The $3,500+ Sword

Just when you think hearing that items reguarly go for 5 digits in GDKP's this pops up.
Gressil, Dawn of Ruin sells for 198k on Gehennas EU - where did all that gold come from?
Well let's have a guess shall we?
Enjoy!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Music used, In order:
Un'Goro: • Vanilla Un'Goro Crater...
STV: • Vanilla Stranglethorn ...
Outro - A small track from Winterspring, "Winterspring 5"
www.youtube.co.... @27min
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Twitch
/ willeonwow
Twitter
/ wille_wow
Tips
streamlabs.com...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
#wowclassic #wow #warcraft #classicwow #TBC #TheBurningCrusade

[@Y0UM4DBR0]

Imagine actually spending $3,500 on a sword that will be irrelevant in 5 months.

[@Benganboy1]

2months

[@starttofinish5826]

@@Benganboy1 it’s defo irrelevant already..

[@Benganboy1]

@@starttofinish5826 guess this DMF + 1 more, and its done.

[@rohleek5939]

It wont be irrelevant, if it was a big dream for you back in the days than its a big deal forever for you. It like a buying new car, there will always be better cars but you can still flex with your old timer :) and this sword.. Good lord.. Thats a rlly nice old timer tbh :D

[@artiome9893]

Thats not true. This sword is even better than lv70 heroic dungeon sword drops, and will only be replaced by TBC epic sword from world drop or Karazhan.

[@MrWwoww123]

Classic wow has conjured the sweatiest humans imaginable.

[@22001177]

Think you just do not know what a real job requires. Sit in a 180degree attic to install basic building requirements for 8 hours straight for 5 days and we can start talking of what causes sweat.

[@reiterateyoursentence3447]

@@22001177 weird flex but ok

[@szencziboldizsar6532]

only to reroll on a fresh server and never going back to their original character

[@HumblebeeRules]

Guys, what is that market tracker at 4:14?

[@Andrew-yl7lm]

@@22001177 spotted the American!

[@TheLinus1997]

"i did a lot of dire maul" /// a lot of dire maul was done.

[@Olibelus]

His credit card did a lot of Dire Maul when he bought all that gold illegally.

[@tatari6627]

@@Olibelus I mean, it was 3 people who all put in for the 198k pot.

[@shanbannan17]

@@Olibelus ye 100%

[@Humbertorgr]

@@Olibelus yea, interpol is after him now dw

[@HumblebeeRules]

Guys, what is that market tracker at 4:14?

[@Emajenus]

"Tinfoil theory about the gold being bought"....really? That's tinfoil? It's 100% guaranteed to be botted or bought. No one is farming 200k just to buy a single item.

[@WillEmmo]

tinfoils about it being used to essentially make it so you can distribute gold to your guild via 1 person buying instead of multiple people risking. Then everyone can full consume and raid log

[@Relbl]

Another YTer 'Frostradamus' is a massive gold farmer and he blows gold through GDKP runs, and even that keeping him fully occupied I've never seen him with much more than 10k... how anyone could amass 250k without cheating (or at least an AH bot) is beyond my understanding

[@Cynidecia]

Either that or he bought hold

[@rksworld4405]

@@Relbl you partialy answered it already: frostadamus is a gold farmer. gold farmers arent the rich people they are just the people making youtube and having their name out there- if you know what you do and play the ah game (not even a lot of time when you rly know what you do you can spend 30 min a day). so a farmer already can blow gold in GDKP runs... what can a person going for big gold in ah do :) think about it- magicuz is over 5 billion gold in shadowlands. you think you can buy that? at that point why even buy gold you cant even spend it. yet does magicuz share what he does? no oc not the face of goldmaking is studen albatrotz with not even 100m gold. the point here just because we cant understand doesnt mean it cant happen... back in the day players would have called people who clear nax on release cheaters too ^^

[@Mithrapas]

@@rksworld4405 yeah people seem to underestimate people and overestimate themself when it comes to gold making.

[@macten6819]

Bots are on a rampage again, at least on Shazzrah. Major healing potion is down to like 20s, that can only mean one thing...

[@MRkriegs]

On Incendius bots are everywhere

[@gishathosaurus6828]

Ah, Shazzrah... good times :)

[@comq01]

Im seeing bots popping out of the ground in front of dmn entrance all the time in faerlina

[@comq01]

Camping the portal for a few minutes i can count at least 5 bots zoning out

[@FaquST]

Arcane crystals are down to 13g on Earthfury

[@Xijor]

'I do a lot of Dire Maul East' is just code word for botting. He bots.

[@tangoman111]

Wrong, others bot. He just swipes the credit card

[@zugdarr]

I do a lot of (anything) is code for Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal. The only reason they're near Dire Maul is to collect the world buffs and raid log. Nobody actually plays the game except the CGFs.

[@1337139]

@@zugdarr speak for yourself a lot of us farm our own gold.

[@justlikeyourfathersaid]

@@tangoman111 more believable guildies pay for it than share the gold at the end of the run

[@janwitt5220]

I legitly did dm east with my gf (priest) until we had enough crystals for thunderfury... took us 2 or 3 month I think? In addition to beeing looged into the demon area in winterspring during work^^ Fuck what a time investment... I never want to see dme again xD

[@bassline2k10]

Brilliant that you have put the spotlight on this - nobody really talks about it but its a big problem for the health of the game

[@mihaa94sky]

Everyone talks about it everywhere. Reddit, forums, in-game, youtube... this is not the first video about it.

