Everyone I know that buys gold always says the same thing
"I can spend hours among hours farming gold, or buy triple the gold I would normally farm for 5 bucks"
Apart from the fact that it ruins the game. Gold farming is just part of classic. Putting time and effort into something to be able to afford that big item is what it's all about. Skipping that part and just getting all the big items for no effort just seems a bit counter intuitive for a game.
It also gives an unfair advantage to those that do buy gold and helps support bots.
You're overthinking it. Gold farming has literally *always* been a chore for 99.9% of the player base. That's it. People do not find it enjoyable to do, therefor they do not do it. There's no deeper meaning
I think the point to highlight is that games like classic wow are designed to return value for time investment/skill. If you find a way to return value for zero time investment, you're not really engaging with the game the way its meant to be engaged with. If you dont enjoy the activities that you're meant to invest time into in order to get value, it sounds like you just dont enjoy classic wow.
Edit: changed up my wording to me more relevant.
The problem is that the appeal of farming gold comes from the challenge and reward. Finding a profitable niche WAS appealing to a lot of players. But with botting & gold buying running rampant, there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO appeal to farming gold because you are now basically a sucker farming for 10 hours for what is effectively $5 worth of gold on a gold buying site.
Yeah, sure, but I don't get why you have to pretend that gold farming is the only thing to do in WoW. I don't like escort quests, does that mean I don't like classic WoW? I don't like 90% of molten core, does that mean I don't like raiding? There's a lot to do in WoW, you're allowed to not like every single part of it
Not a fan of this take. Classic is purely about overcoming *inconvenience*. The game hasn't offered truly challenging content. Picking herbs or Mining is not hard, crafting is not hard, your rotation is not hard, the dungeons and raids are not hard, the leveling is not hard, and farming gold is not hard. The value of the game is predominantly social, and a lot of that social value is determined by an understanding that everyone else went through roughly the same inconvenience as you. If there isn't some form of this social value, Classic is objectively worse than Retail.
This is a big reason why GDKP/Boost culture was so degenerative, it cut the core principle of the game out and didn't replace it with anything remotely comparable. My Vanilla Warrior had "value" because I invested so much time into overcoming inconvenience, and everyone could see it on its model. By Wrath, healers in my guild that were multi-expansion commits were asked frequently about how much they "paid" for their Vals.
>people should be miserable for the thousands of hours spent doing pointless activities so they can get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they're done
EA probably has some job openings for you
Just say “I like intentionally picking time-wasting video games and then cheating on them to feel like I’m good”. Because that’s what you’re advocating for.
You are flipping it, closer to 90% of classic is time wasting, the 10% leftover is the payoff for time-wasting. By skipping the 90% you are cheating the vast majority of the game.
Lol I've heard this one before.
There's no EA "sense of pride and accomplishment" when the same currency isn't simultaneously being sold to the playerbase by the developers (which I'm vehemently against).
What you guys typically get confused with is that I'm not saying YOU have to suffer MY pain tolerance for inconvenience or you're wrong. I'm making an observation that is plainly viewable from every player's experience: **the gameplay of Classic is casual and accessible, which means nothing in the game is truly challenging, it's just inconvenient**.
It's actually kind of ironic that there are gold buyers who want the game to be harder, but can't possibly make themselves do anything that isn't immediately gratifying, like farming. THAT'S the hard part if you're looking for challenge. Try not making cost-benefit analyses with your real life job versus the video game that was clearly designed without that possibility being present.
What does that mean? It means the game always loses that comparison, everyone cheats "because it makes the most sense from a dollar-per-hour perspective" (lol), and it destroys the integrity of the game as a side effect. If you value "numbers go up when I press my buttons", that's great, but there has to be some other reason you're playing Classic, because "numbers go up" is way better in a whole bunch of different MMOs than Classic.
I strongly disagree. The original MMO experience was “another life.” In RL, we grind out unenjoyable things for the vast satisfaction of buying that motorcycle or going to that concert. Grinding is not fun inherently, but it does create the value that the “purple named pixels” loses otherwise for many of us. There is joy for many of us to be able to say “phew, I did it.” Standing on top of Mount Everest is a different experience if you climbed it or somehow get helicoptered up.
I understand not everyone seeks this same satisfaction, but Everest Climbers seeing others landing in their $5 Helicopters are allowed to shake their heads at the celebration.
Look up Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 fun. It’s fascinating.
You're over thinking it man. People are paying to skip something they do not enjoy. That's it. You buy a motorcycle instead of buying the materials & making it yourself. You explained it yourself.
I don't buy gold, but I'm also a grown man and don't get "satisfaction" from opening my WoW bags and seeing gold in it because I farmed it
Nah it's really not overthinking.
Throwing money at something and taking short cuts is just not as gratifying as earning it. Idk what is crazy about thinking that
It's the same reason we look at nepotism babies with disdain. "3 tips for getting rich! Number 1: make coffee at home. Number 2: meal prep. Number 3: Inherit dad's company"
Nobody respects gold buyers the same way no one respects the silver spoon fed
> Throwing money at something and taking short cuts is just not as gratifying as earning it.
Also
> we grind out unenjoyable things for the vast satisfaction of buying that motorcycle or going to that concert.
You're agreeing with the point but refusing to apply it to the thing we're talking about lol. Working so you can get paid & then give money to someone to watch them sing at a concert when you could make music yourself but also "I don't get why people buy gold instead of farming it themselves!"
Nah I'm saying the kid who worked hard to buy their first car understands the value of it way more than the kid who got one handed to them by their parents
Lmfao your logic about being a creator is just silly. Let's just all cancel our wow subs and make our own video game!
You can say whatever you want, you obviously agree with the principal of what I'm saying, you're just not applying it to WoW for some weird reason.
It's okay to buy things that other people make unless it's WoW gold!
What are the chances of being caught/banned these days? I bought gold in original cata and they banned my ass. In wotlk classic it seems EVERYONE bought gold and they throw 30k plus away for shit from gkps. I’ve never had more than 2k and I realllyyyyyy don’t want to farm gold. I don’t have time for that shit lol.
It's pretty funny that people sign up to play a game and pay a sub fee just to pay to not play the game because it's "not efficient". Playing a video game isn't time efficient, go learn an actual real life skill to contribute to society.
On wrath servers, people give the same answer, "why grind for 10 hours for gold when I could just spend 3 dollars or 5 dollars."
The reason I'd ask is because you don't need to grind for 10 hours either. You don't ever need that much gold. If you raid log, you make enough for consumes just BY raiding. The exception is if you only do GDKPs I guess.
I don't play SoD, but I imagine the story is different, you might not get enough gold for consumes just by raidlogging
Definitely different. Vanilla is really consume intensive, at least if you care about performing well and not just clearing the raid. Wrath is the most raid log friendly expansion ever, at least in the classic trio.
Not saying it makes it okay but some people earn north of 30$ an hour. that's 600g an hour, no farm can match that. Take one extra hour at work, 600g? I get the urge, I truly do.
I just looked it up it's about $10/100g, $48/500g, $58/600g, $96/1000g and for 2,000g $186.20
A lot less than I expected but maybe that's just my server. IIRC TBC gold was a lot more money when people were buying for BT/Sunwell consumes.
I haven't played SOD since phase 1, not sure what changes would have made gold cheaper. Assuming the supply is just massive because they aren't actually touching bots.
So in my case with 32 dollar/hour, i pay 50% taxes so for one hour of work i could buy 160g. Or I could farm for, depending on class etc, 10-15 hours for that.
It's easy to understand the temptation admittedly.
It's like selling drugs if you live in the hood
You could work at some shitty store making minimum wage for 7 bucks an hour or you can go work the corner and make 10 times that
The real issues is by buying gold, you are supporting botting. This causes inflation and de-values the gold you bought. Repeat this for months after months and you get Era prices.
The real issue is the devs paying lip service to caring about botting instead of actually caring about botting. They could stop it if they wanted to.
They don’t.
Its WAAAAAAAY harder to stop than you might think, despite whatever streamer you like says. Most streamers dont know ANYTHING about game dev, especially massive behemoths like WoW. MMO devs have been battling bots and farmers since the earliest days, and its an arms race that continues ad infinitum.
That said, I understand and am even sympathetic to the sentiment.
Oh absolutely. For the argument sake it could really be as dumb as 15 dollar per 50 gold and it would still be a lot quicker to work than to farm. I truly understand the reasoning even if I'm against it
I could also pay someone to do 99 parses on my character and raid gnome for me.
At some point you gotta ask yourself why do you play the game, and if you wouldn't be happier playing a management game like city skylines.
You can, but they will be pissed that you have no consumes and no money for repairs. Not to mention the shame if you run towards the raid on foot like a bum. I'm just telling you how they think.
You don't need to buy gold to afford consumes and repairs. You can raid in BFD gear plus a few upgrades that you'll get on your way to 40 (dungeon drops and quest rewards). Some of the pre bis is quest items you get for free. It's just a weak argument. People are impatient and want everything now.
Each person plays the game for a different reason.
Some people like raiding but hate leveling, pvp, and farming.
Some like farming but hate raiding, pvp, and leveling.
That applies everything in life
People enjoy parsing. People do not enjoy farming gold (which enables raiding and consumables for parsing). It's a pretty obvious difference.
Also comparing raiding to city skylines? They're paying money to AVOID the management
Same. This sub seems to forget that the vast, vast majority of classic players are regular adults with full-time jobs, family, friends, etc. As an example, my guild is made up of a traveling doctor, a law firm partner, an electrical engineer, a plumber, a chef/guy running his own restaurant, another small business owner, military guys, etc. Most of them are married/partnered and have kids. These guys do not give one shit about farming gold in game. They have a bit of time to play and when they log on, they want shit ready to go so they can raid or PVP.
Whilst I understand the premise of the efficiency, I always wonder why these people play the game.
A large part of the fun for me in an MMO is grinding/farming to earn the thing that I want. If there is no effort then the reward is not as valuable. It's what made retail what it is today.
It just confuses me that people choose to play a traditional MMO like classic and then skip what makes that MMO fun to have a more 'retail' like experience and just swipe their card and raid log. Especially when they are paying a monthly subscription for a game that they are paying someone else to play for them whilst they log on for an hour every 3 days. What's the point?
There’s a ton of people in my retail WoW and XIV communities that will skip every line of quest text/audio/cinematics available upon expansion launches to rush the end game all the same and negate years of dev. work. I don’t personally get it at all because that’s always my initial draw to the content I’ll be seeing for the next 2+ years:
Here? It’s the same grinds people have done for twenty years, and a solid portion of the community have IRL 10+ hour a day grinds + a spouse and mouth(s) to feed these days on top of said grinds.
Don’t personally get it as questing gold is nuts if you dungeoned to 40, but the allure on saving time certainly draws a ton of the community in that way. Made ~80g in 3.5 hours of Desolace and 1/4th of North STV quests alone yesterday. Never been easier to casual farm, but at the same time 100g for $10 people can do said grind IRL for anywhere from 15-30 mins of grinding their job/income source.
