yeah and then his editors will upload it back onto youtube and get more views and ad revenue than the person who spent every day making the video.... scummy lazy behavior if ask me.
The thing I always come back to when they say we banned X amount of accounts, is that all those accounts were almost immediately replaced. 200k new purchases of the game and monthly subs which in the US would be about $35, or about $7 millions straight into blizzard's pocket. Their only incentive to ban is to create revenue while making it look like they're trying to address community concerns.
They ban the accounts after the botters have had enough time to turn a profit, making the bans functionally useless. It's just a stopgap measure for them to hold up some meaningless number of bans as some sort of proof that they're fighting back against bots, while simultaneously just doing things to make the botters and goldsellers lives easier.
7 million is roughly one-third of one percent of their quarterly revenue. It's an insignificant amount of their income and to imply they want this to continue is laughable
By "keep the gold moving" he didn't mean sending it to his other accounts to avoid getting banned. He meant selling it quicky so you don't risk getting banned while still holding huge amounts of gold on the account.
@@jfkdidntlos791 nah the difference is significant. if the account gets banned, who gives a shit. the actual gold on the account is what he cares about, not the account itself.
@jfkdidntlos791 The total apathy towards the account being banned itself is insane and very bad. The lack of attatchment towards these accounts show clearly how gdkps are just a means of creating real life revenue, nobody is running these for fun.
I really liked the part where bots farming gold that ends up in the server economy sounded exactly like real world money laundering. I guess technically it is, imagine that.
And just like the real world, the money is in the medicine not the cure. Blizzard has no intention of completely removing botters. The system is making them money. They just do sacrificial bans to keep new accounts being started.
This video was AMAZING omg. Editing was incredible. Information was astounding tbh. I had no idea how deep this stuff went or how much money could potentially be made from gold farming. You knocked this video out of the park and I definitely don't think you need to worry about the RUclips algorithm when you put out things of this quality. I felt like I was watching a Coffeezilla video about WoW Classic. Incredible work, keep it up, you have literally already caused changes in the game because of this video. I would be very interested to see what you do next and any other investigative style videos like this would be an instant watch for me. I've watched you for a while and this video is just a cut above the rest. I wouldn't be surprised to see this video get 500k views or more. Interesting from start to finish. Thanks for the work that you do.
Very interesting. Another aspect of this is how relatively easy it is to thwart bots, yet they invest nothing in that area. I specialize in client/server architecture level work in games like this, and it's a very solvable problem that can be done cost effectively. But it's not free, and as long as players buy into the myth that you can't really stop botting, there is little incentive to fix the problem. An interesting tangent here is in the last decade mmo's have become even more client authoritative then they used to be in many cases. It's part of the larger trend in the industry of engineering quality taking a nosedive. Botting is IMO part of the same larger trend. Studios have simply been adapting to what players are willing to put up with, in areas where doing so helps the bottom line.
how is it solved easily? I agree, its very easy to make an automated system that gets like a 75% positive ID rate. Now imagine the absolute shitstorm that will occur regarding those 25% of legitimate players that get banned. People like to think they want the solution really badly, and when they get the solution they want, they get even angrier.
@@Imbalanxdbanning after the fact via an analytical approach is not what I was referring to. You solve this more directly and there are several angles. One is make bots a lot more difficult to write by not having as much information client side, and actually engineering in things that both thwart the approaches bots use, and catch them in the act. So you still do in some cases ban after the fact, but it's using 100% verifiable evidence. It's always a game of cat and mouse. The basic formula is you find approaches that obfuscate data in a way where if they are using the wrong data, it's 100% a bot. And where while it might take them a day or so to fix, you can basically automate changing the obfuscation. Which makes botting untenable. This works because bots have to hardcode data from reverse engineering stuff. There simply aren't any known ways to automate reverse engineering. It takes time. Far more time in relative terms then it takes game developers to push out newly obfuscated data. On PC/Mac it's trivial to do things like push a dll to the client and have it dynamically load it. Combine that with the data is algorithmic not some hardcoded string. There is no way that doesn't take at least several hours to reverse engineer. But it's something the game can update like every few minutes if it wanted to. But even simpler approaches like seeded randoms, or data in algorithmically generated field names works just as well if you don't want to go the dynamic module route. And as for what data would you obfuscate? Well it could be anything really that is detectable, ideally something that actually breaks the bots. Like coordinate offsets for example (again algorithmic not static). There are so many tricks here to stay ahead of bots. It's not a game botters can win against even just a team of 1-2 good engineers.
@@BootyFeaster True we are in 2023 and the private scripts people are buying for 1-2k+ are machine learning bots that will take actual player data in as a model and train the script on this. Whatever blizzard can do the scripted can also do
The point you made about the customer service on gold buying sites is spot on. You would think its like some sketchy website or whatever but tbh the customer service was better then any i've had interactions with in the last couple of years including my hospital and some of the most succesfull companies in my country. Also the other point of the player population that has drasticly changed i've noticed as well. When i look in my guild they are all at least 30 and have a full-time job on the side, working 1 hour for some scraps in game of spending a fraction of what they earn irl to buy gold is such an easy decision. Also they just want some of the actual content like end-game raids/pvp etc. They have 0 interest in the rest of the game like leveling or farming.
@@REgamesplayer the irony is that you cant read. he is clearly talking about farming gold (which is often the most monotone part of the game) not leveling
@@kewa123 Oh the irony. Person accusing others being unable to read failed at reading himself. Read content to the end before trying to make a critique of other person. Otherwise, you are just wrong and abrasive.
I appreciate the work you put into showcasing as much of this stuff as possible. I've suspected a lot of what was shown for a long while, but hadn't fully appreciated the extent of it until now. For months, I always felt a level of disgust each time I logged into the game as a result, and between some guild-related issues and the introduction of the WoW Token, I quit playing Wrath Classic this week. I was GM and RL of a guild I founded day 1 of Classic back in 2019, but enough is enough.
I find it most interesting that blizzard actually knew this in advance. Even before they introduced Classic. It's funny that EA have an extremely good algorithm in FIFA where they block the buyer pretty quickly. But Blizzard obviously doesn't care about that and it's all intentional. In the end, what I have observed, the gold costs more now even on the third party sites since they introduced the token and the token/gold value decreases. So it's a win-win situation for Blizzard and the gold sellers.
I figured this out a long time ago and kept telling people who were saying "lol just ban the bots bro" and similar dumb platitudes that the bots literally thrive because **Blizzard approves of them** . And when they ban the bots, those are again a bunch of re-subs and re-purchases. Bots are excellent for Blizzard.
When they first changed the rare Cataclysm seahorse mount drop from BoP to BoE I pointed out as a passionate collector on WoW forums that this was only helping out gold farmers as all the spawn sites were now camped by bots as a result of their change. As proof also showed the mount selling for real world cash on gold farming sites.... end result I was banned from forums for supporting gold farmers. I appealed saying these bots were a result of their change, I was only showing proof of what they had caused... ban upheld.
great video you made, noticed how much effort you put into it right from the intro, hope you get lots of subscribers. Very interesting infos too, had no idea how deeply rooted this is in WoW, I play this game since 2005 but casual as fuck, gold is mostly spent on bags for twinks, stuff from NPCs and not much more for me xd
Apparently revenue from bot accaunts is a big enough part of Blizzarrds income. That must be the reason they are not willing to get rid of bots. 'New' business model of Blizz is - it's ok if actual players do not pay for sub, we will get money from gold sellers. So Blizzard depends on gold sellers and it needs players to depend on goldsellers.
how do blizzard get money from gold sellers? I mean if players are just farming, or paying gold from gold sellers, that mean golder sellers get the $ and not blizzard right?
