After asking for recent invites to discord boosting services (cloak and dagger) - to name a few, Sylvanas and Nova boosting on Tarren mill, I am currently surprised how blizzard allows such services to continue.
I asked for invites to discord on general trade channel (we know how constant they spam their services) to assess what level they go for such services. After asking several ‘managerial roles’ and people above them - they completely refuse to comment on anything suspicious about their boost service. A few questions for investigation:
How does a mass operation of people in discord allow such services for in game gold only? You have several roles, managerial, moderator, senior management board, staff - do the staff get paid for sitting idle in discord awaiting for boost services to arrive?
After the Gallywix community ban - why is blizzard not reviewing the new boost services provided? Players send complaints constantly, where is the action? You clear/ban a corrupt company, this will only open the window for new companies to take power!
One response i had from a staff member is that they accept in game currency but their are other alternatives if required! I cannot state the specific name of the manger role in the channel - however, the person is reluctant on sharing any information that would harm the business.
Most importantly I asked several times to such boosting services if they were aware of the damage they do to the game - in terms of players not learning a challenging concept in the game and resorting to the ‘easy way out’. General replies involved - we offer services which makes us a business, if you understand how a business operates, you would understand our motives (NOVA).
A shame the game has got to this level… I accept critical feedback - just remember and see for yourself, the boosting element of the game is getting out of hand and it ruins personal player achievement, progression and satisfaction,
well boosting is just a service, and in theory if done exclusively for gold is no different to the TOS than someone paying someone for a piece of crafted gear they didnt craft themselves
if you buy a legendary base item from the AH for gold, instead of leveling up say blacksmithing yourself, gathering the mats, and crafting the item, you are basically paying someone else to spare you the trouble to doing all that yourself in exchange for gold, they are ‘‘boosting’’ you through the crafting process you very well could do yourself
that is the TOS, as long as its for gold it’s ok, gallywix got banned for RMT, if Nova or whatever are found out for RMT they will get banned too since RMT breaks TOS
That is the question - does blizzard know what extent they are offering their services? Breaking TOS? Hence the comment regarding the organisation of their discord channel broken down into such business roles?
Why refuse to comment when you investigate means of services other than gold? one staff says payment is an option - managers completely deny the fact?
well of course players can have opinions on stuff like this, but in general i believe it is in the best interest of companies, and anyone for that matter to take the innocent until proven guilty approach
sure, most boosting services probably do RMT, i mean no one needs 100s of millions of gold, there are just so many items you can buy once all the TCG items are yours
but in order to ban someone for RMT there needs to be proof, like with gallywix there were discord leaks and whatnot
i’m with you that i believe most boosters do RMT, but it’s a very very bad precedent to ban first and ask questions later
this is true, the main reason for this is how commercialised boosting has become
boosting has always existed in wow, even back in vanilla and tbc, and everquest and well since forever in a game where there is a form of interchangeable currency there is bound to be a exchange of services but it wasn’t the way it is now with communities that are organised like real world companies and actively try to sell you carries to skip the content you pay to play rather than you seeking out a person to help you, it’s completely upside down
Easiest fix in the world is to make it against the TOS and start the mass banning. You believe anyone wants to be associated to this kind of behavior the moment they realize they might get banned? The market would dry up faster than a pool of water in the Sahara desert. It all comes down to what kind of quality you want your game to have. Blizzard took their slice of the gold selling pie, fine. So they really can not oppose the transaction of gold much anymore, but when they are actively not taking a stance to this kind of behavior they are basically just selling power or as in adding p2w mechanics to the game which they have been directly doing thou last expansion with BoE BiS items.
To each their own as how they are sacrificing the quality of the game and the experience for this. I get that gaming has changed over the years but blizzard sure are doing their part to lean in towards it rather than opposing it.
Well i don’t believe boosting is inherently evil, if you are stuck and need that little extra push to get over a hump then why shouldn’t you be able to exchange gold for that help like you would exchange gold for a +5 boost to your ilvl from the AH?
What i do believe is the problem is that Blizzard isn’t hard enough on suspicious gold trading, like selling grey items for 9,999,999g on the AH, obvious gold selling going on, investigate or lock that players gold until its been sorted out. Or make bots to scan tradechat for keywords and again, investigate those players accounts and IPs for other accounts they might own.
But to claim that boosting in and of itself is lowering the games quality is just asinine in my opinion, because if paying for help with content is toxic to the game, then so is paying gold for gear because you just bought the gear instead of killing mobs for it, or its toxic to pay someone else for your enchants/flasks/gems instead of just leveling and alt and doing it yourself.
I just wanna touch on this comment, cause there is quite a big misconception regarding this amongst people who actually know nothing about the subject.
As a booster and friends with a former owner of a medium boosting community along with councilmember or a big community, i can tell you that around 90% of boost services provided are not for players unable to clear the content, but rather often alt characters that they don’t wanna spend hours gearing or main characters that are after a specific item. (this figure is for mythic plus, not raiding as i know little about that side of boosting)
So in that respect you can liken it to going on the AH and buying herbs instead of going out for hours and gathering them yourself.
