Asmongold TV - The GOLD SELLING UNDERWORLD of WoW Classic | Asmongold Reacts | Asmongold

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

The GOLD SELLING UNDERWORLD of WoW Classic | Asmongold Reacts Subscribe to Asmongold TV on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AsmonTV Disclaimer: This podcast is an independent project created by a viewer using content from the YouTube channel Asmongold TV. The purpose is to make his content more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people engage with the ideas presented in his videos. This podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially associated with Asmongold. All rights to the original content remain with Asmongold TV. If there are any concerns or requests regarding this podcast, please reach out. ------ Keywords: gaming podcast, streamer reactions, twitch streamer, pc gaming Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The gold-selling underworld for classic wow is worse than you think. Oh no. GDP's gold sellers and botting. The streets of Azarov are riddled with the world's worst criminals, con artists, and illegal contraband. But just how far does this nefarious underworld go? How far has this sinister plague infected itself into the World of Warcraft community? Well, it is much, much, much more than you feel. The systematic exploitation by the means of illicit practices that are blatingly against terms of servers has near destroyed entire server economies.

The World of Warcraft is now a world rule. 10 gold for one potion of speed? What the fuck? ...by a mafia of merciless gold exploiters. It has changed the game forever. And now with the Wow token in the game, the scene is even worse. Oh yeah. Join me as I go undercover into this underworld.

into this underworld to expose the true dark unchecked side of the classic wow community oh god this is good i like it okay right turn it up it's bloody freezing let's throw all the streets in wow the gdkp is a loot system with a very simple concept it stands for gold dragon kill points and evolve from the dkp system instead of bidding points that you've earned in your guild you bid gold for certain gear pieces All the gold then pulls together into a pot that gets shared between every raid member. I love GDKP. This concept has been around for much longer the most people think.

Oh yeah. Since there were in fact, GDKP runs in... Yeah, the fucking Chinese started doing this in BC. And in my server, it didn't really come along until Rath. EverQuest before Wow was even released, and it has been very popular in the Korean MMO scene for a long time. In Classic Wow, it became much more popular and standardized towards the the end of classic between Blackwing Lair and Max Ramas, because at first, a reputation of a

GDP had a bad smell about it. People used to feel scummy about joining a GDP run, and people who ran GDPPs were seen... See, we didn't have this problem of people feeling scummy, because I played on Kelthazod server, US, which was known as the asshole server. There would be like forum threads on the general forums of the Wow, like the Wow website, of like anybody else feel like everybody you play with from Kelthazade is either a Brazilian or an asshole. And then somebody's like, yeah, I play with a lot of asshole Brazilians from there. And then they'll be responding, talking shit back to him. Like, oh, fuck your mother. Shut up, you fucking loser. Oh, yeah, dude. And I remember, like, we had a reputation to uphold. And it was true. Like, everybody from Kelthazade,

this is during cataclysm, everybody from KT was a dick. And it was the same in wrath, too. Like, everybody was just fucking complete assholes because it was a huge server for PVPers so like I mean Mitch was on the server Barry was on the server like a lot of rank one players were on the fucking server

I think soda poppa was on the server for a period of time a lot of like you know wow celebrities were on there as well people you probably wouldn't recognize you have Bagg Jones Swiftie was not on the server I think I don't know if Bejura went on the server or not

Recful wreckful stayed on tychondrius but oh yeah it was fucking massive. It was so big. And so, yeah, I mean, over on my server, everybody loved GDKP. I didn't even know that GDKP was bad. I didn't even know it had a bad reputation because on Kelthazide.

It's no big deal. Bad members of the community. But when plays realize that it's boring and take too long to farm gold, the GDP became more and more accepted in the community. Particularly as the audience of Classic Well is very different to the audience

of the original Rafa the Litchkin. Back in the day, we were able to smooch off our parents, play Woodle Warcraft 16 hours a day, and eat a diet solely of pot noodles and monster energy drinks, and feel absolutely fantastic. Yeah, that would be what the thought. Now is the audience of Wooda Warcraft, on a majority, it has reached an older age. They have less time and more responsibilities.

It's crazy how much people in my Twitch chat actually have children. I mean, who the hell would want to even do that? I mean, why raise children when you can raise your passes? Well, the reason why is because, like, if your kid gets old enough, you can make your kid play the game for you. And so, like, that's really the, that's the end goal. Is like, you get your kid to like, you know, for example, like you tell your kid that like, this is the best game ever,

and you only show him pet battles. And that way he'll farm out all of your pet battle achievements and he won't know what he's missing out on. And then after he finishes that, tell him like, listen, there's a new expansion for the game. It brought out archaeology. And now you have to collect all of the archaeology things for me. You know, and like every rare artifact he gets, like, you know, if he gets Zenrock or whatever, take him to Chuckie Cheese.

My point is, most players have less time now to sit and just farm gold. Hence, why the GDP has become such a big part of the game. But just how big has the GDP seen become? Bro, how the fuck do you have two people die on Malagos 10 men in the first phase? How the fuck does this even happen? What the fuck? Well, luckily, I've been able to interview what I can only describe as the Grand Emperor of GDKP's Zias, who runs the Stax GDKP Discord. This is essentially a GDKP network that runs on the Ferrellina server, the biggest US server.

