but the reality is that blizzard isn't doing enough.

I work in cybersec do not compare buying selling gold and gdkp with how to defend the cyberspace it does not relate at all technically.

To think that Blizzard hasn't been lazy on banning bots is pretty insane to me. Classic WoW there were ENDLESS bot mages going to mara and SM. A month ago we saw hundreds of bots walking into a tree and disappearing. To think blizzard has been "trying" to ban bots who farm gold to sell, the root of the problem is being willfully blind.

Totally agree with Xar. The reason people who don't buy gold love doing GDKP is because they are a great way to earn gold because the gold buyers bring their massive pile of gold they just bought. It's like oh, well I don't buy gold, I just knowingly help them so they pay me with the gold they just bought.

Instead of banning the GDKP, they should target players participating in it and have a bot that would check the legitimacy of their gold income. They have to ban bots by developing algorithms, by having a real-life irl human being looking and searching for them at the gold-farming spots and dungeons, and also by baning users that buy gold, not only by following the gold chain, but also by actively targeting common gold-buyer activities like GDKPs, expensive AH and trade purchases etc.

I love how people say "just find the gold sellers/buyers and ban them" if you havent figured it out by now, Blizzard wants to run this game to make profits, and maximum profits. Hiring people to identify gold sellers/buyers and eradicate them all (theres a fooking lot) dips into maximum profit, as such they will always take the solution that still maximises profit and limits cost.

Main reason I think this is a Fat L? They might as well ban selling BoE's on AH. GDKP is NOT the problem. Blizzards inaction towards banning goldbuying and goldsellers is the problem. This is a band-aid fix that reduces the world of Warcraft experience. If I make an alt, after grinding the raid for months on my main, i love joining GDKP"s because I can get specific loot for my alt at a quicker phase than otherwise. And for my main similarly: I can earn gold each lockout since i'm mostly fully geared, but if that one item drops that I still need from the raid, I can get it 100% from the gold i've gathered.

There is a significant, overlooked issue with GDKPs that persists even in a world without gold sellers, botters, and buyers. MMORPGs experience inflation not only in terms of gold but also in the accumulation of gear over time. As the game progresses, more players acquire gear, leading GDKPs to intentionally seek out poorly-geared players with a lot of gold. This allows well-geared players, who may be missing only one or two items from their BIS but are unable to obtain them, to still earn gold from these raids. A GDKP run with only BIS or near BIS people means 0 buyers and 0 gold if items people already have drops, Consequently, these players are often invited to groups over others who have put in a tremendous effort to obtain pre-raid BiS but haven't spent over 100 hours farming gold. Now, players need to focus on both aspects, which, combined with the need to keep up with inflation, becomes increasingly challenging. For example, in SOD GDKPs, the minimum bid went from 1g to 5g. This 500% inflation is significant and unhealthy for any economy. : 500% inflation within 2 months: only the top rich % can keep up with that and even benefit from it Moreover, GDKPs create a higher demand for gold than the game is designed for, leading to hyperinflation as players intensively farm gold. As this continues, the minimum budget required to join a GDKP raid and the minimum bid for loot keep increasing. Imagine this trend continuing for several months; inflation reaches a high percentage, but the gold/hour farming rate remains the same as in the early stages of the game(sounds really like real life with inflation+wages). This situation effectively locks out new players, returning players, and slower players from the MMORPG's PvE content because they were not part of the ecosystem early on. GDKPs essentially operate like a Ponzi scheme with hyperinflation. Even in a world without gold buying/RMT, this issue is significant, and RMT exacerbates it considerably. Once players who have acquired all their gear (akin to "early investors" in a Ponzi scheme) are only participating for the gold, they need to find new players (new investors) to exploit and scam. They continue to increase the prices of bids and minimum budgets to maintain or increase the gold pot. and we who know what a ponzi scheme is should know its Bad and scummy to run those This system is fundamentally flawed due to these issues, and that's without even considering the impact of RMT, gold buying, botting, and selling. If we factor these in, the situation with GDKPs becomes even more problematic. It's one of the most gatekeeping aspects I've ever seen in a game. I've had my WOTLK mage at pre-raid BiS for three months, and due to everyone participating in GDKPs with hyperinflated prices (further boosted by RMT gold buying), it's become virtually impossible for me to join a single ICC run. This issue is often overlooked because most GDKP participants have been involved from the start and don't feel the impact as much. Meanwhile, I returned to WoW about two months before SOD after a break of over 10 years (I last played around WoD). I got my mage to level 80(aka swipe for lvl boost not better myself on that one with RMT but only did that one becuase already leveled 4 other mages dont wanna do it again) in WOTLK Classic and achieved pre-raid BiS, only to feel like I've wasted a lot of time in HC dungeons due to the long-term effects of GDKP and gatekeeping like this.