In 2019, when I realized they weren't going to do anything about bots and RMT, I decided to get in on the action. I made quite profit on it during covid. I've been banned one time on one account. That's only because I left the bot on for days. As long as you log off and into another account to resume the same bot farm, you are fine. Giving us free level 55 DKs was the stupidest thing they could have done.
When honorbuddy was around, i had a lifetime subscription and ran multiple instances and characters. I had a couple accounts and was making so much gold and items. I did it initially because i wanted to gear up all my characters and have tons of gold, but once i had it all, i didnt care about the game anymore, lol. I ended up getting permabanned on all my accounts for botting and disrupting the wow economy. this was during cataclysm days.
My only gripe with the video is some of the claims towards the end strike me as blatantly untrue, but maybe i took your word's too literal. Theres no way Blizz selling tokens could be considered as exploitive as 3rd party sites that literally steal your card info after putting it in and never sending you a single copper. I also think slashing the profit gold sellers make by forcing them to under bid a token price cant be considered aiding them, and im not sure why players would feel a "need" to buy gold simply because you can now.
Watching this video made me think about how Runescape almost completely killed their game for trying to stop Gold selling and bots. Either the sellers slowly kill the game or the developers have to make the game worse to make gold selling impossible.
It's not just the gold sellers, The guy in this video mentioned that a small army of GMs and forcing people to level in the overworld under natural surveillance helps to seriously keep bots under control, but blizzard literally laid off most of their gms, Jagex despite the size of RuneScape is a shockingly small company, and are similarly unwilling to use said human army.
I played classic since launch but recently quit due to the extreme inflation in wrath. It was bad in vanilla, worse in bc, but in wrath it’s insane. Insane enough to make someone who’s been playing only classic for years longer than official classic severs to be out to quit.
I'm not consuming alot of WoW content since i'm not actively playing it for quite some years, but man, this video is top notch, all the research that had to be done and stuff! :) Good job with it.
If you want an interview or want questions asked; I am a former filthy seller. used to work with people from IGE , IGXE and MMOinn among others. Mind you, I have never botted, there we WAY more efficient ways to do it back in the day and dodge bans.
@@Diceman82 honestly man. I'd be interested in learning what you did and do it myself, haha. But I doubt you'd disclose that, should meta make a video on it I look forward to watching it
POV: its 2am and ive decided to log on my lvl 35 mage to lvl which i havent touched in a year or so. i see i had tailoring up to 200 already from previous play and want to make some spell power upgrades. i go to the AH to look for the 1 pearl and 3 spiders silk i need to be met with spiders silk selling for 100g EACH.
Fantastic video. A lot of this isn't news to me, since I've been keeping myself fairly informed on the subject, but the depth is incredible! Hope this really gets around. I'm sure most GDKP, Token, and Blizzard defenders will still remain staunchly suckling at the teat of willful of ignorance, but if this helps inform even a few players I think it's well worth the effort you put in. This shit is bad for the game.
I've bought gold in both FFXIV and WoW Classic. On a few occasions over the years and I've never been caught. Sure, everyone is safe until they aren't, but there are things that can be done to avoid it being noticed. Rule #1 is to keep the amounts reasonable. Buying 100,000 gold on classic would be a huge red flag. Rule #2 is to keep the amounts especially low on new or low population servers. Again, it sends red flags out when there's nobody to build an economy and there's people getting rich. Rule #3, try to be active in your account. There's no such thing as "passive income" like this. Logging out for a week and coming back to thousands of gold in your mail is very suspicious. If you aren't raiding, questing, or have professions, how do you make gold? They can see most things in game. All in all, GDKP is the safest way to make gold. It's a legitimate way to earn it, and all it costs you is time. In retail, we boost people. Charging 2000-4000g per level, per character ... you can make 240 000 per person, 1-60. In a party of 4 carries and 1 booster, that's up to 960,000g per boost. Technically, 960k is worth 3 WoW Tokens, but it's worth even more to sell to Overgear 😘
@Overgear honestly, if I had the means and capital to start that up, I would. However, between work and daily responsibilities (I'm 36) I just wouldn't have the time to farm. My Paladin is coming along quite nicely, so I'm looking to dabble in player boosting. I'm on Moonguard, and there are a LOT of people asking (and paying DAMN well) for it. Providing how this goes, I might just reach out. Your service has been great, by the way. Reliable, safe so far (bough in Classic, retail, and FFXIV without issue), and pricing isn't horrible. I work very long hours, so it's nice to have an alternative to the same daily quests every day
@Overgear also, I'd be happy with 6k per month. 30,000 seems so over the top. I wouldn't even know what to do with it. I'm a simple man with simple pleasures.
not gonna lie, I'd do a fresh windows install if you used the bot program on your main PC, its very common for cheat devs to add backdoors into their software
I once (long ago) programmed an AH bot for fun. Didn't actually sell any gold, just amassed it. (Not knowing what to do with that gold I'd just buy good BoE gear from the AH and mail it to random people I don't know). What bot did is it would scan the AH for much cheaper than average posted easy liquidatable items and then flip them posting for slightly lower than average prices. Then log off from this realm and log on to another and do the same there. It wasn't a very profitable bot since it was essentially a bottom feeder, taking advantage of players who posted items for too low prices and it depended on the amount of these auction lots. Also there's a hard limit on the number of total lots on the AH before the API stops letting you use the fast scan function forcing you to slowly scan page by page which could take up to half an hour for each realm. But the point is I've never been banned for this, despite my behavioural patterns being very obvious, and my characters spending hours a day near the AH.
Gold selling is really one of the greatest reasons that I have completely given up on MMOs but I am glad that you connected the dots towards whaling which has become an industry standard in gaming. Large MMOs are no longer made to be good games that attract a lot of players but predatory experiences that prey on people with addiction problems just look at games like Genshin and how popular the Gacha mechanic is. So when you are playing a MMO you are being preyed upon by both the developer and the community. Sounds like a lot of fun.
Really enjoying your videos and love the tone you're going for. The 80's documentary/Miami Vice style thing is great. Similar to Cocaine Cowboys and so on. Can I ask what specific song you are using in the intro? Can't find it on the link in the description.
One perspective you didn't mention with respect to the wow token is that of players who attend gdkps and make a passive income from that (not difficult if you don't pay for those big ticket items). I've enjoyed the introduction of the wow token since I never have to pay for my wow subscription -- a single payout can usually buy me 2 months of gametime at current prices! However I agree that the token only makes problems worse in the game's economy. Great video!
The underworld still going wild for sure, great production Goblin! I used to sell DMT buffs during classic wow, it was a real enterprise with a lot of gold to be made by us who mains a hunter. Gold to gear my alts :). Also there were the Mage gangs selling boosts, food n'water and portals.