One irritating thing about how to join GDP runs or Pug in general is having to constantly sign up on Google Sheets to multiple runs. The idea behind this server is that it's a network for every... Let me see here, a featured spot. So it's... Oh, wait. Oh, shit. So they're just selling it for money. Damn, bro.

Like, it's straight up dollar bills. That's smart. Straight up money. Google sheets to multiple runs. The idea behind this server is that it's a network for every raid leader and guild leader who runs GDPs can use to bring everyone together.

So there's just one big epicenter where people can join and make GDP runs. This is the place where GDPs are at their absolute peak. I've been given access to Google spreadsheets to look at the kind of pots that groups are ending up with. As you can see, the pots are utterly mental. That's crazy. The biggest I can see here is 1.5 million gold.

Wow. Divide that by 25 and it's a 60,000 gold split. That's so much fucking gold. And that's like once a week too. But obviously 10% will very likely go to the raid leader. So the raid leader's going to get... Oh, really? Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.

150,000 gold to himself. Yeah. I don't know about you guys, but I don't think I've even made that amount of gold during my whole time playing classic wow. I have, but I didn't make that goal. Is this guy going to get frozen? A million gold. This will be a full, all-to-ar-25-man run doing all of the hard modes. This is obviously where the richest wow players are coming to spend their gold.

I mean, people are spending over 200,000 gold on single items like leg plates of... Leg plates of the endos void. Well, the reason why people are bidding so high on... these items is because the item level got increased so they're going to be more valuable in trial of the crusader the endless void and comets trail as you can see here this is a leaderboard of all the top dog spenders holy shit man spent a total of three million gold in gdkps that's and you see this is the mind of a parser right here see this guy like his healing done is kind of low this is a wrath of the Litch King player. He's got righteous fury on. I guess that's kind of a good idea. And he's standing

here. So he's in the fire. Roughly, the value of $5,000. Stand in the fire and heal higher. It has become so desirable now to join these GDP runs that there's now a monopoly on making groups in the Discord. Because there's so much people wanting to join and make groups, there's simply just too many to put onto the Discord. So if you want your group to stand out, Current pricing model, $30 per day per run. We'll get that. Man. I would make a joke about it being like original wrath,

but this actually was like original wrath. We did this shit all the time. I remember there was one time I joined a, fuck it, I thought it was a GDP, and the guy stole everything out of Sarfang. And then I was happy because I traded him like 8K gold, and he gave me the shoulders. and I just fucking left the raid.

I'm like, okay, fine. You want to steal everything? Okay, well, can I just give you money for this? And, you know, we'll just call it even. He's like, yeah, it's like, okay, all right, see you next week. To buyers, you will have to pay to highlight your group in the Discord at varying rates starting at $30 per day. Wow. This will give you the featured raid leader badge in the Discord to help you stand out.

So what's essentially happening here is guilds and raid leads are paying real money in order to get bigger gold spenders into the digital. GDP groups. There's a real money method in order to... It's like a whale farm. You're paying to be able to collect the whales. Optimize the best GDP runs. Do maximize the amount of gold. A run that is going to half. This game is so fucked. It's just so fucking stupid. But what happened? And since major GDP leads actually sell gold, they probably end up making them money back anyway.

Of course they do. Now, if only GDKP runs made by GILS, essentially gear up their characters faster because what they do is they pour together loads of gold, give it to their members, send them off into multiple different GDKPs. And if you think about it, they're going to have so much money that they can just buy all the gear in the raid and be like fully geared straight after the patches released. And then the top guilds will come together to work on achieving world record passes and speed runs. But many GDKP leaders are in fact selling their gold. Now, what? People are selling gold in classic wow? Does Blizzard know about this? Has anybody told Blizzard? Like, this is... What the fuck? I can't believe it. That's against the rules.

But Zay-S.M-A-Stax Discord has an absolute zero-tolerance policy for raid leads selling their gold or advertising. I love how they say follow the Discord TOS, but you only have to respect the blizzard t-o s in the discord i don't want to paint this discord in a bad light because they have absolutely nothing to do with gold selling zayas's profession essentially is being a discord designer he's made a little bit of a hustle by making really good discord channels yeah unfortunately many gdkp leaders are selling their gold on the side especially he's a smart guy like this is how you always make money you you really make money by doing something that other people people aren't doing. And that's why GDKP is like I used to make, dude, like me and Jeff would

make gold cap in like cataclysm like once a week by like just selling runs and selling carries. And the way that we would do that is that we would just figure out a problem that people have and then solve that problem and then have them pay us to solve the problem. It sounds stupid, but like it actually works. Imagine that. can get you around $500 if you're selling on the side, not involving a third-party middleman website. I know for a fact that many raid leads on my server. A lot of people sell gold to each other.