[@MoonTurky]

Seems like everything is a problem for the health of a 14 year old game

[@spencerskewes9370]

Blizzard only bans bots after the billing cycle at the start of the business quarter

[@conorf8091]

Makes sense

[@robertp457]

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

[@gishathosaurus6828]

False! Blizzard never bans bots XD

[@etaxalo]

@@gishathosaurus6828 They ban just a few after players raise a big stink about it. But from a financial perspective why would they ban them ? The account have to be payed for with a monthly sub and that means free money to them.

[@gishathosaurus6828]

@@etaxalo They did back then, when they cared for the community... way back. Before, GMs would contact you hours after posting the ticket. Now? Yeah, try a week and consider yourself lucky if you're greeted with an e-mail consisting of the most souless, robotic and generic response ever

[@hellfrost333]

"At least no one on the Gryffindor team had to buy their way in. They got in on pure talent!"

[@Whoopsydayzee]

Cracking reference

[@bryanheilman4376]

I cannot do Classic anymore, and I was SO looking forward to it, the people and this sort of crap has not only killed it for me, but disheartened me to my core

[@Jspath3]

What ruins classic WoW: World buff logging and gold/herb farm bots. What could fix classic WoW: Ban more gold sellers, limit gold & bag space for server transfers. Make all buffs time down even when logged off.

[@AkiRa22084]

All my friends stopped playing around level 30...

[@crepooscul]

You think you do but you don't

[@tonisopranoamk9104]

Nobody, who farmed that Gold would spend that money because you know how long you needed for it. Hes 100% a botter or gold buyer

[@mrillis9259]

This is called projection

[@mrillis9259]

Why farm the gold an not use it?

[@mrillis9259]

Really the only thing I see wrong is the timing. AQ 40 gear inside the first month of opening. That would be worth it. Because it would upgrade your çharactter so much.

[@tonisopranoamk9104]

@@mrillis9259 Imagine you are working straight 1 year and than all the earnings going away for ONE TV. Nobody who farmed that gold would do that. Only botters / Goldbuyer

[@tonisopranoamk9104]

@@mrillis9259 Especially for an item which is irrelevant in like 4-5 Months AND he is just a social

[@culley9505]

why is no one talking about the guy who bid 197,000g

[@chemicalchito1302]

He mentions that it was likely to artificially inflate the price so that the guild could get a huge cut of gold “legally”. They most likely never had the gold or intended to buy. The guild pitched in together to buy large gold amounts in order to be wealthy enough for future consumables and junk while not tipping off blizzard, I guess.

[@tsdrum2016]

At least on my server, gdkp are how they actually transfer gold to gold buyers, they even have a well known guild that does nothing but gdkp's and clears rather easily. Guild A all chip in to buy gold, they go to gdkp guild and talk about it on discord, magically the gdkp run is basically a ton of people from guild A and the rest from gdkp guild. Massive bids on items, at the end pay out equals what guild A bought from gold seller(gdkp guild). Btw, the gdkp guild runs multiple bwl, aq40 and naxx runs, just this week I know they did 15 different aq40s and at least a dozen bwl's and naxx runs.

[@WillEmmo]

Bids went like 135 - 150 then randomly 198k if i remember right, wasnt anything like you'd expect it to be.

[@snigelsallad]

the 2nd highest bidder was actually at like 150k so this dude potentially overbid 40k+, makes it even more suspicious imo

[@laugo5773]

@@WillEmmo ye he went all in :)

[@AlexeyFilippenkoPlummet]

What I find amusing here is that this is nothing new. Basically what we have is a highly organized hierarchy of competitive people who are making, spending and managing money... Familiar, isn't it? In everyday world this is called a corporation. And already in-game corporations went to heavy money laundering, knowing full well that the source they get their money from certainly did not "legally" farm his wealth, but not caring about it in the slightest. This is just human and society nature. And WoW once again provides us with the means for a perfect social experiment, just like it did many times before, including the epidemiological studies with the corrupted blood incident.

[@jamesharris3667]

Guess it's like a lot of other things in life; those who take the illegitimate route tend to get ahead of the rest with a better reward. But that usually also means a greater risk. First thing I thought of was the doping problem among so many top athletes. But there are many more examples ofc.. I haven't played wow for a very long time and I'm not fully up to date, but from what I've understood is that blizzard aren't doing much about the rampant botting and gold-buying? If so, it gives those in-game corporations even less reason to care about the legitimacy of their operation.

[@AlexeyFilippenkoPlummet]

@@jamesharris3667 well apparently a guy was able to bot out 200k gold and have no problems doing so. And Willie had many other such examples in his videos so I guess you have your answer lol. Ironically I'm sure that's how real life works too - if you play on big numbers, you have higher chance to not get responsible.

[@michenerkruse]

It's been a ride watching your channel grow, brother, creeping up on the 100k mark!

[@ReeceDK]

That's not a big deal, I have the same amount of gold on my main. Oh, this isn't Retail?

[@F14thunderhawk]

on retail ive handled about 10 times that much gold just to level one of my 8 legendary patterns to tech 4. and 190k is only about $26

[@sooibot]

[@khan9946]

obviously chap bought the gold typical new classic experience where people buying their way out .

[@gojonnygogogo]

Gamers love to pretend they hate pay to win but obviously if you give people even the slightest option a good chunk of people will choose to pay. Honestly having in game currency directly compatible to real money makes me sick.

[@beornyondur4594]

correct, the dopamine rush that you get from paying to win and beating out other people is higher than doing drugs.

[@skunkynuggets6881]

The problem is that some gamers don't care while most gamers hate it. Any company that caters to that kind of gamer is just hunting whales at the expense of everyone elses fun.

[@zariygo]

Imagine how much a single warglave might be sold in a gdkp run...

