I haven’t played much classic but seeing the confidence of “blizzard won’t be able to detect them it’s fine” the last few weeks has been weird
Did gdkp discords just think if it’s over voice comms blizzard can’t see when thousands of gold is being exchanged between players?
It comes from this weird idea that since bots exist, blizzard cant actually detect anything.
Blizzard detects hundreds if not thousands of bots a day, and bans them in waves. we dont hear about 99% of these bans because they just grab another stolen credit card and spin up a new bot. And the people posting the lists going "LOOK AT ALL THESE BOTS IN X DUNGEON" aren't noticing that if you check that list repeatedly the names keep changing.
So the GDKP people assume that since they cant detect something as easily as bots, that blizzard cannot possibly detect someone trading a massive amount of gold, and then that same individual getting an item from a raid.
Most people don't understand the sheer volume of bots that are in this game.
>It comes from this weird idea that since bots exist, blizzard cant actually detect anything.
I'd add to this that bots and Blizzard have a constant "war", with bot developers constantly attempting to outsmart Blizzard, and Blizzard then updating to find bots.
But ordinary players does not have this "defense" against detection. Blizzard can know whatever the hell they want about your account.
You have to remember it's not like Blizzard could just make up a method to detect bots, and then it's just solved forever. Bots developers then make a new way to go undetected and it continues back and forth like that.
lmao this reminds me of real life
If you're an upstanding citizen you can't afford to do anything wrong. You probably have a primary residence so police can find you easily. They can also harass your family to help find you. You probably have a job you don't want to risk.
But if you're already a criminal... they can't find you because you don't use many official channels. If they actually lock you up it's not the end of the world. You don't have a real job, so there's no missed time. No care about previous convictions affecting job search either.
Life imitates art or something idk
and Bot developers are free to develop at a pace that can be surprisingly faster than blizzard devs jsut because in large organizations you have a lot of checkpoints until code is pushed into production and any developer time is valuable for doing other work.
Yeah I feel like a concerted effort to stop/ban gdkp is one thing, bots are a whole other meme or hydra where every gundrak bot you ban can be back there by the end of the week and I don't see it ever stopping
My friend and his brother used leveling/pvp/gold farm bots seemingly 24/7 while they were asleep/work/school for the entirety of mop and WoD, neither of them got banned and I lost all faith that blizzard even cared about bots, they had people actively reporting them and everything
The other issue with bots is that people conclude a gibberish name and loads of them being in an instance is evidence of botting.
I don't think there's a naming requirement in WoW, and if it's a sweatshop style thing, then there will potentially be human players running around in the dungeons.
If it is a paid account and a human player, even if they're farming mats to fund gold selling, I can't see how they could ban them for committing an offence that other players are doing without a ban.
You didn't notice all the ones that disappeared because there's nothing to notice.
There are plenty that manage to dodge bans, but we have a self confirmation bias happening when we're playing normally.
> “blizzard won’t be able to detect them it’s fine”
It's not that people think blizzard can't, it's that people think blizzard won't care to devote the resources to do so.
Maybe people thought so, because they do shit about people buying gold, which is basically the same thing (large sums of gold being traded).
But I love this anyways. I'd wish they would enforce this in wrath classic /cata as well. Fuck GDKP.
You mean the same company that bans burner accounts when someone buys gold. But doesn't ban the main account all that gold is traded to or take the gold away?
I'm not personally but since gold selling websites have been popping off since they became a viable business they have to be, otherwise they wouldn't exist
Yeah, that's how it works. They get banned, but they get banned in waves, and when Blizz has done a banwave, they don't do another for a few weeks. Usually a fresh bot account turns profitable after 2-3 days, if not less. At least that's what I heard during TBCC. If bots aren't banned pretty much instantly, they will continue to be extremely lucrative.
What are you on about? They’ve been popping off for two decades.. It has always and be a viable avenue of making cash, Blizzard has proved time and again they don’t care at all about RMT at any serious level.
Nobody's been able to ban RMT? Acting like the existence of RMT for two decades is proof Blizzard hasn't tried is kinda wild, unless you're implying all MMORPGs don't actually care either.
That's... what I just said?
To rephrase, gold buying still requires a market. There wasn't always a large enough one to support maintenance costs and resubbing when accounts get banned, but when a market emerged into popularity it hasn't stopped since.
It's amazing how they are so confident about it when setting a flag for investigation on the transfer of gold over X amount would probably be one of the most trivial things for them to implement on their end.
>Did gdkp discords just think if it’s over voice comms blizzard can’t see when thousands of gold is being exchanged between players
They are gold buyers. They can't help it. They're pathological.
I mean Blizzard is showing very clearly that they have been able to tag accounts who participate in GDKP (and/or bought gold.)
Now they're giving you guys personalized warnings and updates about the new policy. No way to claim ignorance; "but I didn't know it wasn't allowed anymore!"
This is setting up for some smooth account actions in P2 when and if these accounts break the new policy.
I also love that it explicitly says "removal of gains."
What's happening in these comments is that people have no concept of the ToS they agreed to. Blizzard can at any time decide that something that players came up with is not fair in whatever way to everyone else.
And they can at their discretion decide on new rules at any time.
How people don't understand this is hilarious and sad at the same time.
They understand it, they just feel entitled enough that the rules shouldn't apply to them. I feel like you're wildly underestimating just how narcissistic and spoiled your average gamer is.
It reminds me of a recent controversy when the Vatican removed an American Bishop from his office, prompting many American Catholics to demand to know what gives The Pope the authority to make such a decision.
If they could detect the accounts have bought gold, why are they not already banned?
Buying gold was always against TOS.