Like, it's actually a lot more common than you might think. Of course, you have G2G enjoyers, but what you usually have too are people that just like you know somebody that you buy gold from. Definitely doing it. I challenge you to pretend to be interesting buying gold. and ask some GDKP raid leads. One of my long-term viewers has been running GDKP since the dawn of classic,

and has told me that people are constantly asking him if he sells gold. He doesn't. People do the same thing to me. It just goes to show how big of a thing it is. And also, you have to think, where on earth is this gold coming from? Are people really sitting on their PCs farming 3 million gold? Of course or not. Well, they do.

Well, no, think about it, right? If, like, if you're getting a 60K, let's say you have a 40K pot in like in GDP. Most people that are like serious like classic wild players, they probably have like, especially if they're selling gold and making living with it. They've got like six characters, seven characters. So they're making like, let's say 30,000 gold times six.

So they're making like what was that way? Like fucking 180, 250,000 gold a week. And then they're selling it. More like 14? Maybe, yeah. And like, that's how you make the money. These GDP runs are essentially absorbing gold bought from gold sellers that is found by bots. And then this gold is being redistributed into the server economy through GDPs.

So the economy is built by gold farming bots. People buy this gold and spend the gold in GDPs, or the gold is snowballed and dispersed into the playbase. There's no wonder people don't farm gold anymore because by joining a GDP you can essentially obtain the gold that people purchase from bots. without spending the money yourself. Oh yeah, well, this was true, even in original wrath. Like, this is how, like, as soon as I started, like, it was like a massive fucking paradigm shift for me whenever I started joining GDKP,

and I would, like, do all these, like, gold farming methods and shit like that. And then as soon as I started doing GDKPs, and I came back with, like, a 10K pot out of an ICC, and it was like, oh, well, I just made more gold than I could have farmed in, like, three days. Well, I mean, I'm never farming again. Like, I'm never going to farm again in my life. And after that, like, that's whenever I started selling runs and doing that.

It's the best way to farm gold. It's not even, there's nothing that's even remotely close. You just have to join GDKP. Just before we move on, guys, this video has taken ages for me to make. Like, it's taken a good two weeks of research, editing, scripting, yada, Because like I've said in my previous Cataclism video, I want to spend more time and passion into making single videos. I've actually spent quite a bit of money making this video and I also have to drive an entire hour just to get a perfect five second clip for the intro. So if you like the video, please do subscribe because that tells me that people are liking these videos.

And then I don't have to worry so much about uploading very frequently to appease the YouTube algorithm. So now it's time to go further down the rabbit hole because we need to find the source. of this gold mine. This actually is good video. Where and how is this gold farmed and spread into the world? Botting has been a thing in WOW and MMOs for years. In fact, people were botting in Vanilla Wow. Oh yeah.

Now, particularly in World of Warcraft, I think it is more susceptible to getting botted because Blizzard allow the public to edit their LUI code and make add-ons. This makes it much easier for people to make very powerful bots in the game. and the addition of macros in the game also makes it even easier. People probably wonder why new MMOs don't really have add-on support or macros, and this is why. Well, the Koreans do it best. They just say, oh, everybody's botting. Okay, well, I guess we'll just put botting in the game.

Now we have autoplay, and so, yeah, if you want a bot in the game, yeah, there's a button for it. It's on the menu. Just press it if you're feeling bored. As I speak right now, I've got a level four in dead warrior leveling her way up in Tristful Glaze, without me even needing to be tabbed into the game. Because I'm not missing about in this video, guys. The only way we can find out how good these bots are is actually installing them and trying them out for ourselves.

But don't worry about me getting banned or anything. This very likely won't happen. I talked to a Blizzard CM before starting this project, fully detailing and explaining what I intend to do. She said it's probably not a good idea for me to do this on my main account because I'd very likely get banned. But the Blizzard CM has done me a massive solid than giving me a free version of Dragon Flight Epic Edition and 90 days game time.

I didn't even need a Dragonfly key, but you never know. It may come useful in a future video. Now, I do criticize Blizzard a lot, and obviously I will do a lot in his video, but it has to be said, the Blizzard CMs are absolute diamonds. So when I criticize... Yeah, I've had the same interactions. I've had nothing but positive interactions with Blizzard for multiple years now. This does not include Blizzard.

in any shape or form because they are so generous and so helpful to me and to other content creators when it comes to, you know, working on their project. So I've booted this bottle up to do some low-level leveling and I'm astounded on how well it performs. It honestly performs better than most players. I'm getting 8KXB per hour less than level 5. It is leveling extremely efficiently. Wow. It knows precisely where to go and kill mobs, what route to take, where to accept and turn in quest. And I've noticed it does this pathing process where you can see.

a line being drawn on the screen. This detects the best route so you don't get stuck anywhere. It finds quest items, mobs, NPCs, and everything that you need. If we can go to the class trainer, automatically learn the best spells, and vendor your loot.

There are a number of different profiles you can load into the bot software. It's ridiculous. I wonder, like, if I started botting in while and I was just, like, streaming while the bot was running, but I was acting like I was playing the game, how long would it take for people

to notice. What if it just went on for like years? And it's like I didn't even play the guy. I haven't played. I never even played track and flight. It was just all the bot.

It's just easy to do. People in the community also program more profiles and sell them on the website. Yeah, what if I've already been doing it? Yeah. Profiles for dungeon grinding for gold. As we know many bots right now are farming botanica since this is an easy consistent farm that is instanced, that gathering profiles do...