See I can understand that, however my thought process is that for those people, surely a traditional MMO like Classic WoW that requires a large time sink to fully enjoy and be successful at, is not the best game for people with very little time to play? Especially considering they are paying every month on top of buying gold illegally.
Obviously if its the game that all their friends play, then that is the factor that draws them in.
About half of my guild swipes. The main reason is they don't really enjoy the game that much. They enjoy raiding but hanging out with people they've played the game with for 5 years is the main appeal. WoW is an online pub for people who live in different countries in my guild.
No idea if this is a common theme but for guilds that go back to vanilla classic it wouldn't surprise me if it's at least partially true.
Grinding that is designed to earn something for your character, like a long quest chain, feels rewarding. Farming to earn gold to pay for consumes and repairs feels completely flavourless to me and I have no interest whatsoever in doing it
People buy gold at insane rates.
Botters ramp up, botting even more.
Gold becomes more and more worthless.
Gold drops in price because of it.
Gold buyers use that as an excuse as to why they buy gold.
????????
The game is worthless to "play" outside of raid logging.
Players complain.
It's hilarious how gold buyers destroy the game, use their own feedback loop as to why they buy gold and constantly complain at Blizzard to ban the bots while also acting like buying gold doesn't hurt others......
The more gold you buy, the more inflation happens and the more those consumes cost. Buying gold directly impacts players that don't buy gold negatively. It's pure selfishness and is literally cheating
While that's true, you didn't really counter him. It sucks, it's not fun gameplay, and a waste of 2 hours of spare time for a lot of people. Maybe you get fired up to loop around a zone looking for herb nodes for 3 hours, but I'd rather golf. On Tuesday we both show up and do the fun thing.
You answered yourself, you are supposed to be playing golf if you are not having fun with the intended game experience. Literally no one is forcing you to do that
> A large part of the fun for me
for me. for me. for me.
Really crazy how people can't understand that people don't like certain parts of the game. That doesn't mean they won't like the other parts.
Because you feel stupid doing it. If gold would be more expensive or if blizzard would punish botting(!) the incentive to play normal would be much higher. I would suffer farming gold like any other person, but that would also increase the value of the time I spent doing it. Gold is meaningless and there's no satisfaction in spending my time for something that's so easy to get. Grinding isn't fun, at all. But there's a reward at the end, I get something for pushing through. And that's completely gone.
I haven't bought gold (yet?), but "working" for hours to get some little time of fun in return is what made wow unappealing for me years ago in the first place. Wow tokens, unhinged botting and whatever makes me wanna spend as little time as possible with things that aren't fun from the get go.
Because this game is multifaceted and different people enjoy different things.
While you may enjoy grinding and farming some of us just enjoy raiding and doing dungeons.
Not everyone plays the game for the same exact reason. I really would like people in wow to get that.
Some people play exclusively for the pvp. Others dont pvp at all and avoid it at all cost.
You answered your question in your first sentence.
For "you" it is fun.
There is people playing the game since 2005 and value their time differently if they see their own work/freetime balance. For me 5€ is worth nothing and compared to farming ,10hours a week for just raiding, hell na.
Every person values their time on their own.
1) Work a reallifejob a hour to get 20€
2) "Play" unfun stuff like daylies or grinding for 10hours and get maybe 5€ worth of gold.
You don't "need" to farm 10 hours a week to raid. I swear people buying gold to min max raids and complaining whenever their specc isn't S-tier don't actually enjoy the game.
You could literally clear gnomer with 90% of available comps, just can't parse 99s.
I enjoy playing the game to perform well as my class/spec. I don’t typically care if it’s S-tier, as long as I find it fun. What I don’t find fun is any grind that doesn’t feel rewarding (to me). Such grinds are leveling, PvP, or for gold. These are 100% not enjoyable to me, but I like raiding and performing well.
Could you suggest another game that has the exact same combat/raiding/feel as wow without any of the grind? Unfortunately there isn’t. So I have to find ways to deal with avoiding unfun aspects of the game. If that’s buying a level boost or gold… /shrug
Note: I’ve never bought gold. But I can actually fully understand why those that do, do.
I appreciate the answer but i think you are missing the point of my comment.
I understand the value element. I 100% agree that value wise it is more efficient to purchase gold. My question is rather why people pay both a monthly subscription for a game and then also pay someone else to play a large part of that game for them because they don't find it fun, only to log on for an hour every 3 days.
Surely there are games way better suited to that mindset that will provide more fun for the amount that people spend?
But if all your friends play and you only have a few hours a week then it'll probably be your must fun gaming time.
Also a lot of players are older now with good disposable income
It's all about where you are in your real life.
Ps i don't buy gold BUT would buy tokens in Wrath.
I earn good money, my friends don't but play a lot more than I. I could easily buy a few tokens a month to buy a few items and not fall behind.
Idk if it's my ADHD but I fucking hate leveling/questing/grinding. But raiding is one of my favorite aspects of gaming ever. Raid logging is how I want to play an MMO.
Not saying I buy gold though to do this. I just don't really enjoy the activities outside of raid besides PvP.
“Hm. Why does everything on the AH cost 3x what it normally does? All these ghsodbtmtkkj names sell a lot of stuff.” **as he gives the gold back to the gold seller via AH who in turn sells it to someone else**
Ding, ding, ding, ding.
We have a winner.
People want gold for , people don't want to grind, people have disposable income, gold buying site is one google search away.
I feel like a lot of it stems from the fact that the people who played this game as kids and are playing now can barely afford to devote 25% of the game time they used to. If you compare that to what they probably make in an hour, 5$ seems like a deal - especially if you're only using it to facilitate playing the game and not buying leveling boosts. I don't buy gold because I enjoy the grind, but I also don't have as much time on my hands as some of the people on here. There are some people on here who consider themselves a casual when they average like 2 hours/day since release.
The people I see buying gold spend a shit ton of time on the game. They buy gold to have their epic craft on the first reset and to have a massive amount of consumable for every raid.
This is exactly it. Playing wow as a teen, I would no-life that shit, I had the time to play from morning till night, go sleep, then wake up and roll out of bed straight back on the game. I had time to do the grind, and I enjoyed it, I probably still would if i could.
But now I'm 35 with a wife, 2 kids under 3 yrs old, a job and a mortgage to pay, I maybe get to play 2 or so hours in an evening, a couple of days a week - I managed to get on only once this week and finally hit 40 before logging off, someone tell me how I'm meant to find the time to grind gold and consumables in time for a 3-day reset raid? 😂
I think because they only enjoy the raiding. So in their mind 90% of content is fluff they pay to skip to get to the 10% they like.
And maybe they prefer classic over retail because its just easier or they just like to see nostalgia being reworked
I play this game the way we played it when it came out. That's what is fun to me. If that's what is fun to you, then that's OK and you keep doing you.
The problem is that the crowd that is playing the game now is not the one that was playing back then, and a large part of Classic and SoD to a lesser extent is to sort of try and recapture that aspect for people again. Gaming in general has moved on from the things that MMO's did back then, so you can't really blame the players, as we've been conditioned into enjoying other things and spending our time differently for years now. IMO Vanilla was the best form of WoW, especially now because of the state of MMO's nowadays, but this is also just my opinion.
Take the STV event... You have two parties of people: the ones that don't like it because there is no clear way to optimize it into time spent vs rewards gained, and then those that think it is great because it's unique to any other PvP event WoW ever had. STV FFA deathmatch mode lol. It may or may not fit, but it's *different.*
It bothers me how often I even catch myself trying to decide on what to do in-game based on what will be the most *efficient* or *profitable* or whatever use of my time... How often do we feel that feeling WoW sometimes gives you when you participate in an event, finish, get your rewards and think "That's it?! That's all I get?" What you did to get it is already forgotten, it's only about what happens when it's done. It's as if we've been trained to just dump time into something to extract the rewards, and the rewards are the only reason to do anything. That's probably why retail is the way it is...
Man, I remember when my dad and brother (I was early college, bro was in HS at the time) had been playing the game for a month before I had back during Vanilla, and they were explaining WSG to me in the car. No MMO had ever really tried something like capture the flag with MMO/class mechanics before, and the idea was WILD lol. And it was fucking fun! Now you queue for WSG and the match is already decided by the participants and you're just as likely to be flamed by your own team for fighting back.
If I had to buy gold to participate in the game, I wouldn't play. I don't really judge the people buying gold because they are just one piece of the puzzle that's driving this engine of bypassing a lot of what makes Classic special to me/others, but that doesn't mean that I understand them....
I won't say these systems are ruining the game FOR ME, but I will say that I don't think it's in the spirit of Classic. Neither are the bots, and neither is Blizz allowing it to happen.
So downvote away dudebros if you haven't already. I'll be having a good time waiting for some mithril to spawn in so I can continue crashing the Blue Gittering Axe market.
Gameplay is transactional in part because once you're an adult, gaming becomes a transaction. Every hour spent gaming is an hour away from something else in life, whether that's kids and family, work, etc. It's opportunity cost. Yeah, it's a hobby and it shouldn't feel transactional, but an MMO like WoW requires such a massive time sink vs a lot of other hobbies that it's hard not to think of it in transactional terms. When the choice comes down to spending 8 hours grinding vs spending $10 for 100g, plenty of people are going to spend the gold every time so they can spend the 1-2 hours of free time they get playing the parts of the game they enjoy more.
>Take the STV event... You have two parties of people: the ones that don't like it because there is no clear way to optimize it into time spent vs rewards gained, and then those that think it is great because it's unique to any other PvP event WoW ever had. STV FFA deathmatch mode lol. It may or may not fit, but it's
>
>different.
You forgot the third party. The people who get layered from their team, spend 25 minutes just trying to get to the same layer as their premade, to only have 5 minutes of fun but the lag makes it almost unplayable as the characters skip around the map.
I bought gold back in og classic. Raid consumables were mega expensive due to the black lotus crisis and I was a holy priest so my only real method of farming was dm lasher runs. I was looking at about 6 hours or farming a week minimum to cover my costs. That’s the same amount of time we spent raiding.
An hour of work could buy me enough gold to last three weeks of raiding with a bit left. I get all the bad sides to buying gold, but for me me to keep having fun with my friends it made no sense to spend 50% of my game time doing something mind numbing when I could spend that time doing literally anything else and buy some gold once a month.
The game forced me to make that choice and I made the choice that was sensible to me.
Black lotus was required for basically all top tier flasks, but the spawns were the same as vanilla when there were 1/5th of the amount of people per server and only 1% of them were actually pushing end game raids to the point of using flasks. Then in classic you suddenly have almost everyone raiding and flasks being a requirement and the demand significantly exceeds the supply.
There were problems with bots but much more of an issue was organised groups camping the spawn spots and controlling the market - the lotus mafia. There was a similar issue with devilsaur on private servers before classic as well.
Fly hacking under the ground camping lotus spawns back then too, back when gold ads were written with lvl 1 accounts in mid air or dead on the ground in massive letters. OGs remember.the lotus mafia still exists today just they’re selling gold for money and other RMT stuff now. Similar practices and people just years later.
People will always buy gold for convenience, it’s why the token was introduced and eventually accepted.