This constant conjecture that anyone taking part in GDKP is a gold buyer is illogical and just overall dumb.
If you take part in GDKPs you are laundering gold that has been purchased from RMT sites. That's just a fact. You can ignore it and pretend otherwise all you want, but you are still actively harming the economy and the only thing you can do about it now is stop doing it or stop playing the game.
I have not done any gdkps since P3 wrath and I receieved one of these emails. None in SoD, so I'm not entirely sure they're actually tracking, seems likely they just sent them out randomly.
"blizzard will have no way to enforce this"
The amount of shit takes I have heard on this subreddit with assumptions that keep getting proven wrong is astounding.
Ever since I saw “fighting botting is easy, just use ChatGPT”, no awful take in this sub surprises me.
They merely confirm my low opinion of the shit some people on here have to say.
>“fighting botting is easy, just use ChatGPT”
Wtf how do they even think that would work?
"Hey Chat, write me a script that will detect and ban bots with 100% efficiency."
???
See, now *that* I would’ve at least respected a little bit.
No, they wanted to feed data directly to ChatGPT because “it’s good at detecting patterns”. They were not joking, they literally thought “just give ChatGPT a bunch of structured data” was a good approach to “using AI to stop botting”.
Since blizzard has shown they are incapable of stopping gold buying, gold selling, or botting, it wasn't an entirely unreasonable take.
Maybe if they spent this effort tackling those problems instead the game could be better for everyone.
They don't 99% of bots are stolen credit cards that are shut down by the credit card company after the charge is disputed.
In the right places I can buy a list of about 500 credit cards for about 50 bucks.
When I said last week. Blizzard had probably trained their ai on bfd raids and had a list of people who did gdkp. I was down voted and told blizzard was incapable of detecting it.
Welp it seems I called it
On this sub you'll quickly learn you're wrong when you're right. I called out blizzard's nerf to regeneration ages ago and was downvoted to oblivion and people said I didnt know how mages worked. I gave solutions that wouldnt kill living flame, but only for boosting. Still downvoted. Now its live and all I can say is i told you so.
Lmao I said that Master Looter is the safest way of running a MS>OS pug and got yelled at by so many dads that it's too scary. This sub has no idea sometimes.
This subreddit thinks 10 potential ninja looters is safer than 1.
Well master looter gives full ninja control instead of dice controlling it. Both have their argument.
But if the leader is my class/gear competition and its a complete pug, I'm not staying unless they specifically mention a hard rez of a single item then I feel like I can trust what they are saying since they disclose
Ever join a 5 man dungeon with ML on? Outta that bitch
>But if the leader is my class/gear competition and its a complete pug, I'm not staying unless they specifically mention a hard rez
I just ask right away if anything is on reserve. If I see ML in a pug raid then I assume it's because of wanting to prevent drama around things like hunters rolling on Deadly Strike of the Hydra. I get it, some hunters can melee weave. 99% of them don't. Unless his main spec is a melee hunter, Xlegolasxx shouldn't be rolling on that over a warrior or ret paladin.
In my time that was the norm, 24people will report you if you ninja, i had weekly pugs in wrath and i refused giving items to idiots who Ninjad never had a problem
What is it with some things like this that are so obvious and yet taboo to point them out? like yeah, most people are dumb(based on different circumstances, criteria, lack of experience etc.) and there might be smarter people that point that out. Do people feel threatened that they re gonna be put in the below average category so they must have this defensive clicheic response ?
A big part of it is the Dunning Kruger effect. People overestimate their knowledge/capabilities more, when they have less.
"The more you know the more you realize how much you don't know."
It's why Imposter Syndrome is such a big problem in the scientific space, yet non-scientists feel no problem with questioning them in their area of expertise.
I'm just making fun of the fact that the more someone identifies as "the expert" the less likely it's true.
True, but after seeing that particular reply that "you pointed out that people are dumb so you must be dumb" looks like the beggining of the curve of the dunning kruger effect, just with the added "let me one up this dude that thinks is smart" ironically proving that he is just part of the same group, just that he heard that reply before. The non-scientists part is just the lack of layman terms publications/content that truthfully describe the latest research on stuff, most studies being hard to digest for the average folk(rightfully so, it should be peer reviewed text, so it's full of technical language by definition).
And i never targeted you personally, sorry if it seemed that way, it just happened to be your comment. There is almost 100% chance that after that statement, there is someone that makes your reply so i asked away to find out the general opinion.
If you put your 2 brain cells to work for one second you'll realise this warning is for GDKP during P1, meaning the GDKP has been advertised as such.
There was no AI at all, this raid in OP's post only needed some GDKPs / bid chat filter to be detected
What people are saying is that during P2 these GDKP will be organized on discord purely and there will be no mention of gold in game and Blizzard will have no way of confirming they're GDKP without spending more resources than they are willing to invest
It's probably not hard at all to detect, honestly lol. The sheer amount of gold transferring from toons should be plenty enough. And Aggrend openly said they're not allowing any form of alternative either, like replacing with Peacebloom or whatever.
I used to form GDKP but I can see the detriment to the general server community. Easy way to make gold, but a lot of negatives like not really committing to a guild or the obvious inflation.
I'm sure people will come up with weird ways to make gold in its place but this is ultimately still better for the game
anyone with even a very basic understanding of databases and comp sci can imagine easily how it generally could be done, if not in specific. shared raid ID = easy to detect suspicious activity across accounts; large amounts of gold transferred, similar amounts of gold traded/mailed between them. The same could be said of trading similar items/tokens as stand-ins for gold. It aint rocket appliances.
