The GOLD SELLING UNDERWORLD of WoW Classic | Asmongold Reacts 

Whenever Asmon remembers something illegal he did back in the day- "Man, so my friend..."

Yknow, Asmon is kidding, but my mom introduced me into WoW by telling me you just kill things and skin them. I did this on her character for weeks, before she showed me flower picking. She was a smart lady I guess lmao

Next thing you know the IRS will shutdown Blizzard servers for an audit.

Making kids play WoW is a real strat. I was so excited to play for my Uncle and he just had me fishing and mining for him all the time.

Back in Wrath I had a friend who was broke IRL, his family life was awful and at 16 he was supporting himself. We would "buy" his gold with $ so we could support our friend without him feeling like it was charity.

At this point, I must admit that it was me, in 2007, who asked my father forcibly after seeing all the commercials on TV. We did raids together, dungeons, joined a guild and saw the members irl. And now I'm still here but alone.

When I played on Whitemane my guildie got death threats and mass reports from the farming / gold selling mafia for undercutting and trying to reset prices in flasks / lotuses. They control the economy and regular players cant stop it

I miss the days of Swockwickdus' Death Rolls. It was a real world of warcraft.

So let me get this straight. People pay money so they don’t have to play the game and then wonder why there’s a wow token and diablo immo?

I have always suspected that Blizzard are in on this and only take action if its too obvious. Apparent proof of this is when Blizz lost the lawsuit to that bot company, the day after they lost they banned the implicit accounts that were using bots. in short they could not earn money from the lawsuit so they made game that way so they could, since the wow token came in play.

I will admit I had my daughter farm ore in FF14 a couple of times

Real story when i was in high school back in original vanilla wow, my friends dad was grinding r14 and during summer holidays he made him farm premades all day for him while he was at work, and if he came home and he hadn't farmed him enough honour points he used to go crazy. The was back before cross realm bgs so every que took like an hour only for you to get into the game and the other team immediately just left when they saw it was a premade. If you were lucky you might get 1 or 2 games per day vs another premade. unrelated but on a similar line: before that, his dad bought ff8. They each had their own save file, but if his dad came home and my friend was further than him in the game he would just delete his save file... so my friend had to check where his dad was so he wouldn't go past him and then stop playing. His dad was fucking arse at games so it took forever to get anywhere lol

no way to avoid this in modern day MMos cause companies never punish it. look at every MMO. inflation goes nuts, people buy carries or inferno capes, or ultimate runs

so players killed the game themself. and then players are shocked when gamedevs decide to add personal loot into a MMO.

I was undercutting some insane price on iron ore (like 10gp a ore) and i put in like 300 ore. Some guy start whispering me about it in some foreign language clearly upset.

The WoW token actually still isn’t worth buying, people are still buying gold on websites since $22 gets you 20k instead of $20 for 6k.

funny how the Wow token on Farelina went from 10k to 5k in like a week. no one is gonna end up buying a token with gold when they have more money IRL than in game

Did I watch this 30 minute video yesterday in its entirety? Yes. Am I going to watch an hour-long episode of asmon's reaction to said video? Also yes.

Back in original Warth and TBC my dad would pay me pocket money to do mining, skinning, herbing while he was at work so 7 year old me would spend more time playing than my dad did. Used to listen to Linkin Park on Itunes while doing it loved those days.

I might have bought gold in classic years ago. So they sent it with some items and a long letter. The letter was apologizing that he and his wife stacy heard I was in the hospital. He then said, hey here this is for you, I hope it helps. It was from CN. After that though it always just said ""gdkp cut". Only time I got banned was before they did it this way. It was a 3 day ban but they didnt even take the gold away from me.

The bottom line is blizzard has complete control over the backend of the game and can log any transaction they want to. Obviously acting on that data in real time is a big ask, but they could certainly use their logs to identify the path gold takes in the game and ban users accordingly. The idea that you could somehow 'launder' gold in WoW is ridiculous, and the only reason why people are able to do RMT is because blizzard allows it to happen. Why is anybody's guess, I can only assume some spreadsheet tells them it's more profitable to allow this kind of thing.

I used to do things to make gold in retail and then I realized people will pay gold cap for mounts and started carrying raids

It's funny when Asmon mentions the bots in Hellfire Ramparts back in Cata, because that was my favorite farm. I was too stupid or poor to get a bot program, though. It was just like 12 hours a day of me rerunning and vendoring.

Gold sellers have existed since Vanilla. Nothing can surprice anymore about WoW. Everytime I watch those videos I get reminded of why I quit this game back in legion.

As a resto shaman, I found GDKP's one of the only few ways to lift my character out of poverty. I didn't have alts to supplement my healer's income, I only played 1 character and that's all he did was heal. Occasionally I would bid for something, but for the most part I would just contribute my share to the pot and stick it out until the end of the raid.