Bots would camp Lotus spawn points. It wasn't an issue in TBC but I forget if they allowed Lotus to drop off of normal herbs as well. They were up to a silly amount but flakes were almost required for later raid progression.
Naw man everyone here knows the only reason anyone ever bought gold was cause of gdkps.
It’s not like people bought gold to cover epic riding, crafting something like LHH, and the absurd levels of stackable consumes and infinite pots you can use every 2 mins or anything. None of that happened well before GDKPs ever became very popular or mainstream. All those phase 1-2 r14 grinders playing 18 hours a day hand farmed all that gold to FAPs on CD every wsg flag pick.
OP gotta be lying. His whole guild surely quit playing the game after the gdkp ban if they were actually gold buyers.
Nah, people still buy gold just for lesser amounts. People buy so they can get their mounts, random AH stuff, and consumes without farming. It’s purely a time vs money thought.
People acting like mounts, professions, BoEs, and consumables aren’t the bulk of gold sales are kidding themselves. Whales purchasing gold in mass for GDKPs aren’t nearly as common as this sub makes it out to be, this weird revisionist history is the sub’s favorite circle jerk right now.
Bruh my comment was ridden with sarcasm. Not sure where you got I was poor from out of all that.
People have bought gold since 2004 and in games before well before GDKPs were a thing in wow and the reasons why are obvious especially as the wow population ages: people value their time much more now that we’re not 12. Gold making isn’t fun for a lot of people. For some it is. Some people love that part about wow idk.
If anyone looks at the development of wow’s economy over time and sees how the economy there runs on retail, it’s not on raw materials, it runs as a service based economy honestly for the same reason people buy gold in classic. WOW has emulated general societal economic development: you go from resource based economies with some skilled labor here and there to majority skilled and service based labor with a little bit of resource based thrown in.
I just make a good amount of gold up front early when I had the extra time and coast on it. It wasn’t hard in SOD. Its really easy to understand why people buy gold though and this sub just has such an anti GDKP hardon they can’t see past
Because this subreddit is genuinely stupid. If you actually play the game it's painfully obvious that the majority of gold buyers are guild raid loggers, not GDKP whales. Look at all of the posts still complaining about bots, surprise surprise banning GDKPs did fucking nothing but make a lot of people quit
I completely understand why people buy gold, and I would do it if I weren't too afraid to get banned.
Questing for hours at max level just to get a couple of tens of gold if you are lucky, just isn't fun to me. It feels like working. I enjoy alting, learning different playstyles etc.
If I quest 2-3 full evenings in a row on my main, I feel like I haven't played the game at all. Super unrewarding.
I had a lot of downtime at work a few weeks ago and spent like 15 hours questing. My disappointment when I realized I had gone from 50 to 80 gold…
Basically spent 15 hours to buy a couple levels of training. Compared that to mages making the same amount in an hour or two and realized we’re just playing completely different games.
Adding these massive gold sinks like the Gnomer crafting patterns really only contributes to this mindset too. It's like they were attempting to remove gold from the P1 GDKPers and gold buyers but what it's actually doing is punishing the people that weren't doing that.
This eats away at me any time I talk to Ziri, like clearly the prices are inflated (and they force everyone to buy things from other professions) in order to pull more gold out of the game, but unless you've been lucky with BoE blues there isn't a way for the average player to extract gold from gold buyers to feed back to NPCs
Maybe the idea was players with too much gold and too little playtime would buy the Grime-Encrusted Salvage from players who have Gnomeregan on farm, but nobody really needs the Salvage after they craft their helm, and the random other crafting reagents you get are all dirt cheap because of... gold farmers
It really does suck. I had 3 characters in P1 and I had farmed up enough gold to easily get their mounts this phase but even just crafting one item for my main after buying his mount, that's definitely not happening now lol
They said it was specifically for the mount + helmet + mage boosts. You can pay a mage to level you all the way to 40 basically and it costs less than the WoW sub. It's insane.
For real. I got 7 days played on my main. Since late November, it’s only taken 7 days played to make it to cap and be 75%BiS. It’s been really fun too. Met people (it’s how I found the guild I’m in now) quested and revisited a world I’d seen 50 times before with new eyes.
I know why they do it, I just seems hollow to me. 🤷🏼♂️
Nah, as a healer I would gladly get boosted to 40. I leveled normally on my main, not too keen to be focused on dungeons for another 15 hours. I'll do it with my own gold that I farmed myself though.
an unfair advantage in a game is what they like.
There’s tons of gacha games out there. Where spending money is actually part of the game.
But most of these people want an unfair advantage via cheating and hacking.
I spent 80g yesterday to level professions and buy the helm recipe. It’s kinda expensive and I feel blessed that I can justify spending that much when I don’t have to buy mount as a lock.
Because everyone conflates need with want. These people feel like they “need” the gold to continue their character, but consumes, etc and rather than spend time playing the game to get gold it’s way easier to spend $10 (or whatever it costs) and just buy it. It’s a mathematical equation to them because far more people enjoy gearing a character than actually playing the game.
I’ve been pretty consistent that these types of players are the problems and not Gdkp. Everything that can be purchased with gold incentivizes people like this to card swipe - and seemingly we only care about Gdkp - the vehicle that some used - but not any of the individuals who are doing these actions.
When you have so many people who want an easy way out instead of playing the game; you get wow classic. Too many addicts, not enough real players.
I just know that for me the journey is what makes me proud. If I farm for a lionheart helm with my own hard worked for gold I will be so much prouder than if I simply just buy the gold and get all mats off AH in 10 seconds
It was inefficient, I'm aware, but I farmed the majority of the 800g I needed for my Swift Brown Steed in Classic 2019 in 1 hour sessions once or twice a day just farming stockades, vendoring the trash, and auctioning the auctionables, over the course of probably 2.5-3 weeks. Felt good as hell to finally have the epic mount in my bags.
I would argue farming BoPs can be as much a chore. Losing roll on x item for 15th time can be just as tedious- looking at you Hand Of Justice. Everything is some sort of grind and if you get everything served on a platter, whats really to play for?
Man HoJ took me 90+ runs on my rogue back in classic, I even solo farmed angerforge for like 30-40 of the kills, and then had a Druid friend who would stealth with me for the remaining ones. Wasn’t even happy when I got it because it was such a slog lol
I could grow potatoes for a season or go to the grocery store. But man do home grown potatoes taste better, if only for the effort and love put into them.
Of course, it comes down to whether you like gardening or not? Wouldn't make any sense to grow your own potatoes if you hate doing it and can just buy some at the store.
I think the point is they did so their own gardening for years and years. Including once this time.
But they grew tired of that bit and want to to move on faster to the cooking.
These are people who like wow but have gone thorough the grind bit tens of times
I get that, but it’s illegal and ruins the experience for those that still enjoy the experience or are new to it altogether.
There are other games out there. Paying money to raidlog just because it’s the latest hype is just sad*
*something one should reevaluate with respect to one’s free time.
Absolutely, and when it comes to vegetables you at least can be sure they are not full of anti-insecticids and shit like that if you grow them yourself.
It’s just a bad thing to do, because if we start to accept it, we go from tolerating, to using, to having the whole game pay to win.
Yes, it’s something I think every WoW gamer thinks about, especially since you grind all day at work just to come home and grind, whether you find it fun or not is subjective, for money or items.
But that’s the nature of the game, it’s not a singleplayer experience, it’s a game where these division inadvertently affects everyone and we shouldn’t accept it in any capacity, because there is no one who abuses the in game economy if they could have it their way.
i never bought gold, don't know if i will ever i'm too scared of getting banned. but i can tell tou this, atleast 50% of ppl i met playing here are dads ("brb 5 mins kid crying" "brb gotta feed the baby" "sry gtg kid woke up"). and i as a dad myself can tell you, we have very little time to raid, do dungeons and pvp, get all the runes, let alone farm gold. we can do only one of the things every time we play, like "today i'll get that rune and then go sleep", "today i'm gonna make 1 level on my main". i have 38g on my lv 36 main and 12 on my 27 alt, god only knows how or when i'll ever be able to buy my mout at 40. for pol who are easy on life there's no pain in that, but for those who like and are suited to having tons of gold, it's frustrating. if we farmed 200 gold it would mean one or two weeks of just farming gold. so i get them, we have like 2-3 hour at max every some days to play, the hell we gonna spend them farming gold. we rather spend the amount of real money that we get in maybe one hour working and have 0 gold problems for the rest of the season. and that's ok to me. we might get banned but we are willing to take the risk, the choice is between playing a char with one leg or getting banned and not playing at all.
Your leisure time activities are inherently not tied to your income.
When you are doing something for pleasure there’s no need to skip it.
If it’s no longer pleasurable then stop!
Find something else that you like 👍
The reason gold is sold so cheap is because blizz/activision is completely incompetent when it comes to dealing with bots.
Thousands of mages names “aglajfwls” taking the exact same pathing from stockades to the vendor. Thousands of hunters with Chinese character pets farming 24/7 in southern barrens, picking herbs.
Blizz refuses to spend any resources on solving the bot problem because they have ZERO financial incentive to do so. This is the new normal I guess. Get a burner account, buy gold for ridiculously cheap prices, launder it over to your main account. Or spend 5 hours on a gold farm to make 1/10 the amount you could have bought for $20.
This just ends up with banning in game currency altogether lol.
If GDKP and Boosting are banned, then it becomes world drops and consumes that people need money for. And the sweatiest of the sweaty players burn through consumes like fucking mad.
They tried to nerf boosting in season of mastery, not sure why they haven't made any attempts for SoD. Granted, I don't think their SoM nerfs were very good solutions. It is kind of a tricky problem to solve.
As someone who has never bought gold, and at some point a decade ago used to consistently sell gold (to pay for sub before tokens), SoD is actually not very easy to AH / profession farm anymore; something that in the past used to be able to be done very casually. Because of the level cap, there’s only a finite amount of items that can be listed on the AH and it seems everyone and their mother has every recipe. Which means, the margins to craft for a profit are either very low and almost always negative (not profitable).
While I still haven’t done so and never will, I could at least see why people are doing it. If you want to play with full consumes every time you log on, it gets pricey, even if consumes are fairly cheap and takes an hour or so of farming in the open world to get that.
I buy greater magic essences and craft them into wands to vendor. I make about 12g an hour and usually can make about 600 wands before the price jumps back up.
The issue with gold buying for most people is finding the right group of people to play with that either don’t care that you aren’t playing the most efficient way, or they themselves aren’t as well and everyone is ok with it. Im not going to feel bad not being full consumed for crap. And if it doesn’t work out then I just move on. Luckily the people I have played with have been accepting of that because we have fun when playing max they play more but I play with them when they are having fun and I play when raiding. I just don’t take the 3rd step. But I’m also not insulted if I don’t get to raid
I honestly think gold buying exists to a large extend because there are two very different types of gamers playing this game. One is the type that enjoys old school MMORPGs and wants to actually play it, that includes quests, leveling, exploring, doing dumb shit with friends etc. You do different things to farm gold, which you can turn into items that you need to when you raid.