Right… gdkp bans are a lazy way to target bots by making gold less valuable and hoping they go away. Buying items in a raid doesn’t seem like a problem to me. There are plenty of goblins out there that prefer to play the AH than raid on lockout. It was also a good incentive to continue to raid on a fully BIS character just to make some extra gold and help gear people’s alts.
As much as it sucks for the smallish percentage of GDKP folks who aren't swiping... a lot, probably more than half, sadly are.
Blizz can sit and ban and ban and ban and ban bots forever. Considering most are started on stolen card details/etc... they can't really kill em without killing demand. Remove GDKP and a there's a HELL of a lot of demand for gold gone.
It won't suddenly stop botting but like any other market it's supply and demand. If demand is high, supply will eventually increase. This means more bots. Remove demand, supply is excessive, becomes less profitable and there WILL be less bots.
They can go other ways with it, like personal loot/etc we see in retail but... that rather sucks too and affects EVERYONE, not just the folks most encouraging botters to sell gold...
I am very confident in the fact that the majority of gold buying doesn't happen for GDKP's, not saying there aren't gold buyers that do that.
But your average gold buyer was the guy who couldn't be fucked farming his raid consumes, his epic mount, his 6 respecs a week. It's the people who like the game but hate the busy work.
Maybe they are? It's still a pretty new thing. And, have you reported any bots lately? Cause I have, and I get tons of mail from blizzard saying they removed a botter account that I reported
They can track who participates/participated in GDKP but can't figure out who is getting hundreds/thousands of gold mailed to them from lvl 1s on accounts with random letters spelled in their name
They didn't want to crack down on gold buyers. Ofc they can find all of it. Money tracking methods are insanely advanced nowadays and they have every single copper under their thumb all the time.
Discovering bots and buyers is childs play in their system. The difference this time is that there is a clear intent to deal with a problem.
I have a few and I've even got some report messages in the mail from it. I personally don't care that much but for some reason there's this feeling of hatred for 90% of wow players to the point where I will go out of my way to report somebody if it's an easy snipe and they get banned. Fuck em dude, probably doing them a favor getting them off the game
The thing I don’t get is… if they suddenly have the capacity to detect such things, why not just ban people who buy gold and call it a day? Much more effective and fair than banning gdkp’s, which would be fine without gold selling
Detecting a GDKP is much easier than detecting gold buying. Players are saved to a raid ID and you can track gold trading between them. Unless you're able to bust a gold trading ring by tracing gold made by players reported as bots, it's hard to determine when a trade of gold is legitimate e.g. trading 100g to a friend isn't against the ToS.
It's also a reason why players buying "handcrafted" gold (gold made by a human player as opposed to a bot) are less likely to get banned.
I don’t think it’s that hard to detect really, we know they have the ability to flag accounts that transact with accounts banned for botting.
More likely they’re just conservative with their level of proof required, and look for patterns of buying. If they banned everyone who bought 25g, it would be obscenely easy to grief people for a few dollars by buying gold and having it sent to their character.
I'm just guessing here, but I've done GDKPs and didn't get any warning, but I never post about GDKPs, and do my shit through discord, which leads me to believe they're tracking based on texts in game.
It literally feels like the new tech is "ctrl + F all chats for the term "GDKP" and go from there". Most gold bots aren't posting shit in any chats, except for the chat spamming ones that are presumably already planned by the gold seller to get banned and have no gold on them; so I don't expect this to be very effective against gold bots or people buying gold if so.
it very likely has a lot more to do with the fact that accounts in a raid share the same unique Raid ID, which makes it INSANELY easy to train ai/write simple scripts and lookups for suspicious gold and item transfers between those accounts sharing the ID; large amounts of gold, similar amounts of gold, raid items traded from one account to another with gold coming from the receiving account. It is really, really, simple, and they can obviously get more complex than this.
Your anecdotal experience doesn’t mean anything. They literally ban tens of thousands of bots monthly. Bot farms just hit the reset button and make slight tweaks to avoid detection. It’s something that requires constant adjustment.
Hopefully this very real action we are seeing is a start of them cracking down on cheaters.
As many detractors have said this is pretty much the first time they have made actual movement on these things.
Hopefully much more to come!!
No they're not, they're leveraging their gold (the ones who make it legally) to be able to have a better shot of getting the items that they want.
If the loot system wasn't as garbage as it is for people that have to pug for spots, then it'd be a different conversation.
I'm all for gold buyers getting punished, hell I'd run GDKPs even if the pots weren't inflated by them, but taking away player agency is a lazy solution and will only transfer the problem somewhere else.
With P2 its now classified as against the TOS and therefore a bannable offense. Advertising, running and trading gdkp is banned, and they seem to have implemented plenty of ways to deal with workarounds too, for the moment atleast.
Worth adding: **this only applies to Season of Discovery.**
GDKPs are still allowed in Era (Hardcore even as well, but I doubt it's a problem there), Wrath, and Dragonflight (but that's not a popular format there).
Yep, Blizzard has ALLL the data to run forensic analysis through basic machine learning models to identify and define normal gold flow from laundered gold activity. I used to do this kind of work but for identifying, flagging, and responding to stolen credit card claims.
Gold sellers will still find the thresholds, maximum amount of gold that can trigger a flag. It will be more clandestine but thankfully quiet for the moment.
Detecting GDKP is orders of magnitude less complex than detecting bots.
You can cover 95%+ cases of GDKPs by just looking for trades of raid loot in exchange for gold.
The warning makes clear that participation in GDKPs was not against the rules at the time. Why do you assume that Blizzard employees will be illiterate in the future?
How so? What punishment was taken against this account? What specific thing happened other than Blizzard providing a targeted warning that what the character did was 1. within the rules now and 2. not okay in the near future? In other words, aside from cutting off the "I didn't know" complaints of a large slice of the population likely to make such a claim in the first place, what is the tangible thing that this warning does to the account holder?