[@Waishwhw72i19sjx7]

$5k each i imagine. Maybe 6k for main hand 4k for off but it balances out. The legendary bow that doesn't require ammo will be about $4500.

[@zugdarr]

By that point, gold will be so flush on the servers you cannot really account for it except in real dollars. If Blizzard wants to clean up TBC a little they can limit transfers to TBC to level 58 and above only. But they'll probably just roll over into TBC, and the gold trade will continue.

[@darylsdog9521]

@@Waishwhw72i19sjx7 the bow is not the best one since it doesn’t require ammo it makes you do less dmg so i don’t see it going for 4k

[@BPN25]

198,000 gold on classic. no inflation to see here move along. TBC is fucked

[@alle38]

@@zugdarr Even if they made it so that only level 60 players could transfer and let's say they imposed a 2k gold limit to bring with you (who doesnt have at least 1k+ at this point basically). That would just mean everyone with an obscene amount of gold would buy items/consumes etc that they know will still be valuable in tbc and then sell them once they are there.

[@Capricrit]

Hungering Cold dropped on my server and it went for over 90000 Still insane

[@flinxsl]

The first one on my server went for just over 50k. Whitemane alliance has a lot of GDKP culture and the guy who won it has multiple characters that goes to lots of GDKPs. Now in a world where gold buying exists that gold does trickle into GDKP players' pockets but that doesn't mean any individual buyer is the one who directly bought the gold.

[@frondwestfall]

Westfall this week?

[@biscuit6623]

Only 90k? What a steal! Garr binding just went for 91k about 2 months ago on kirtonos :p

[@Capricrit]

@@frondwestfall ye

[@Capricrit]

Wait FROND is that you

[@Bugumir]

People like that gentleman keep me from logging on. Thank you.

[@TheIndignation]

I'm gonna laugh really hard when I get a Gressil for free.

[@WillEmmo]

We have had 2 so far, feels pretty good tbh!

[@amen7692]

those people probably can buy a new car every day so 3500 dollars is nothing for them

[@mitchland1192]

@@amen7692 the kind of people that rich do not play wow lol

[@amen7692]

​@@mitchland1192 some obviously do

[@jake41591]

@@mitchland1192 ask henry cavill lol

[@Valvad0ss]

dude bought the gold from bots 100%. DM east my ass!

[@HumblebeeRules]

Guys, what is that market tracker at 4:14?

[@keirbourne5323]

@@HumblebeeRules Nexus Hub

[@andrewdk8849]

eggnoc was a chinese gold seller that got an order from for 198.000 Gold 5 days before the launch of classic, he decided the best way to deliver this gold was to level a warrior on Gehennas, join the guild under a false alias, gear up said warrior, play it for 6 phases and then deliver the Gold in a Naxx GDKP using a Gressil, Dawn of Ruin as a coverup. But he kinda started to like ... the memes, the hardcore right wingers in there.. it was a match made for heaven for eggnoc. So he stayed, he played.. he pumped and he owned. This what too much however and Eggnoc's behaviour came to Blizzard's attention. 6 Days after a world first Sub 1 hour speedrun it happened - Account has been suspended due to violations of Blizzard Service Policies - Eggnoc was shook but he knew his job was finished. The 198.000 Gold have been delivered.

[@foreveryoung1678]

Multiboxers (before they were banned) could easily get this amount of gold. I know a player on our server who multiboxed 13 hunters. He reached gold cap mainly by farming frostmaul e’kos. Whenever it drops he gets 13 of those.

[@Mrlonefighter]

Yep. A guildie on my server multiboxed 20acc's + and pretty much controlled the entire marked of Frostmaul E'kos and other items. I get where Willie is coming from when hes comparing that gold to hours spent farming stuff like DME. But controlling a marked, multiboxing to farm certain items or host Gbid raids are for sure much more rewarding. Tho that 198k was 99% likely bought

[@honuk435]

@@Mrlonefighter multiboxing 20 accounts is still pay to win, so even if/when that's true it's the same story

[@Mrlonefighter]

@@honuk435 True, never said it wasen't :P

[@vetlestoraas600]

Multiboxing isn't banned. Software to controll 20 accounts with 1 click is though.

[@skunkynuggets6881]

Those only drop for the group. At most he would get 5 of them

[@vzwson4995]

GDKP runs and world buffs were enough to chase me out of classic. The worst.

[@1un4cy]

Don't you normally go to those to earn gold rather than get loot?

[@AkiRa22084]

How are GDKP runs a problem? They were the best way to make gold back in Vanilla.

[@vzwson4995]

@@AkiRa22084 you mean the laziest way to make gold? They are toxic in ever aspect.

[@AkiRa22084]

@@vzwson4995 Doing raids in a pug is lazy? In an MMO? You seem to have issues, man...

[@Mokkalol]

We've seen crazy prices on my server too. But I worked together with our GDKP lead and we've inspected most big buyers had the same thing in common; They are transfers. They stocked up on lotus's/other high end on their dead servers and moved to our big server when they could and made a fortune. 5 of the big buyers are friends and locked down entire zones on their dead servers with lotus/RTV nodes, and continued to do so on an alt until another 6 months passed right around naxx came out so they could transfer another char = more gold . (6month cd on transferring) Ofcourse some of them do buy their gold. But to discredit all of them wouldnt be fair. There are some really smart goblins out there too.

[@Presearing]

The only reason I can grasp behind dropping that much gold on an item is 5 minutes of fame - everyone knows the dude's name now, even if it's infamy.

[@zwojack7285]

Hopefully blizz does too and takes a good look at his Account

[@tarron3237]

I don't tbh. Really honest. Is it Eggnoc? Stupid name if yes. So yeah, being famous with a silly name for an item that gets devalued with the next expansion..