Yeah, most bots want to farm things that you can just sell for raw gold because you just completely circumvent the auction house. Mining and herbing, before they reintroduce the level 55 restriction on death nights, a lot of bots were simply just making death nights and running around bad lands doing, you know, mining mithril, since that was an easy 500 gold per hour. You've also got simple cloth farms and profiles to continuously keep. you into battlegrounds for XPite. The Joyce Journey's buff active again,

you will very likely see this very soon. The bot will even attempt to do PVP to its best of its ability to avoid getting banned. Oh, there is your software Benetto. Yes, it's genuinely called Benetto. I wish I was making that one up. But there are other bots out there like Bot Bro and Orca. They cost around $20, but for some reason

they have this hidden fee to make you pay on other $20 to unlock the software, apparently, because it won't work on Windows, without this unlocker key. It's basically complete twaddle to make you spend more money. Who could have expected that?

Why wouldn't XE install a file just not work on Windows? Because they can finesse you out of more money and they don't tell you that until afterwards and you can't really sue them because it's some bot company that's like based off of

it's out of Estonia or it's out of it's in Madagoland Gascar or it's like in steak, right? It's incorporated in Curacao. Like, what the fuck are you going to do to them? And then now they've got your money. It doesn't make any sense. And you have to pay that $20 every month in order to continue using the software.

It is a bit of a fath to install the software or lots of file editing, but anyone with a semi-decent PC skills could figure it out. I imagine a bigger gold bot farming companies have found ways to crack the bot software and make their own software to farm goals so they don't have to spend this monthly fee. Oh, yeah, no doubt. Now I have to imagine that I have spent the money to get a level 70 character boost.

In day one, my character would easily be level 80. And I mean one real-time day because I would just be able to leave the bot running overnight. The bot also knows how to optimize gold making. For instance, it always returns to a vendor when you run out a bag space. So leveling 70 to 80, you can easily get a decent three to five. I wonder if you took 25 bots.

Could you program them to clear? next 25 man in like full next 25 gear I bet you could probably kill at least a few of the bosses 1,000 gold and this is roughly the cost of $6 since gold is so cheap at a minute at this point you would have

a character now ready to do some gold farming we have seen in my previous video many bots are grinding TBC dungeons they essentially clear the dungeon disenchant greens and blues they get for extra money and possibly use tailoring to yield more gold from the cloth by selling them as backs.

Some will also farm Manateum since inside they can get any... You also, like one part of this is you get a lot of grey items, and the grey and green items sell for a high gold value. Make sure 100 gold per hour, if you... I used to have a friend. Oh my God, I forgot all about this. I had a friend, his name... He doesn't run out, it's Tyler. And he had a character...

His character's name was Namar. They're big, big soccer fans. like Zach's ex-rowy-wife friend. And there was like a bug at the time that would show players online that weren't online. And every time I would

log on, Namar would be in ramparts. And he was like a level 85 warrior. And I thought it was the bug. It wasn't. It was the bot. And this character sat in

Hellfire ramparts 24-7 for months wow hey Zach how did Tyler get the sandstone Drake

that's crazy I thought only like one guy had that where did he get the money he loves ramparts yeah I had no idea of mining these runners normally yield

500 to a thousand gold per hour that's a lot and so well programmed they will farm gold faster more efficiently than any human can. So in average, I would say, but runs out of 700 gold.

That's just under 17,000 gold per day. That's roughly $21 per day. So within three days, the cost of setting up a new account is covered. Like I said before, the people who are using... And then you also have people that buy stuff with like stolen credit cards

or like stolen gift cards or something like that. So that way the cost is even lower. Because like they obviously like, You don't just, like, whenever you're buying, I've never bought stolen credit cards before, so like I don't really know how this works. But my understanding of it is that usually they have like a person who knows a person who can generate codes or something like that. Or they have some sort of fishing program and they sell them. So you're still buying it, but you're buying it for cents on the dollar. No, I've never done that.

It's too risky. It's way too risky. It's way too risky. pay this upfront cost of a character boost. Not to mention how you can easily find the gold on retail for a free month of sub. But at least a wow token will never come to Raffa the Litch King Classic. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And bots don't need to do dungeon runs. They can just buy Sarinite ore off the auction house and use the Saranite shuffle method with prospecting to flip 500 gold per hour just sitting in a major city next to an auction house. Now, $21 per day might seem like a small amount. I mean, that will probably barely cover it. $21 per day is fucking insane. Because let's say you have 30 accounts running. That's $600 a day.

That's nuts. The electricity cost to run a computer. Well, the thing is, these bots can easily be run on multiple different game clients at once. Because you can customize the window size of the wild game client. And you'll see this a lot on bot farms. that they're going to have, like usually, so there's different ways that they do it, right? But like generally what they do, it depends on like how the game does bands, but they can have each game running on its own virtual desktop on its own VPN,

or they can just have multiple instances of the game running on the same PC. And they'll have like maybe, I would say that a PC, like a value PC that has like a value PC that has like like, you know, like good stuff, but not like top of the line. So like you're talking like maybe, because they're going to be making them themselves, right? Because like they're just doing so much of it. Like if you build a PC like that, you're probably looking at $1,500, $1,500. You can probably run 10 accounts on one of those. To make it so small, but it barely takes up any CPU power.