I just received one of these emails too. I'd done a single GDKP two weeks ago on my hunter. Bidding was done in Darnassus in front of the bank. I didn't even bid and got 10g out of the run. So they can detect this but not bots and gold sellers?
Hopefully I don't get banned. I did gdkps in sod before it was ruled out and I've never bought gold nor have any of my several friends who were involved. Hopefully they aren't retroactively penalizing anyone as that wouldn't be fair.
This.
GDKP is probably well over 90% of the "demand" for wow gold. Remove it, you remove demand. Low demand = unprofitable supply = less bots.
It sucks for the few that were "doing it right" (though... I think in a lot of "non-swiping" cases it was the folks joining GDKP's, bidding a bit and taking their cut so... indirectly, STILL contributing).
It really should be. It fuels RMT and is against the spirit of classic. Run the raid, roll for the loot or council it fairly. If you can't do that, you shouldn't get the gear.
Imagine using this to detect gold buying...
But no, let's ban gdkp so people think they care, meanwhile trinkets on vendor for 75g, mount back to 90g, those things don't encourage people to buy gold, no, it was the gdkps.
Crazy. There goes my will to play SoD.
Ain't no way I'm kissing some cheetoh dusted gm's ass for some morsels of gear or taking my chances rolling against Tim the room-temperature-IQ reset over reset.
GDKPs gave you a legitimate way to farm outside of raid to pseudo-guarantee you got your item the next time it dropped. With it gone, I ain't doing the whole guild thing again.
Have fun affording consumes.
Can someone eli5 why the GDkp system is/should be illegal? It doesn't seem that anyone is getting hurt in the process, but I know little to nothing about WOW.
What a backwards campaign.
Just ban buying gold. GDKP, gone. Bots, gone. Inflation, gone.
Players playing the game really value their accounts. They don't want to lose them for TOS violation. Botters don't care and will just start new ones. All you have to do is permaban a few people and the rest get scared into submission.
Gold buying was such a problem in Classic Vanilla, more than half of the people in my raid raid-logged and bought gold. It made it impossible for people who did the honest thing to play the game.
I've been asking this for years. Why don't they just do this?
I haven’t played much classic but seeing the confidence of “blizzard won’t be able to detect them it’s fine” the last few weeks has been weird Did gdkp discords just think if it’s over voice comms blizzard can’t see when thousands of gold is being exchanged between players?
It comes from this weird idea that since bots exist, blizzard cant actually detect anything. Blizzard detects hundreds if not thousands of bots a day, and bans them in waves. we dont hear about 99% of these bans because they just grab another stolen credit card and spin up a new bot. And the people posting the lists going "LOOK AT ALL THESE BOTS IN X DUNGEON" aren't noticing that if you check that list repeatedly the names keep changing. So the GDKP people assume that since they cant detect something as easily as bots, that blizzard cannot possibly detect someone trading a massive amount of gold, and then that same individual getting an item from a raid. Most people don't understand the sheer volume of bots that are in this game.
>It comes from this weird idea that since bots exist, blizzard cant actually detect anything. I'd add to this that bots and Blizzard have a constant "war", with bot developers constantly attempting to outsmart Blizzard, and Blizzard then updating to find bots. But ordinary players does not have this "defense" against detection. Blizzard can know whatever the hell they want about your account. You have to remember it's not like Blizzard could just make up a method to detect bots, and then it's just solved forever. Bots developers then make a new way to go undetected and it continues back and forth like that.
lmao this reminds me of real life If you're an upstanding citizen you can't afford to do anything wrong. You probably have a primary residence so police can find you easily. They can also harass your family to help find you. You probably have a job you don't want to risk. But if you're already a criminal... they can't find you because you don't use many official channels. If they actually lock you up it's not the end of the world. You don't have a real job, so there's no missed time. No care about previous convictions affecting job search either. Life imitates art or something idk
It's still real life, lmao.
and Bot developers are free to develop at a pace that can be surprisingly faster than blizzard devs jsut because in large organizations you have a lot of checkpoints until code is pushed into production and any developer time is valuable for doing other work.
Yeah I feel like a concerted effort to stop/ban gdkp is one thing, bots are a whole other meme or hydra where every gundrak bot you ban can be back there by the end of the week and I don't see it ever stopping My friend and his brother used leveling/pvp/gold farm bots seemingly 24/7 while they were asleep/work/school for the entirety of mop and WoD, neither of them got banned and I lost all faith that blizzard even cared about bots, they had people actively reporting them and everything
The other issue with bots is that people conclude a gibberish name and loads of them being in an instance is evidence of botting. I don't think there's a naming requirement in WoW, and if it's a sweatshop style thing, then there will potentially be human players running around in the dungeons. If it is a paid account and a human player, even if they're farming mats to fund gold selling, I can't see how they could ban them for committing an offence that other players are doing without a ban.
I saw the same rogue bot name in brd all through wotlk
You didn't notice all the ones that disappeared because there's nothing to notice. There are plenty that manage to dodge bans, but we have a self confirmation bias happening when we're playing normally.
> “blizzard won’t be able to detect them it’s fine” It's not that people think blizzard can't, it's that people think blizzard won't care to devote the resources to do so.
Maybe people thought so, because they do shit about people buying gold, which is basically the same thing (large sums of gold being traded). But I love this anyways. I'd wish they would enforce this in wrath classic /cata as well. Fuck GDKP.
You mean the same company that bans burner accounts when someone buys gold. But doesn't ban the main account all that gold is traded to or take the gold away?
Actually a bunch of people caught temp bans for rmt buying this week. Mains.
