Today we had a lot of top guilds come out and state their opinions on boosting. The truth is basically every top guild boosts because consumables and the world first race costs a lot of gold.
The fix? Raiding and M+ no longer needing a gold cost for consumables, no longer have OP BoEs drop in heroic or mythic raiding. Very simple. Top players would no longer have any incentive at all to waste their time boosting people. At the same time, if u want to do harder content than your skill level allows, join a guild, make friends!! Don´t just be antisocial and buy boosts. It´s a win-win-win.
Of course, Blizzard isn´t going to do this, because WoW at this point probably makes a significant part of its money from the WoW token. With the reduced WoW playerbase the token income is probably more important than ever.
So yeah, boosts, can be fixed very easily. Blizzard just doesn´t want to.
Yeah, and that´s great there are still reasons for gold to have value, but most top raiders or m+ players don´t care about expensive mounts and stuff like this. So many guilds would just not boost, because they can not be bothered.
Indeed. Common things boosters use gold for include boosts for their own alts, subscription (pay with gold and play for free), BMAH items, AH items, rare mounts, convert to balance to buy store items/other games etc. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.
If they have to take such an hard approach to the game that they need to shape every aspect of it like you suggest they might as well make boosting bannable, it would be less effort to do so.
The issue is not boosting. The issue is it is incentivized due to existence of WoW Token. Normally, i would never make Torghast boosts. Its a disgusting place. But i guess people wanted to farm Soul Ash / Cinder quickly before gearing up to not lost that weekly max gain. People paid 150k for a single run. At one point i had like 3 million gold.
Why? 'Cuz I could buy tokens with them.
In regards to consumeables; they are not really expensive. Their price increased because there is an insane inflation in the game, mainly pushed by raw gold farmers (bots).
What I am trying to say is that consumeables are a symptom, not a disease.
But consumables are part of wow and other mmo’s since dawn of the first internet that is not 56k dial-up internet.
Your proposal is radical i must say.
You can still have consumables, but make them so cheap that you don´t need to go out of your way to farm to get them. Or like I said earlier, have them come from reputation or clearing dungeons, make them BoP instead.
Could also add stuff like bigger gold rewards from raids. Could have treasure chests with lots of gold or BoE transmog items? Or just LFR tier BoE items, so players can send the loot to their alts or something, or make money that way.
It´s the same with M+, there is simply no excitement at all at the end of the dungeon currently. Best case scenario you get an epic item you can´t use because weekly vault or mythic raiding has higher ilvl.
Could add all sorts of stuff to the end chest to make M+ self sustaining at higher lvl if you are creative about it. Again I´m just coming with ideas, something it seems like Blizzard simply refuses to do, having made no changes to the current situation for expansions upon expansions.