The gold problem in WoW Classic is getting bigger and bigger. Many don’t feel heard – and Blizzard’s punishments for streamers are a joke.
Gold in World of Warcraft is a great thing – you can pay for pretty much anything with it. Potions, repair costs, special recipes – but increasingly also loot in dungeons and raids. So-called “GDKP runs” are commonplace, especially in the various versions of WoW Classic.
What are GDKP runs? To put it simply, the rewards offered during such dungeon or raid visits are gold. The highest bidder gets the respective item. At the end, the gold is distributed among all participants in the raid group. In theory, this is a fair system – those who have earned a lot of gold can afford a lot of items. The others benefit from this and get gold themselves for future runs.
What is the problem? Much of the gold in these systems has now been earned through illegal means. In the vast majority of cases, there are bots behind this that use numerous accounts to farm the gold completely automatically and then sell it.
Although buying gold is technically permitted – namely through the WoW brand – both the use of bots and buying gold on external sites are prohibited.
The fact that Blizzard was unable to restrict bots and providers has now had dramatic effects on many realms. Items are often sold for several million gold – it is obvious that these amounts cannot be farmed legally.
There is now even a petition in the WoW Classic subreddit that wants to get Blizzard to take action – even if support here is still cautious.
Streamer incident makes everything worse: Just a few days ago, an incident caused a particular stir. The well-known streamer Sodapoppin bought gold with real money and was sanctioned by Blizzard for it. Instead of an actual account penalty, there was only a warning and the illegally purchased gold and the resulting items were removed from his account.
For many players, this was clear evidence that Blizzard simply isn’t cracking down hard enough on such offenses. At the same time, many believe that other gold buyers will feel emboldened. If the biggest punishment is just having your gold taken away, is it even a punishment?
Buying gold is often legitimized: On the other hand, there is an ever-growing group of players who seem to be of the opinion that buying gold in the game is completely okay and is, so to speak, “part of the game”. A large part of the economy now works like this. More and more people are of the opinion that it is completely legitimate to simply exchange real money for gold because you simply no longer have as much time to play as you did back then. You want to spend the little time with real character progress and not farm gold for days or months.
What solutions are there? One idea from the community is to simply banish all users of “GDK runs” and those who buy and sell gold illegally to a kind of “shadow realm” where they will only meet other players who also do so follow these practices. Anyone who has been convicted should simply be excluded from the “normal” realms.
Many people find this approach very drastic, but others are of the opinion that only a drastic solution can help so that the various versions of World of Warcraft Classic do not repeatedly sink into the downward spiral of buying gold.
Do you know a better solution to eliminate the gold trading problem once and for all?
Elsewhere there is at least something to laugh about – because the stupidest death in WoW Classic HC has its own cinematic.