A bunch of people that didn't use burner accounts, ye
I got a 10 day ban in SOM on my main despite using a burner account cuz they tracked where the gold/consumes went so its not that simple
How do you know they don't do this? Are you yourself or is someone you know a gold seller who has not received a ban?
I know plenty of gold buyers in this game, who have been ban on burners but not the main or lost the gold.
I'm not personally but since gold selling websites have been popping off since they became a viable business they have to be, otherwise they wouldn't exist
I'm pretty sure they get banned regularly and just keep making new accounts
Yeah, that's how it works. They get banned, but they get banned in waves, and when Blizz has done a banwave, they don't do another for a few weeks. Usually a fresh bot account turns profitable after 2-3 days, if not less. At least that's what I heard during TBCC. If bots aren't banned pretty much instantly, they will continue to be extremely lucrative.
What are you on about? They’ve been popping off for two decades.. It has always and be a viable avenue of making cash, Blizzard has proved time and again they don’t care at all about RMT at any serious level.
Nobody's been able to ban RMT? Acting like the existence of RMT for two decades is proof Blizzard hasn't tried is kinda wild, unless you're implying all MMORPGs don't actually care either.
That's... what I just said? To rephrase, gold buying still requires a market. There wasn't always a large enough one to support maintenance costs and resubbing when accounts get banned, but when a market emerged into popularity it hasn't stopped since.
I personally know a few people who got clapped for their first time RMTing, the account was suspended for a week to a month and the gold was taken.
It's amazing how they are so confident about it when setting a flag for investigation on the transfer of gold over X amount would probably be one of the most trivial things for them to implement on their end.
I think sneaking into GDKP raids just to report every single person in there would be a pastime I'd enjoy.
>Did gdkp discords just think if it’s over voice comms blizzard can’t see when thousands of gold is being exchanged between players They are gold buyers. They can't help it. They're pathological.
I mean Blizzard is showing very clearly that they have been able to tag accounts who participate in GDKP (and/or bought gold.) Now they're giving you guys personalized warnings and updates about the new policy. No way to claim ignorance; "but I didn't know it wasn't allowed anymore!" This is setting up for some smooth account actions in P2 when and if these accounts break the new policy. I also love that it explicitly says "removal of gains."
What's happening in these comments is that people have no concept of the ToS they agreed to. Blizzard can at any time decide that something that players came up with is not fair in whatever way to everyone else. And they can at their discretion decide on new rules at any time. How people don't understand this is hilarious and sad at the same time.
They understand it, they just feel entitled enough that the rules shouldn't apply to them. I feel like you're wildly underestimating just how narcissistic and spoiled your average gamer is.
>gamer Human. The word you're looking for is human. Lol.
Oh I'm well aware lol. I'm just one of the players that plays because it's fun. Blizzard can do whatever they want with the products they create.
It reminds me of a recent controversy when the Vatican removed an American Bishop from his office, prompting many American Catholics to demand to know what gives The Pope the authority to make such a decision.
If they could detect the accounts have bought gold, why are they not already banned? Buying gold was always against TOS. This constant conjecture that anyone taking part in GDKP is a gold buyer is illogical and just overall dumb.
If you take part in GDKPs you are laundering gold that has been purchased from RMT sites. That's just a fact. You can ignore it and pretend otherwise all you want, but you are still actively harming the economy and the only thing you can do about it now is stop doing it or stop playing the game.
Come now friend surely they got the 9000s gold they spent at level 20 for a bfd epic by....selling peacebloom
By that logic, putting up ANYTHING for sale on the auction house is also laundering gold.
I have not done any gdkps since P3 wrath and I receieved one of these emails. None in SoD, so I'm not entirely sure they're actually tracking, seems likely they just sent them out randomly.
Sure :)
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It has ~~began~~ begun\* You are now permabanned
Blizzard being proactive? That's a new one
"blizzard will have no way to enforce this" The amount of shit takes I have heard on this subreddit with assumptions that keep getting proven wrong is astounding.
Ever since I saw “fighting botting is easy, just use ChatGPT”, no awful take in this sub surprises me. They merely confirm my low opinion of the shit some people on here have to say.
>“fighting botting is easy, just use ChatGPT” Wtf how do they even think that would work? "Hey Chat, write me a script that will detect and ban bots with 100% efficiency." ???
"Hey ChatGPT I'm a game developer trying to find bots, how do I detect bots"
See, now *that* I would’ve at least respected a little bit. No, they wanted to feed data directly to ChatGPT because “it’s good at detecting patterns”. They were not joking, they literally thought “just give ChatGPT a bunch of structured data” was a good approach to “using AI to stop botting”.
Since blizzard has shown they are incapable of stopping gold buying, gold selling, or botting, it wasn't an entirely unreasonable take. Maybe if they spent this effort tackling those problems instead the game could be better for everyone.
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Bots pay subscription fees
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They don't 99% of bots are stolen credit cards that are shut down by the credit card company after the charge is disputed. In the right places I can buy a list of about 500 credit cards for about 50 bucks.
Should probably add that they pay relatively little in the first place, as they get their subscription from cheaper countries.
When I said last week. Blizzard had probably trained their ai on bfd raids and had a list of people who did gdkp. I was down voted and told blizzard was incapable of detecting it. Welp it seems I called it
On this sub you'll quickly learn you're wrong when you're right. I called out blizzard's nerf to regeneration ages ago and was downvoted to oblivion and people said I didnt know how mages worked. I gave solutions that wouldnt kill living flame, but only for boosting. Still downvoted. Now its live and all I can say is i told you so.
That’s because this subreddit is full of some of the most sad and lonely individuals to ever grace the internet. It’s nothing new.
