The gold issue in WoW Classic is becoming increasingly serious. Many feel unheard – and Blizzard’s penalties for streamers are a joke.
Gold in World of Warcraft is a fine thing – you can pay for just about anything with it. Potions, repair costs, special recipes – but increasingly also loot in dungeons and raids. Especially in the various versions of WoW Classic, so-called “GDKP runs” are the order of the day.
What are GDKP runs? Simply put, during such dungeon or raid visits, bids are placed on rewards, using gold. The highest bidder gets the respective item. The gold is then distributed among all participants in the raid group at the end. In theory, this is a fair system – those who have earned a lot of gold can afford many items. The others benefit from this and receive gold for future runs.
What is the problem? A large portion of the gold in these systems has now been earned through illegal means. In most cases, bots are behind this, farming gold with numerous accounts in a fully automated manner and then selling it.
Technically, the purchase of gold is allowed – namely through the WoW Token – but using bots and buying gold on external sites is prohibited.
The fact that Blizzard has not been able to rein in the bots and providers has had dramatic effects on many realms. Often, items are sold for several million gold – it is obvious that these amounts cannot be farmed legitimately.
There is even a petition in the WoW Classic subreddit aimed at urging Blizzard to take action – although the support is still muted.
Streamer incident makes everything worse: Just a few days ago, an incident caused quite a stir. The well-known streamer Sodapoppin had bought gold with real money and was sanctioned by Blizzard for it. Instead of an actual account penalty, he only received a warning, and the illegally purchased gold and the items obtained with it were removed from his account.
For many players, this has been clear evidence that Blizzard simply does not take strong enough action against such offenses. At the same time, many believe that other gold buyers feel encouraged. If the biggest penalty is that the gold is just taken away – is it even a penalty?
Gold buying is often legitimized: On the other hand, there is an ever-growing group of players who apparently believe that buying gold in-game is perfectly fine and is essentially “part of the game.” A large part of the economy now works this way. More and more people believe that it is perfectly legitimate to simply exchange real money for gold, as they simply do not have as much time to play as they used to. They want to spend the little time they have on real character progression, not spending days or months farming gold.
What solutions are there? One idea from the community is to ban all users of “GDK runs” and those who buy and sell gold illegally to a kind of “shadow realm,” where they only encounter other players who also engage in these practices. Anyone who has been caught once should simply be excluded from the “normal” realms.
Many find this approach very drastic, but others believe that only a drastic solution can help prevent the various versions of World of Warcraft Classic from continually sinking into the downward spiral of gold buying.
Would you know a better solution to eliminate the problem of gold trading once and for all?
Elsewhere, there is at least something to laugh about – because the dumbest death in WoW Classic HC has its own cinematic.