[@Brandon-tz2wh]

What’s his name I forgot it 1 second after it popped off the screen

[@comq01]

So does blizzard, we hope

[@ashrasmun1]

One warrior reacts to Gressil with 198k Another one reacts with "IF portal pls" (8:20) I love it :)

[@speedycerv]

lol nice catch

[@DJ_Treu]

I converted over 1.3 mill gold on retail into 75% completion (Edit tp clarify: for scarab Lord) from selling boosts in Early Nyalotha and saving up for a long boy. I instead spent it on that so if you want a conversion rate to $ based on how many tokens i could have gotten for it vs the Scarab lord. Id say youre spot on about 3500.

[@HugeAckMan420]

This guy could afford 40 epic flying mounts during naxx and I had to wait until wotlk to get mine.

[@johnt836]

Part of the issue are the high-pop megaservers that are far larger than the game was designed for. The best classic experience is found on the lower-pop PvE servers. I play on a healthy low-pop pve server (Azuresong) and it wasn’t until last week that the first guild full-cleared Naxx. The second-place guild is on Sapphiron I think. Meanwhile, I’m progressing through Naxx on two separate characters in two separate guilds. What consumables I can’t farm in the open world I can just buy using gold I farmed myself because consumables aren’t ridiculously overpriced. Flasks are around 150g to 200g right now, for example.

[@pyromike7237]

Blizzard's handling of gold buyers and bots is nothing short of pathetic

[@MRkriegs]

It is almost nonexistent lol sad

[@Petter1900]

Our server never gets these kind of numbers. Its kind of insane whenever an item goes 5 digits. Even Wraith Blade only went for 7k, and that was the highest priced item we had in the GDKP runs I've been in. Bindings usually go for 5k or something, so you could say that item might cost you more than 10k through the GDKP route, but still.

[@jackie7892]

GDKP is more powerful than guilds run? what a sad story

[@JacobSimonsen]

They have money to bring the consumes needed

[@jeremyhoffman5655]

Ya it's pretty sad and fucked up you have surrender your gold just do a dungeon....the whole ideal of a dungeon or raids is to gain not to loose gold off the jump

[@Connor-gz4jv]

I am going on 1 month trying to get this bot in swamp of sorrows banned. its so blatantly obvious its crazy how they are still out there running into the tree roots....

[@larserik4629]

I lured a bot in swamp of sorrows all the way to Stormwind, mind controlled him and kindly asked people to report this obvious bot. Fast forward 2 weeks later my account gets perma banned for botting (wtf xD) and that bot is still farming in swamp of sorrows... Gg blizz, gg.

[@Connor-gz4jv]

@@larserik4629 yuppppppp anytime I see my guild in the swamp I ask them to report them. Who knows maybe I should make a youtube video on it lol

[@conorf8091]

@@larserik4629 blizz wouldn’t perm ban for nothing. What’d you really do lol

[@larserik4629]

@@conorf8091 I have always regarded of my self as a good faith actor so this ban was surprising and confusing to me. I tried to appeal the decision of course and they later reduced the ban to 6months, but only due to me being a "first time offender". The thing that angered me the most was that they didn't bring forth any evidence or say anything specific beyond "Exploitation - Third Party Program, otherwise known was botting". I mean I can understand that Blizz don't want to give away their detection system, but it's such a hopeless situation when you are accused and you genuinely don't know what you have done wrong, you know? As for what might have caused this ban, I have a few guesses. Warning: this will be lengthy. My first guess would be that an addon triggered something. Unitscan comes to mind, an addon that makes a clickable pop up on your screen when a specific mob is targetable. This would be an automation I think. However that would mean a perma ban for basically every dude who has farmed tidal charm so you'd think that addon would have been disabled by now or that other people would have been banned for using this addon. Furthermore getting a perma ban for this seems just waaay over the top. Maybe I'm wrong though, would love to hear someone else's take on this. Second guess, which is a bit of a tinfoil hat imo but here it goes. I was ranking at back when there was still fierce competition for high bracket spots. I was a big noob. However, my class was in high demand so I got picked up by a premade and they got me a high bracket. Some of the private server boys didn't like to see a noob getting a higher bracket spot than themselves so I wouldn't be surprised if a certain toxic guild on my server arranged to have me mass reported. I've been told from people who played and ranked on private server that this practice wasn't unheard of. Third guess. I was leveling a rogue in the open world, something rare on my server. The rogue had the bot-like looks, fiery weapons, show helm etc. Maybe a few people who passed me reported me? A lot of people did /wave at me and I waved back as I find the emote stuff amusing :P At the time I wasn't aware that lots of bots also do this, they wave back if you /wave at them. This sounds extremely thin reason for a ban, then again I remeber this GM who banned alleged streamer snipers for griefing... Lol. Fourth guess. As I told you in the first post, I took a bot to SW. Perhaps the good people of Storm Wind reported my character instead of the bot I brought. Some doing it for the memes, others because they are toxic like that. Would have been hysterical if this actually lead to a ban :P Fifth and final guess. A bunch of factors combined. - I had more than 100 days /played in March. I play this game... a lot. - I would play for long periods of time. For example, I played for 30hrs straight lvling my rogue, just a few days before I got banned. - The ban happened at the same time as blizzard reduced their support staff due to corona. Every time I sent a ticket to the support team I had to wait 9 days for them to reply (the replies were usually just one or two sentences such as "It has been confirmed" and "Further requests on this topic will not be reviewed"). Anyway... As to what actually caused this ban I will never know. Just gotta let it go and move on. However, I know for a fact that I didn't use any programs to play my character for me. I grinded every stupid little thing myself. And after I got banned, I grinded it all back again on the new account. A true no lifer xD Remember Conor F, you asked for this. Cheers all

[@conorf8091]

@@larserik4629 Wow. Anyway you’ll be glad to know. If the wow account has been banned but blizz main account all good you should be able to start “fresh” but keep all ur achievements and mounts still. I got perm banned years ago but was able to keep mounts , titles etc. Thank you for the lengthy reply. Mine was strung together in about 2 minutes, enjoy

[@Zapzdoughnut]

This is 1000% why I quit classic. Can't have anything nice any more.