It could be more. Yeah, you're right. Was it possible for so long. Is it more now? If you had five clients open farming, that's $100 per day, times up by 30 and it's $3,000 per month. Yeah. Converted to pounds, that's just under two and a half grand per month.

That's 30 grand per year at around £15 per hour. Now, to put in perspective, my sister actually earns as much and she's a fully qualified veterinary nurse. Yeah. That's just with five clients. You can easily run 40. Yeah, then you run even more of them, right? Because like, it's like you're playing cookie clicker at that point. clients at once people were doing this in original classic wow when we're multi-boxing to

wipe raid groups on the way to black wing layer with 40 clients running you could make just under 300 grand a year 24 grand per month and that's roughly 152 pounds per hour not really a bad wage if you think about it obviously this oh it's fucking ridiculous yeah it's absolutely fucking ridiculous now the thing is before you go and you do it I, because I've looked into this a lot. I actually know more about the economics of it than you would expect. Number one, you have to look at power costs. Obviously, that is a variable cost that will increase the more processing you have.

You have to look at running multiple PCs in order to do it. So like the entry cost to doing something like this is probably somewhere around like $5,000 to $10,000. then also you have heating, cooling, and the electricity for the cooling in order to keep that there. And then also you have to run like different networks to make sure that each different PC is running and working at the exact right way. Then you have to actually sell the gold. Let's see, we have to buy the PCs, of course, and they have to buy monitors for the PCs to run on. And then if you're running a monitor 24-7 with all these applications, they're going to die faster. So like you're really like it's not in just, it is an infinite money glitch, but you can't start from zero to make it happen and hope you don't get banned.

Well, getting banned is inevitable. The goal is not to avoid getting banned. It's to get banned less frequently so that you can still keep making money. I mean, you would have to have your PC running 24-7 for a whole year. But still, if you cut that wage in half, you're still insane. paid more than a doctor or a lawyer. I have heard many anecdotes of gold farmers who in certain countries are making more than doctors. Or people who have just done it quickly short term over the course of a few months to buy a car or something. It makes serious money. Oh, it does. And we haven't

even talked about how people are using fly hacks and other hacks to speed up the process of making gold. It also isn't a requirement yet to two-step verify your account on Woodward Warcraft, your battle net account. So these companies still have the ability to hack accounts, still. steal the gold and sell it. As long as a... Yeah, like two-step verification isn't a catch-all solution, but it does solve a lot of the problems.

It makes it a lot. It makes it a lot less common. The only way to truly mitigate bots is to ban them earlier during their lifetime, ban them before they can make a profit, or increase a running cost, but obviously we don't want to personally spend more money on game time.

But I have talked to people who have been... Well, there's different ways that you could do it. For example, like, you could make it where in order to trade with other users in the game, you would have to complete two-step verification. You could make it to where, obviously, the bans happen faster, so the bots make less profit, so less people would be willing to bot in the game. There's a lot of games that you can make money boughting in, but there's not a lot of people botting in that game because the overhead, like, the profit margin is lower.

So, like, why would you want to bought in a game where you're going to make 10% of your money, whenever you could bot in a game where you could make 50% of your money. You see what I'm saying? You can always circumvent two-step verification. There will always be a way to get around it, and every method to reduce bad behavior is going to reduce a percentage of that bad behavior

that is below 100%. But yes, requiring two-step verification will reduce the amount of bots, but it will not get rid of it. But to run bots for months without getting banned, A bot is more likely to get banned if they're caught in the open world and reported by players. But if you're level to max level playing the game normally

and then just bought yourself on inside a dungeon farming guard, you're much less likely to get banned and can run a bot for months. And you normally only picked up by the big bot bandwaves. You don't even need to do it like that. You can just put a bot into a dungeon to level through dungeons. Yeah.

And then you're just never going to get caught. All of these anecdotes by... Well, sometimes people do get caught botting in dungeons. But a lot of times, like I remember I would have bots in my dungeons and nobody even cared Because the bot never went AFK It never complained so who gives a fuck I've heard from people from my Twitch chat I'm obviously not going to name and shame, but luckily being a Twitch streaming you do end up meeting people with experience in these kind of practices

However, luckily very recently as I was scripted in this video an alleged gold botter and seller has totally opened up to his practice and his process on Reddit. He's been botting and selling situational vanilla and the glider bot. He claims on average he gets a good 90 days out of one account and runs 25 accounts at once. You know, further also... 90 fucking days, are you kidding me? Borting what I've heard from other people and, you know, other sellers. What a joke.

Further goes on to explain how the game's warden system, as he calls it, auto-bans botters. Apparently the warden tech is very outdated and basically the botters have found. ways to well ultimately defeat it and get around it. Yeah, of course. And there also used to be much more game master assistance when it came to detecting and banning bots. Who could have expected that? Who could have expected that?