As an example, say you have a player who wants a specific trinket from mythic plus. He has already cleared the dungeon he wants it from on a 15 (or whatever gear is gonna scale to), but he never gets invited to the groups cause we all know having done the dungeon on that level is not enough in pugs, you need it on like 2 levels higher.
So he looks and sees he has more than enough gold and decides to buy a boost so that if the trinket drops from any player in the group, he gets it.
Now i don’t think this is unfair. He is taking the easy way out, but it’s not like he is doing something he hasn’t done before.
And this is kind of the same with alt characters. Where you have already cleared the content and instead of just starting gearing over on a new character, you just wanna start pushing so you pay for the gear you could have anyways gotten in 2 weeks.
The rest of the post has been rather nicely answered in the comments already i see, so i am not gonna touch on that.
These people get paid money and all boosting communities take part in RMT.
This does not require any “proof” but only common sense.
Just ask yourself, why would someone spend their entire day spamming in trade? Really just for gold? For what? Really just to buy gold tokens for WoW sub and that’s why they spend their day on trade?
Why would raiders be available at any time to start a boost raid? Really just for gold? You mean those raiders who probs already got millions of gold and anything they want are literally this dedicated to boosting someone just so that they can receive gold? Really?
Why are those people who manage this spending so much effort to do nothing else but… make absurd amounts of gold. Why? They are literally on the PC at all times, not having any job IRL. How do they finance themselves? How do they buy food?
Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is all just because a bunch of nerds want to make gold is naïve as heck. There were rumours that the previous boosting community that got banned had contacts within Blizzard and that those contacts were well aware of the RMT but due to the good relationship they had with them it didn’t seem to be an issue. It looks like the only reason they were shut down is because evidence started leaking and Blizzard did not want bad publicity.
It would not even be strange to assume that Blizzard is getting paid off to stay quiet since we simply do not know how much money is involved here but I do know that back in the day when the Chinese were the gold farmers there were significant amounts of money involved, enough for the boss back then to live very luxurious life. Jus task yourself, how is it possible that Blizzard only shut Gallywix down after screenshots came out? Surely they can link where that gold is going? Every time they sell the gold for money they must be trading it with someone else and Blizzard can see that on their system, very clearly.
I agree. I would find very hard to believe that in NSA surveillance era, Blizzard doesn’t know if players X has received 3-4M gold from trading or can’t see a 30 people run in HC where 10 of them are just tagging the boss and they all transfer 100k to someone that is spamming trade about Nova.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizz actually is making some decisions to encourage boosting and might be one of the reasons why we have so many systems and some parts of the game are so broken. The boosts bought with gold are beneficial to Blizz, that gold is either a token or /played to farm the gold.
I agree. I saw yesterday someone advertising Torghast boosts and it kinda ruined the sense of achievement I had from just finishing some floors on my own.
The way boosting works is that you have advertisers, they get a percentage cut of what they sell. To give an example.
M+ 15 sold, let’s set the price to 200k.
The boosters would get around 30-35k gold the advertiser would get around the same. The remaining amount would go to the “bank” to pay the “higher ups”.
As a booster you get payed ones a month depending on how many people you have helped boost.
Advertisers and boosters get nothing for just lurking around on the discord
As for blizzard taking action, i know blizzard asked and got Oblivions spreadsheet which shows where all the gold has gone. I assume they got Nova’s and Sylvanas’ aswell.
If you encounter snyone offering services for real money report them. This is against ToS and the people can look forward to a life time ban.
Also keep in mind, even at gallywix very few people were involved in the RMT. The vast majority did not break any ToS. In Gallywix it was the “bank” that was involved in the RMT which is a very small circle of people and not those you would encounter day to day.
I think the best option here is either to completely eradicate them OR intergrate them in game. For example
Make a group
The customer checks the in-game tab.
Deposites gold in a “limbo”
If the dungeon is cleared gold is distributed to the rest of the group
The customer is unable to interact with anything in the dungeon. Can opt for loot.
Just my idea, people are welcome to debate it or improve it
People know nothing about the subject…simply because they do not want to get involved with the legality of boosting services and actually play the game.
Go back to the original point of its evidently clear its becoming a problem within the wow community and constant trade spam - as one member posted later in the discussion, why would someone wait around all day on trade and then be free with availability all of a sudden to carry out the service just for gold? Something doesn’t add up, whether blizz turns a blind eye to the problem due to the implemented of the wow token who knows?
This is not me saying there are not legitimate boosting services, I am sure there are!
if you have proof that real money is involved, you can get them banned.
if your argument is “people shouldn’t be able to use gold to unlock content”, then ban anyone who’s selling BoE epics in the AH because it’s essentially a p2w mechanic.
players giving gold to others in exchange for services is not against the rules no matter how distasteful you find it. if I started listing the stuff I find disgusting we’d be here all night
Never thought I’d see a decent post by a blood elf in 2020.
Kudos to you.
Boostertrash are the same people who multiboxed and same people who bot. Their work is wow and they make a good living off it.
Blizzard directly benefits from boosts via token sales and keeping wow trending among these streamers/“pros” on twitch etc