I'm really interessed on how will the bots vs games be with how IA is improving in a insane rate, might not be hard to think that in some time, they will need just to accept and enforce this kind of thing... Also, on Brazil, where i live, a month is of game time is around 5% of a min wage, so its really expensive here, if you consider how costly things are currently ; I would continue playing wow, but it was so expensive money-wise, that i had to give up
I don't think AI will make too big of a dent as it uses too much energy as it is. Clientless bots I. The thousands will outperform any AI in terms of efficiency
Thanks for making this video, I've felt this happening much much more near the end of classic when it was considered the "Norm" and would just make excuses about how botting isn't connected with GDKPs, despite it being the only reason you'd want that much gold.
I had my own GDKP community during classic and hosted everything on my warrior. I was so stupidly busy raiding on a main rogue while also running all raids every 3 days and every sunday just to have a bigger pixel amlunt than others. I quit after getting P1 bis in wrath and ivr never been happier
It is though. If blizzard banned bots and anyone who bought or sold gold starting in classic it would have been a very different experience. Gdkp is fine if people are farming gold. There also isn't one "community" that includes all players, and players have no ability to police other player's behavior outside of reporting.
While obviously the “gold buyer’s” fault for breaking ToS, it is Blizzard’s job to upgold that ToS. So ultimately, it is Blizzard’s fault 😔. Buying gold is a form of cheating. There will always be cheaters in video games and it is the developer/company’s job to get rid of the cheaters.
Yea, Bliizzard could put a stop to it of course. But imagine, how many subscriptions would Blizzard loose if they would go hard after gold sellers and buyers. Gold selling and buying being so rampant in classic. Proves that the community actually loves RMT. It makes them no business sense to ban them. Of course I would love it if they did but they never will.
warden is the retail version of the system that detects botting. it knows the titles of every window you have open on your computer. I'm not sure if it's still called that, but it was known back in the day
Incredible work. probably the only way to end this is for the player base to turn their backs on GDKPs and treat them as shameful. but it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon
You can almost ignore GDKP entirely if you aren't on a top 5 server for your region. If you're on golemagg or faerline or w/e, you've been getting fucked like this for like 5 years straight now and if you haven't left yet, you're probably fine.
I've seen a few of your vids on and off over the years since wow classic started. This is the first one that has been really impressive to me. Just wanted to say good job.
Great video. Just imagine how much electricity gets used up by bots playing the game :D I stopped playing on classic in P4 vanilla after I saw the druid/priest/mage grp bots farming strat live for orbs.
Thanks for high-lighting just how serious and profitable this is, along with how easy it is to run. I still find it funny how so many are waking up to this now with the statements that the Token somehow has ruined Wrath of the Lich King due to GDKP's, when in reality it's been a thing from the start. I can recall very well how I found certain videos that detailed just how profitable this "industry" was originally back in the early 2000's. The concept of botting and even cheating is a wide spread issue across almost all online gaming, and goes beyond that even - it's by far not a new phenomenon, and cheating or botting in WoW certainly is not either. Which brings me to the point that while the Token is crap, it's not the main cause of this, which is what some people might think. Since botting and cheating was a thing way before the Token was originally released, and Blizzard certainly did have GM's working on this in the past, but it didn't resolve the issue. Which again, is an issue that is so wide spread that people seem to not be able to grasp it, yet they attempt to do so by narrowing it down and simplifying it by shouting that all that Blizzard needs to do is ban the bots, that's how easy it is. If it was truly that simple, then online malpractices wouldn't be a thing today, unless someone truly wants to take the tinfoil hat plunge and assume the worst. An who do we have to thank for this regarding WoW botting? well take a look at either yourselves or over your shoulder at the person next to you that happily swiped. So many shout for Blizzard to fix this, while having been the reason it's such a shit show in the first place - both hypocritical and pathetic.
Something I've just realized is that blizzard putting out the token will make others think it's OK to buy gold. So they'll look at the price and go mmm, that's a big expensive, I wonder if I could get it cheaper from someone else.
@@johnathanwalker8395 Are you saying only 25% of players are actually playing the game, and the other 75% are farming gold? If that's true, who is buying all that gold?
Several guilds of Myzrael where into GDKP. New guilds would come to the server, AGONY, and sell their services... They literally came into the server and caused the market to hyperinflate, then they left and started the processs on a new server. To make it worse, the guild used a loot council, they would lure in good players for the content, bring in "old" guild members who were returning and "award" the loot to the "old" guild members. All the while hiding that they had GDKP operations.
But for real, do people buy raid gear? If something from this video, I understod that there need to be a market for it. Is there really a market for buying raid gear?
RMT and gold selling is the biggest elephant in the room for a lot of online games. As soon as you can pick between 10 bucks vs 10 hours of grinding, people will pick the 10 bucks.
8:55 Blizzard does NOT allow the public to edit their lua code. There are secured lua functions that bots use that they access by hacking the client Have you done any research what so ever?
@@Vihara2 The blizzard addon api is very limited that's why bot creators use lua unlockers to unlock the wow's protected functions. For example one of these protected functions is the StrafeLeftStart which makes your character move strafe to the left. If these functions were available to the public addon creators would have made auto levelers ages ago but since they're "protected" botters use tools called lua unlockers that modify the clients memory to bypass that protection. Go educate yourself about protected lua functions on wowapi instead of talking out of your ass.
I wouldn't use the absolute statement of "The WoW token literally doesn't help anybody but gold sellers and boosters" because I know a few people that just play the auction house like it is basically a game within a game and made enough to buy tokens for a good 3 years of game time, and they still had so much gold left over. Will it be more skewed to gold sellers/boosters buying the token off the AH? Sure. But not literally only. Otherwise, great video :)
Not sure you are making a point here. Yes, you have people running the game in a game but it has the same demand destruction because the inflation they are fuelling will result in less players that can keep up
I too dropped classic because gold farming became unbearable. Anything that could be reasonably farmed was overstocked by bots and everything you needed was ridiculously expensive. These methods blizzard pursues is going to destroy the game for the audience that doesn't engage in some form of rmt.
They know the game is on its last chapter and there won't be many players left after wotlk. So they are squeezing the life out of the game atm because it is going to die anyways.
you are naive if you think they wont keep the goldmine going as long as possible, meaning classic+ or just new fresh progression servers starting from vanilla again. just look at what they did with sod. not to mention sod is alive and thriving still and its nearly a year old already.
Firemaw EU here I took a break from WoW just after the release of Phase 1 wotlk, 2 months or so. The last few weeks I was doing GDKP's, not huge pots, I would get maybe 4-7K gold at the end of the world tour runs. Just returned to phase 2 a few weeks ago and I can not get a spot in a GDKP, as I don't have enough gold to join, I have 30K, I was told minimum would be 50, or even 100K for certain runs. It's becoming ridiculous, I'm sure the WoW token is gonna make it even worse.
This video will stand the test of time and be looked upon as another kink in WoWs armour and where the company went wrong. Excellent work. It has your finger prints all over it but I can smell Madseason....