To mess around with his characters to disrupt a botting process. And obviously to find out whether he is a bot or not. He used to wake up sometimes and have 10 accounts banned. But now with VPNs of virtual machines, it's much easier to not get banned. Yeah. So this is interesting because it means that a bot is a bot of running the bots on virtual PCs rather than using it on their

own all the time. Well, it also makes Classic Wow easier to bot because Classic Wow requires less PC resources. Like, for example, just running Wow retail is harder than running Classic Wow. Like, for obvious reasons. It's just like the same as running Tetris

is harder than running Witcher 3. So, because of that, you're going to be able to run more copies of the game and make a higher profit margin from bodding in classic versus boughting in retail. Which obviously cuts down on electricity costs. So people left a lot of questions on this post. And I read through all the guy's replies, and I'll read out the most interesting ones.

He says the GDKPs are a huge source of income for him. The days of the Chinese sweatshop are over, and now there's a big divide of... Yeah, now it's a South American sweatshop. There's tons of people in South American countries that are doing this. where gold sellers are coming from, you know, many are from Europe, the States and other parts of Europe. After getting banned, he can get another account set up within 15 minutes. And he stresses the importance of keeping the gold moving through accounts to prevent an account from getting banned for gold selling or buying.

He personally runs 60 bots across free machines. He says it is possible to run over 100 bots, but you will need two people to manage it all. It talks about how AI could make bots even better because vendor bots can think for themselves rather than follow predetermined parameters and pre-coding. So in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if bots become even more intelligent and cause even more damage to the game. I bet they will. Yeah, absolutely. That's what's going to happen because people are just going to get better at doing botting and then botting will be even harder to find. And that's it.

What did they take over? Three years. The industry of gold selling is much bigger than you think. It expands widely across all of the games selling various different currencies and different services like arena boosts. Like, look what it says trial of the crusader pre-order available. Like, bro, you're already, like, you're getting your shit already. Like, you're planning not now, like, or sorry, not then, but right now. Like, you're already buying gear that's not even out yet.

furious gladiators to bard only seven hundred dollars expires soon better buy it now cutting edge old war to get gear and even power leveling on classic error for this video I wanted to focus on gold selling obviously so I decided to go ahead and buy some gold on my throwaway account and see what the process looks like it cost me three pounds to get 2,000 gold

That's nothing. Technically 1,900 because I accidentally said my character wasn't on Alliance and not Horde But luckily, the customer service is insanely good on this website. Yeah, it's better than Blizzard. Yeah, customer service for this kind of stuff.

This is it. This is very common. If you're ever doing something that's under the table or illegal, like most people will have way better service because they don't want you to report them. They don't want to have an altercation. They want things to go extremely smoothly.

They message me before I ever knew there was some kind of issue to adjust the amount of gold that I would receive. The website I used was overgear. They must be making some serious bang for them to have such good customer service to the point where it's probably even better than Blizzards. And it took just under two hours for the gold to arrive. As you can see, they have cleverly tried to make the purchase less suspicious by writing in the message,

Here is your cut from a GDP with a bullet, which is probably a, you know, cheapest item. And this is the thing, right? Is that if you knew that people were doing this and these gold were, this gold was being sold, all you can do is you just look and see if these two accounts ever did any sort of a raid together. If the answer is no, then it probably was just buying gold. And then that's what happened. And so there you go.

You just ban them. Again, a human could figure out this was bullshit. in like a fraction of a second. But you combined the game. Now there's a number of these different gold selling communities and some of the search than that, bro. No, it's not. What's the more research?

So, okay, so you have an IP address connected to this account. You have an IP address connected to this account. You also have access to all the other characters and accounts on side of that inside of the Battlenet account. So if you have no interaction between these two accounts at all within like the last fucking 30 days, the odds are this is somebody buying gold.

Also, why would they include gun like a fucking shots in there? That's probably not what's happening either. Also, where is this person getting the gold from? You just investigate the gold seller and you can figure it out. It would take no time at all.

On G2G as well. They claim to have millions of gold available for purchase across all rounds. Now, I tried to get in contact these gold sellers. They are extremely secretive and confidential. Yeah. As you can see by the DMs, I definitely tried. This makes sense, as these companies could easily get sued by Blizzard,

as they are essentially selling a Blizzard products. Yeah, they are. It also wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to avoid the tax man, like Dr. Alan Grant tries to avoid a T-Rex, you know, just stay still and don't do anything and hope they don't see you. I've actually been applying this technique to a number of my family members, and it works quite well, actually. Yeah, it does.

Well, from what I can understand. Yeah, it works with everything, basically. just don't move and they'll leave you alone. Well, it's because Blizzard, it's not worth their effort to go after a lot of these companies because they're in countries that are hard to prosecute.

It's not financially viable for them to do it. They did it with Honor Buddy back in like 2008, but that's because Honor Buddy was huge. From the website, these GoldSellers are more of a middleman company. The days of ramming 50, Cheney, sweaty men into an office to play Wooder Warcraft are over.

