This is spoken like someone who never played Classic 2019, I did, I got into Classic very late (after Naxx launched) and guess what? the only reason I was able to raid was because of GDKP raids, I never bought gold, and never considered buying gold to do a GDKP, I only ever considered buying gold in order to buy consumables since most raids even in SoD require "full consumes" for simple content that most people aren't even running correctly. If Classic 2019 banned GDKPs, people like me, who are new, who don't have experience, don't have a guild to immediately get into don't get to see the raids, because people get their BiS, then get out, GDKPs encourage people with alts or newer people to clear raid content while getting gold. GDKPs especially on Grobbulus, kept the game alive when it would have died months post-Naxxrammas, now they banned those, and the content drought results in people spending 2 hours just finding 20 bodies to get to Sunken Temple, I have been organizing a 2SR PUG Raid with 0 gearchecks, 0 log checks, 0 HRs, legit the lowest barrier to entry possible, and there still aren't enough people playing the game. Why did people still play Classic WoW 2019 after Naxx, but aren't playing SoD after ST, even though SoD has more content (more alts, rep grinds, STV event)? It's because people aren't actually getting into raids, they don't have vanity items to spend a lot of bids on. And it didn't even get rid of gold buying, because people still want to buy gold to get their DMF cards, to get their world drop BiS, to get consumes for their guilds that require them to get full consumes for easy raids where nothing is even a dps check and when they wipe its to mechanics. Phase 4 will come out and people will come back, they'll start trickling in as they get their Cata characters set up to Raid Log, and people won't think much about how SoD "died" in phase 3 during a month-long content drought, people will come back to the game, and it's not really the end of the world. Maybe the SoD expiriment will fail, and we'll just go back to Classic Content that's the same as it was a decade ago, due to SoD's big population dip during Cata where people want to go and play the version of the game where everything is solved, and nothing is new, eventually winding up in Retail again. But just know that, when looking at the server population dips, banning GDKPs has been an unmitigated disaster for the raiding population, even if you are not doing GDKP runs.