Yes you can do this.

Not killing Putricide only prevents you to go to Arthas. Nothing else.

If all your prices are that low, a pot of almost 1k each will have a much larger relative value than a similar pot elsewhere.

It basically just means there's less gold in circulation on the server, which has caused less inflation. I wouldn't discount the potential of GDKP just because there are fewer zeroes in your figures.

I just noticed this site, which could be an interesting development for GDKP. Does anyone have any more information to shed?

GDKP RUN, Gold Run, Gold Pot, Cash Run:

It appears to be run with suspicious (possibly nefarious) motives. Despite taking most of the text straight from my OP to preface the website, it also has several points worthy of note:

- It mentions every server (from all realms) of both WoW and Aion
- It has a button for 'Live help'
- The text not directly copied from the OP uses somewhat broken English. (Eg: "As a buyer,you can inform us your need")
- It uses the words 'our business'

Basically it looks like a Gold Selling website, except setup for running GDKP raids. Buying gold itself is not mentioned at all. Everything might appear legitimate for now, but it could turn out quite sinister. Interesting text is:

This is quite an interesting/disturbing development. It appears that a model is being set up which will 'run gdkp raids' like a cross realm/game business. Does anyone have more information on this website? Who it's registered to (and in what country). Obviously it's not a charity going by the business text, so people will naturally begin to wonder why exactly they are doing this - and how they would profit from it.

It would be a very unusual situation if Gold Selling type business attempted to organise and run (successfull) GDKP raids for WoW players. The next questions would be: "Why would they do this?" and "How will they profit by doing this?". GDKP raid leaders are often:

- Geared max level characters
- Players fluent in communicating over vent/ingame
- Familiar with class/instance/game mechanics

Therefore, it's natural to assume that any sort of business set up will require some sort of scheme to recruit raid leaders, because they are what make GDKP runs a success. You can't set up a business to run hundreds of GDKP raids over all the Warcraft realms via using your own employees.

But why would you as a raid leader want to get involved? The only scenario I could see is if these raids did something like take 10% of the pot. That 3-5k is sold for real money, and the raid leader receives a split of the money (paid to his credit card). Basically it would turn the recruited Raid Leader into the indirect Gold Seller. If a business like this ran 100 GDKP raids, each with a pot of 30 000 (10% tax taken), they would have 300 000 gold available to sell for real money, and that's their profit, split with the raid leaders. You can see how the model could work.

Or perhaps everyone is charged an 'entry fee'. The money is collected by the raid leader (then onsold for real money), and the rest of the raid is run like any other normal run.

The easiest way to stomp this out, would simply to be to go only on GDKP runs that have no entry fee and take no tax out of the pot. I don't see how else they could make this kind of business model profitable: It needs to suck extra money out of players/pot somehow, and there's only a limited number of ways to do that and not turn them off wanting to go to your run.

Tyrian,

That's not exactly a new thing. Gold sellers are eager to find ways to launder money/gold. For instance, there have been cross-server BG pug groups that will have Ventrilo used to coordinate hosted by a goldseller (name is advertised in vent, etc), with "premium" access if you give then $x or y gold. It was only a matter of time until similar arrangements came around for gdkp.

The idea, based on the portions you quoted, seems to be that they want to groom GDKP leaders to put together runs. They help the leader solve some of the arrangements for the group, then have their "mercenaries" get in the groups to absorb a good portion of the end pot. I don't think it's a particularly great model, as the larger the proportion of mercenaries is the smaller the pot size will be. Perhaps what the site is really trying to do is simply set themselves up as a hub for this sort of activity and make their money mostly off ad revenue and pushing gold from the landing page of the site. That would leave a lucrative opening for raid leaders, as they would basically be getting free help with organizing without having to give a cut of their gold to the site itself (similar to the afforementioned vent hosting for BG pugs). This is just theorizing, of course, but it sounds plausible enough to be worth the 40-60 bucks a year the domain registration+hosting costs.

As for the registrar, they are Domains by Proxy, Inc. registered through GoDaddy. So the registrar values their privacy. Though in all fairness, I use a proxy when registering my domains as well. Less spam to deal with.

Someone could do more digging, but it would go into a gray area rather quickly.

The most obvious revenue model would be to implement a tie-in to gold selling sites, either initially or later on as the site builds volume.