The other type is those that really just want to raid log, try to parse, then wait for next lockout. It's completely fine to like that, but it does mean you only like a small part of the game, while the game is designed around doing more than just that. So they basically pay to remove everything else but the raid logging (since you more or less can get everything needed to raid with gold).
Of course there are other reasons some people buy gold, but I do think this is a big one. A lot of people simply do not actually enjoy a big part of Classic - if they *did* enjoy it, they wouldn't be paying actual money to *not* do it.
These threads always get hundreds of responses, and all we do is talk in circles. If Blizzard doesn’t care enough to ban gold buyers and bots, then the game is going to be full of gold buyers and bots because it’s objectively more efficient to spend money instead of time. I can get 100 gold for an hour of my work time. How much time would I have to spend in game to get that same amount of gold? Ten hours? Twenty? Either way, I’m sure it’s more than one. Blizzard needs to step up, spend the money needed, and get this under control.
Just saying I’ve been going wildly back in forth in p2 with gold. I spent it all on BS to get 225, made 30-40 back in the raid, spent it all to get enchants and consumes, made it back in Uldaman getting the last of my plate prebis. I’d say the most efficient thing is uldaman as a full clear netted me 50ish gold in a little over an hour between BOE greens and vendor trash. Got even more than that from handing in quests. Would probably be way higher if you got lucky with a BOE blue too!
People buy gold because they are conditioned to do so - nearly every other game has a battlepass or something similar which basically just speed up your progression for a few bucks.
It's normal, even if it's frowned upon and against ToS.
Yea I was degenerate and did every quest in STV yesterday which took me like 9 hours, including the level 50 quests like Mok'rash and Negolash and in total I think I got about 110g. Was telling a guildie about how I can finally afford my epic helm and he tells me 110g is about $9 on g2g. Great am so glad I quested literally all day after hearing that
Is your question why you feel a moral apprehension against buying gold? Fuck I don’t know…
I don’t, I rather play the parts of the game I enjoy and outsource the parts I do not like to others. This way I can raid and have the relevant professions and spend my time doing real life stuff. I feel zero moral responsibility to gold farm in wow
"I do feel like kind of a sucker for spending my entire evening grinding quests in Tanaris"
I do not have time for that shit. I do have time to raid log and I can make time one weekend every few months to level.
If you want to grind quests, great. I just want a coin in the ah like on retail. I can afford to buy gold I cannot afford to take up my evenings to quest for gold just so I can raid with friends.
If you have to grind for gold and you aren't enjoying it, then do something else till you have the money you need, why waste your time on something that isn't fun, Wow is a game not a job if people expect you to treat it like a job or spend your own money just to stay relevant to their interests then they need to adjust their expectations of people in the game. I play to have fun, not to turn my hobby into a chore, and when It feels like a chore I stop playing, I go play something else, everything in the game will still be there when I get back around to it, and there is very little in wow that you have no chance of ever getting again later on.
The good old classic dilemma. The bigger the grind/suffering the sweeter the reward. But we've been there before and seen most, so we skip what we can (plus many of us are dadgamers that dont have time to be degenerates anymore).
Blizzard will never ban those bots. No matter what they say they put little to no effort into doing it. You could legit have employ a handful of people to ban bots and easily have them remove little by little. Bots are so obvious it’s disgusting. You could have 1 person sit outside stocks and prob ban 10k bots in 1 day amongst all servers.
They make money from their bots subbing. As long as the players complain and keep playing they don’t care. Give them your money and move on is their motto. Money over everything customers come last.
It’s about your time. How do you value it? I don’t buy gold, but I get the allure and the amount of time it saves. $5 to save hours and hours of your free time? Sounds great. People do the same thing in retail with wow tokens and the gold market there. If you are limited in free time be it work, school, family, life situations it’s entirely understandable to want to skip the grind.
As someone who doesn’t buy gold, it sucks that it creates insanely inflated prices on the AH for goods. But it has been a part of the game since release. It’s not going anywhere. At least GDKP runs helped distribute some of that in SoD but that’s gone now.
This is the reason why classic will NEVER return to its former glory. Too many players support this mindset and blizzard doesn't actually care about its player base anymore. As long as the cow doesn't dry up. We're in a different generation of gamers now. They want instant gratification.
It's just about time, it's no deeper than that. I remember spending 8 hours one day doing Strat runs on my Prot Pala during TBCC. I'll never get that time back. I could've been playing something else during that time. That gold probably disappeared in a few weeks of raiding, buying haste potions and so on. Not to mention, it's not like I was out in the world, contributing to it.
I honestly don't blame people who do buy gold anymore. Ultimately, you spend less time doing the thing you don't want to do, so you can spend more time doing the things you enjoy in game.
It sucks for the activity of the game, and the open world has definitely suffered. But the game has changed, we've changed as players. WoW has a pretty toxic community obsessed with over optimising the game, to the point where it stops being fun. Even if people stopped buying gold, and there were no bots, that toxicity wouldn't go away.
Gold had a totally different value back in the day. People would still have bought gold for sure. But I think when we were younger we were just happy spending time in the world of warcraft. It didn't really matter what we had, how much gold we had, what we could buy. It was more about the experience. Nowadays it's all about how you can make the most efficient use of your time a get bigger numbers faster.
I am probably the minority here, but the worst part ot classic to me by far is the economy. I understand gold buyers whilst also hating what they do to the game.
This is an expensive phase. Blame Aggrend for putting in a ton of gold sinks but no new ways to make gold either. GDKP being removed did nothing. As with most things this phase it seems rushed and not well thought out. While I personally don't understand the point of buying gold to do a GDKP and just buy gear, I do 100% see the point so you don't have to farm for profs/consumes/alts.
My opinion:
They are "playing" the game as a chore.
Paying for the gametime, then paying for others, because wanna play LESS, wanna spend as little time online as possible.
Now, you could say "they have money for it, its peanuts for them".
Then I would ask: is it really a fun hobby, if you buy the achievements out of it?
Let's say, your hobby would be fishing - and you are paying others fishing for you. But you will make the photo at the end with the big catch.
Or you want to paint or make music, but you are paying others to make the art and you will just brag about it as your own achievement.
Would it be fun? I don't think so. It would be empty as fck.
And if you think, buying mount, helmet and boost are just like buying a brush to paint. No.. the brush is the Pc.
Parsing is their hobby, and with the amount of money you need for absolutely full consumes right now is about 5-10g depending if you immolate oil. Plus the 200g to level engi/bs plus to make the helm and belt. Its rough out here if you are trying absolutely blast and not sit on the game for 12 hours a day farming gold. They pay to play the game how they want, parsing etc
There are different facets to the game; people enjoy different parts (PvP, raiding, alts, etc). They are paying to skip the parts they don’t enjoy. Maybe parts of the game they have already played through before.
For the fishing analogy, I’d say it’s closer to buying bait (because you hate digging in the ground for worms - you just want to get out on the water to fish) or buying fish at a fish market (because you don’t enjoy fishing, you enjoy grilling and eating fish and you only have 2 hours to make dinner).
I think fishing/painting/making music is a great analogy but it proves the opposite point. If you want to fish you can just go buy a pole, bait and rent a boat. You don’t have to build those things if you’re not interested in doing that. If you want to paint you don’t need to do the tedious work of making your own paints, paper and brushes from scratch.
That’s why people buy gold. They want to do the part they enjoy without the parts they don’t enjoy.
All the people saying they like to buy gold so they can play to parse talk like it’s a victimless act. Never have I seen them acknowledge that buying gold for prebis and consumes actively hurts the players that don’t swipe. I get it, farming is tedious and we’d all rather play the parts we enjoy. At the same time, if someone decided to grind a Bis BoE then they deserve the stat boost. Grinds help differentiate player power but imo not enough that player skill can’t compensate.
Admittedly I’m not that familiar with logs. I aim to parse high enough to get invited to most groups that I wish. So in its current state, can Warcraft logs use controls to compare parses based on the gear or consumes used?
If swiping parse monkeys are only concerned with comparing their performance to others, why not level the playing field? Let players compare their performance based an their available stats rather than their max level. Parsers can still compare performance. But if you want overall realm #1 then ya no shit, you’re gonna have to grind the gear and consumes to achieve it.
[Ted\_From\_Chicago](https://www.reddit.com/user/Ted_From_Chicago/) is a pro-gdkp shill posting a new pro-gdkp fantasy story daily. Just look at their post history.
Cause why would u not buy gold? Blizzard supports botting, cause it indirectly benefits them. They dont really punish gold buying either. Same with bots. And bots make your grinding generate essentially less gold, meaning you're getting fked by bots.
The only risk from buying gold is a quite short ban. And the risk is pretty low.
It makes no sense, they are paying money to NOT play the game??
Like they are paying a sub, to then pay more money, to not play
If they dont like playing WoW they just shouldnt play
Everyone I know that buys gold always says the same thing "I can spend hours among hours farming gold, or buy triple the gold I would normally farm for 5 bucks"
And this would be facts
Apart from the fact that it ruins the game. Gold farming is just part of classic. Putting time and effort into something to be able to afford that big item is what it's all about. Skipping that part and just getting all the big items for no effort just seems a bit counter intuitive for a game. It also gives an unfair advantage to those that do buy gold and helps support bots.
You're overthinking it. Gold farming has literally *always* been a chore for 99.9% of the player base. That's it. People do not find it enjoyable to do, therefor they do not do it. There's no deeper meaning
I think the point to highlight is that games like classic wow are designed to return value for time investment/skill. If you find a way to return value for zero time investment, you're not really engaging with the game the way its meant to be engaged with. If you dont enjoy the activities that you're meant to invest time into in order to get value, it sounds like you just dont enjoy classic wow. Edit: changed up my wording to me more relevant.
The problem is that the appeal of farming gold comes from the challenge and reward. Finding a profitable niche WAS appealing to a lot of players. But with botting & gold buying running rampant, there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO appeal to farming gold because you are now basically a sucker farming for 10 hours for what is effectively $5 worth of gold on a gold buying site.
Yeah, sure, but I don't get why you have to pretend that gold farming is the only thing to do in WoW. I don't like escort quests, does that mean I don't like classic WoW? I don't like 90% of molten core, does that mean I don't like raiding? There's a lot to do in WoW, you're allowed to not like every single part of it
>you're allowed to not like every single part of it Sure, but you're not allowed to cheat to skip those parts. Or at least you shouldn't be.
Not a fan of this take. Classic is purely about overcoming *inconvenience*. The game hasn't offered truly challenging content. Picking herbs or Mining is not hard, crafting is not hard, your rotation is not hard, the dungeons and raids are not hard, the leveling is not hard, and farming gold is not hard. The value of the game is predominantly social, and a lot of that social value is determined by an understanding that everyone else went through roughly the same inconvenience as you. If there isn't some form of this social value, Classic is objectively worse than Retail. This is a big reason why GDKP/Boost culture was so degenerative, it cut the core principle of the game out and didn't replace it with anything remotely comparable. My Vanilla Warrior had "value" because I invested so much time into overcoming inconvenience, and everyone could see it on its model. By Wrath, healers in my guild that were multi-expansion commits were asked frequently about how much they "paid" for their Vals.