from my experience, a very small % of ppl must be buying gold for gdkps, legit stuff are so cheap that even dave 46 doing 5 quests per day can afford gear, this hurts every single legit gdkp enjoyer, in favor of ppl that never even deal with gdkps in the first place, literally everyone that shits on gdkps saying it "ruins economy" are completely delusional, i hope it will be a rude wakeup call when your consumes are 100g for the raid that week instead of 20g.

I kinda feel like Asmon's arguement is "Gold buying will happen regardless of GDKPs. They just let everyone siphon off of the swipers guilt free." He's also wrong about gold inflation. One person giving one person 1000 gold is not the issue. The issue is when you distribute that gold. one person gives 200 gold to 9 other people every single week. Then those 9 people are going to be comfortable buying a consume for 3 times the price. This drives prices up, and punishes everyone not joining a GDKP. If you don't dip your toes into the dirty money, one way or another, you get punished for it by the rising prices.

Blizzard doesn't remove bots because of the subscription model. If the amount of bots comes even close to the amount of players quitting due to the bots, it simply wouldn't be financially apt to ban them. 15 dollars a month per bot. Ban 1000 bots and lose 15000 dollars a month while paying employees to perform the bans. This is also why private servers deal with bots much better, privates servers don't collect 15 dollars per bot per month.

i think he's speaking from the point of allot of people see bots and report them but they still not getting banned , while there's no fix but u could just hire 30 gm's per server to work 10 pepple in 8 hours shifts 24/7 inside the game to ban bots instantly , it would not fix the problem but it would lessen it , and they not willing to spend money on something that would make game better but not fix the problem entirely

I would just like to appreciate both of your stances in this matter and the way you decided to debate the issue. No forcing each others POVs, no attacking. Two very professional adults sharing each others opinion and debating on the issue. Actually refreshing to see, good vibes all around, thank you for that. Edit: especially in the light of Asmons reaction to reaction, very well handled from both of you

mY ReSpOnCe To AsMoNgOlDs ReSpOnCe holy shit its a never ending chain of react videos

I had the same experience as Xaryu except instead of turning tide it was deaths sting from AQ. Never got it. Bid over 9k vanilla hand farmed gold on it

Blizzards “tries” to ban bots but can’t/dont fully enforce it. Blizzard will try to ban gdkp but won’t be able to fully enforce it. It won’t matter. GDKP system will just change to something else like a “reserve/buy-in” If you want to enter the raid you need to pay and you’ll be able to reserve the item you want and you’ll get your money back if your item doesn’t drop. The way GDKPs are being done will just slightly change for it to not be a “gdkp”

Man. Why does no one ever talk about how the WoW token is actually community driven. You’re buying and selling game time. You’re not buying a token then selling it to a vendor, you’re selling it to another player who wants game time. It’s not just money for gold. There’s so many transactions taking place with the wow token. It’s not what everyone keeps saying it is

Back in Wrath they also didn't have the WoW token. Responding to any question with, "I got it with gold" has wildly different connotations than it did back then.

Yikes... serious L take. Blizzard isn't doing shit to ban gold buyers and Soda was the perfect example.

Banning the players buying gold will GREATLY reduce the amount of gold purchased

Don't ban gold sellers, ban gold buyers. The more gold buyers you ban, the lower the demand for gold becomes, and the lower the price will drop. This also disincentivizes more people from buying gold, which in turn will drop the demand even further. It's a two-pronged attack. As soon as the price of gold drops below that of the cost of producing it, the problem will be resolved and gold sellers will cease to exist because it is no longer profitable.

I don't play WoW anymore, but wouldn't making loot either personal or preventing people from needing on loot that is not for their spec help fix the issue? Or is it more complicated than that?

I'd also like to point out that gold is very cheap right now BECAUSE of the fact they're not being heavy handed with it. There is very little risk and because so it creates competition which leads to a cheap product. It's a huge trickle down effect if they ban the top sellers. When there is more risk involved, gold will be more expensive in general and be a natural deterent for most people.