The practice now is to be more freelance. Anyone can sell their goal to this website, whether it is a normal play. Yeah, and the websites are the ones that really make all the money. Like, again, because the reason why it's a middleman thing, the websites find the buyers, and the websites also find the sellers. And it's not like the website takes, you know, they buy the gold for $100 and they sell it for $100. No, they buy it for $100 and they sell it for $150 because there's a million people trying to

bought gold. So guess what? These sellers can just decide to go at the lowest price. So it's like somebody saying like, oh yeah, you can make $600 a day. Well, there's going to be somebody out there who's okay with only making $500 a day. And then if that person's okay only making $500 a day, there'll be somebody out there who also is okay making $400 a day. And before you know it, the price is driven down so much that it be.

becomes unprofitable to, uh, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, and that's why in general, botting in games becomes much less profitable over time. Because not only does the game diminish in popularity and the demand for gold goes down, but also the amount of people that are in the space trying to monopolize it goes up. Race to the bottom is the worst. Yeah. It's effectively a price war because all of these people want to make their money. Gold left over that you're not using. Steve Bannon. Yes. Yes. the Lachgd KP leader. You sell it to the website and then this gold is re-sold.

They say their gold isn't obtained from illegal practices like botting and account hacking, but there's absolutely no way to determine this, especially as I've been told, there's an acute practice of gold laundering to take the trace off it. Normally someone will make a throwaway account and make a guild bank to deposit big amounts of gold into, and then it will be dispersed to multiple different people in different accounts. There's definitely a number of ways to avoid getting banned for gold selling

and buying. The guild bank method is apparently the best proven method to not get banned when purchasing gold. A number of guilds are doing this in order to get gold for GDKPs because it's just a faster way to give up. I mentioned earlier. GDKP raid leaders are also using methods like this to essentially cut out the middleman and sell their gold for a better amount. Yep. Oh yeah. The bots even jump? Yeah, I know. But don't worry everyone because now that the Wow token is in the game, it means nobody will ever buy gold on third-party sites anymore.

Because according to the lead dev of Classic Wow, the token is a proven tool to mitigate RMT. Despite the fact... Well, actually, no, never mind. I missed Mr. Bruton. That G2G and basically every other gold buying site is currently undercutting the token by 50%. Yes, 50%. Right now on Goldmaga Wow token costs 17 pounds. and you get 8.8,000 gold, or you can get the same amount of gold for nine pounds.

Fair enough, since there is now... I do think that people would rather pay a 50% markup to have a 0% chance of their account getting banned. But if the markup is so high... It's like if the disparity is so high, then people will still buy it secondhand. Or buy it from the illegal sellers. But a safe, reliable and legal...

method to buy gold in the game, less people will use third-party sites. Yeah. But this helps retailers reduce their running costs. They have hoards of gold lying around on different accounts on every server in the game. Now they can just buy game time with gold and focus more on boosting and loot selling services. This really is like Blizzard throwing a boomerang into their own face. But the thing is Blizzard already know that. The Wow token is purely in the game to make profit.

make more money from a game they're developing. It's like... What's his name? Mike Yubara said they don't make any money on the Wow token. Like, I don't understand how they're not able to make any money on the Wow token. That doesn't logically make sense to me. Because if buying the services for the fee that the game is selling them for, like, because obviously, like, you get $20 and then somebody else gets $20,

of Blizzard services. What he's effectively saying is that Blizzard services don't generate a profit. And how could Blizzard services not generate a profit whenever Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company? Yeah, I don't see how... I don't understand the logic there.

Printing money. They can just add stuff to the game that people will pay for. It didn't require any development cost to implement the while token. It's been in the game for years. And even in classic, since it has been data-mined years ago.

I think there's this huge misconception that the Wow token will fix RMT, but in truth, it really doesn't do anything. In fact, it just further destroys server economies. GDKP has been so popular in the game, there's a huge incentive to buy gold. Blizzard definitely knew this. Well, there's a huge incentive to buy gold because you don't get banned for buying gold. There would be no incentive to buy gold if the moment that you bought gold, you got permanently banned. That's why there's an incentive. It's not because of GDKP.

because we had GDKPs back in wrath and like, yeah, you had people that bought gold, but it's nothing like it is now. GDPs aren't against terms of service and haven't been. They have waited for the concept to blow up, and then they've added a system where people can buy gold for real money. It's genius money-making, but we're all getting bent over in the storeroom.

The average players are not buying playtime, okay? It takes about 10 to 16 hours to farm enough gold, to buy a game token. Or... There actually are a lot of people. I didn't know this until I had conversations with them. There are a lot of people who do buy a wow token every month instead of spending money. Could work for three hours on minimum wage in the UK and have enough money for two months of gain time.

I mean, what are you going to do? Even when I was a kid and had absolutely no income, I just saved a little bit of my lunch money every week, went to the bank, literally were pound coins and deposited it into my bank account, just so I can play World Warcraft. I put it on my dad's credit card. The World Token literally doesn't help anybody, apart from gold sellers and boosters who are farming tens of thousands of gold every day. And another, obviously, bad side effect of the Wow token

is how it'll inflate the prices of basic commodities like flasks and food. But the average raider has to spend more money just in their average week of raiding, it means they have to do more boring content like gold farming, meaning they are much more likely to just quit playing the game because they can't be over gold farming so much. Well, nobody wants to have to go out and farm random mobs. They don't want to have to do that. It's not a point.