[@mihaa94sky]

While I absolutely disapprove of people buying and selling these large amounts of gold, why is this the reason you quit the game? How does it impact you personally?

[@nonneponne]

@@mihaa94sky It removes the hard work and time put in to a game when someone just buys the gold and gets loot with no effort....

[@mihaa94sky]

@@nonneponne Absolutely agree mate. Sucks ass but it doesn't impact me one bit what other people spend their gold on. I see no reason to quit the game over it but to each their own I guess.

[@jordanschlansky4093]

@@mihaa94sky I inflates the gold for everyone else though. So contrary to popular belief, if all you do is dungeons and raid and prices for everything goes up, you're gonna get screwed unless you actively farm and sell items that are inflated with the new economy.

[@mihaa94sky]

@@jordanschlansky4093 Well the way it works though is inflation is going to happen regardless of buyers/sellers/botting because this game lacks needed gold sinks. Gold is almost 95% of the time just changing hands. There are ways to bring in gold into the economy (doing quests, killing mobs, pickpocketing, raid bosses, etc) and very few actual sinks where the gold disappears (mounts, respecs). It would get to that point one way or another regardless if someone buys gold. The actual problem lies in botting which is speeding up the process.

[@wickedgrinaz]

Love the content, WillE!

[@mmocracy]

It's going to be like the guy who bought the warglaive rogue in tbc all over again, thanks for doing this WillE

[@Schniiiiiiiiiiiiif]

imagine if blizzard cared and banned this guy,, would be funny tho, but if you can buy a sword with almost 200k gold and not get banned its basically open season and blizzard has allowed gold buying.

[@Durgenheim]

I got to the part about rogue bots pickpocket farming BRD and was curious about how many of them do that on my server. Among many others, there's currently one in there named "Willera" doing the thing. YOU SNEAKY SNAKE

[@AkiRa22084]

Also, since GDKP works like an auction, that means that there was at least one more person there that was also ready to spend almost as much gold...

[@793Force]

Nihilum had a rogue in TBC, ClozE was his name. He famously sold his warglaive rogue account for (If i recall right) 14000$. The account was later banned.

[@noahdidehbani4765]

I was proud to farm around 10k worth of gold (mostly with hunter cheese in BS on 2 accounts). But even with my stash, Naxx is slowly depleting my gold. I will have to commit more precious time to farm gold in an increasingly competitive area with more passive lotus farmers finding there way to BS spawns and other regions each week. Grantiid if I where to do it again I would have had a better long term investment strategy from phase 1 and grew my wealth better through out new phases. With limited time to farm gold and even assuming Naxx will become cheaper as the guild gears up I will have to purchase gold myself. Hate to do it but I am on track by late march, early April to be broke with a new expansion on the horizon .Makes the tinfoil hat (6:20) seem like one I should wear as ill likely buy gold clearing nax every week till then. WillE, been following you since the launch of classic and I love your videos, Incredibly interesting and relating to the current state of the game across the whole world. Thank you man, always look forward to watching your videos.

[@messdpmessdp2192]

Interestingly this culture in classic wow is a great way to test real world economic theories. For example "trickle down economics". Gold/GDKP buyers are like the ultra rich, GDKP carriers sell their services directly to the ultra rich like a Yacht salesman, or a corrupt politician, and the rest of the classic community are the regular people, middle/working class. So does trickle down economics work? Does the wealth trickle down? Well kind of. Prices on a lot of items are propped up, so an honest gold farm does make more gold than it would have otherwise. Grave Moss / Fadeleaf in SM for example was insane for a while. But overall do we have the same buying power as we would otherwise? Probably not, but its hard to say for sure. I dont want to go too far into real world stuff obviously. But there are some very funny people who have strong feelings about economics in real life, but then when they experience it in miniature in game, they have strong feelings in completely the opposite directly. And it goes both ways! So called leftists tell me the wow gold will trickle down, and so called libertarians telling me gold buyers have ruined the economy!

[@MD-fj4ux]

Eggnoc played on dreadmist first, pretty sure they are all running bots in there guild. a few of them got banned back on dreadmist

[@Me0wG4ming]

he was in my guild, never seen him farm. At least not on eggnoc... so i wonder which char then..

[@randomguy1378]

It's actually quite a bit worse in China. First off, there are much much more gdkp raids compared to NA and EU servers combined. The only things preventing NAXX from becoming mostly gdkp in China is the difficulty of the raid. There was actually a corrupted ashbringer that was sold for 4500000 gold and yeah thats seven digits. Which of course gold is quite a bit cheaper over there currently at 0.037rmb(chinese currency) for 1gold in wow. Which translate to 150gold=1USD or 30000USD

[@sgtcarneiro]

The gold cap is due to a database limitation since the gold input is probably defined as a 32 bit signed integer. That makes the maximum size for that input equals to 2147483647. So the actual cap is 214748 gold, 36 silver and 47 coppers.