Blizzard is not banning ppl who buy gold. They are banning the bots not the buyers, unless you openly say ingame that you are buying you will not get banned

18:34 Why is GDKP encouraging gold buying enough to ban it? "You just admitted techno festivals encourage drug use, so why don't you want to ban techno festivals? Seems like a good idea to me. We're just combating drug abuse from both sides." - person who personally doesn't like visiting these festivals

Agree completely with Xar. Reducing incentives to buy and have large amounts of gold is good, no matter how you look at it.

i dont understand why so many people are against blizzard wanting to refocus the game toward guild and community over stripping all that away to sell playing the game to other players.

Idk why he focuses so much on the semantics tbh. Feels like an typical asmon "I wanna be anti out of principle" take. And his annecdotes make funny stories and all that, but to take them as base to argue on is weak

I really don't think GDKPs are the only incentive to buy gold. People still want enchants, BoEs, consumables, etc. Just getting rid of GDKPs will do nothing to stop it. People want to get gold for little effort so they will buy gold. This is going to be a failed experiment and the only difference is now I am going to be losing rolls to afk players in raid instead of buying items with gold I earned through farming or selling summons with my friends lmao

GDKP is the best loot system for pugs. The only fair loot system. The only problem with it is that Blizzard has to get rid of the bots. Rolling system is horrible, SR system is improved rolling, but people tend to SR the only items other people need so they can free roll on other items. GDKP is server wide DKP system and it would work nicely if Blizzard took care of their game. And to top it off in GDKP everyone has a reason to join and raid together. If you're bis you can farm gold, if you need just one item you can bid it up, if you need a lot of items you can moderately bid on all. The only bad thing is if someone with no gear joins and doesn't bid on any upgrades, but that's why you get the buyers.

complaining about gold buying while the wow token exists... >.>

asmongold has alot of takes for having very little actual gameplay

You can't 100% ban people. You can place barriers, you know like not letting them reach max level day 1, and actually moderate your game so you catch the gold farmers before they can farm. Catching them after they already made sales and made more than they spent is just useless. If they don't have any risk of loss, they'll just make another 10000 bots. Runescape controls bots better than wow my dude.

Everyone leaves out the most important part about WoW. This is a monthly subscription game. We pay for continual content and Blizzard should 100% have top tier anti cheating teams in place

I respectfully disagree with Xar on that "Blizz is trying". Are they banning a few here and there? Sure. But let's not pretend these bots are trying to be super sneaky and miraculously circumventing Blizz's efforts. Anyone who's played the game for more a than a day will run into a bot out in the open. We all remember lvl 80 guildless DKS farming SPs and it was plainly obvious to anyone that these were bots. Yet there was instances of known bots that would go months before getting banned. And yes I know Blizz bans in "waves" but imo they take way too long in between waves.

1:02 on the surface, sure, but then gold sellers are included, and suddenly down the line theres break in TOS, gdkp could be fine if there wasn't people buying gold.

There is also inflation through gdkp, the amount of gold in the system increases because people farm gold so that they can buy something. Actually, every incentive to farm for gold increases the amount of gold, unless you spend it on an NPC and not on another player.

I can’t say I’ve had a negative experience with GDKP, even if you don’t get an item you still get a cut and as someone who doesn’t buy gold, It’s usually higher income rate than traditional farming. Thanks gold buyers

This analogy of cyber security is a little odd to me . Every action and transaction that passes through a server is logged. It would not be hard to setup some automated scripts that could flag any account exchanging gold under predefined conditions for further investigation. The difficulty probably lies in obtaining the manpower to actually investigate all the accounts.

This is an L because Blizzard still refuses to enforce their own TOS. Ban gold buyers, ban boosters, and ban hackers, period. I don't like GDKP, but banning them is treating the symptom, not the root cause.

Here is the thing no one is really talking about. Gold Buyers are now going to be those guys in your pug groups trying to bribe you for your drops, which is going to make pugging insufferable. Also now they can turn to the AH to play the market and make the game more annoying by inflating prices on things we want. Ex. BoEs, Matts, consumes those new skill books, etc. Now I don't really mind them banning GDKP runs cause I don't do them but if it makes playing the game more annoying I rather it stay in the game.

you know what incentivizes buying gold? having anything in the game that is worth buying for gold. its dumb to treat a symptom and not the illness. Blizzard is in no way doing everything to stop RMT. They dont even want to deal with the biggest factor in RMT, which is botting.