Very great video, but I disagree that the wow token is generically bad for the game. No MMO has won the war against bots and probably never will the best way they can mitigate bots is providing safe avenues for the players already engaging in these activities to avoid other problems. Gold in WoW has no value attached to it and is needed for a small portion of gameplay. The rising consumable price that everyone is blaming the token for happens at every phase transition and we just got JJ which increases player traffic causing rising demand(prices). I have over 400k gold and have never been in a GDKP or bought gold, I spend a lot of time using the auction house and selling those consumables. Those infamous bots that everyone hates lower the price of those consumables more than anything. When bot ban waves hit the mats I use to craft always spike until the next wave of bots fills the supply back in. If they made raiding about 15% easier so raid leaders don't need to spend hours of time into forming groups the gdkp scene would take a hit. Most people I know using GDKPs go because of how well organized they are and they clear content more reliably than normal groups because the content is too hard for the average raider. I also want to say I don't condone botting, but until blizzard makes mundane tasks like herbing/mining/grinding fun it will always be a necessary evil.
yeah cause a multy bilionare company has the need to work with gold sellers..... as some1 with some iq can understand from this video is that it need to mutch effort and money from bliz to try stop gold selling more then the money they make from classic. You want gold sellers to end DONT BUY GOLD AND DONT JOIN GDKP THE END
18:20 virtual pc's aren't electricity free. If you're talking about cloud gaming computers, the cost monthly, usually more than power. But I assume they are using virtual machines to mask where they are playing from, these still take just as much electricity... lol
I used to bot back in the days from vanilla wow through to original Wrath, started with a fishing bot, then Glider and Honorbuddy were the tools of choice. I had 15 bots running back then and lived comfortably from selling the gold. I eventually stopped when I got into hardcore raiding and lost my main account twice in ban waves. I haven't botted since then but I must admit seeing this made me tempted to fire up some bots and have a look at how good the bots are these days.
so i am strictly a retail gold maker, when classic came out, i leveled a hunter to 60 just to see how long it would take to get epic riding mount. now that there is a token in classic. i am having a great time making gold in classic. bronze bars are 2g, but the token is 6.5k, i love this. this is fun. a couple of vendor recipes, mine/farm. level a tailor. i am having fun.
Few thoughts. First, awesome video! 100% accurate. Really neat to hear about some of the details behind the scenes. Second, I used to buy plat in EverQuest and gil in FFXI back in the day. Even back then I can echo the sentiment that RMT is surreal in the sense that they have the BEST customer service of any business I've ever dealt with. It's weiiiiird but it's true. I'm not saying RMT was the right decision. But they are super polite and professional and fast. I haven't bought game currency in many years, but. Third, the thought of AI putting bots into hyperspeed is crazy. They're already so good at it. I wish RMT wasn't a thing, even if it made me feel special and happy back when I was younger and often depressed and miserable. But it does ruin games' economies, and yet... especially for games with subscriptions, where's the incentive for companies to ban them? Even in FFXIV they're everywhere. A sub is a sub. Ban them occasionally, but I would bet it's 99% because they know the bot runners will just buy a new copy of the game.
This is one of the best videos I've seen here in this channel. I appreciate that you described and covered everything in details about the dark side of the game, it was like watching a documentary about mafia and drug production. At the end, money is above everything, and the ones who love the game are the losers here.
i like that, you contact them through dc, email etc. and always explain, "dude im making a documentry, wanna talk about it" and they say nah you say is there anyone i can speak to? like a manager or smth :D idk, its really funny to me :D
Gold selling website interview out now: ruclips.net/video/b7ORIRgCXp8/видео.html
bald man is going to get like an hour and a half of content out of this, great video!
Toothless millionaire pauses video.
yeah and then his editors will upload it back onto youtube and get more views and ad revenue than the person who spent every day making the video.... scummy lazy behavior if ask me.
@@Narque him stream will get more traffic and visibility to this channel so its only fair
@@Narque work smarter not harder.
are you talking about asmongold?
The thing I always come back to when they say we banned X amount of accounts, is that all those accounts were almost immediately replaced. 200k new purchases of the game and monthly subs which in the US would be about $35, or about $7 millions straight into blizzard's pocket. Their only incentive to ban is to create revenue while making it look like they're trying to address community concerns.
@@jonnycroxville4590 Yeah they could ban more often and make it not profitable for the botters, but that will hurt their pockets so they dont.
They ban the accounts after the botters have had enough time to turn a profit, making the bans functionally useless. It's just a stopgap measure for them to hold up some meaningless number of bans as some sort of proof that they're fighting back against bots, while simultaneously just doing things to make the botters and goldsellers lives easier.
7 million is roughly one-third of one percent of their quarterly revenue. It's an insignificant amount of their income and to imply they want this to continue is laughable
@@SashenkaKun They could easily solve it by hiring at the very most 10 people, but they dont so yeah. Definitely dont want it to stop.
@@SashenkaKun Shareholders and executive dont care, anything that increases their bottom line is a goal
By "keep the gold moving" he didn't mean sending it to his other accounts to avoid getting banned. He meant selling it quicky so you don't risk getting banned while still holding huge amounts of gold on the account.
@@jfkdidntlos791 nah the difference is significant. if the account gets banned, who gives a shit. the actual gold on the account is what he cares about, not the account itself.
@jfkdidntlos791 The total apathy towards the account being banned itself is insane and very bad. The lack of attatchment towards these accounts show clearly how gdkps are just a means of creating real life revenue, nobody is running these for fun.
I really liked the part where bots farming gold that ends up in the server economy sounded exactly like real world money laundering. I guess technically it is, imagine that.
,
this analogy has been used for years. GDKP was always gold washing.
The bot is the Federal Reserve
And just like the real world, the money is in the medicine not the cure. Blizzard has no intention of completely removing botters. The system is making them money. They just do sacrificial bans to keep new accounts being started.
it's always interesting when real world phenomena make their way into video games naturally
This video was AMAZING omg. Editing was incredible. Information was astounding tbh. I had no idea how deep this stuff went or how much money could potentially be made from gold farming. You knocked this video out of the park and I definitely don't think you need to worry about the RUclips algorithm when you put out things of this quality. I felt like I was watching a Coffeezilla video about WoW Classic. Incredible work, keep it up, you have literally already caused changes in the game because of this video. I would be very interested to see what you do next and any other investigative style videos like this would be an instant watch for me.
I've watched you for a while and this video is just a cut above the rest. I wouldn't be surprised to see this video get 500k views or more. Interesting from start to finish. Thanks for the work that you do.
Gold Sellers with a better Support then most Gaming Companys do have.
The effort really does show, keep up the good work!
The intro was incredible and worth whatever you had to do to make it
Very interesting. Another aspect of this is how relatively easy it is to thwart bots, yet they invest nothing in that area. I specialize in client/server architecture level work in games like this, and it's a very solvable problem that can be done cost effectively. But it's not free, and as long as players buy into the myth that you can't really stop botting, there is little incentive to fix the problem.