The line of thought isn't hard to follow:
- Prevalence of GDKP runs gives people incentive to buy gold
- If you manage to create a popular GDKP portal, you've gathered a lot of high potential gold buyers in one place
- Featured gold ads on this portal will be highly effective, thus very valuable to gold sellers

It might be started by a gold seller, or it could just be someone looking to sell ad space/the site later.

I can't picture any scenario really where as a raid leader I'd want to get involved with these guys. They offer "Raid leaders will get a credit after every successful raid" but it doesn't say what you use those "credits" for.

Since it clearly seems to be setup to run as a business I agree that it seems they're in it to make money. I'm all for capitalism and making money for your efforts, but the only way (I know of) for someone not employed by Blizzard to make real money based on actions in game is against the Terms of Service. So why would I want to get involved with someone that may be breaking the Terms of Service?

Even if the way they *ARE* making money is by hosting ads not breaking the Terms of Service and not selling gold themselves, I don't see ANY benefit they can provide to a raid leader that I can't do on my own via the realm forum posts and the mmo-champion raid comp tool.


I would be more concerned that this is another way for gold sellers or scammers to find people in game who have lots of gold. Since they have raid leaders submit a report "Submit reports about the the GDKP raid including things like Drops and their transaction prices; Total revenue; How much gold split to every worker; who was absent". Although I usually post a summary of prices on the realm forums, I always remove the names of who bought what.

Hey you, successful GDKP runners.

I got a question, I've been running GDKP raids for quite a while on Dentarg EU - both ToC25 and ICC25.
While ToC25 doesnt seem to impose any trouble, especially when it was with guild "boosters", Festergut and Rotface seem to be way too hard for your average joe and cant be possibly beaten by my GDKP raids for 3 weeks already. Closest i've come on Festergut is around 10-11% and then wipe on enrage, and that is with babystitting, explaining tactics, calling out for possible blinds/cooldowns usage on vent. Now even thinking about attempting Rotface makes me cringe. is this the same for you, on average size realms? Or is it Dentarg being obnoxiously bad?

I do a run on Spinebreaker that is in a similar situation. To date, everyone has been very understanding, and after three weeks of runs, I am turning away more and more people. Honestly, when the "Songs of battle" buffs are put through, I feel that the GDKP runs will start to balloon in success and gold pot.

Hi, I run a gold pug on Dunemaul US that this past week got Rotface and for the past three weeks got Festergut. My story quickly: I ran a successful random-converted-to-gdkp TOC25 through most of 3.2 (ended up as 2 toc25, 2 ony25 runs over 4.5 hours one night a week), and now in 3.3 I moved the pug to IC25. My guild is ten man focused so we bring 7-10 of our raiders who are intimately familiar with the mechanics on 10 man (this includes 2 skilled tanks but usually only 1-2 healers), and then I have a rolling calendar invite that includes the most skilled puggers I met throughout TOC25. There's a churn of maybe 8 or so spots each week with the remiander being regulars.

Basically what I told my puggers was that I wouldn't be bringing any poorly geared alts (or poorly geared mains, for that matter), and while a willingness to bid on items is still necessary, geared/skilled/knowledgeable players are what I am looking for first and foremost. What I've found is that apart from the regular crew that likes having a decent 25 man to run (but only wants to devote one afternoon a week to it), I can also grab two or three main raiders from other guilds that were asked to sit out that week who are interested in badges, a chance at loot, and a couple thousand gold. With the possibility of hard modes starting next week, I expect several guilds that are currently running 2 IC25 raids (half alts/half mains x 2) will switch to one main raid. If this is a common occurrence, hopefully successful GDKP runners can pick up a few of the geared/skilled alts so that their pugs have more success.

tldr: bring the player, not the bankroll and IC25 non-attempt-limited bosses are very possible.

Thanks for the advice, last night managed to get down Rotface quite easily. In fact, almost killed Festergut right after, 5-6% wipe. Filtering people for 3 weeks seem to give results, and bankroll increases every time.

Alternatively you could make it known that if that if people act like children and quit when it's not going perfectly you just won't bring them next week. I don't know if its just me, but my runs get 100ish signups (about 60 on forums, then 30or so via in game mail and pm's) for 25 spots. So the threat of just never getting another invite is very real, especially when people have generally waited a fair few weeks just to get a spot in the actual group.

We do however kill Festergut and Rotface, and were getting sub 5% wipes on Putri last week, and have a very VERY good core of people.

Thats an interesting point actually.... How are other GDKP run leaders balancing the need to take 'the best' players to kill the new bosses, with the desire to get the best bang for your buck (biggest pots)?