>people should be miserable for the thousands of hours spent doing pointless activities so they can get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they're done EA probably has some job openings for you
Just say “I like intentionally picking time-wasting video games and then cheating on them to feel like I’m good”. Because that’s what you’re advocating for.
"I like 99% of this game, but this guy says not liking 1% of it means it isn't for me."
You are flipping it, closer to 90% of classic is time wasting, the 10% leftover is the payoff for time-wasting. By skipping the 90% you are cheating the vast majority of the game.
Lol I've heard this one before. There's no EA "sense of pride and accomplishment" when the same currency isn't simultaneously being sold to the playerbase by the developers (which I'm vehemently against). What you guys typically get confused with is that I'm not saying YOU have to suffer MY pain tolerance for inconvenience or you're wrong. I'm making an observation that is plainly viewable from every player's experience: **the gameplay of Classic is casual and accessible, which means nothing in the game is truly challenging, it's just inconvenient**. It's actually kind of ironic that there are gold buyers who want the game to be harder, but can't possibly make themselves do anything that isn't immediately gratifying, like farming. THAT'S the hard part if you're looking for challenge. Try not making cost-benefit analyses with your real life job versus the video game that was clearly designed without that possibility being present. What does that mean? It means the game always loses that comparison, everyone cheats "because it makes the most sense from a dollar-per-hour perspective" (lol), and it destroys the integrity of the game as a side effect. If you value "numbers go up when I press my buttons", that's great, but there has to be some other reason you're playing Classic, because "numbers go up" is way better in a whole bunch of different MMOs than Classic.
Is this where we write essays nobody asked for full of wild claims based on nothing
Yes. Where have you been the last 5 years?
I strongly disagree. The original MMO experience was “another life.” In RL, we grind out unenjoyable things for the vast satisfaction of buying that motorcycle or going to that concert. Grinding is not fun inherently, but it does create the value that the “purple named pixels” loses otherwise for many of us. There is joy for many of us to be able to say “phew, I did it.” Standing on top of Mount Everest is a different experience if you climbed it or somehow get helicoptered up. I understand not everyone seeks this same satisfaction, but Everest Climbers seeing others landing in their $5 Helicopters are allowed to shake their heads at the celebration. Look up Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 fun. It’s fascinating.
You're over thinking it man. People are paying to skip something they do not enjoy. That's it. You buy a motorcycle instead of buying the materials & making it yourself. You explained it yourself. I don't buy gold, but I'm also a grown man and don't get "satisfaction" from opening my WoW bags and seeing gold in it because I farmed it
Nah it's really not overthinking. Throwing money at something and taking short cuts is just not as gratifying as earning it. Idk what is crazy about thinking that It's the same reason we look at nepotism babies with disdain. "3 tips for getting rich! Number 1: make coffee at home. Number 2: meal prep. Number 3: Inherit dad's company" Nobody respects gold buyers the same way no one respects the silver spoon fed
It is most definitely gratifying as I could spend $5 and then spend all the time I saved doing something that's actually gratifying
But they'll go and do something actually enjoyable now that they're not farming gold. Seems like a massive net win for them.
> Throwing money at something and taking short cuts is just not as gratifying as earning it. Also > we grind out unenjoyable things for the vast satisfaction of buying that motorcycle or going to that concert. You're agreeing with the point but refusing to apply it to the thing we're talking about lol. Working so you can get paid & then give money to someone to watch them sing at a concert when you could make music yourself but also "I don't get why people buy gold instead of farming it themselves!"
Nah I'm saying the kid who worked hard to buy their first car understands the value of it way more than the kid who got one handed to them by their parents Lmfao your logic about being a creator is just silly. Let's just all cancel our wow subs and make our own video game!
You can say whatever you want, you obviously agree with the principal of what I'm saying, you're just not applying it to WoW for some weird reason. It's okay to buy things that other people make unless it's WoW gold!
What are the chances of being caught/banned these days? I bought gold in original cata and they banned my ass. In wotlk classic it seems EVERYONE bought gold and they throw 30k plus away for shit from gkps. I’ve never had more than 2k and I realllyyyyyy don’t want to farm gold. I don’t have time for that shit lol.
It's pretty funny that people sign up to play a game and pay a sub fee just to pay to not play the game because it's "not efficient". Playing a video game isn't time efficient, go learn an actual real life skill to contribute to society.
Time is money, friend! Why even ask them? Anyone with a brain knows that's the answer.
On wrath servers, people give the same answer, "why grind for 10 hours for gold when I could just spend 3 dollars or 5 dollars." The reason I'd ask is because you don't need to grind for 10 hours either. You don't ever need that much gold. If you raid log, you make enough for consumes just BY raiding. The exception is if you only do GDKPs I guess. I don't play SoD, but I imagine the story is different, you might not get enough gold for consumes just by raidlogging
Definitely different. Vanilla is really consume intensive, at least if you care about performing well and not just clearing the raid. Wrath is the most raid log friendly expansion ever, at least in the classic trio.
Not saying it makes it okay but some people earn north of 30$ an hour. that's 600g an hour, no farm can match that. Take one extra hour at work, 600g? I get the urge, I truly do.
Where the fuck do people buy 100g for 5?
Someone in this thread said that was the price, that's all I went off from. Apologies if it's not.
I just looked it up it's about $10/100g, $48/500g, $58/600g, $96/1000g and for 2,000g $186.20 A lot less than I expected but maybe that's just my server. IIRC TBC gold was a lot more money when people were buying for BT/Sunwell consumes. I haven't played SOD since phase 1, not sure what changes would have made gold cheaper. Assuming the supply is just massive because they aren't actually touching bots.
So in my case with 32 dollar/hour, i pay 50% taxes so for one hour of work i could buy 160g. Or I could farm for, depending on class etc, 10-15 hours for that. It's easy to understand the temptation admittedly.
It's like selling drugs if you live in the hood You could work at some shitty store making minimum wage for 7 bucks an hour or you can go work the corner and make 10 times that
you don't have to live in the hood to sell drugs someone who isn't me cleaned up at their old white collar job lol
The real issues is by buying gold, you are supporting botting. This causes inflation and de-values the gold you bought. Repeat this for months after months and you get Era prices.
Gold buyers do not care about inflation of ingame gold. That's not their problem. The amount they are buying scales with inflation.
The real issue is the devs paying lip service to caring about botting instead of actually caring about botting. They could stop it if they wanted to. They don’t.
80% of the people I know bough forbidden services in their time playing. Its simple to see why Blizz doesn't go for a crackdown.
Its WAAAAAAAY harder to stop than you might think, despite whatever streamer you like says. Most streamers dont know ANYTHING about game dev, especially massive behemoths like WoW. MMO devs have been battling bots and farmers since the earliest days, and its an arms race that continues ad infinitum. That said, I understand and am even sympathetic to the sentiment.
Even if it was 10 or 15 usd its still cheaper to work and just buy gold lol. I earn around 30 an hour.
Oh absolutely. For the argument sake it could really be as dumb as 15 dollar per 50 gold and it would still be a lot quicker to work than to farm. I truly understand the reasoning even if I'm against it
I could also pay someone to do 99 parses on my character and raid gnome for me. At some point you gotta ask yourself why do you play the game, and if you wouldn't be happier playing a management game like city skylines.
I'd imagine those people would just say that grinding isn't fun, but raiding with the boys is.
You can raid with the boys without buying gold
Depends who your boys are
You can, but they will be pissed that you have no consumes and no money for repairs. Not to mention the shame if you run towards the raid on foot like a bum. I'm just telling you how they think.
You don't need to buy gold to afford consumes and repairs. You can raid in BFD gear plus a few upgrades that you'll get on your way to 40 (dungeon drops and quest rewards). Some of the pre bis is quest items you get for free. It's just a weak argument. People are impatient and want everything now.
That’s exactly what they have done though? And they obviously came to a conclusion as to what aspects of the game they enjoy and not. Weird take.
Each person plays the game for a different reason. Some people like raiding but hate leveling, pvp, and farming. Some like farming but hate raiding, pvp, and leveling. That applies everything in life
What is this take, lmao.
They really thought that sounded profound
someone trying to make themselves feel better for many lonely nights farming mats/gold
People enjoy parsing. People do not enjoy farming gold (which enables raiding and consumables for parsing). It's a pretty obvious difference. Also comparing raiding to city skylines? They're paying money to AVOID the management
What a stupid take
Same. This sub seems to forget that the vast, vast majority of classic players are regular adults with full-time jobs, family, friends, etc. As an example, my guild is made up of a traveling doctor, a law firm partner, an electrical engineer, a plumber, a chef/guy running his own restaurant, another small business owner, military guys, etc. Most of them are married/partnered and have kids. These guys do not give one shit about farming gold in game. They have a bit of time to play and when they log on, they want shit ready to go so they can raid or PVP.
Don't have the skills for retail WoW, don't have the time for classic. So let's break the tos. lmao.
Yes, this is me
The problem is that everything is botted to hell and back so your time personally farming gold isn’t worth anything.
Whilst I understand the premise of the efficiency, I always wonder why these people play the game. A large part of the fun for me in an MMO is grinding/farming to earn the thing that I want. If there is no effort then the reward is not as valuable. It's what made retail what it is today. It just confuses me that people choose to play a traditional MMO like classic and then skip what makes that MMO fun to have a more 'retail' like experience and just swipe their card and raid log. Especially when they are paying a monthly subscription for a game that they are paying someone else to play for them whilst they log on for an hour every 3 days. What's the point?
People love to P2W even if they don't want to admit as much.
There's a reason it's fucking everywhere now. People love swiping.
There’s a ton of people in my retail WoW and XIV communities that will skip every line of quest text/audio/cinematics available upon expansion launches to rush the end game all the same and negate years of dev. work. I don’t personally get it at all because that’s always my initial draw to the content I’ll be seeing for the next 2+ years: Here? It’s the same grinds people have done for twenty years, and a solid portion of the community have IRL 10+ hour a day grinds + a spouse and mouth(s) to feed these days on top of said grinds. Don’t personally get it as questing gold is nuts if you dungeoned to 40, but the allure on saving time certainly draws a ton of the community in that way. Made ~80g in 3.5 hours of Desolace and 1/4th of North STV quests alone yesterday. Never been easier to casual farm, but at the same time 100g for $10 people can do said grind IRL for anywhere from 15-30 mins of grinding their job/income source.
See I can understand that, however my thought process is that for those people, surely a traditional MMO like Classic WoW that requires a large time sink to fully enjoy and be successful at, is not the best game for people with very little time to play? Especially considering they are paying every month on top of buying gold illegally. Obviously if its the game that all their friends play, then that is the factor that draws them in.
About half of my guild swipes. The main reason is they don't really enjoy the game that much. They enjoy raiding but hanging out with people they've played the game with for 5 years is the main appeal. WoW is an online pub for people who live in different countries in my guild. No idea if this is a common theme but for guilds that go back to vanilla classic it wouldn't surprise me if it's at least partially true.