They aren't ban gold buyers. I've been buying gold for 15 years and never so much as gotten a suspension. They focus on gold sellers/botters.

Plot twist, Blizzard is the one with all the gold bots. Which is how they all were programmed to "lag switch" through walls, trees, etc. That way they can keep the wow sub at $15 a month over the last 18 years. So they have created a literal money farm by creating bots that are "farming" gold when in reality they are just creating and selling gold online to players. Which maybe thats why gold buyers arent banning gold. Because they are in reality blizzards best customers

GDKP is so nearly synonymous to gold buying that anyone that says otherwise is deceptive. There is no separation between GDKP and gold buying. There is no need to have GDKP. Just roll need/greed/pass in a pug and stop monetizing everything. Fuck paying for drops.

Turns out by killing a way people play kills a chunk of the playerbase. Aggrend needs a ego check.

The computer security you talk about applies more to the account hacking of the past. The bot farms of today are an indication to me that Blizzard does not give a damn.

The WoW team has access to data that tells them how people got their gold. They have struggled to elimiinate botters for years even though every single person who plays the game can spot it as soon as they get through the loading screen. Yes, I'm convinced that Blizzard is doing the absolute bare minimum to combat cheaters.

They’re doing this because a lot of people are complaining about GDKPs, I think the only people who enjoy GDKPs are a result of gold buying either you are spending the gold you bought or you are receiving gold in the run from people who bought gold , even back when asmon was running this back in WotLK original. Maybe it would be great in a perfect world where gold buying was actually impossible but that’s never been the case

You can't go into a gdkp and win gear unless you buy gold in the game now people have way more then you can farm

People like Asmon rely on conspiratorial thinking when it comes to things like this, such as: "Blizzard just doesn't care and doesn't do anything". "Blizzard is too lazy". "Blizzard this and that". He obviously says that with no evidence because it "feels" true.

I think GDKPs being banned has to be step one in the process as they serve a purpose of “cleaning” the RMT gold.

@xaryu your take on cybersecurity is correct but there are bots that exists over months and thats blizzard being to lazy or not willing to spent money for people taking actions against bots

Theres nothing wrong with GDKPs if there is no buying/botting for gold but that wont happen and GDKP makes it way worse, i just dont know how much worse.

Blizzard sells gold on other game versions which can be transferred to SoD without breaking TOS. Lots of games sell currency and or benefits in the form of "pay to win", I don't consider these people bad actors for purchasing nor do I fault game developers trying to generate extra revenue. I wouldn't do it personally, but I'm fully supportive of those willing to spend money on gold and then joining my GDKP and funding the rest of us who are glad to play the game and carry them for their items. That's an honest days work in game for me, and it offers players without the freedom in their schedule to spend enough time playing the game to earn said currency, while cyclying it through the economy in various ways to players who are able to put in the work in the game (in a perfect world without bots). SOLUTION: Crack down harder on bots and add a currency token like in other game versions and sell the gold yourselves Blizzard, take said revenue and fund the "gamer police" to keep giga banning botters. Allow the GDKP system to continue and your gold sales will grow exponentially without a doubt. Also, let the people bitch n moan- it's good for their heart I'm sure, but stop listening to them!?

The argument of GDKPs in OG wrath vs in SOD is totally different. SOD is far more new and people have not had time to accumulate the amount of money that is being traded legitimately, like they would have back in the day.

none of this matters. theres always been those "interested in selling that" and i cant see them getting around selling items youve won other than person loot and i dont think we want that

dunno about you guys but i think the best solucion for the gdkp problem is just to nerf hunters. if it doesnt work - nerf them again until the problem is solved.

This is exactly what Blizzard does though. If you don't play the way they envisioned they just nerf.

if enough people truly want GDKP or any type of DKP to be part of the game then another way to go about it. is to add a in-game loot option that automatically manages the loot and gold. however that would likely require some degree of effort from the developers to pull off. honestly my guild back in original TBC and WOTLK used a DKP system with an addon that worked rather well most of the time. since we regularly had to swap out members who couldn't make it to raids and/or people wanting to gear alts. but if they wanted to make a new currency that PuG's could use then something like the badge system from later expansions could work.

