Probably (most likely) already a topic that has been here before, but that only makes the issue more significant. Every major realm is stacked with NOVA and other booster spammers. Please do something about it, it’s killing the game. No human interaction in these channels is possible anymore, logging on to the spam feels like I’m playing a cheap mobile p2w game.
To start with: Make trade chat accessible to authenticator accounts only, and start actively moderating and banning the people that spam this with countless level 10 alts. Have advertising for boosting communities be banned as per the rules. The solution is simple, really. Do something about this please, players are tired of putting up with this, and the communities can clearly not behave normally (and have to take over the entire trade channel with their continuous spam). Making players have to install addons to deal with this problem is obviously not the way to go. (Also: if AddOn developers can effectively filter out the boost spam, why can’t Blizzard?)
Accounts now require an attached Battle.net Authenticator to post custom text when listing a group for Dungeons, Raids, or Rated PvP activities. All players may still search for and join others’ groups.
Developers’ note: A Group Finder that’s full of advertisements bothers us as much as it does you, but a challenge we’ve faced in trying to eliminate those ads is that they are often posted by compromised accounts or other throwaway accounts, such that penalties incurred by in-game reporting have not proven to be an effective deterrent. And regardless, relying on reports still means that some number of players have their experience disrupted by the spam before it gets reported. The Battle.net Authenticator is available for mobile devices and is a simple and convenient way to secure your World of Warcraft account, but if you prefer not to use it for whatever reason, you will still be able to post groups that will have descriptions auto-populated (e.g. based on raid name and difficulty selected in UI dropdowns, or derived from the Mythic Keystone currently in your bags). Our goal is to clean up the Group Finder while trying to minimize the inconvenience to ordinary players.
Search now allows a numeric range (i.e. search “5-9” finds M+ key levels from 5 to 9).
Autofill group finder information based on the creator’s keystone. The information can still be manually entered.
Group creators can now set a minimum Mythic+ or PvP rating requirement for applicants.
Group creators can now select a playstyle to set expectations for their group.
PvP Rating will now display when browsing for Rated PvP entries and in the applicant window.
Group creators are now able to browse listings.
PvP categories now use the player’s PvP Item Level instead of their regular Item Level.
My apologies, you are correct of course it won’t do anything for trade chat. Let’s hope that now they have made a start, they may be open to giving booster’s their own chat channel
Thanks for the suggestions, but that’s not an optimal way of dealing with the problem (from Blizzard’s perspective). You can’t really expect to attract a new playerbase if you make them install addons just to put up with the insane amount of boost spam and let the issue wither and disrupt the game without doing anything about it. I think we shouldn’t be tolerating that, and instead have Blizzard put in their own system to filter the spam out, or disallow it in the rules in the first place.
It is a trade channel. And they are offering a “trade” → a service for gold.
Regardless if you like or hate them. Its not against the ToS to use the trade channel to uhm…trade?
You will have to find a different avenue to discuss the weather or cat pictures…
Trading in an MMO (human interaction) =/= level 10 alts spamming the same macro 20 times a minute advertising for large boosting communities. I don’t have to spell out the ABC’s for you here; this ain’t it lol. And my suggestions included changing the ToS to cover this subject.
They already enforce that a single person can not post endlessly without delay, there’s throttling in place. It just happens that it’s spammy because there are a lot of different people spamming.
Can’t really crank up the throttling, either, because that’d be to the detriment of non-boost chat at this point.
It’s selling a service for gold, that’s literally what Trade is for.
It’s Trade chat, not “Social chat”. I do not consider random banter about american elections, or about thunderfury, blessed blade of the windseeker, or dirge, or similar useful or desirable on Trade.
You want general chat, that’s what General is for. It’s not spammed by boosters, either. It is city-bound, though, but everyone’s in Oribos or Stormwind/Orgrimmar anyway, so no biggie.
Whats there else to trade? For “physical” items you got the AH anyway. As for the spam, a lot of advertisers are spamming there to get a piece of the cake.
People that defend the sorry state of the trade channels are part of the problem, in my opinion. If you want a World of Warcraft where the main global channels are completely riddled with robot-like spam for large boosting communities’ business models, then you do you. I personally think you’re just conditioned to the point where you don’t mind it anymore (or you advertise/make money for one of these communities yourself). I think it’s pointless to even discuss the possibility of allowing such spam in the game; in a flourishing MMO it’s simply not desirable.
Before then it was some lousy a**l jokes now they have boosters. At least the boosters are using the channel what it was intended for(to trade).
If you want to discuss pretty cats or some stupid thunderfury joke. By all means, use the /1 channel? Just move /2 to a separate tab like I did years ago.(or use any other chat filtering addon).
Noone here is defending the current state. It is atrocious, and renders Trade almost completely useless. But it’s never been particularly useful either. Not for its intended purpose anyway.
Random banter, dirge spam, political flamewars do not belong on trade. The moment those are banned, I’ll support banning or moving boost spam aswell. But as it stands, as annoying as it is, boost spam has a more valid reason to be there than social chat.
The thing is though, my post never implied that I would like political flame wars or spam to be allowed on trade chat, so disagreeing with my argument about boost spam based on that premise seems weird. By all means I’d be for a chat channel system that’s actively being monitored, but getting rid of the major elephant in the room is step 1, because as it stands nobody can even chat in there because of the excessive spam.
Another topic for a separate thread, but still related; removing the WoW Token in its entirety would be amazing too. No more incentives for people to buy boosting services with real money! Now it’s starting to look like an actual game again. Wow…!
On the other hand, before boost spam, Trade chat was 99% flame wars and dirge spam. At least boost spam is on-topic.
It’s not for chatting anyway.
Yeah, no. I buy my game time with gold, it’s nice and comfy, get your hands off it. Thanks.
They’d just go to shady sources, like they’ve done before the WoW token. Selling carries, items, etc, existed way back in Vanilla too. I bought Benediction for a friend then (the amount of dragon pets I needed to farm to be afford that, uugh…), and my guild did raid & attunement carries in TBC and WotLK for gold. The token just made the existing practice legit, and safer, and cross-realm groups made carries more practical. Blame those, not the token. The token has little to do with it.
Removing it wouldn’t change a damn thing, not in a good way, at least.
By all means, keep a way to buy game-time with in-game gold, but remove buying in-game gold for real money. The first one is fine, the second one causes issues.
Have them go to shady sources, at the risk of having your account banned. We live in an age where AI can self-drive cars and everything, there’s no excuse for Blizzard to not be able to track shady trades and deals and act on it. They’re a massive company with the resources for it. Legitimizing this destructive practice doesn’t do anything other than giving Blizzard a way to profit off it themselves and internalizing the issue. I’d say much of the damage has already been done, but it surely won’t help make the game any better. Reminder that we also pay a sub every month for a smooth experience with minimal disruptions, so Blizzard has to take some accountability here, not the players.
@comments about trade chat being used for social incentives, so what, really? I can’t wrap my head around the current boost spam being better than any kind of social interaction in an MMO. Just like you’re telling me to download addons to filter the spam, you could also put the people that flame or cause drama on ignore.
I’ve taken to just using “/leave trade” when first entering a city on any characters. Even though addons can be useful for this I’ve found this to be the better solution.
Apart from the spam, it’s not a destructive practice in any shape or form. And like I said, I’m all for banning boost spam from trade, as long as any non-Trade chat is also banned. If I join Trade, I’d like to trade, not read about someone’s love life or something. Go use General for that.