An interesting tangent here is in the last decade mmo's have become even more client authoritative then they used to be in many cases. It's part of the larger trend in the industry of engineering quality taking a nosedive. Botting is IMO part of the same larger trend. Studios have simply been adapting to what players are willing to put up with, in areas where doing so helps the bottom line.
how is it solved easily? I agree, its very easy to make an automated system that gets like a 75% positive ID rate. Now imagine the absolute shitstorm that will occur regarding those 25% of legitimate players that get banned.
People like to think they want the solution really badly, and when they get the solution they want, they get even angrier.
@@Imbalanxdbanning after the fact via an analytical approach is not what I was referring to. You solve this more directly and there are several angles. One is make bots a lot more difficult to write by not having as much information client side, and actually engineering in things that both thwart the approaches bots use, and catch them in the act. So you still do in some cases ban after the fact, but it's using 100% verifiable evidence.
It's always a game of cat and mouse. The basic formula is you find approaches that obfuscate data in a way where if they are using the wrong data, it's 100% a bot. And where while it might take them a day or so to fix, you can basically automate changing the obfuscation. Which makes botting untenable.
This works because bots have to hardcode data from reverse engineering stuff. There simply aren't any known ways to automate reverse engineering. It takes time. Far more time in relative terms then it takes game developers to push out newly obfuscated data.
On PC/Mac it's trivial to do things like push a dll to the client and have it dynamically load it. Combine that with the data is algorithmic not some hardcoded string. There is no way that doesn't take at least several hours to reverse engineer. But it's something the game can update like every few minutes if it wanted to.
But even simpler approaches like seeded randoms, or data in algorithmically generated field names works just as well if you don't want to go the dynamic module route.
And as for what data would you obfuscate? Well it could be anything really that is detectable, ideally something that actually breaks the bots. Like coordinate offsets for example (again algorithmic not static).
There are so many tricks here to stay ahead of bots. It's not a game botters can win against even just a team of 1-2 good engineers.
@@Imbalanxd human will not do perfect combination for 10 hours straight
@@BootyFeaster True we are in 2023 and the private scripts people are buying for 1-2k+ are machine learning bots that will take actual player data in as a model and train the script on this. Whatever blizzard can do the scripted can also do
@@chrisochs7112 How's about stop playing classic and giving your money to the very corruption you fight against.
this video was awesome man, loved the editing and music choice. interesting to think how normalized gold buying really is in the game
So GDKP runs are essentially used to launder BOT bought gold.
And also provide a convenient excuse for blizzard to implement the WoW token so they can capitalize on this issue themselves.
The editing on this and the hamming it up to make it seem like goldsellers are on par with murderous druglords is absolutely amazing. Fantastic video!
I always appreciate a nice Z4. I'm an S2000 fan myself, but have always admired the German's rendition of the roadster.
Funny, I came here to call it an ugly car lmao
The point you made about the customer service on gold buying sites is spot on. You would think its like some sketchy website or whatever but tbh the customer service was better then any i've had interactions with in the last couple of years including my hospital and some of the most succesfull companies in my country.
Also the other point of the player population that has drasticly changed i've noticed as well. When i look in my guild they are all at least 30 and have a full-time job on the side, working 1 hour for some scraps in game of spending a fraction of what they earn irl to buy gold is such an easy decision. Also they just want some of the actual content like end-game raids/pvp etc. They have 0 interest in the rest of the game like leveling or farming.
Oh the irony. People rush leveling process when old school classical was all about leveling. I never played WoW past its leveling process myself.
@@REgamesplayer the irony is that you cant read. he is clearly talking about farming gold (which is often the most monotone part of the game) not leveling
@@kewa123 Oh the irony. Person accusing others being unable to read failed at reading himself. Read content to the end before trying to make a critique of other person. Otherwise, you are just wrong and abrasive.
I appreciate the work you put into showcasing as much of this stuff as possible. I've suspected a lot of what was shown for a long while, but hadn't fully appreciated the extent of it until now. For months, I always felt a level of disgust each time I logged into the game as a result, and between some guild-related issues and the introduction of the WoW Token, I quit playing Wrath Classic this week. I was GM and RL of a guild I founded day 1 of Classic back in 2019, but enough is enough.
DEF especially with ToGC looking like a hot garbage raid it's time to suspend the sub
Gdkp are banned on turtle
Turn your back and never look back king.
"the most dramatic video noone needed or wanted that there are hundreds of" -better title
lol
I find it most interesting that blizzard actually knew this in advance. Even before they introduced Classic. It's funny that EA have an extremely good algorithm in FIFA where they block the buyer pretty quickly. But Blizzard obviously doesn't care about that and it's all intentional.
In the end, what I have observed, the gold costs more now even on the third party sites since they introduced the token and the token/gold value decreases. So it's a win-win situation for Blizzard and the gold sellers.
I figured this out a long time ago and kept telling people who were saying "lol just ban the bots bro" and similar dumb platitudes that the bots literally thrive because **Blizzard approves of them** . And when they ban the bots, those are again a bunch of re-subs and re-purchases. Bots are excellent for Blizzard.
Every time I think about getting back into wow, I see something like this and remember “oh yeah there isn’t a level playing field
I am half way through this video and I am fascinated. This is like watching a documentary on something applicable to your life.
When they first changed the rare Cataclysm seahorse mount drop from BoP to BoE I pointed out as a passionate collector on WoW forums that this was only helping out gold farmers as all the spawn sites were now camped by bots as a result of their change. As proof also showed the mount selling for real world cash on gold farming sites.... end result I was banned from forums for supporting gold farmers. I appealed saying these bots were a result of their change, I was only showing proof of what they had caused... ban upheld.
Posting a link or screenshot was an idiotic idea.
great video you made, noticed how much effort you put into it right from the intro, hope you get lots of subscribers. Very interesting infos too, had no idea how deeply rooted this is in WoW, I play this game since 2005 but casual as fuck, gold is mostly spent on bags for twinks, stuff from NPCs and not much more for me xd
9:50 Blizzard CM helping you to showcase botting in Classic? KEKW what? I had to rewind 3-4 times to make sure I heard you right
Like I said the CMs are legends 😂
dear god... this all sounds so much fun
i love to have my hobby become a smaller and worse version of real world
Apparently revenue from bot accaunts is a big enough part of Blizzarrds income. That must be the reason they are not willing to get rid of bots. 'New' business model of Blizz is - it's ok if actual players do not pay for sub, we will get money from gold sellers. So Blizzard depends on gold sellers and it needs players to depend on goldsellers.
I think it was one of the dudes who worked on nostalrius and helped blizzard make wow classic that said 20% of subs are from bots
It’s just a win in every sense for them they get paid and the servers look populated
how do blizzard get money from gold sellers? I mean if players are just farming, or paying gold from gold sellers, that mean golder sellers get the $ and not blizzard right?
@@Christiansmoviesnow bot accounts have to pay for subscrption :)
In 2019, when I realized they weren't going to do anything about bots and RMT, I decided to get in on the action. I made quite profit on it during covid. I've been banned one time on one account. That's only because I left the bot on for days. As long as you log off and into another account to resume the same bot farm, you are fine. Giving us free level 55 DKs was the stupidest thing they could have done.