[@UserName-ei7dk]

You stated that at the end each person had a payout of 7k+ gold. For those who didnt bother to do quick math the sword alone paid each player(assuming theres 40 player) 4950g each. That is insane, I've been saying GDKP should be against TOS since I saw DFT go for 800g, but your right it will never happen.

[@zugdarr]

DFT at 800g? I would snap that up in a heartbeat. We had 2 of them back to back, each went for over 15,000g, and that was in Phase 3.

[@Mirceabalea]

I've been a gamer all my life and I always got a thrill when I got a new item, but to pay that amount of money for a virtual item is plain and simple nuts. I can't imagine the motivation to do this, especially when TBC is coming out in aprox half a year.

[@onofish487]

no chance he has that money by normal means

[@mihaa94sky]

There is a chance and it's very much possible to earn that much gold legitimately. The part that gives it away that he's a gold buyer tho is that no sane person who farmed that amount of gold would ever spend it all on one item that will become obsolete in TBC.

[@emillio6182]

@@mihaa94sky That is true. I farmed lots of gold on my mage but I would never spend it all on one item lmao

[@siliablackfame5771]

Or I don't know, what if he got it by doing gdkp runs? Shocker right? :D

[@Scresho202]

Hey! Could you maybe do a video about how many people got the scarab lord mount in classic? Really wanted to find infos but didnt :D MAybe you know more

[@ericthompson5875]

I only just started doing GDKP as a carry healer in p6. It's become necessary to have a chance of consuming each raid. Before now I was getting away with a bit of felcloth/DME jump farming a week, and then briefly some Eko farming. Now, no way will that keep up. Ideal world, no botters/gold buyers and I can easily continue what I was doing before. But as a single 60 healer GDKP is the only option to have a chance on my server.

[@cecilofs]

Exactly why this problem is so insidious. Forces otherwise legit people to get their hands dirty just to keep up :(

[@Hempflakes]

I will say, there are two types of GDKPS I've seen. There are these chinese gold buyer GDKPS and there are also lower budget GDKPS where people can farm rep in AQ20 and items usually bid 200-1500g and everyone gets paid for farming rep instead of just running AQ20 for the 50th time

[@teslatacos9806]

Botting and gold buying go hand and hand with classic wow. Its part of the original experience LUL

[@zugdarr]

That's pretty true actually, when I started back in Classic at a friend's urging, the very next thing he explained to me after how and where to create a character was where to buy safe gold. His logic was that I would enjoy the game far more if I didn't have to worry about gold. I never followed that latter suggestion and he was always pestering me to sell him my gold....

[@konradbrochocki4923]

@@conorf8091 You clearly know nothing about this scene.

[@DaFro112]

For some reason this reminds me of when I played on a private server that was wrath of the lich king, I liked the server but the fact you could swipe your credit card and just buy gear really turned me off from playing. Imagine having a clearly freshly dinged level 70 death knight, paladin, warrior (take your pick) jumping you with a fully done shadowmourn, I believe the players on the server collectedly referred to them Creditmourn or Visamourn. Keep the vids coming WillE, always find these interesting

[@ArenaHealer]

I was a fool to think I'd get a guild, progress with them, and gear each other up each week. My server is nothing but GDKP, and I see new names/buyers all the time in raids. I doubt TBC will be better, but would be great to find a group of people that did just want to have fun and not be the best at a 16yo game.

[@DrIgor-ny1we]

Our guild is casual progress.. We are not rushing Naxx or the other raids when they came out for that matter. We are a danish guild only however, so no one else can join the guild.. But i'm very happy to have found one of the few guilds that are like this ^^

[@FROZENbender]

*did just want to have fun.

[@ArenaHealer]

@@FROZENbender ty. i had a different sentence then edited w/o changing the 1st part.

[@zugdarr]

TBC will be 10x worse. With bots being 10 levels higher and able to AOE farm old content solo, the gold is going to be insane. I know I used to farm Scholo on my rogue back then, I made a small fortune clearing the instance over and over. And then you have the dailies, which will inflate gold beyond measure. The gold cap was discovered during TBC, prior to this nobody really knew that there was an actual cap of 214k. And then it became a common practice to try to reach 214k. Have fun!

[@Kemachris]

@@zugdarr Nah people knew that the cap was there, it's basic programming knowledge the highest number you can get with 32 bits is 2,147,483,647, so thats where it comes from.

[@zugdarr]

It's disgusting anymore. I really enjoyed GDKP when I could compete with real gold. I'd get outbid by gold buyers all the time, but it wasn't out of hand several phases ago. Here's a little backstory and a wall of text rant. I work alchemy and other consumables on the AH like crazy, and I know I'm one of the server's leading AH players because that's my history in WoW. It depends on which phase, but in Phase 6 I'm pulling about 3k a week in profit out of the AH, and that's with religious posting every single night and often during the day on raid days. For about 2-3 weeks after raid releases, I'm pulling 5 figures a week in profits and this is with semi hourly post/reposts in the evening. In real life I make a very nice living and if I wanted to I could buy hundreds of thousands of gold with little problem, but I don't, because it's an extreme waste of money. I don't have time to raid with a dedicated group because normal guilds raid when I'm working or spending time with my family on weekends, and I can put one evening a week into GDKP runs, and I was a regular until Phase 6. I'm now seeing items go for 20 to 40k, and that's a full stop. I have about that much gold earned in game and that means I'm just picking up scraps they don't want, otherwise I'd go bankrupt competing against these people. I've forced bids up weekly since AQ release, never winning anything. I'm taking home 1500-2000g per raid, but that's nothing when you have people mastercarding their way to victory weekly. Certain cultures believe in gold buying, as evidenced by the token in one country. Many of them play in the US as well, and they throw 10s of thousands down weekly, same people, same guilds, all of that particular culture. We all know that they aren't grinding 30-50k a week out of Mara runs so they can run GDKP. I don't compete against them in the AH either, I know who my competition is and what guilds they are from. It's straight up gold buying. So in the end, [b]honest gold making doesn't compete in GDKPs[/b]. I've taken a break since the first run, where Kiss of the Spider went for nearly 30k, and then the next week it went for the same amount... These runs are nothing but gold dumps for TOS violators, nothing more. Guilds are financing their raiding activity just pandering to gold buyers. And Blizzard simply refuses to punish the buyers and botters. How hard is it to go through mailbox and trade records where thousands of gold was exchanged? What, will people threaten to quit if they close accounts? The company has NEVER enforced their hard line no tolerance policy on cheating, going all the way back to Diablo 2. Change my mind.