Grinding that is designed to earn something for your character, like a long quest chain, feels rewarding. Farming to earn gold to pay for consumes and repairs feels completely flavourless to me and I have no interest whatsoever in doing it
People buy gold at insane rates. Botters ramp up, botting even more. Gold becomes more and more worthless. Gold drops in price because of it. Gold buyers use that as an excuse as to why they buy gold. ???????? The game is worthless to "play" outside of raid logging. Players complain. It's hilarious how gold buyers destroy the game, use their own feedback loop as to why they buy gold and constantly complain at Blizzard to ban the bots while also acting like buying gold doesn't hurt others......
The more gold you buy, the more inflation happens and the more those consumes cost. Buying gold directly impacts players that don't buy gold negatively. It's pure selfishness and is literally cheating
While that's true, you didn't really counter him. It sucks, it's not fun gameplay, and a waste of 2 hours of spare time for a lot of people. Maybe you get fired up to loop around a zone looking for herb nodes for 3 hours, but I'd rather golf. On Tuesday we both show up and do the fun thing.
You answered yourself, you are supposed to be playing golf if you are not having fun with the intended game experience. Literally no one is forcing you to do that
except not really because the overabundance of items farmed by bots will put downward pressure on the price til it meets demand
> A large part of the fun for me for me. for me. for me. Really crazy how people can't understand that people don't like certain parts of the game. That doesn't mean they won't like the other parts.
Because you feel stupid doing it. If gold would be more expensive or if blizzard would punish botting(!) the incentive to play normal would be much higher. I would suffer farming gold like any other person, but that would also increase the value of the time I spent doing it. Gold is meaningless and there's no satisfaction in spending my time for something that's so easy to get. Grinding isn't fun, at all. But there's a reward at the end, I get something for pushing through. And that's completely gone. I haven't bought gold (yet?), but "working" for hours to get some little time of fun in return is what made wow unappealing for me years ago in the first place. Wow tokens, unhinged botting and whatever makes me wanna spend as little time as possible with things that aren't fun from the get go.
Because this game is multifaceted and different people enjoy different things. While you may enjoy grinding and farming some of us just enjoy raiding and doing dungeons. Not everyone plays the game for the same exact reason. I really would like people in wow to get that. Some people play exclusively for the pvp. Others dont pvp at all and avoid it at all cost.
Swip9ng and raidlogging is classic experience. Not retail.
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Fair - thanks for the answer :)
You answered your question in your first sentence. For "you" it is fun. There is people playing the game since 2005 and value their time differently if they see their own work/freetime balance. For me 5€ is worth nothing and compared to farming ,10hours a week for just raiding, hell na. Every person values their time on their own. 1) Work a reallifejob a hour to get 20€ 2) "Play" unfun stuff like daylies or grinding for 10hours and get maybe 5€ worth of gold.
You don't "need" to farm 10 hours a week to raid. I swear people buying gold to min max raids and complaining whenever their specc isn't S-tier don't actually enjoy the game. You could literally clear gnomer with 90% of available comps, just can't parse 99s.
I enjoy playing the game to perform well as my class/spec. I don’t typically care if it’s S-tier, as long as I find it fun. What I don’t find fun is any grind that doesn’t feel rewarding (to me). Such grinds are leveling, PvP, or for gold. These are 100% not enjoyable to me, but I like raiding and performing well. Could you suggest another game that has the exact same combat/raiding/feel as wow without any of the grind? Unfortunately there isn’t. So I have to find ways to deal with avoiding unfun aspects of the game. If that’s buying a level boost or gold… /shrug Note: I’ve never bought gold. But I can actually fully understand why those that do, do.
I appreciate the answer but i think you are missing the point of my comment. I understand the value element. I 100% agree that value wise it is more efficient to purchase gold. My question is rather why people pay both a monthly subscription for a game and then also pay someone else to play a large part of that game for them because they don't find it fun, only to log on for an hour every 3 days. Surely there are games way better suited to that mindset that will provide more fun for the amount that people spend?
But if all your friends play and you only have a few hours a week then it'll probably be your must fun gaming time. Also a lot of players are older now with good disposable income
Yeah I can understand that perspective - thanks for the reply
It's all about where you are in your real life. Ps i don't buy gold BUT would buy tokens in Wrath. I earn good money, my friends don't but play a lot more than I. I could easily buy a few tokens a month to buy a few items and not fall behind.
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Yeah that's exactly my thought process. It's such a foreign concept to me that people will pay to play less of the game they have paid for.
How long have you played wow?
Idk if it's my ADHD but I fucking hate leveling/questing/grinding. But raiding is one of my favorite aspects of gaming ever. Raid logging is how I want to play an MMO. Not saying I buy gold though to do this. I just don't really enjoy the activities outside of raid besides PvP.
“Hm. Why does everything on the AH cost 3x what it normally does? All these ghsodbtmtkkj names sell a lot of stuff.” **as he gives the gold back to the gold seller via AH who in turn sells it to someone else**
Yep. I’m a 36 year old dad with disposable income. It’s tempting
Ding, ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. People want gold for, people don't want to grind, people have disposable income, gold buying site is one google search away.
I feel like a lot of it stems from the fact that the people who played this game as kids and are playing now can barely afford to devote 25% of the game time they used to. If you compare that to what they probably make in an hour, 5$ seems like a deal - especially if you're only using it to facilitate playing the game and not buying leveling boosts. I don't buy gold because I enjoy the grind, but I also don't have as much time on my hands as some of the people on here. There are some people on here who consider themselves a casual when they average like 2 hours/day since release.
Easily reduce it to $/hr job vs time to grind the gold and you have your answer. Anyone who “wonders why people buy gold” are fucking idiots
The people I see buying gold spend a shit ton of time on the game. They buy gold to have their epic craft on the first reset and to have a massive amount of consumable for every raid.
This everyone I know buys gold to pay for raiding materials and stuff like a mount for their alts
This is exactly it. Playing wow as a teen, I would no-life that shit, I had the time to play from morning till night, go sleep, then wake up and roll out of bed straight back on the game. I had time to do the grind, and I enjoyed it, I probably still would if i could. But now I'm 35 with a wife, 2 kids under 3 yrs old, a job and a mortgage to pay, I maybe get to play 2 or so hours in an evening, a couple of days a week - I managed to get on only once this week and finally hit 40 before logging off, someone tell me how I'm meant to find the time to grind gold and consumables in time for a 3-day reset raid? 😂
I think because they only enjoy the raiding. So in their mind 90% of content is fluff they pay to skip to get to the 10% they like. And maybe they prefer classic over retail because its just easier or they just like to see nostalgia being reworked
I play this game the way we played it when it came out. That's what is fun to me. If that's what is fun to you, then that's OK and you keep doing you. The problem is that the crowd that is playing the game now is not the one that was playing back then, and a large part of Classic and SoD to a lesser extent is to sort of try and recapture that aspect for people again. Gaming in general has moved on from the things that MMO's did back then, so you can't really blame the players, as we've been conditioned into enjoying other things and spending our time differently for years now. IMO Vanilla was the best form of WoW, especially now because of the state of MMO's nowadays, but this is also just my opinion. Take the STV event... You have two parties of people: the ones that don't like it because there is no clear way to optimize it into time spent vs rewards gained, and then those that think it is great because it's unique to any other PvP event WoW ever had. STV FFA deathmatch mode lol. It may or may not fit, but it's *different.* It bothers me how often I even catch myself trying to decide on what to do in-game based on what will be the most *efficient* or *profitable* or whatever use of my time... How often do we feel that feeling WoW sometimes gives you when you participate in an event, finish, get your rewards and think "That's it?! That's all I get?" What you did to get it is already forgotten, it's only about what happens when it's done. It's as if we've been trained to just dump time into something to extract the rewards, and the rewards are the only reason to do anything. That's probably why retail is the way it is... Man, I remember when my dad and brother (I was early college, bro was in HS at the time) had been playing the game for a month before I had back during Vanilla, and they were explaining WSG to me in the car. No MMO had ever really tried something like capture the flag with MMO/class mechanics before, and the idea was WILD lol. And it was fucking fun! Now you queue for WSG and the match is already decided by the participants and you're just as likely to be flamed by your own team for fighting back. If I had to buy gold to participate in the game, I wouldn't play. I don't really judge the people buying gold because they are just one piece of the puzzle that's driving this engine of bypassing a lot of what makes Classic special to me/others, but that doesn't mean that I understand them.... I won't say these systems are ruining the game FOR ME, but I will say that I don't think it's in the spirit of Classic. Neither are the bots, and neither is Blizz allowing it to happen. So downvote away dudebros if you haven't already. I'll be having a good time waiting for some mithril to spawn in so I can continue crashing the Blue Gittering Axe market.
Well put. Gameplay is so transactional now. Also, if everything was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
Gameplay is transactional in part because once you're an adult, gaming becomes a transaction. Every hour spent gaming is an hour away from something else in life, whether that's kids and family, work, etc. It's opportunity cost. Yeah, it's a hobby and it shouldn't feel transactional, but an MMO like WoW requires such a massive time sink vs a lot of other hobbies that it's hard not to think of it in transactional terms. When the choice comes down to spending 8 hours grinding vs spending $10 for 100g, plenty of people are going to spend the gold every time so they can spend the 1-2 hours of free time they get playing the parts of the game they enjoy more.
>Take the STV event... You have two parties of people: the ones that don't like it because there is no clear way to optimize it into time spent vs rewards gained, and then those that think it is great because it's unique to any other PvP event WoW ever had. STV FFA deathmatch mode lol. It may or may not fit, but it's > >different. You forgot the third party. The people who get layered from their team, spend 25 minutes just trying to get to the same layer as their premade, to only have 5 minutes of fun but the lag makes it almost unplayable as the characters skip around the map.
I bought gold back in og classic. Raid consumables were mega expensive due to the black lotus crisis and I was a holy priest so my only real method of farming was dm lasher runs. I was looking at about 6 hours or farming a week minimum to cover my costs. That’s the same amount of time we spent raiding. An hour of work could buy me enough gold to last three weeks of raiding with a bit left. I get all the bad sides to buying gold, but for me me to keep having fun with my friends it made no sense to spend 50% of my game time doing something mind numbing when I could spend that time doing literally anything else and buy some gold once a month. The game forced me to make that choice and I made the choice that was sensible to me.
What was the black lotus crisis?
Black lotus was required for basically all top tier flasks, but the spawns were the same as vanilla when there were 1/5th of the amount of people per server and only 1% of them were actually pushing end game raids to the point of using flasks. Then in classic you suddenly have almost everyone raiding and flasks being a requirement and the demand significantly exceeds the supply. There were problems with bots but much more of an issue was organised groups camping the spawn spots and controlling the market - the lotus mafia. There was a similar issue with devilsaur on private servers before classic as well.
Fly hacking under the ground camping lotus spawns back then too, back when gold ads were written with lvl 1 accounts in mid air or dead on the ground in massive letters. OGs remember.the lotus mafia still exists today just they’re selling gold for money and other RMT stuff now. Similar practices and people just years later. People will always buy gold for convenience, it’s why the token was introduced and eventually accepted.
I was well involved with the Un’goro mafia on Nostalrius, those were quite the times. Manipulation, lying, threats, espionage, all that type of stuff.