My guild used to sell H LK kills in Wrath for $100... We'd also do 10/25H ICC GDKP runs with 10-15 guildies and would fill the rest with buyers who didn't get a cut. Had a few items that would go for gold cap (DFO/DBW mainly).

5:00 flashbacks to my mom and dad getting me to gear up their rogue and druid for pvp

4:40 Man I remember how i "trained" my 9yo brother to farm fishing mount from Conjurer Margos in Legion, he was grateful that i let him touch "game for adults"

I am shocked, I did not know they brought the gold token to classic. I stopped playing classic because of all of the speed leveling, bah not the way it was intended and yes it happened back in the original too lol.

This is hardly an underworld anymore, its more like a shopping mall

Used to use a mephisto/pindle bot in D2, go to sleep and wake up to a nice inventory of stuff.

17:35 Someone needs to save this clip for future asmongold rants.

Just look at the weed market. Even in legal states. People buy from street dealers, because its cheaper than going to the dispensary and paying a huge tax markup. The token thing is essentially the same thing.

I pugged an m+ +11 Azure Vault in 10.0, and we had a Vulperan Monk Tank that was a bot. It was very suspicious at first and using abilites that forced movement on the tank messed up the bot, basically giving the group confirmation. We all reported, and about a week later, I was sent a message saying that action was taken. However, that bot was probably just running m+ over and over again, grinding valor.

Not sure if this qualifies as GDKP but on my vanilla server (EU) back in the day, it was an open secret you could buy yourself into getting carried by mostly the higher-end guilds and claim certain items, or even certain PVP ranks. But this was then only maybe a handful of people who reserved a spot/specific loot - all on individual negotiation basis.

During early wow I managed to get some sharpening stone schematic that only dropped in the Barrens at a low rate. I was the first person on my server to get one (at least.. the first to get one and realize that they could sell them and make a fortune) and what a glorious 2 weeks that was. 10 gold a pop seemed to be the sweet spot. Made 1-2k gold. A lot for a lv20odd at the time.. until the dreaded day when none sold and I saw someone else had posted for 9g99s. A few days later and he was posting for 2g so I had to message the guy. He said to meet him at some bar in orgrimmar to talk it through. I reluctantly went.. and oh boy. I just told him that if we both sold at 10 gold, we would both benefit so it's a win-win. He said "You know.. collusion is a serious crime. The orgrimmar militia will throw us in the stocks if they find out. I'll have to think this over for some time." Ahhhh I was 12 years old. I just wanna make some gold dude. Will you or will you not agree to just cease this undercutting war?? After 5 minutes of him talking with no answer I gave up. The next day I noticed that 2 more people had started selling them so the price was down to 1g anyways.

gold farming and selling ruined the last server I played on, it got to the point no one was running anything except mage bots running people thru all the various 5 mans as you leveled, so people would buy gold, buy runs, get to max, be absolutely useless, then eventually people started the transfer train off the server because most people were useless in pvp and pve, then the gold buyers started transfering off because there was nothing to do at the end game

Been looking forward to this reaction, absolutely legendary video from Metagoblin.

One time I purchased gold in wow back in like 2015 I spent like 90 bucks and met up with a dude in wow , I was told to wait at a spot in the world of wow , I was worried I would lose my hard earned dollars worth , I waited And all a sudden here come a dude on his mount.asked my name and said yes , to my surprise I got hooked up and that day was one of the coolest days at the time for sure , I tip my hat to whoever that was cause I’ll always remember that and made my day for real ! That gold helped me rank up sooo much !

Easy fix, no more mailing gold. Gold sellers aren't gonna hang out in stormwind doing trades all day, it'd be too inefficient.

If Blizzard wanted to spend the money they could easily develop AI that would be capable enough to ID these gold buyers and ban them with 99%+ accuracy.

What I think they meant when they said WoW token didn't generate any income is that in terms of subscriptions it's not giving them more money, since without the token you'd still need to buy a sub. However the fact you can buy stuff of the blizz store makes it so it's definitley more profitable than a sub fee. They probably just misspoke either on purpose or not

It must be really hard to identify a bot as a bot, when the account uptime is like 23+ hours per day for more than 3 days straight. That is either account sharing or botting. Just ban it no questions asked. I remember back in early diablo 3 where you could actually look at these kind of stats on some third party sites. And there were accounts with 99%+ uptime that had not been banned for months. Just ridiculous.