Your point on people buying gold is correct. Won’t ever not be someone selling or someone buying. The wow token isn’t just buy an item for irl money and get I. Game gold only. It allows another person to buy that token and waive their monthly subscription fee. So it has a bigger bonus. Not just “buying gold”.

Talking about defence when almost everything would be solved with 1 GM, not alot of effort. just one fucking GM. Defending Blizzard on shutting down a big part of the community because they wanna save one yearly salary is beyond ridiculous.

Believe it or not , i don't think that removing WoW token is a good idea . They should just ban gold seller's, bots and gold buyers... I played WoW for around 1 year during Shadowlands and i did buy WoW token with real money only once . I have never buy gold btw just saying, it's not fair to remove that option from skilled people who can get that much gold without buying it so they don't have to spend IRL money . Removing WoW token is fighting with the simptom and not the disease, same with GDKP .

Asmon does not understand how it works. Even if you ban all gold selling accounts, more will pop up, it doesn't matter what system you put in place. You can't control human behaviour without severe restrictions.

Asmongold's take is right but he doesn't consider that they're paying for items with gold that they BOUGHT. Nobody in their actual right mind would do a GDKP with gold that they earned in-game. With how many botters there are, if you tried to legitly make your gold you're basically making like $1 an hour.

GDKP's encourage people to buy gold. More gold buying encourages more Botting. Whales will buy ass tons of gold online to get all the gear. Peoples get butt hurt losing to whales in a GDKP's... so they buy more gold. More gold buying encourages more gold selling, making botting a very profitable service. More Bots then. It becomes this vicious cycle between players and whales all buying gold, and the game becomes swipe to win. More Bots. This devastates the social fabric of the game because all the high prices encourage even more gold buying, and the game economy is ruined. You have to buy gold just to keep up with the high prices. The game becomes pay to win even further. More bots... The higher demand for gold requires more even more bots to keep up. The game becomes flooded with bots. MOAR BOTS!! You level a alt Death Knight in Wrath Classic because you just want to PvP, but all of a sudden there's no people. Only Bots. They chose DK's, because they start an higher level and can do alot of damage easily. This is how the WoW Token became introduced in Wrath Classic. This is why you have to buy gold in Wrath classic, just keep up. This is why you saw so many bots in Wrath. This is why I quit playing. And this is why GDKP's, Botting, gold buying, and gold selling should all be banned. And you think those botting accounts and hardware just went away? Nonsense poopy pants! The bots are still there.. lurking in the shadows,... waiting... for a new phase for Season of Discovery to launch.... and the cycle, to begin again... more money... more gold... more GDKP.... more bots... more money ... more gold ... more GDKP... more bots... more money .. more gold... more GDKP... more bots... MORE MONEY ..M ORE GOLDEE MORE GDKP MORE BOTS MORE BOTS MORE MONEY MORE GOLD MORE GDKP MORE BOTS MORE BOTS!! AAAAHHHHHAMOPQEO GU9QWP9EFJ[QEFJE[AQW What? There's only Bots and RMT in this game? F this I'm quitting for Final Fantasy XIV

I dunno why Xaryu is defending Blozz so much for the bans. He said it himself, he farmed for weeks to get 30k for the GDKP and someone just out cold bids 100k, someone who is known gold buyer. Are you telling me it's so difficult to check who has over 100k and if they got it through trade from character that probably doesn't exist anymore? Come on it's not that difficult to find bots/gold buyers and set example. Banning bots just means less profits.

Top 3 worst things in Classic: 1. Gold Buyers. 2. Gold Sellers. 3. GDKPs. Let's hope number 1 gets destroyed some day soon before more damage is done.

7:50 Asmon has made it clear as well - banning botters do nothing if the amount of gold they can make in the week or month before they're banned is profitable, cuz they can just do it again, and again... Banning GDKPs will lower the demand for gold buyers = make botters less profitable - at the same time Blizzard is banning accounts and character left right and center. Imo I like the idea of limiting the rng by "wasting a resource" but the way that GDKPS do it, there's no way to filter out disingenuous actors who buy or bot.

I disagree with Xaryu saying it's a constant battle. Yes to some degree it is, but you could make it not worth it for them by making it that they won't get their investment back. That would stop it. Problem is that it would also cost Blizzard money, money that they don't feel like spending on it.