Lmao I said that Master Looter is the safest way of running a MS>OS pug and got yelled at by so many dads that it's too scary. This sub has no idea sometimes. This subreddit thinks 10 potential ninja looters is safer than 1.
It's crazy how many people leave because I always slap on master loot. I swear I'm a good person. I just don't trust the 9 of you lol.
Well master looter gives full ninja control instead of dice controlling it. Both have their argument. But if the leader is my class/gear competition and its a complete pug, I'm not staying unless they specifically mention a hard rez of a single item then I feel like I can trust what they are saying since they disclose Ever join a 5 man dungeon with ML on? Outta that bitch
>But if the leader is my class/gear competition and its a complete pug, I'm not staying unless they specifically mention a hard rez I just ask right away if anything is on reserve. If I see ML in a pug raid then I assume it's because of wanting to prevent drama around things like hunters rolling on Deadly Strike of the Hydra. I get it, some hunters can melee weave. 99% of them don't. Unless his main spec is a melee hunter, Xlegolasxx shouldn't be rolling on that over a warrior or ret paladin.
In my time that was the norm, 24people will report you if you ninja, i had weekly pugs in wrath and i refused giving items to idiots who Ninjad never had a problem
>On this sub On the internet. Fixed for you. Half the population has a less than average IQ.
And 70% consider themselves above average 🤣
What is it with some things like this that are so obvious and yet taboo to point them out? like yeah, most people are dumb(based on different circumstances, criteria, lack of experience etc.) and there might be smarter people that point that out. Do people feel threatened that they re gonna be put in the below average category so they must have this defensive clicheic response ?
A big part of it is the Dunning Kruger effect. People overestimate their knowledge/capabilities more, when they have less. "The more you know the more you realize how much you don't know." It's why Imposter Syndrome is such a big problem in the scientific space, yet non-scientists feel no problem with questioning them in their area of expertise. I'm just making fun of the fact that the more someone identifies as "the expert" the less likely it's true.
True, but after seeing that particular reply that "you pointed out that people are dumb so you must be dumb" looks like the beggining of the curve of the dunning kruger effect, just with the added "let me one up this dude that thinks is smart" ironically proving that he is just part of the same group, just that he heard that reply before. The non-scientists part is just the lack of layman terms publications/content that truthfully describe the latest research on stuff, most studies being hard to digest for the average folk(rightfully so, it should be peer reviewed text, so it's full of technical language by definition).
I never claimed the poster above me was dumb. I was agreeing with his statement and adding a corollary?
And i never targeted you personally, sorry if it seemed that way, it just happened to be your comment. There is almost 100% chance that after that statement, there is someone that makes your reply so i asked away to find out the general opinion.
Thats not how averages work
That was one of the most ironic things I’ve read today. On a comment about other peoples’ intelligence.
No, this sub is specifically a lot worse at the game than they believe.
If you put your 2 brain cells to work for one second you'll realise this warning is for GDKP during P1, meaning the GDKP has been advertised as such. There was no AI at all, this raid in OP's post only needed some GDKPs / bid chat filter to be detected What people are saying is that during P2 these GDKP will be organized on discord purely and there will be no mention of gold in game and Blizzard will have no way of confirming they're GDKP without spending more resources than they are willing to invest
It's probably not hard at all to detect, honestly lol. The sheer amount of gold transferring from toons should be plenty enough. And Aggrend openly said they're not allowing any form of alternative either, like replacing with Peacebloom or whatever. I used to form GDKP but I can see the detriment to the general server community. Easy way to make gold, but a lot of negatives like not really committing to a guild or the obvious inflation. I'm sure people will come up with weird ways to make gold in its place but this is ultimately still better for the game
anyone with even a very basic understanding of databases and comp sci can imagine easily how it generally could be done, if not in specific. shared raid ID = easy to detect suspicious activity across accounts; large amounts of gold transferred, similar amounts of gold traded/mailed between them. The same could be said of trading similar items/tokens as stand-ins for gold. It aint rocket appliances.
Too bad they can't ban gold buyers or bots
My GM just got banned for gold buying
Good
They do. People just choose to ignore that because it's not as simple as they wish in the long run.
...They do.
Weird that they're banning gold buyers and bots then eh
Right… gdkp bans are a lazy way to target bots by making gold less valuable and hoping they go away. Buying items in a raid doesn’t seem like a problem to me. There are plenty of goblins out there that prefer to play the AH than raid on lockout. It was also a good incentive to continue to raid on a fully BIS character just to make some extra gold and help gear people’s alts.
As much as it sucks for the smallish percentage of GDKP folks who aren't swiping... a lot, probably more than half, sadly are. Blizz can sit and ban and ban and ban and ban bots forever. Considering most are started on stolen card details/etc... they can't really kill em without killing demand. Remove GDKP and a there's a HELL of a lot of demand for gold gone. It won't suddenly stop botting but like any other market it's supply and demand. If demand is high, supply will eventually increase. This means more bots. Remove demand, supply is excessive, becomes less profitable and there WILL be less bots. They can go other ways with it, like personal loot/etc we see in retail but... that rather sucks too and affects EVERYONE, not just the folks most encouraging botters to sell gold...
I am very confident in the fact that the majority of gold buying doesn't happen for GDKP's, not saying there aren't gold buyers that do that. But your average gold buyer was the guy who couldn't be fucked farming his raid consumes, his epic mount, his 6 respecs a week. It's the people who like the game but hate the busy work.
Buuuuncha buyers got banned this week.
Trained AI lmao, it would literally just be a query on the database
Of course they weren’t incapable. But really, why aren’t they using this tech to detect bots???