When honorbuddy was around, i had a lifetime subscription and ran multiple instances and characters. I had a couple accounts and was making so much gold and items. I did it initially because i wanted to gear up all my characters and have tons of gold, but once i had it all, i didnt care about the game anymore, lol. I ended up getting permabanned on all my accounts for botting and disrupting the wow economy. this was during cataclysm days.
whats your screenname shit lord?
@@jeepanon haha, honorbuddy was so insane. rip our lifetime subs
How much profit you made ?
@@kurrwa When TBC was out, I was making about $800 a week after running costs on Mankrik US.
Blizz will never actually fully ban bots. They make way too much money from botters to even care.
Fun Fact : The Biggest Mafia of this game is BLIZZARD Himself!
'Why raise children when you can raise your parses.' This absolutely cooked me.
Well made video, I'd love to see more essays about WoW culture stuff like this
My only gripe with the video is some of the claims towards the end strike me as blatantly untrue, but maybe i took your word's too literal. Theres no way Blizz selling tokens could be considered as exploitive as 3rd party sites that literally steal your card info after putting it in and never sending you a single copper. I also think slashing the profit gold sellers make by forcing them to under bid a token price cant be considered aiding them, and im not sure why players would feel a "need" to buy gold simply because you can now.
Watching this video made me think about how Runescape almost completely killed their game for trying to stop Gold selling and bots. Either the sellers slowly kill the game or the developers have to make the game worse to make gold selling impossible.
It's not just the gold sellers,
The guy in this video mentioned that a small army of GMs and forcing people to level in the overworld under natural surveillance helps to seriously keep bots under control, but blizzard literally laid off most of their gms,
Jagex despite the size of RuneScape is a shockingly small company, and are similarly unwilling to use said human army.
bots are really good to osrs economy
@@TheSunshrine They absolutely are not lmfao
"mafia"
picturimg Tony Soprano as awow player is bringing me crazy levels of joy.
may james gandolfini rest in peace
Wow this was really interesting. Thank you for sharing your investigation with us.
I played classic since launch but recently quit due to the extreme inflation in wrath. It was bad in vanilla, worse in bc, but in wrath it’s insane. Insane enough to make someone who’s been playing only classic for years longer than official classic severs to be out to quit.
It's illegal money laundering. I got threatened by these mafias
Fantastic video! The Miami Vice thing totally worked and I love it.
I'm not consuming alot of WoW content since i'm not actively playing it for quite some years, but man, this video is top notch, all the research that had to be done and stuff! :) Good job with it.
I never add any comments to vids I watch but I can see those hours put into this video. Great work!
If you want an interview or want questions asked; I am a former filthy seller. used to work with people from IGE , IGXE and MMOinn among others. Mind you, I have never botted, there we WAY more efficient ways to do it back in the day and dodge bans.
DM me on discord dude
@@MetaGoblin Message sent.
Share your secrets :0
@@jamestomlin5525 I am, talkin with meta. That said, you have any questions right here?
@@Diceman82 honestly man. I'd be interested in learning what you did and do it myself, haha. But I doubt you'd disclose that, should meta make a video on it I look forward to watching it
POV:
its 2am and ive decided to log on my lvl 35 mage to lvl which i havent touched in a year or so. i see i had tailoring up to 200 already from previous play and want to make some spell power upgrades. i go to the AH to look for the 1 pearl and 3 spiders silk i need to be met with spiders silk selling for 100g EACH.
Fantastic video. A lot of this isn't news to me, since I've been keeping myself fairly informed on the subject, but the depth is incredible! Hope this really gets around. I'm sure most GDKP, Token, and Blizzard defenders will still remain staunchly suckling at the teat of willful of ignorance, but if this helps inform even a few players I think it's well worth the effort you put in.
This shit is bad for the game.
14:25 tell me you've never paid electricity bills without telling me lmfao
I've bought gold in both FFXIV and WoW Classic. On a few occasions over the years and I've never been caught. Sure, everyone is safe until they aren't, but there are things that can be done to avoid it being noticed.
Rule #1 is to keep the amounts reasonable. Buying 100,000 gold on classic would be a huge red flag.
Rule #2 is to keep the amounts especially low on new or low population servers. Again, it sends red flags out when there's nobody to build an economy and there's people getting rich.
Rule #3, try to be active in your account. There's no such thing as "passive income" like this. Logging out for a week and coming back to thousands of gold in your mail is very suspicious. If you aren't raiding, questing, or have professions, how do you make gold? They can see most things in game.
All in all, GDKP is the safest way to make gold. It's a legitimate way to earn it, and all it costs you is time. In retail, we boost people. Charging 2000-4000g per level, per character ... you can make 240 000 per person, 1-60. In a party of 4 carries and 1 booster, that's up to 960,000g per boost. Technically, 960k is worth 3 WoW Tokens, but it's worth even more to sell to Overgear 😘
@Overgear honestly, if I had the means and capital to start that up, I would. However, between work and daily responsibilities (I'm 36) I just wouldn't have the time to farm. My Paladin is coming along quite nicely, so I'm looking to dabble in player boosting. I'm on Moonguard, and there are a LOT of people asking (and paying DAMN well) for it. Providing how this goes, I might just reach out.
Your service has been great, by the way. Reliable, safe so far (bough in Classic, retail, and FFXIV without issue), and pricing isn't horrible. I work very long hours, so it's nice to have an alternative to the same daily quests every day
@Overgear also, I'd be happy with 6k per month. 30,000 seems so over the top. I wouldn't even know what to do with it. I'm a simple man with simple pleasures.
@Overgear How much can you make by boosting in retail servers? From Horde side? And how "safe" is it?
@Overgear How do I get started? What is required? Who do I contact?
in vigilance, we eternally fight against the beasts who strive to consume us
not gonna lie, I'd do a fresh windows install if you used the bot program on your main PC, its very common for cheat devs to add backdoors into their software
I once (long ago) programmed an AH bot for fun. Didn't actually sell any gold, just amassed it. (Not knowing what to do with that gold I'd just buy good BoE gear from the AH and mail it to random people I don't know). What bot did is it would scan the AH for much cheaper than average posted easy liquidatable items and then flip them posting for slightly lower than average prices. Then log off from this realm and log on to another and do the same there. It wasn't a very profitable bot since it was essentially a bottom feeder, taking advantage of players who posted items for too low prices and it depended on the amount of these auction lots. Also there's a hard limit on the number of total lots on the AH before the API stops letting you use the fast scan function forcing you to slowly scan page by page which could take up to half an hour for each realm. But the point is I've never been banned for this, despite my behavioural patterns being very obvious, and my characters spending hours a day near the AH.
Gold selling is really one of the greatest reasons that I have completely given up on MMOs but I am glad that you connected the dots towards whaling which has become an industry standard in gaming. Large MMOs are no longer made to be good games that attract a lot of players but predatory experiences that prey on people with addiction problems just look at games like Genshin and how popular the Gacha mechanic is.
So when you are playing a MMO you are being preyed upon by both the developer and the community. Sounds like a lot of fun.
This is why I play gw2
Not p2w store, only cosmetics and quality items for lazy people, and has its own gold store
Really enjoying your videos and love the tone you're going for. The 80's documentary/Miami Vice style thing is great. Similar to Cocaine Cowboys and so on. Can I ask what specific song you are using in the intro? Can't find it on the link in the description.