Like, why would you want to do that at all? Fuck that. You can just buy the gold. This is why I quit classic wow and had a few months break between Blackwing Lair and AQ4. Either that are they will buy gold and third party sites or the wow token. Further just exacerbating the economy even worse and eventually it will be so bad that the genuine gameplay experience of Rafflection classic will simply just be much worse than it should be. There's no other way of saying it. The game will just be worse.

I do think that being able to buy gold with real money makes the game worse. I would prefer if the wow token, I think the wow token is the most corrosive thing. that they've ever added into the game. These money on subscriptions from people quitting. But obviously, that doesn't seem to matter because if they didn't feel they could make more money from less, but bigger paying customers, they wouldn't do it.

Well, I don't even think it's that simple. So here's how you can prove that Blizzard makes money on the Wow token. And I'm sure, if somebody Blizzard wants to correct me on this, please do. But let's think about this logically. Person A gives Blizzard $20. And then person B gives the person A 20,000 gold.

Or let's say, theoretically. And then Blizzard takes the gold, sorry, the $20 from person A and gives it to person B. So Blizzard just got $20. Blizzard created $20 out of nothing. like you like fucking uh you know uh conjuring dollars boom there's a fucking uh there's a 20 bill right they are conjuring it out of nowhere somebody is giving them money then that 20 dollars is turned into battle net balance let's assume it's turned into the battle net balance now you can't do that in classic wrath but you can do it in retail wow so just

you know for the sake of the conversation let's just assume it's retail well i'm assuming they'll probably convert this in Classic Wow as well. And you can then buy the services that are on, or sorry, the things on the Blizzard store for the retail price that they charge for them. So logically, if Blizzard is not making money on the Wow token, then Blizzard is not making money by selling anything on their store. Do you see what I'm saying?

Like it's, it's, I, I can't even imagine this. No? Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me explain it. Okay. So we've got, let's see, person A, person B. Uh, and then we have, uh, Blizzard. Okay. And so person A, uh, gives $20, right? Then Blizzard gives the $20 to person B. Is a wow token $15? A wild token, is it $20 or is it $15? $20 to buy. So, okay, so then they just literally $15, like $5 just is evaporated. Is that what you're saying?

$5 literally evaporates? Right. Okay. And then this person right here for the gold, we're going to go ahead and say, I apologize for this. We're just going to put G for gold. and then Blizzard gives this person the gold. So this $15,

where does this $15 go? It goes to whatever this it goes to something that is redeemable on the Blizzard store, right? Right? Something has to be redeemable on the Blizzard store in order for it to be viable with the money that you get from a Wow token. So then you have the $15 and this is the Blizzard store. To say that the Wow token is unprofitable is to say that the $15 that you spend on the Blizzard store does not generate profit. And if it does not generate profit, it probably wouldn't exist. Wouldn't that also say the sub fee is not profitable?

But the wow token is not just the sub fee. That's only the case for classic wow. So in order to make the, in order to make the statement that the wow token is not profitable for Blizzard, you would have to make the concession that buying anything with BattleNet balance would also not be profitable for Blizzard. And that's not even taking into account the 25% of the transaction that is immediately taken by Blizzard just by the nature of it occurring. So this is a minus $5. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense.

P's now have this design, make more money from less players, which unfortunately normally results in less quality player experience. This video was supposed to be about the dark side of the classic wow and investigation into the industry of illicit practices in the community. But as you can see, Blizzard aren't exactly morally superior to gold-selling websites. With the inclusion of the character boost and the wow token, their practices are literally just as predatory and exploitive as third party websites. Furthermore,

I don't think that Blizzard's practices are as predatory or exploitative as third party websites. Third party websites are infinitely worse, but what Blizzard is doing is not good for the game. They are aiding third party websites, not mitigating them. By increasing the players need to buy gold and allowing third party sellers to reduce their running costs to better run their industry. Every single gold seller that I've talked to is happy about the wow token being in the game. For terms of service agreement that they stand on. Another reason, too, is it muddies the water between who's buying gold legitimately and who's not. It's about as brittle as a politician's backbone.

The true Dark Side World of Warcraft isn't hidden away within some hidden mafia community operating in the shadows. It's right in front of everyone in plain sight for everyone to sink. This is a really good video. I do not think that Blizzard is even remotely as bad as the third-party sellers. I don't agree with that. However, I think that this is a really great level of research, and Metagoblin absolutely deserves props for this. This is such a great video.

Give it a like, guys. Give them a sub if you haven't already. This is an amazing video. So I love watching this stuff. I think it's amazing. Why not? Because these third-party websites often exploit people. They don't pay them all the time.

Sometimes they don't pay their sellers. Now, the customers, they pay them. But they don't pay the people they're selling them gold. And they'll frequently just like undercut them or do shit like that. Because they don't have to. Because there's so many people that are trying to sell gold. It's ultimately Blizzard's game. And it's their prerogative to decide what.

they're going to do in their game so like exploiting somebody else's game in a malicious way for your own profit like this is like categorically worse right