For many, the seasonal realm of Season of Discovery (SoD) for Classic Era World of Warcraft (WoW) has been a huge breath of fresh air, keeping many aspects of the game as true to the original as possible but with some small quality of life changes as well as the introduction of bigger changes using the runes system, it’s safe to say it has been a huge success.
Many players have been eagerly awaiting the second phase of the game, an increase in level cap up to 40, the introduction of more runes, and new zones and raids for players to take part in. It was recently announced that P2 would arrive on February 8th, but only recently have some additional details been unveiled, and some of these major changes ahead for Phase 2 will have quite the impact.
Of the most talked about issues, news around the ban of GDKP’s has probably been the biggest. Within the classic era World of Warcraft, GDKP’s are a way for players to use in-game gold to buy items from raids and speed up the gearing process, and in the past it has been quite a social activity. With the re-release of classic era, these GDKP’s have been a major contributor towards RMT activity which paves the way for a huge number of other issues within the game.
RMT is a real money transaction, the act of using real currency to purchase something in-game. In other game genres, this is just part of the game, for example non uk online casinos require real money in order to play, games like WoW require a subscription to get online, and other games require the game to be purchased in the first place. In this instance, however, RMT involves either buying gold from a third-party re-seller, or buying the item directly for a cash transaction.
The issues this raise comes with botting and exploiting in game, the gold that’s being sold needs to come from somewhere after all, an increased risk of scams as services take players real money without delivering the in-game goods, and a whole host of other issues in between. It has always been something of a difficult issue to handle within World of Warcraft, but this ban along with other efforts made to tackle bots and cheaters may look to finally crack down on this.
Additional changes such as quality of life adjustments in the game through the addition of skill books, more gearing options within the raid through tier tokens which is a well loved feature from later versions of the game, and additional profession changes have all been largely very well received and it’s shaping up to be a great period for the game, as it’s seasonal play and only temporary, for some it’ll be something that comes and goes, but for others it represents a fantastic batch of changes to keep the game feeling fresh and to keep many of the issues that casual players have with the classic era at bay.
With the game set to have a few more major content patches over the next year, for a large number of players this has certainly brought a lot of faith back in the developers to do some great changes, and stays on par with the rest of Season of Discovery as the developers have been paying close attention to player feedback and made positive changes based off that feedback.