I don't think you did a good enough job showing how these things actually hurt the player experience.
the players themselves haven't gotten that yet it seems, but the classic community isn't at all what the OG community was and it shows
LOL the 90s music like I'm watching something the school turned on was perfect
One perspective you didn't mention with respect to the wow token is that of players who attend gdkps and make a passive income from that (not difficult if you don't pay for those big ticket items). I've enjoyed the introduction of the wow token since I never have to pay for my wow subscription -- a single payout can usually buy me 2 months of gametime at current prices! However I agree that the token only makes problems worse in the game's economy. Great video!
The underworld still going wild for sure, great production Goblin! I used to sell DMT buffs during classic wow, it was a real enterprise with a lot of gold to be made by us who mains a hunter. Gold to gear my alts :). Also there were the Mage gangs selling boosts, food n'water and portals.
The amount of effort put in here is amazing! Truly a solid video
Awesome vid! Love the longer format
Great investigative video mate, keep up the good work!
Makes me wonder why I am not doing this myself...
I'm really interessed on how will the bots vs games be with how IA is improving in a insane rate, might not be hard to think that in some time, they will need just to accept and enforce this kind of thing... Also, on Brazil, where i live, a month is of game time is around 5% of a min wage, so its really expensive here, if you consider how costly things are currently ; I would continue playing wow, but it was so expensive money-wise, that i had to give up
I don't think AI will make too big of a dent as it uses too much energy as it is. Clientless bots I. The thousands will outperform any AI in terms of efficiency
Thanks for making this video, I've felt this happening much much more near the end of classic when it was considered the "Norm" and would just make excuses about how botting isn't connected with GDKPs, despite it being the only reason you'd want that much gold.
I had my own GDKP community during classic and hosted everything on my warrior. I was so stupidly busy raiding on a main rogue while also running all raids every 3 days and every sunday just to have a bigger pixel amlunt than others. I quit after getting P1 bis in wrath and ivr never been happier
Community creates GDKP, community buys gold from gold sellers , community says bliz fault .........
FAX
It is though. If blizzard banned bots and anyone who bought or sold gold starting in classic it would have been a very different experience.
Gdkp is fine if people are farming gold.
There also isn't one "community" that includes all players, and players have no ability to police other player's behavior outside of reporting.
While obviously the “gold buyer’s” fault for breaking ToS, it is Blizzard’s job to upgold that ToS. So ultimately, it is Blizzard’s fault 😔. Buying gold is a form of cheating. There will always be cheaters in video games and it is the developer/company’s job to get rid of the cheaters.
Yea, Bliizzard could put a stop to it of course. But imagine, how many subscriptions would Blizzard loose if they would go hard after gold sellers and buyers.
Gold selling and buying being so rampant in classic. Proves that the community actually loves RMT.
It makes them no business sense to ban them.
Of course I would love it if they did but they never will.
Gold sellers works for shitzzard...its a win win for them(mooooar money)😉switch to turtle
warden is the retail version of the system that detects botting. it knows the titles of every window you have open on your computer. I'm not sure if it's still called that, but it was known back in the day
Incredible work. probably the only way to end this is for the player base to turn their backs on GDKPs and treat them as shameful. but it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon
more like they should implement a way to ban bots in the early stage
You can almost ignore GDKP entirely if you aren't on a top 5 server for your region. If you're on golemagg or faerline or w/e, you've been getting fucked like this for like 5 years straight now and if you haven't left yet, you're probably fine.
@Jonny Croxville its impossible to stop
The only way to stop it is for blizzard to hire gamemasters that actually work for a living, but we all know blizzard wont do shit.
@@jonnycroxville4590 Yes but we have to talk about things that are actually possible/doable
I am very pleased with the intro. It was worth the drive! Laughed my ass off real good!
Everyone who doesn't like the state of the game atm should just unsub and play private servers again.
Great job. This kind of gave me madseasonshow vibes with the music(and I mean that as a compliment). Great vid
I've seen a few of your vids on and off over the years since wow classic started. This is the first one that has been really impressive to me. Just wanted to say good job.
Great video. Just imagine how much electricity gets used up by bots playing the game :D I stopped playing on classic in P4 vanilla after I saw the druid/priest/mage grp bots farming strat live for orbs.
I am allergic to word "GDKP" or "bot" since wotlk classic. It is the worst plague that has ever existed in wow.
Naw naw naw.. this seriously, this video was TOP SHELF! Good job man.. I hope it gets the views and recognition it deserves.
Thanks for high-lighting just how serious and profitable this is, along with how easy it is to run. I still find it funny how so many are waking up to this now with the statements that the Token somehow has ruined Wrath of the Lich King due to GDKP's, when in reality it's been a thing from the start. I can recall very well how I found certain videos that detailed just how profitable this "industry" was originally back in the early 2000's. The concept of botting and even cheating is a wide spread issue across almost all online gaming, and goes beyond that even - it's by far not a new phenomenon, and cheating or botting in WoW certainly is not either. Which brings me to the point that while the Token is crap, it's not the main cause of this, which is what some people might think.
Since botting and cheating was a thing way before the Token was originally released, and Blizzard certainly did have GM's working on this in the past, but it didn't resolve the issue. Which again, is an issue that is so wide spread that people seem to not be able to grasp it, yet they attempt to do so by narrowing it down and simplifying it by shouting that all that Blizzard needs to do is ban the bots, that's how easy it is. If it was truly that simple, then online malpractices wouldn't be a thing today, unless someone truly wants to take the tinfoil hat plunge and assume the worst.
An who do we have to thank for this regarding WoW botting? well take a look at either yourselves or over your shoulder at the person next to you that happily swiped. So many shout for Blizzard to fix this, while having been the reason it's such a shit show in the first place - both hypocritical and pathetic.
@Old School Daffy Duck Are you suggesting the unthinkable? - Blizzcrackers can't even begin to think of this possibility!
Something I've just realized is that blizzard putting out the token will make others think it's OK to buy gold. So they'll look at the price and go mmm, that's a big expensive, I wonder if I could get it cheaper from someone else.
Hmm, so why even play this game, if you're not going to play this game?
ask 75% of classic players
@@johnathanwalker8395 Are you saying only 25% of players are actually playing the game, and the other 75% are farming gold? If that's true, who is buying all that gold?
Damn that ending gave me the chills!!! Great video metagoblin cheers mate!!!
Several guilds of Myzrael where into GDKP. New guilds would come to the server, AGONY, and sell their services...
They literally came into the server and caused the market to hyperinflate, then they left and started the processs on a new server. To make it worse, the guild used a loot council, they would lure in good players for the content, bring in "old" guild members who were returning and "award" the loot to the "old" guild members. All the while hiding that they had GDKP operations.
But for real, do people buy raid gear? If something from this video, I understod that there need to be a market for it. Is there really a market for buying raid gear?
RMT and gold selling is the biggest elephant in the room for a lot of online games. As soon as you can pick between 10 bucks vs 10 hours of grinding, people will pick the 10 bucks.
A different elephant in the room is: why do players play games that are so easy that they can easily be played by bots?