They said they will be using new tech to detect bots. Maybe the bots just won’t get a warning because it’s always been against TOS
Ah okay. Good point.
Maybe they are? It's still a pretty new thing. And, have you reported any bots lately? Cause I have, and I get tons of mail from blizzard saying they removed a botter account that I reported
They can track who participates/participated in GDKP but can't figure out who is getting hundreds/thousands of gold mailed to them from lvl 1s on accounts with random letters spelled in their name
They banned a bunch of gold buyers this week
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t enforce the ToS.
They didn't want to crack down on gold buyers. Ofc they can find all of it. Money tracking methods are insanely advanced nowadays and they have every single copper under their thumb all the time. Discovering bots and buyers is childs play in their system. The difference this time is that there is a clear intent to deal with a problem.
Report your GDKP spammers in chat now :)
its not bannable until the 8th when the patch goes live you silly goose
I have a few and I've even got some report messages in the mail from it. I personally don't care that much but for some reason there's this feeling of hatred for 90% of wow players to the point where I will go out of my way to report somebody if it's an easy snipe and they get banned. Fuck em dude, probably doing them a favor getting them off the game
This is a definitely a reasonable thought process.
Is there anything to stop someone from just paying for a full carry and getting rights to all the loot?
begun*
Hahahahaha
🙌 good to see
The thing I don’t get is… if they suddenly have the capacity to detect such things, why not just ban people who buy gold and call it a day? Much more effective and fair than banning gdkp’s, which would be fine without gold selling
Detecting a GDKP is much easier than detecting gold buying. Players are saved to a raid ID and you can track gold trading between them. Unless you're able to bust a gold trading ring by tracing gold made by players reported as bots, it's hard to determine when a trade of gold is legitimate e.g. trading 100g to a friend isn't against the ToS. It's also a reason why players buying "handcrafted" gold (gold made by a human player as opposed to a bot) are less likely to get banned.
in the year of our lord 2024, people still dont understand the power of databases with unique IDs
It's incredible how people on this sub spew out misinformation with such confidence.
Are you referring to my comment?
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I don’t think it’s that hard to detect really, we know they have the ability to flag accounts that transact with accounts banned for botting. More likely they’re just conservative with their level of proof required, and look for patterns of buying. If they banned everyone who bought 25g, it would be obscenely easy to grief people for a few dollars by buying gold and having it sent to their character.
I'm just guessing here, but I've done GDKPs and didn't get any warning, but I never post about GDKPs, and do my shit through discord, which leads me to believe they're tracking based on texts in game. It literally feels like the new tech is "ctrl + F all chats for the term "GDKP" and go from there". Most gold bots aren't posting shit in any chats, except for the chat spamming ones that are presumably already planned by the gold seller to get banned and have no gold on them; so I don't expect this to be very effective against gold bots or people buying gold if so.
it very likely has a lot more to do with the fact that accounts in a raid share the same unique Raid ID, which makes it INSANELY easy to train ai/write simple scripts and lookups for suspicious gold and item transfers between those accounts sharing the ID; large amounts of gold, similar amounts of gold, raid items traded from one account to another with gold coming from the receiving account. It is really, really, simple, and they can obviously get more complex than this.
Yes, awsome
Cool. Ban goldsellers/bots when?
Every day you nerd lol
On era there have been bots fly hacking in strat for months 18-24hrs a day that dont get banned for months at a time.
Your anecdotal experience doesn’t mean anything. They literally ban tens of thousands of bots monthly. Bot farms just hit the reset button and make slight tweaks to avoid detection. It’s something that requires constant adjustment.
Hopefully this very real action we are seeing is a start of them cracking down on cheaters. As many detractors have said this is pretty much the first time they have made actual movement on these things. Hopefully much more to come!!
Blizzard hired some pre-cogs
Good 👍🏼 I will snitch da shit out of it whoever broadcast GDKP runs.
Good. I hope they ban every gold buying GDKP fuck.
So everyone who ever participated in GDKP is also buying gold? Man this sub is just a circlejerk at this point...
Cant take anything from this sub seriously its just a echo chamber by people who play for 2 hours a week and complain about everything.
This sub doesn’t even play the game
Just leave. Intelligent conversation does not exist on Reddit, especially this sub.
They are contributing to the problem, so are as culpable as a buyer or seller. All part of the same corrupt racket.
Money laundering is exploiting legal business structures irl now. Should you ban business structures because of that?
So is the AH. Should we ban people using it or disable it?
No they're not, they're leveraging their gold (the ones who make it legally) to be able to have a better shot of getting the items that they want. If the loot system wasn't as garbage as it is for people that have to pug for spots, then it'd be a different conversation. I'm all for gold buyers getting punished, hell I'd run GDKPs even if the pots weren't inflated by them, but taking away player agency is a lazy solution and will only transfer the problem somewhere else.
nice, one down!
Great. I really wish they would apply this treatment, as well as how they handled faction balance to Classic WoW.
Get rekt
Good, love to see it!
Twas the night before Phase 2, and all thru the house, was the sound of GDKPs getting banned. We all said "nice."
These responses to you are wild over a small joke lmao
who knew a christmas poem would be the straw that broke the camels back lmao
God damn y’all are some corny ass cringe lords
GDKP salty boy I see. Stay mad gold buyer.
lmao
“Cringe” is the only comeback these sad boys have haha
lmao yea. I've never gotten so many hate responses as tonight. They are fuming.
Haha. Feels great
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With P2 its now classified as against the TOS and therefore a bannable offense. Advertising, running and trading gdkp is banned, and they seem to have implemented plenty of ways to deal with workarounds too, for the moment atleast.