[@BPN25]

198,000 gold on classic. no inflation to see here move along. TBC is fucked

[@zugdarr]

@@BPN25 And yeah, I remember when TBC started in 2007 and I had enough to pick up my 280 mount on one character. Big gold on my server back then was 5-10k. Friend of mine had 120k, and Blizzard closed his account for suspicion of gold farming. Yes, they actually did their jobs at one time, even if he was innocent.

[@CrystaTiBoha]

Easy: the guy wanted a WillE episode on his willy substitute. Well done.

[@jeremyhoffman5655]

Instant gratification generation killing this game if not the gaming world.

[@nolabets3130]

WillE you crushed it through all classic dude, content always on point

[@Okipouros]

Meanwhile willie raiding with well known gold sellers

[@benf5467]

I´m pretty sure the Gold-Cap is a server-side limitation, not a client-side one. So it may be that we´re on a legion client but it does not matter at all.

[@laurap3244]

He didn't buy the sword, he bought the notoriety from spending 198,000 gold on an item

[@IncognitoGuerrilla]

And few weeks from now nobody will remember him. Not really worth €3500

[@Watthead80]

Imagine if the person who won the sword was an enchanter and had an old epic. When they recieved the sword the immediately DE the old epic and receive a Nexus Crystal.

[@pokemonduck]

I sure am looking forward to The Botting Crusade..

[@crolvarsk4901]

The server im playing on has a very strict ban on GDKP and has active GMs that actually give a damn about gold sellers and the server rules. Gold sellers are usually removed from the game within minutes of an advert.

[@evasion.6096]

My god they better release some fresh TBC

[@adamgatt719]

Client isn't relevant to the gold cap. It is probably caused by the currency field in the database being integer type which usually has a 2 to the power of 32 limit.

[@skylarlinden945]

I dont think it's a secret that everyone knows the gold was bought lol - the sword was sold and bought within the same guild. They're just laundering gold to fund their guild speed runs. This is also why Blizz needs to heavily limit what people can bring into TBC

[@user-pj8em4gu6v]

Looking forward to that bubble bursting when they announce fresh TBC servers ;)

[@TheNuub63]

It's not even about being salty for him having so much gold, it's straight up like you said, if he had legitimately got that gold he would never part with it in such a way. I think this killed classic wow and future progressive expansions. It's not in activision Blizzard's interest to put a lot of attention and labor into banning these players, so the botting will go on in tbc, plus all the botted gold from classic will transition into TBC, making it an inflated mess of an economy from the get-go. Not looking forward to it. Blizzard needs to take action.

[@bhot9293]

I thought this would ruin classic for me too but honestly raiding isn't that hard outside of certain maxx fights. Our guild does AQ,BWL, and MC gdkps and stuff definitely goes way up there. We can even do 2 runs of everything and keep one in the guild so we have a chance of getting top items. We plan on doing gdkps in TBC too. Way better than farming out in the world imo.

[@zugdarr]

@@bhot9293 The only issue it the ethical dilemma. You are trading for botted and bought gold when you sponsor GDKPs. For most there is no dilemma. But in the end, you are sponsoring the very reason they are buying gold from farmers.

[@Valvad0ss]

@@zugdarr facts

[@BPN25]

198,000 gold on classic. no inflation to see here move along. TBC is fucked

[@Twooshort]

Once upon a time, Blizzard would drop a big fat banhammer on everyone within a mile of that raid-ID.

[@DrewPicklesTheDark]

Blizzard doesn't exist anymore. It's an Activision subsidiary wearing it's skin.

[@KarvidSR]

Best part, he isn't even banned. Blizzard literaly don't give a F.

[@justlikeyourfathersaid]

why would he get banned?

[@adamizor0014]

@@justlikeyourfathersaid Because there is no way he obtained all that money in just DM runs. Botting 100%

[@boalollal242]

I mean, this should be noticable by blizz? They should be able to trace the income...

[@anorouch]

Didnt the guy with the only neon green mechanostrider get his acc closed by caught selling it? As well as that one of a kind neck legendary from rag? They USED to care. 800 layoffs later. They don't.

[@zugdarr]

@@anorouch The mechanostrider, yes. The neck no, the person was still playing in BFA.

[@zugdarr]

It is traceable, but the manpower to do it is the issue. I'm convinced Blizzard only investigates reports only, and there are thousands of those tickets filed every single day. They don't seek it out.

[@skunkynuggets6881]

@@zugdarr We need another red shirt guy to change his question and catch them off guard at Blizzcon.

[@llww5288]

It's not surprising at all in China. We have a lot of gold farms and this sword costs around 5k usd in my server for the first one.