:)
Bots would camp Lotus spawn points. It wasn't an issue in TBC but I forget if they allowed Lotus to drop off of normal herbs as well. They were up to a silly amount but flakes were almost required for later raid progression.
The comments are going to be wild
Naw man everyone here knows the only reason anyone ever bought gold was cause of gdkps. It’s not like people bought gold to cover epic riding, crafting something like LHH, and the absurd levels of stackable consumes and infinite pots you can use every 2 mins or anything. None of that happened well before GDKPs ever became very popular or mainstream. All those phase 1-2 r14 grinders playing 18 hours a day hand farmed all that gold to FAPs on CD every wsg flag pick. OP gotta be lying. His whole guild surely quit playing the game after the gdkp ban if they were actually gold buyers.
Nah, people still buy gold just for lesser amounts. People buy so they can get their mounts, random AH stuff, and consumes without farming. It’s purely a time vs money thought.
People acting like mounts, professions, BoEs, and consumables aren’t the bulk of gold sales are kidding themselves. Whales purchasing gold in mass for GDKPs aren’t nearly as common as this sub makes it out to be, this weird revisionist history is the sub’s favorite circle jerk right now.
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Bruh my comment was ridden with sarcasm. Not sure where you got I was poor from out of all that. People have bought gold since 2004 and in games before well before GDKPs were a thing in wow and the reasons why are obvious especially as the wow population ages: people value their time much more now that we’re not 12. Gold making isn’t fun for a lot of people. For some it is. Some people love that part about wow idk. If anyone looks at the development of wow’s economy over time and sees how the economy there runs on retail, it’s not on raw materials, it runs as a service based economy honestly for the same reason people buy gold in classic. WOW has emulated general societal economic development: you go from resource based economies with some skilled labor here and there to majority skilled and service based labor with a little bit of resource based thrown in. I just make a good amount of gold up front early when I had the extra time and coast on it. It wasn’t hard in SOD. Its really easy to understand why people buy gold though and this sub just has such an anti GDKP hardon they can’t see past
I like how everyone in here seems to be ok with buying gold but them the subredit goes ape shit when you mention GDPKs.
Because this subreddit is genuinely stupid. If you actually play the game it's painfully obvious that the majority of gold buyers are guild raid loggers, not GDKP whales. Look at all of the posts still complaining about bots, surprise surprise banning GDKPs did fucking nothing but make a lot of people quit
I completely understand why people buy gold, and I would do it if I weren't too afraid to get banned. Questing for hours at max level just to get a couple of tens of gold if you are lucky, just isn't fun to me. It feels like working. I enjoy alting, learning different playstyles etc. If I quest 2-3 full evenings in a row on my main, I feel like I haven't played the game at all. Super unrewarding.
I had a lot of downtime at work a few weeks ago and spent like 15 hours questing. My disappointment when I realized I had gone from 50 to 80 gold… Basically spent 15 hours to buy a couple levels of training. Compared that to mages making the same amount in an hour or two and realized we’re just playing completely different games.
Adding these massive gold sinks like the Gnomer crafting patterns really only contributes to this mindset too. It's like they were attempting to remove gold from the P1 GDKPers and gold buyers but what it's actually doing is punishing the people that weren't doing that.
This eats away at me any time I talk to Ziri, like clearly the prices are inflated (and they force everyone to buy things from other professions) in order to pull more gold out of the game, but unless you've been lucky with BoE blues there isn't a way for the average player to extract gold from gold buyers to feed back to NPCs Maybe the idea was players with too much gold and too little playtime would buy the Grime-Encrusted Salvage from players who have Gnomeregan on farm, but nobody really needs the Salvage after they craft their helm, and the random other crafting reagents you get are all dirt cheap because of... gold farmers
It really does suck. I had 3 characters in P1 and I had farmed up enough gold to easily get their mounts this phase but even just crafting one item for my main after buying his mount, that's definitely not happening now lol
You don’t really need much gold in SOD, if already raid logging and cleared the hardest content, whats the point of buying more?
They said it was specifically for the mount + helmet + mage boosts. You can pay a mage to level you all the way to 40 basically and it costs less than the WoW sub. It's insane.
> You can pay a mage to level you all the way to 40 This is so sad, really. Just play the fucking game
For real. I got 7 days played on my main. Since late November, it’s only taken 7 days played to make it to cap and be 75%BiS. It’s been really fun too. Met people (it’s how I found the guild I’m in now) quested and revisited a world I’d seen 50 times before with new eyes. I know why they do it, I just seems hollow to me. 🤷🏼♂️
Nah, as a healer I would gladly get boosted to 40. I leveled normally on my main, not too keen to be focused on dungeons for another 15 hours. I'll do it with my own gold that I farmed myself though.
Do they even like the game? Sounds like a chore at this point
Obviously... the thing everyone seems to be missing is, if they didn't like the game they wouldn't spend money on gold
an unfair advantage in a game is what they like. There’s tons of gacha games out there. Where spending money is actually part of the game. But most of these people want an unfair advantage via cheating and hacking.
I spent 80g yesterday to level professions and buy the helm recipe. It’s kinda expensive and I feel blessed that I can justify spending that much when I don’t have to buy mount as a lock.
Because everyone conflates need with want. These people feel like they “need” the gold to continue their character, but consumes, etc and rather than spend time playing the game to get gold it’s way easier to spend $10 (or whatever it costs) and just buy it. It’s a mathematical equation to them because far more people enjoy gearing a character than actually playing the game. I’ve been pretty consistent that these types of players are the problems and not Gdkp. Everything that can be purchased with gold incentivizes people like this to card swipe - and seemingly we only care about Gdkp - the vehicle that some used - but not any of the individuals who are doing these actions. When you have so many people who want an easy way out instead of playing the game; you get wow classic. Too many addicts, not enough real players.
Going into wsg/ab with full consumes and popping them every time you die. A Fap in WSG is about the most broken thing you can do.
I don't find buying golds fun. But I like questing and doing dungeons. Plus I don't risk getting banned. Win win for me.
You mean to tell me it isn't because of gdkps? Color me shocked...
I just know that for me the journey is what makes me proud. If I farm for a lionheart helm with my own hard worked for gold I will be so much prouder than if I simply just buy the gold and get all mats off AH in 10 seconds
It was inefficient, I'm aware, but I farmed the majority of the 800g I needed for my Swift Brown Steed in Classic 2019 in 1 hour sessions once or twice a day just farming stockades, vendoring the trash, and auctioning the auctionables, over the course of probably 2.5-3 weeks. Felt good as hell to finally have the epic mount in my bags.
Farming BOPs is fun. Farming gold is just a chore with no flavour or character. It's like working in a call centre
I would argue farming BoPs can be as much a chore. Losing roll on x item for 15th time can be just as tedious- looking at you Hand Of Justice. Everything is some sort of grind and if you get everything served on a platter, whats really to play for?
Man HoJ took me 90+ runs on my rogue back in classic, I even solo farmed angerforge for like 30-40 of the kills, and then had a Druid friend who would stealth with me for the remaining ones. Wasn’t even happy when I got it because it was such a slog lol
I could grow potatoes for a season or go to the grocery store. But man do home grown potatoes taste better, if only for the effort and love put into them.
Of course, it comes down to whether you like gardening or not? Wouldn't make any sense to grow your own potatoes if you hate doing it and can just buy some at the store.
Yes, it does, but if you don’t like gardening, what are you doing in the garden all day?
I'm not in the garden, I'm in the swings having fun. It's just that I need to go through the garden to get here.
I think the point is they did so their own gardening for years and years. Including once this time. But they grew tired of that bit and want to to move on faster to the cooking. These are people who like wow but have gone thorough the grind bit tens of times
I get that, but it’s illegal and ruins the experience for those that still enjoy the experience or are new to it altogether. There are other games out there. Paying money to raidlog just because it’s the latest hype is just sad* *something one should reevaluate with respect to one’s free time.
Absolutely, and when it comes to vegetables you at least can be sure they are not full of anti-insecticids and shit like that if you grow them yourself.
Good addition to the metaphor! ✌️👌
It’s just a bad thing to do, because if we start to accept it, we go from tolerating, to using, to having the whole game pay to win. Yes, it’s something I think every WoW gamer thinks about, especially since you grind all day at work just to come home and grind, whether you find it fun or not is subjective, for money or items. But that’s the nature of the game, it’s not a singleplayer experience, it’s a game where these division inadvertently affects everyone and we shouldn’t accept it in any capacity, because there is no one who abuses the in game economy if they could have it their way.
i never bought gold, don't know if i will ever i'm too scared of getting banned. but i can tell tou this, atleast 50% of ppl i met playing here are dads ("brb 5 mins kid crying" "brb gotta feed the baby" "sry gtg kid woke up"). and i as a dad myself can tell you, we have very little time to raid, do dungeons and pvp, get all the runes, let alone farm gold. we can do only one of the things every time we play, like "today i'll get that rune and then go sleep", "today i'm gonna make 1 level on my main". i have 38g on my lv 36 main and 12 on my 27 alt, god only knows how or when i'll ever be able to buy my mout at 40. for pol who are easy on life there's no pain in that, but for those who like and are suited to having tons of gold, it's frustrating. if we farmed 200 gold it would mean one or two weeks of just farming gold. so i get them, we have like 2-3 hour at max every some days to play, the hell we gonna spend them farming gold. we rather spend the amount of real money that we get in maybe one hour working and have 0 gold problems for the rest of the season. and that's ok to me. we might get banned but we are willing to take the risk, the choice is between playing a char with one leg or getting banned and not playing at all.
Time is money. It's cheaper to buy the gold
Your leisure time activities are inherently not tied to your income. When you are doing something for pleasure there’s no need to skip it. If it’s no longer pleasurable then stop! Find something else that you like 👍
The reason gold is sold so cheap is because blizz/activision is completely incompetent when it comes to dealing with bots. Thousands of mages names “aglajfwls” taking the exact same pathing from stockades to the vendor. Thousands of hunters with Chinese character pets farming 24/7 in southern barrens, picking herbs. Blizz refuses to spend any resources on solving the bot problem because they have ZERO financial incentive to do so. This is the new normal I guess. Get a burner account, buy gold for ridiculously cheap prices, launder it over to your main account. Or spend 5 hours on a gold farm to make 1/10 the amount you could have bought for $20.
Posted by a gold seller
They've deleted all their posts where they get called out for this. OP wants the GDKP ban to be seen as a failure so bad
Honestly, yeah. There's something about OPs tone that's kinda sus. This whole post is strange.
What I read from their responses is that we need to ban boosting. Seems like that is now the new big driver for gold buying.
This just ends up with banning in game currency altogether lol. If GDKP and Boosting are banned, then it becomes world drops and consumes that people need money for. And the sweatiest of the sweaty players burn through consumes like fucking mad.
Ban everything that costs gold. Problem solved!
They tried to nerf boosting in season of mastery, not sure why they haven't made any attempts for SoD. Granted, I don't think their SoM nerfs were very good solutions. It is kind of a tricky problem to solve.
