Introduction to why GDKP should be banned:

GDKP has, for the longest time, been a blight on other realms and clusters of our great game. Anyone who has played on other clusters know the hellscape I am talking about. GDKP leads to Elitism, where new players are shut out of content. It leads to a huge increase in botting, and of real-world trading, where players feel the need to spend real world money just to enter and keep up with the requirements of raiding. It leads to the breakdown of the games social aspect, and floods the in-game message channels with paid boosts and gold selling websites.

If GDKP comes to Classic vanilla, it will fundamentally change everything about the game that we hold so dear, and destroy any semblance of the game we know and love.

Why has this become an issue now:

We have been immune from this issue for a long time, as the cluster has protected itself via community action and self-policing. With anniversary realms moving onto TBC, we have had an influx of players from anniversary realms who did not share our ethics, and it is no surprise that GDKP only truly began once these players transferred from these servers.

GDKP was previously banned in these servers, as it had been banned in Season of Discovery and Hardcore before it. This is because Blizzard, listening to the feedback of players, took the right and brave steps to intervene and save these realms. Players on these realms who were unhappy with the decision set their sights on a new target, where GDKP isn't banned: Ours.

These players used the difference of the economies between the clusters in order to bring tens, or potentially hundreds of thousands of gold to our cluster, meaning that they can afford to abuse the GDKP system to buy any items they want, potentially forever. This means in their GDKP runs, you are never winning their loot. They own that loot before you even sign up.

What will happen if we do not do something about it:

If we do nothing about this, we will see exactly the same things that have happened on all other game modes where this is allowed:

1. Huge increase in gold buying/selling: GDKP runners don't farm their own materials. They either use gold bought from illicit sources, or the gold earned from selling boosts and items. This puts a huge pressure on the in-game market, as demand skyrockets without an increase in supply, pushing up prices higher and higher....until:
2. Increase in botting: In order to take advantage of the increased demand for gold and materials. Gold farmers increase the amount of bots running on the realm. This they use to farm materials (bought by GDKP runners), and the gold itself (also bought by GDKP runners). This often leads to huge market inflation, which pushes players to buy gold in order to keep up.
3. Ruining new/casual player experience: GDKPs are designed to promote an elitism that means new players are barred from entering raids (unless they have the gold to grease the wheels). Fresh 60's, or more casual players, will find themselves shut out of raid content, due to huge consume costs and huge gold buy-ins and parsing requirements to even have a chance at a raid spot.
4. Paid boosts and levelling: In order to deal with the shift from social ties to pure gold being the currency of the realm, many players will feel like the only way to progress, if they do not want to buy gold, is to sell boosts to others. We have all seen what happens where the chat is completely filled with boost selling and GDKP advertisements, rather than looking for groups and normal trading that it was intended for.
5. Breakdown of the social aspect: in normal realms, players join guilds and share in the struggle of overcoming challenges together. You make friends along the way, and share in the success together. GDKP breaks this bond, because only 1 thing matters for success: Gold. This was never how the game was supposed to be played, and fundamentally breaks one of the most important aspects of it.

The Outcome and my plea to you:

The best possible outcome is that Blizzard bans GDKP. I am not advocating that anyone is banned, but they already have a place they can have GDKP, on the Firemaw cluster. If they want GDKP, they can simply move there and have GDKP.

Our cluster has done fine without GDKP for many years, and many players chose these realms precisely because these illicit behaviors were not present here. It was you, the players, who made this possible by denouncing and policing the cluster to keep it out.

I do not know if Blizzard will take action, respond, or even take a single notice of this. My hope is that by signing this petition, we can make the strongest possible case to Blizzard, and perhaps save our game.

Love, Craam