[@WormyMaster]

As of today, Mograine-EU has 2 (pure, no guilds attached) GDKP pugs that clear Naxx. Our first Hungering cold went for 26k

[@Alex-os5co]

Thanks Willie :) Love your videos

[@TheOrkishslave]

Mildly curious if the person who bought that was running a Dire Maul Tribute buff summon/buff team. I know someone on my server does that and rakes in a silly amount...

[@AhriFae]

You know... if I were a multimillionaire I would probably buy gold too

[@26ryanpat]

I do GDKP runs and am in a GDKP guild. Its fun we raid 3 lockouts of every instance a week. Meaning 3 toons 3 lockouts MC/Bwl/AQ/Naxx. If you are strapped for cash ya just take the payouts one week and depending on drops you will be back up to 10k again. I see nothing wrong with it at all We raid more than anybody else we take tons of pugs and we carry them in naxx. It makes the old content that I have not needed anything in more fun because you actually care what drops and you are not bored out of your mind in MC. Gdkp has its place people love it.

[@Amopeika]

Well Legion client doesnt mean that the variables of the game have to be exactly the same as in legion. And the gold cap is the way it is because they used an integer as storage for the number and since there is 32 bits in a integer you can store esactly this (2147483647) number in it. That means also that copper and silver actually are in the same continus number as gold :)

[@pedropierre9594]

Me who got it for free “ surprised pikachu face”

[@goskawow1943]

I've sent in reports on multiple occasions with clear evidence of people buying gold and have never heard a peep

[@blackfalcon1324]

the biggest concern is how someone has that much gold. I feel like they need to go some kind of mass gold reset for TBC, like reduce peoples gold by upto 85% based on how much they have.

[@Alvareux]

You forgot about the 30 instance daily lockout.

[@Patatetbk]

Thats a good example of why the economy needs to be addressed before everything is moved to tbc. As someone who skipped classic but is interested in tbc iwill have no chance to buy anything for weeks if not months.

[@BombVoyageAU]

Plaguebloom is 120g a stack on my server atm. Mageblood pots 12g each, Mongoose 15g. Gold is nothing to GDKP players so they throw a heap of it at consumes because they get it it all back at the end of a run. Meanwhile your average raid logging raider cant possibly keep up with the price of consumes that has raised due to GDKPers (particularly gold buyers) - especially on new content when wipes are sure to happen.

[@Marko90pfc]

Thank you! Love your videos! Good content and editing. You made me return to classic :) Can you make a preparation video for TBC, like what consumables will still be used in TBC and what should each class do in order to prepare for TBC or overall what to expect. Thanks, keep up the good work!

[@DevinRAR]

I’ll be honest here, the people with big gold stonks, the far majority of them, are actually just running the bot farms themselves. It’s fairly easy and cheap to start a throw away bot farm. $3,500 is more like 100-300 depending on a few factors.

[@zwojack7285]

Lmao, he 100% just bought it. Might be Henry Cavill :v

[@SimonRobeyns]

it's crazy, either botting or endless days of farming from day 1. How can any sane person get this amount of money is beyond me.

[@Lifehatepwn]

Its not only that, he was in the group Payo was and it was all streamed, the same dude and his friend bought all the tier 3 so payo can't get them, they payed like 25k for each token just to pretend trade them to him, lol. So imagine how much gold they bought to have 199k left after buying all the other items in that run just for fun.

[@chiprules96]

My guild gave this weapon to my warrior for free. Looks like I scammed em good

[@jeremyhoffman5655]

.....its not suppose to cost you anything.....you shouldnt be losing gold to just do a raid with anyone especially with your own guild.

[@IncognitoGuerrilla]

8:20 this doesn't actually work. If you target someone and report them, or if they whisper you and you report them you get a message saying thank you for reporting. However if you whisper and report them, you dont get any messags

[@jimmyc00l]

They can't ban him based on feelings, because then they can ban me or you based on feelings rather than evidence too.

[@HallsteinI]

It's been ongoing for as long as raid PUGs have been a thing at this point. Gold sellers sell gold to players, they gather enough funds to run massive botting operations and need to create demand for their product. That's where GDKP raids enter the picture. Most of the people who sign up for GDKP are your competitive personality types who are looking to get ahead of the curve, and then there's whales who want to pay their way to the front of the curve. The lifespan of wow gold is exactly like the water cycle that you learn about in fifth grade. It starts at the bots then makes its way into the hands of gold sellers, then players buy gold from the gold sellers, then turn around and spend that gold to *buy gear from GDKP runs ran by gold sellers.* It's so fantastically fucking stupid when you look at it in the bigger perspective, but as long as people have more money than sense and games reward people who find a way to get ahead this will keep happening in perpetuity. Or the people who run the game take some god damn personal responsibility and pursue the cheaters, which would be the honest thing to do considering they're being paid for this scam. I'm so done with classic and theme park MMOs in general. They were fun a decade ago before they were solved games. These days games like classic literally act as a money laundering operation for grey collar criminals.

[@jeremyhoffman5655]

Fucking well said and put. I started in 05, I feel you

[@inthendwealldie]

There's a dude on my server who actually spent $7,000+ USD to obtain a Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal, and I'm pretty sure he's still around, so I doubt Blizz does much about RMT lol

[@dougpayne2695]

Maybe it's just me but on sulfuras we have two full gdkp groups that cleared naxx in the second week, its not a huge accomplishment that other groups are dropping them this many weeks in.

[@khanzy.]

Gehennas was the biggest gold buyer server in the world. I have friends that proudly admit to buying 99% of their gold.

[@zenzenchi]

gdkp is just a product of the the time when player getting sick of loot priority for those“besties team” “streamers” and “need everything” It just equals the chances and rights of players getting their dream gears.

[@laugo5773]

There were pics on discord with receipts containing his name and the amount of gold he bought