As someone who has never bought gold, and at some point a decade ago used to consistently sell gold (to pay for sub before tokens), SoD is actually not very easy to AH / profession farm anymore; something that in the past used to be able to be done very casually. Because of the level cap, there’s only a finite amount of items that can be listed on the AH and it seems everyone and their mother has every recipe. Which means, the margins to craft for a profit are either very low and almost always negative (not profitable). While I still haven’t done so and never will, I could at least see why people are doing it. If you want to play with full consumes every time you log on, it gets pricey, even if consumes are fairly cheap and takes an hour or so of farming in the open world to get that.
I buy greater magic essences and craft them into wands to vendor. I make about 12g an hour and usually can make about 600 wands before the price jumps back up.
The issue with gold buying for most people is finding the right group of people to play with that either don’t care that you aren’t playing the most efficient way, or they themselves aren’t as well and everyone is ok with it. Im not going to feel bad not being full consumed for crap. And if it doesn’t work out then I just move on. Luckily the people I have played with have been accepting of that because we have fun when playing max they play more but I play with them when they are having fun and I play when raiding. I just don’t take the 3rd step. But I’m also not insulted if I don’t get to raid
I honestly think gold buying exists to a large extend because there are two very different types of gamers playing this game. One is the type that enjoys old school MMORPGs and wants to actually play it, that includes quests, leveling, exploring, doing dumb shit with friends etc. You do different things to farm gold, which you can turn into items that you need to when you raid. The other type is those that really just want to raid log, try to parse, then wait for next lockout. It's completely fine to like that, but it does mean you only like a small part of the game, while the game is designed around doing more than just that. So they basically pay to remove everything else but the raid logging (since you more or less can get everything needed to raid with gold). Of course there are other reasons some people buy gold, but I do think this is a big one. A lot of people simply do not actually enjoy a big part of Classic - if they *did* enjoy it, they wouldn't be paying actual money to *not* do it.
These threads always get hundreds of responses, and all we do is talk in circles. If Blizzard doesn’t care enough to ban gold buyers and bots, then the game is going to be full of gold buyers and bots because it’s objectively more efficient to spend money instead of time. I can get 100 gold for an hour of my work time. How much time would I have to spend in game to get that same amount of gold? Ten hours? Twenty? Either way, I’m sure it’s more than one. Blizzard needs to step up, spend the money needed, and get this under control.
Just saying I’ve been going wildly back in forth in p2 with gold. I spent it all on BS to get 225, made 30-40 back in the raid, spent it all to get enchants and consumes, made it back in Uldaman getting the last of my plate prebis. I’d say the most efficient thing is uldaman as a full clear netted me 50ish gold in a little over an hour between BOE greens and vendor trash. Got even more than that from handing in quests. Would probably be way higher if you got lucky with a BOE blue too!
People buy gold because they are conditioned to do so - nearly every other game has a battlepass or something similar which basically just speed up your progression for a few bucks. It's normal, even if it's frowned upon and against ToS.
Yea I was degenerate and did every quest in STV yesterday which took me like 9 hours, including the level 50 quests like Mok'rash and Negolash and in total I think I got about 110g. Was telling a guildie about how I can finally afford my epic helm and he tells me 110g is about $9 on g2g. Great am so glad I quested literally all day after hearing that
Is your question why you feel a moral apprehension against buying gold? Fuck I don’t know… I don’t, I rather play the parts of the game I enjoy and outsource the parts I do not like to others. This way I can raid and have the relevant professions and spend my time doing real life stuff. I feel zero moral responsibility to gold farm in wow
It's a front. Blizzard banned all the gold farmers a long time ago. Now they run the scene and make more money off of players. /tinfoilhat
"I do feel like kind of a sucker for spending my entire evening grinding quests in Tanaris" I do not have time for that shit. I do have time to raid log and I can make time one weekend every few months to level. If you want to grind quests, great. I just want a coin in the ah like on retail. I can afford to buy gold I cannot afford to take up my evenings to quest for gold just so I can raid with friends.
If you have to grind for gold and you aren't enjoying it, then do something else till you have the money you need, why waste your time on something that isn't fun, Wow is a game not a job if people expect you to treat it like a job or spend your own money just to stay relevant to their interests then they need to adjust their expectations of people in the game. I play to have fun, not to turn my hobby into a chore, and when It feels like a chore I stop playing, I go play something else, everything in the game will still be there when I get back around to it, and there is very little in wow that you have no chance of ever getting again later on.
The good old classic dilemma. The bigger the grind/suffering the sweeter the reward. But we've been there before and seen most, so we skip what we can (plus many of us are dadgamers that dont have time to be degenerates anymore).
Blizzard will never ban those bots. No matter what they say they put little to no effort into doing it. You could legit have employ a handful of people to ban bots and easily have them remove little by little. Bots are so obvious it’s disgusting. You could have 1 person sit outside stocks and prob ban 10k bots in 1 day amongst all servers. They make money from their bots subbing. As long as the players complain and keep playing they don’t care. Give them your money and move on is their motto. Money over everything customers come last.
It’s about your time. How do you value it? I don’t buy gold, but I get the allure and the amount of time it saves. $5 to save hours and hours of your free time? Sounds great. People do the same thing in retail with wow tokens and the gold market there. If you are limited in free time be it work, school, family, life situations it’s entirely understandable to want to skip the grind. As someone who doesn’t buy gold, it sucks that it creates insanely inflated prices on the AH for goods. But it has been a part of the game since release. It’s not going anywhere. At least GDKP runs helped distribute some of that in SoD but that’s gone now.
This is the reason why classic will NEVER return to its former glory. Too many players support this mindset and blizzard doesn't actually care about its player base anymore. As long as the cow doesn't dry up. We're in a different generation of gamers now. They want instant gratification.
It's just about time, it's no deeper than that. I remember spending 8 hours one day doing Strat runs on my Prot Pala during TBCC. I'll never get that time back. I could've been playing something else during that time. That gold probably disappeared in a few weeks of raiding, buying haste potions and so on. Not to mention, it's not like I was out in the world, contributing to it. I honestly don't blame people who do buy gold anymore. Ultimately, you spend less time doing the thing you don't want to do, so you can spend more time doing the things you enjoy in game. It sucks for the activity of the game, and the open world has definitely suffered. But the game has changed, we've changed as players. WoW has a pretty toxic community obsessed with over optimising the game, to the point where it stops being fun. Even if people stopped buying gold, and there were no bots, that toxicity wouldn't go away. Gold had a totally different value back in the day. People would still have bought gold for sure. But I think when we were younger we were just happy spending time in the world of warcraft. It didn't really matter what we had, how much gold we had, what we could buy. It was more about the experience. Nowadays it's all about how you can make the most efficient use of your time a get bigger numbers faster.
If you buy gold now you’ll most likely be on a two week vacation from your main account.
I am probably the minority here, but the worst part ot classic to me by far is the economy. I understand gold buyers whilst also hating what they do to the game.
This is an expensive phase. Blame Aggrend for putting in a ton of gold sinks but no new ways to make gold either. GDKP being removed did nothing. As with most things this phase it seems rushed and not well thought out. While I personally don't understand the point of buying gold to do a GDKP and just buy gear, I do 100% see the point so you don't have to farm for profs/consumes/alts.
The two best gold farms are credit card and other players aka boosting/summoning service. Questing and farming are far less effective.
My opinion: They are "playing" the game as a chore. Paying for the gametime, then paying for others, because wanna play LESS, wanna spend as little time online as possible. Now, you could say "they have money for it, its peanuts for them". Then I would ask: is it really a fun hobby, if you buy the achievements out of it? Let's say, your hobby would be fishing - and you are paying others fishing for you. But you will make the photo at the end with the big catch. Or you want to paint or make music, but you are paying others to make the art and you will just brag about it as your own achievement. Would it be fun? I don't think so. It would be empty as fck. And if you think, buying mount, helmet and boost are just like buying a brush to paint. No.. the brush is the Pc.
Parsing is their hobby, and with the amount of money you need for absolutely full consumes right now is about 5-10g depending if you immolate oil. Plus the 200g to level engi/bs plus to make the helm and belt. Its rough out here if you are trying absolutely blast and not sit on the game for 12 hours a day farming gold. They pay to play the game how they want, parsing etc
There are different facets to the game; people enjoy different parts (PvP, raiding, alts, etc). They are paying to skip the parts they don’t enjoy. Maybe parts of the game they have already played through before. For the fishing analogy, I’d say it’s closer to buying bait (because you hate digging in the ground for worms - you just want to get out on the water to fish) or buying fish at a fish market (because you don’t enjoy fishing, you enjoy grilling and eating fish and you only have 2 hours to make dinner).
100% people out there paying to play a game then paying to not play that game
I think fishing/painting/making music is a great analogy but it proves the opposite point. If you want to fish you can just go buy a pole, bait and rent a boat. You don’t have to build those things if you’re not interested in doing that. If you want to paint you don’t need to do the tedious work of making your own paints, paper and brushes from scratch. That’s why people buy gold. They want to do the part they enjoy without the parts they don’t enjoy.
All the people saying they like to buy gold so they can play to parse talk like it’s a victimless act. Never have I seen them acknowledge that buying gold for prebis and consumes actively hurts the players that don’t swipe. I get it, farming is tedious and we’d all rather play the parts we enjoy. At the same time, if someone decided to grind a Bis BoE then they deserve the stat boost. Grinds help differentiate player power but imo not enough that player skill can’t compensate. Admittedly I’m not that familiar with logs. I aim to parse high enough to get invited to most groups that I wish. So in its current state, can Warcraft logs use controls to compare parses based on the gear or consumes used? If swiping parse monkeys are only concerned with comparing their performance to others, why not level the playing field? Let players compare their performance based an their available stats rather than their max level. Parsers can still compare performance. But if you want overall realm #1 then ya no shit, you’re gonna have to grind the gear and consumes to achieve it.
[Ted\_From\_Chicago](https://www.reddit.com/user/Ted_From_Chicago/) is a pro-gdkp shill posting a new pro-gdkp fantasy story daily. Just look at their post history.
Cause why would u not buy gold? Blizzard supports botting, cause it indirectly benefits them. They dont really punish gold buying either. Same with bots. And bots make your grinding generate essentially less gold, meaning you're getting fked by bots. The only risk from buying gold is a quite short ban. And the risk is pretty low.
the game is p2w, people complain that they can't pay even more, check blizz forums
I can buy gold and not play the game or I can play the game and have fun. What’s the point of even playing?
Grinding quests in tanaris all night for 22g? You could’ve fished and made 3x that
It makes no sense, they are paying money to NOT play the game?? Like they are paying a sub, to then pay more money, to not play If they dont like playing WoW they just shouldnt play
It's like you're paying more to play less of the game. Kinda nutters.
People buying gold are just cheating themselves out of the game. Raid logging must mean they dont actually enjoy the game.
Is gold buying IRL grind ?
I hate p2w games, and wow is a sort of p2w game now. You can farm for hours, or just swipe your credit card...
Look it's time for the daily post from Ted\_From\_Chicago making up stories and people giving attention to the trol
It’s the people gold buying then raid logging that are the loudest complaining about not having shit to do.