@@petersteenkamp beats me. I’m kinda done with them myself.
8:55 Blizzard does NOT allow the public to edit their lua code. There are secured lua functions that bots use that they access by hacking the client Have you done any research what so ever?
Pretty sure you're wrong there champ
@@Vihara2 The blizzard addon api is very limited that's why bot creators use lua unlockers to unlock the wow's protected functions. For example one of these protected functions is the StrafeLeftStart which makes your character move strafe to the left. If these functions were available to the public addon creators would have made auto levelers ages ago but since they're "protected" botters use tools called lua unlockers that modify the clients memory to bypass that protection. Go educate yourself about protected lua functions on wowapi instead of talking out of your ass.
He doesn't understand the difference and also doesn't understand what a VM is. Don't think he understands the economics either.
I wouldn't use the absolute statement of "The WoW token literally doesn't help anybody but gold sellers and boosters" because I know a few people that just play the auction house like it is basically a game within a game and made enough to buy tokens for a good 3 years of game time, and they still had so much gold left over. Will it be more skewed to gold sellers/boosters buying the token off the AH? Sure. But not literally only.
Otherwise, great video :)
Not sure you are making a point here. Yes, you have people running the game in a game but it has the same demand destruction because the inflation they are fuelling will result in less players that can keep up
I too dropped classic because gold farming became unbearable. Anything that could be reasonably farmed was overstocked by bots and everything you needed was ridiculously expensive.
These methods blizzard pursues is going to destroy the game for the audience that doesn't engage in some form of rmt.
They know the game is on its last chapter and there won't be many players left after wotlk. So they are squeezing the life out of the game atm because it is going to die anyways.
I don't think so. Because that was being said back in the day too, and yet its still going.
It will be smaller, no doubt about that. But its not over.
This is 100% correct. Squeeze what you can out of it because it will die off in Cata.
you are naive if you think they wont keep the goldmine going as long as possible, meaning classic+ or just new fresh progression servers starting from vanilla again. just look at what they did with sod. not to mention sod is alive and thriving still and its nearly a year old already.
Firemaw EU here
I took a break from WoW just after the release of Phase 1 wotlk, 2 months or so. The last few weeks I was doing GDKP's, not huge pots, I would get maybe 4-7K gold at the end of the world tour runs.
Just returned to phase 2 a few weeks ago and I can not get a spot in a GDKP, as I don't have enough gold to join, I have 30K, I was told minimum would be 50, or even 100K for certain runs. It's becoming ridiculous, I'm sure the WoW token is gonna make it even worse.
This video will stand the test of time and be looked upon as another kink in WoWs armour and where the company went wrong.
Excellent work. It has your finger prints all over it but I can smell Madseason....
Great job, liked and subbed!! True inspiration for my journey to start making my own videos
Very great video, but I disagree that the wow token is generically bad for the game. No MMO has won the war against bots and probably never will the best way they can mitigate bots is providing safe avenues for the players already engaging in these activities to avoid other problems. Gold in WoW has no value attached to it and is needed for a small portion of gameplay. The rising consumable price that everyone is blaming the token for happens at every phase transition and we just got JJ which increases player traffic causing rising demand(prices). I have over 400k gold and have never been in a GDKP or bought gold, I spend a lot of time using the auction house and selling those consumables. Those infamous bots that everyone hates lower the price of those consumables more than anything. When bot ban waves hit the mats I use to craft always spike until the next wave of bots fills the supply back in. If they made raiding about 15% easier so raid leaders don't need to spend hours of time into forming groups the gdkp scene would take a hit. Most people I know using GDKPs go because of how well organized they are and they clear content more reliably than normal groups because the content is too hard for the average raider. I also want to say I don't condone botting, but until blizzard makes mundane tasks like herbing/mining/grinding fun it will always be a necessary evil.
if you can kill gdkps the demand for gold would plummet
Fanstatic increase in production quality. Great work
lol prob blizard are working whit most of the big gold seling sites
yeah cause a multy bilionare company has the need to work with gold sellers..... as some1 with some iq can understand from this video is that it need to mutch effort and money from bliz to try stop gold selling more then the money they make from classic. You want gold sellers to end DONT BUY GOLD AND DONT JOIN GDKP THE END
@@dimvots6729 if they wanted to stop rmt they would have just banned boosting + gdkp but they want a cut
18:20 virtual pc's aren't electricity free. If you're talking about cloud gaming computers, the cost monthly, usually more than power. But I assume they are using virtual machines to mask where they are playing from, these still take just as much electricity... lol
I used to bot back in the days from vanilla wow through to original Wrath, started with a fishing bot, then Glider and Honorbuddy were the tools of choice. I had 15 bots running back then and lived comfortably from selling the gold. I eventually stopped when I got into hardcore raiding and lost my main account twice in ban waves. I haven't botted since then but I must admit seeing this made me tempted to fire up some bots and have a look at how good the bots are these days.
Really enjoyed this, a lot of work! Thanks for making!! Well played!!!
Every player is buying gold it's sad
@Eddy maximum boobie
so i am strictly a retail gold maker, when classic came out, i leveled a hunter to 60 just to see how long it would take to get epic riding mount.
now that there is a token in classic.
i am having a great time making gold in classic.
bronze bars are 2g, but the token is 6.5k, i love this. this is fun. a couple of vendor recipes, mine/farm. level a tailor. i am having fun.
God man, it absolutely sucks that one of the worst companies on the market owns one of the greatest games of all time.
the amount of gold circulating around gdkp is absolutely obscene, I've never made that much!
Love how the guy playing wow infront of the news back in 2006 didnt even bother to shower before the cameras showed up
Few thoughts.
First, awesome video! 100% accurate. Really neat to hear about some of the details behind the scenes.
Second, I used to buy plat in EverQuest and gil in FFXI back in the day. Even back then I can echo the sentiment that RMT is surreal in the sense that they have the BEST customer service of any business I've ever dealt with. It's weiiiiird but it's true. I'm not saying RMT was the right decision. But they are super polite and professional and fast. I haven't bought game currency in many years, but.
Third, the thought of AI putting bots into hyperspeed is crazy. They're already so good at it.
I wish RMT wasn't a thing, even if it made me feel special and happy back when I was younger and often depressed and miserable. But it does ruin games' economies, and yet... especially for games with subscriptions, where's the incentive for companies to ban them? Even in FFXIV they're everywhere. A sub is a sub. Ban them occasionally, but I would bet it's 99% because they know the bot runners will just buy a new copy of the game.
This is one of the best videos I've seen here in this channel. I appreciate that you described and covered everything in details about the dark side of the game, it was like watching a documentary about mafia and drug production. At the end, money is above everything, and the ones who love the game are the losers here.
Really nice video detailed and easy to follow not mentioning the topic of it which is in depth. Well done keep going like this!
crazy effort bro, ty for undercovering this. Just watched it asmon
i like that, you contact them through dc, email etc. and always explain,
"dude im making a documentry, wanna talk about it"
and they say nah
you say is there anyone i can speak to? like a manager or smth :D
idk, its really funny to me :D
Amazing video its like a real life documentary about kidnapping or some other mafia action.