Smartest Thing blizzard could have done is starting a gold selling company under the radar, then make the price like 20% of that what gold sellers want from you. Make the whole thing not lucrative for them anymore while also getting all the buyers data. But don't ban them right away, wait for the gold sellers to move on to another game. Then strike all gold buyers at once

Played WoW on KT just through Burning Crusade. Some really good memories and also the single only instance I ever raged quit a game. My first ever raid run of MC with my guild I kept getting mind controlled into the lava. Pretty funny to think about now. Good times.

How about an mmo that has no economy, no currency, and every player has to earn everything they have and maby you can trade certain items for other items In a barter system. Don't know if it could work, but sounds better then this stuff.

Literally why I stopped playing classic when TBC came around.. People want to escape their real life suffering in the fantasy of Azeroth, but can't seem to leave their credit cards behind..

This is a big reason why people like fresh servers. I bought a ton of wow tokens for game time when I played. It got to a point where it got to expensive and I quit playing during BFA.

Here's the real solution to the problem: Back in WoD I was convinced that Blizz would introduce a mobile game of the garrison system, with which you could do all the boring legwork like farming gold and making potions etc., I was also convinced that you could set it up in the game so it would just automatically happen while you were offline (so you wouldn't have to set it up on mobile). Garrisons were such a missed opportunity for Blizz, and i haven't touched wow since that expansion. Instead of introducing wow token, you could've just introduced offline play and everybody would be happy, bots would lose their purpose (apart from gDKPs). Blizzard doesn't gain anything by having more people online, you only log in to do content and not slave away gathering flowers. Hell, you could even introduce p2w with buying legendary followers who would gather faster or something. People will always buy gold, unless the company makes it so farming gold/mats/etc. is not a chore. gDKPs will always be a thing, but now they have evolved into an actual business, and i wholeheartedly agree with Asmon's take on the big fat goblin paying for gear from lowly peasants running around killing bosses for him, the wow token killed the RP.

glad you reacted to this so fast been waiting on it

What they said about the wow token was that the 5 dollar extra fee wasn't a big profit increase. Not that they aren't making money of it.

The wow token should be seen as a digital gift card (except for the 5 dollar fee which is pure profit) where the redemption is more of a advertising function as their profit incentive. They can make money from when a wow token recipient buys more than the face value of the card, or when there is an unused balance left on a card. If they are making redemptions to people who were already going to pay for a sub fee the redemption value loses them an equal value elsewhere.

Playing and raiding with my guild, this is completely invisible to me.

Being a stacked tank and selling heroic runs made/makes so much gold, and if you also have a stacked healer friend you could sell the run for more. Plus you could sell certain pieces of gear for gold too like in TBC all the attack power classes wanted the hourglass from heroic BM. You could even sell it for a lot more by the tank saying they are reserving it for DPS off spec for raids baiting them to pay more.

They will pretend you’re a buddy coming back, or alt and send potions and mats with friendly messages with gold.

this is why solo self found is so important

When classic wow was re made me and my guild did normal dkp and we collected a few gold per raider around one gold to five depending on what they wanted to donate per raid we would funnel this to alts of officers who we trusted and we gave free enchants ect to all the main raiders on new items there was never any issues

@4:45 When I was grinding for HWL in OG Vanilla, one of the usual crew of grinders regularly had his ~12 year old son play BGs with us on his character when he went to work. He would call his son in sick to get him out of school 1-4 times a week, depending on how much honor he needed to grind. Incredible times.

I had a low level money maker toon in EQ. Was just high enough level to self-teleport. You could hide your level in EQ (literally just turn it off), and I had a robe on that character that was super rare, and no way anyone under super high level could realistically get one, but it was on the RP server, so I was able to mule it over from my main. I would get groups together for teleports to hard to reach locations, collect the dough, then teleport myself away as I ungrouped. Ran that thing for years. So many people fell for it multiple times.

Also, if boters really want to maximize their profits, they could try to modify the game to be headless. Which is taking out the rendering so it only does what it needs to bot. That way you can run way more instances on the same setup, though it would take more effort. There was a thing in minecraft a few years ago where some people were running several instances and boting to perform an exploit, and they modified the game to not render the game so they could run more instances on the same computer. (This is the NoCom thing that happened on the minecraft server 2b2t)

Asmon "I've had a good relationship with blizzard for years" Also asmon "I don't think blizzard is as predatory as 3rd party websites"

I made mu sibling farm my honor gear on all characters at every new xpac/major patch all the time since TBC 😂

"This game is so f*cking stupid. What happened?" Well, they allowed GDKPs to exist and they did nothing about gold buying/selling. This is why private servers are a generally better player experience and why they're growing in popularity again.