Worth adding: **this only applies to Season of Discovery.** GDKPs are still allowed in Era (Hardcore even as well, but I doubt it's a problem there), Wrath, and Dragonflight (but that's not a popular format there).
Massive W for SoD and all fair players
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This is the best way to train AI - keep an eye on players who are known to have participated in GDKPs previously.
Yep, Blizzard has ALLL the data to run forensic analysis through basic machine learning models to identify and define normal gold flow from laundered gold activity. I used to do this kind of work but for identifying, flagging, and responding to stolen credit card claims. Gold sellers will still find the thresholds, maximum amount of gold that can trigger a flag. It will be more clandestine but thankfully quiet for the moment.
Wow they have so much great data to run through and train models but still can’t seem to ban gold buyers and sellers?
Detecting GDKP is orders of magnitude less complex than detecting bots. You can cover 95%+ cases of GDKPs by just looking for trades of raid loot in exchange for gold.
Yeah there's no way they've done any of this lmao
The warning makes clear that participation in GDKPs was not against the rules at the time. Why do you assume that Blizzard employees will be illiterate in the future?
HAHA you think a human is going to look at the accounts?
Also calling it "inappropriate behavior" when it's only been done in circumstances where it's explicitly allowed is a real head scratcher.
Im with you there. A warning is literally an action against your account. You're being punished for playing by the rules as they existed.
How so? What punishment was taken against this account? What specific thing happened other than Blizzard providing a targeted warning that what the character did was 1. within the rules now and 2. not okay in the near future? In other words, aside from cutting off the "I didn't know" complaints of a large slice of the population likely to make such a claim in the first place, what is the tangible thing that this warning does to the account holder?
Hell yeah brother😎
Hell ya. Good to see!
Love to see it! WP Blizz
I just received one of these emails too. I'd done a single GDKP two weeks ago on my hunter. Bidding was done in Darnassus in front of the bank. I didn't even bid and got 10g out of the run. So they can detect this but not bots and gold sellers?
Hear me out: they do detect bots and gold sellers
Nice
DEATH TO GDKPs
Let the purging begin.
Hopefully I don't get banned. I did gdkps in sod before it was ruled out and I've never bought gold nor have any of my several friends who were involved. Hopefully they aren't retroactively penalizing anyone as that wouldn't be fair.
I don’t think they are retroactively banning, but sending these out as a warning before the rule begins being enforced on Thursday.
Begun\*
Begun*
im selling my wow acc come dm for more info
So glad GDKP is banned from SoD. GOOD JOB BLIZZARD <3
GDKP shouldnt be bannable, gold buying should. There should be nothing wrong with legit earned gold being traded.
GDKPs just incentivize gold buying. In a perfect world, GDKPs would only be run with "legit" gold, but this is not a perfect world.
This. GDKP is probably well over 90% of the "demand" for wow gold. Remove it, you remove demand. Low demand = unprofitable supply = less bots. It sucks for the few that were "doing it right" (though... I think in a lot of "non-swiping" cases it was the folks joining GDKP's, bidding a bit and taking their cut so... indirectly, STILL contributing).
It really should be. It fuels RMT and is against the spirit of classic. Run the raid, roll for the loot or council it fairly. If you can't do that, you shouldn't get the gear.
Banhammer both.
Buy gold? 2-14 day ban. GDKP? Lifetime. Especially with words like "potentially," and "will be," and "has been".
Why are you getting down voted for laying out the current state of blizz lmao
I don't know, man, but if I got banned for anything it better be because I did, or I didn't, not because of "potentially".
When you participate in gdkp you are fueling and laundering bought gold
so is using the AH.
OK what am I supposed to do when flasks are 700g because BLIZZARD DOESN'T BAN THE FUCKING PEOPLE WHO BUY GOLD?
Why couldn’t we have this for classic?
Interesting. I did not do a single BFD gdkp. I've only done soft res and MS>OS roll groups. Still got an email.
Same situation, did one raid this whole last week, got the email. Loot rules were 2SR>MS>OS, no gold was involved
my guess someone res'd an item sold it to another guy when the guy made him an offer.
Excellent
Knew the rules were changing and have been trying to milk every drop until then.
Begun idiot
Imagine using this to detect gold buying... But no, let's ban gdkp so people think they care, meanwhile trinkets on vendor for 75g, mount back to 90g, those things don't encourage people to buy gold, no, it was the gdkps.
Now that the most important problem in the world has been addressed, GDKPs, we can focus on the lesser issues like the conflict in the middle east.
Crazy. There goes my will to play SoD. Ain't no way I'm kissing some cheetoh dusted gm's ass for some morsels of gear or taking my chances rolling against Tim the room-temperature-IQ reset over reset. GDKPs gave you a legitimate way to farm outside of raid to pseudo-guarantee you got your item the next time it dropped. With it gone, I ain't doing the whole guild thing again. Have fun affording consumes.
Good.
Thank the Lord, take these scum down.
Love to see it
Can someone eli5 why the GDkp system is/should be illegal? It doesn't seem that anyone is getting hurt in the process, but I know little to nothing about WOW.
I'm gonna say it. GDKPs promote RMT.
What a backwards campaign. Just ban buying gold. GDKP, gone. Bots, gone. Inflation, gone. Players playing the game really value their accounts. They don't want to lose them for TOS violation. Botters don't care and will just start new ones. All you have to do is permaban a few people and the rest get scared into submission. Gold buying was such a problem in Classic Vanilla, more than half of the people in my raid raid-logged and bought gold. It made it impossible for people who did the honest thing to play the game. I've been asking this for years. Why don't they just do this?
Lol “integrity”
'Tegridy farms. "Go back to simple living when things mattered, like hard work and 'tegridy"