They should put a 10k gold cap per character , this way gdkp bids would be capped at 10k gold, which isn’t enough and would lead the system to be impossible to use unless using trust (over people trading the loots after the raid while waiting the gold being mailed from alts) and people would be forced to use other loot distribution systems

Blizzard has lost control, and the funny thing is their doing nothing to sort it. and you know why, their making lots of money from this

Now iimagine that one day throught ChatGPT bots could join GDKP runs without anybody knowing that they're bots

Blizzard is never going to get rid of bots in the way we want them to because they make to much money from bots making new account's. If they ban the bots straight away then they will stop making new accounts which doesn't look good for shareholders because the number of new accounts or new players will decrease.

You can't raid in WoTLK unless you have multiple WoW tokens

i love when asmon goes on about the old days of wow because i just get flashes of streams i watched and times i attempted to get into the game again but would always want to die and never stay long playing

Never played WoW but I love these videos for some reason, fair play. Good quality content.

During Wrath, I was a small time subsistence gold seller. I would sell golf for a game card every month.

This is so much better from MetaGoblin, I ALWAYS thought he was a low effort creator, but this is much more than what I expected from him. Good job.

Imma be honest and admit, i've bought gold in wotlk classic. It is mind numbingly simple and easy. IMO, I feel blizzard should scrap the 2hour window to trade BOP raid/dungeon gear and enforce a system of class-based gear drops. Introduce more daily/consistent gold sinks so players doesn't just sit on millions of gold. Take OSRS for example, they have their "wow token" version in the form of Bonds but to trade them requires players to pay a hefty fee which offsets the P2W aspect and they are continuously cracking down on the ultra rich by introducing lots of gold sinks, trade taxes and item sinks on their GE to control supply/demand. They're still not perfect, but the economy in OSRS is improving and stabilizing.

Goddamn, this reminded me individual servers had reputations. Nostalgia TKO

This is what happens to a game that has no anticheat and that doesnt ban bots and RMTers.

In the end, the state which Blizzard is today is the Blizzard that it's Players deserves

Its so funny that he is surprised about 10g for a potion when they were even more expensive back in 2009 on my server.

4:50 I actually used to raid on my dad's behalf when he was too busy lmao

i go to overgear on days where i just want to give up. It's just nice to have someone to talk to.

This fucks the economies for F2P players so hard. People buy gold = gold value is diluted = everything gets more expensive.

I find how interesting the first real world turing experiment its happening in gaming right now. How is bot bad if the end user isnt able to perceive that it's a bot? cant wait to see the new era of AI

Potion of Speed are about 9g on NK Horde side, slightly less on Alliance.

Blizzard has completely given up on WoW (Classic and retail)

bald god of games

me sitting here in onslaught harbor waiting on respawns: "am I literally the only person that ENJOYS farming gold?" In Vanilla Classic I actually had a lot of fun doing jump runs in DM, now I make bags in onslaught harbor... I always have more than enough gold, I don't no life the game... I just do not understand the hatred of "farming gold." it has always been one of my favorite aspects of the game, especially on a fresh max toon. What am I gonna do to generate income? what upgrades can I get to make it more efficient? there are fun moments of progress to me. idk...

From wrath to mop, I always hated going against at KT pre-made in BGs.

I was on a bad BG playing at 22-2300 I switched to KT, my first queue was jahmilli playing god comp. That BG was loaded with pros.

I know someone who had parents that had them farm on their toons as a chore they had to do every day before they could play their own lmao.

28:50 you dont need multiple monitors. just RDP from your main PC to them.

i lived ramparts at 80, but you couldn't run it permanently. it was too quick for the reset cap.

Asmon seems to miss the fact that there are countless methods of making gold naturally in the game. Just with a few alts, you can make tens of thousand of a few world quests on each character. This leads to people essentially receiving services, they otherwise would've paid for, for free. This is why the token may not be a profitable solution.

bruto mount if it ever comes back to a vendor would cause alot of ppl to shell out money for either blizz tokens or rmt

In the first (non classic) era of the game, playing on an EU, predominantly UK + Dutch + Danish population server, my experience was that it was a HUGE nono to do any type of buying / selling / boosting until at least WOTLK, which is when I quit. You would be shamed and blacklisted serverwide if you got found out.

I was on Bleeding Hollow. I remember Kel Thuzad hate posts on the forums. good times.

It's funny that his reason for not using stolen credit cards is that it's risky (24:40). Shouldn't the main reason be that it's criminally illegal?

0:22 looks so familiar

33:00 i had that once. i was farming saronit for hours and suddently the vines did start to disapear just when i was about to mine them....after the third i /y WTF, stop it admin!---and it stopped.

Gdkp confuses me.. as a boomkin i was in full bis in my 3rd week of doing nax.. theres so many raiding guilds why does anyone pay?

I've played on Kel'Thuzad since vanilla. Never realized you were on that server too.

I know . i have friends work for those gold seller. They run it like 24/7 so one account have 2 player that change every 10hours or 11. Man those poor guys