Boosting... WHERE does it end?

For me, it is not of those options (at this point I almost want to endorse these RMT’s just so that Blizzard can’t get more money, but I won’t ofc)

You do not fight a bad situation by becoming bad as well or fight against something by lowering your own standards or fight criminals by becoming one yourself. Raise your standards and fight these things the hard way, which in this case might mean that they spend a little more money to do it etc.
With regards to the point of being lazy (even in a game) then you do not deserve anything.

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That is a noble goal, but like in real life not a realistic one. Humanity is selfish, and with access to an easier way then doing the “hard work” some people will always take the easy route. I see paid services more as damage prevention then damage fixing. To me, if people are capable of buying a wow token instead from a RMT trader and this causes one less person to be hacked then its worth it.

Can you show me this studies? Also I’m not saying that when token is available bots are making gold only to buy game time. That would make no sense. They can for example spend like 5% of bottled gold to buy tokens to continue bottling and 95% they can sell to gold buyers. But what is clear that botters don’t need to pay sub if token is available, why would they do that? It is much easier to just use bottled gold for game time.

https://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-wow-token-two-weeks-later.html

With data graphs and at the time one of the only comparable services.

The premise is pretty simple, price will start at current gold selling price, botters then need to give huge discounts to attract people still going to them instead of legal ways, in return the wow token price will fall again, this will continue till a substantial portion of the gold sellers have gone out of business. It will take time but it will help.

Maybe offtopic but…
Imagine if blizzard just could hire one guy to focus on removing botters in classic.
I bet one guy alone could EASILY remove 99% of the botters and you’d have way less gold inflation.
It’s just insane to me how some botters have been online 24’7 for over a year, even though we report them.

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Ok, this is from 2015 and when I tried retail in Dec I seen lot of boomkins botting. Thing is that botters add gold to economy and increase gold price of token in AH that way, making token more attractive to buy for real money and sell for gold. If there are no botters and less gold in economy, gold value of token will go down making it less attractive. And this will make illegal gold buying more attractive again.

You are endorsing Retail features here to stop the bots? Really, this is where we are going with this discussion?
This is so wrong in so many ways.

And you actually believe that if Blizzard is offering a cash service is good but bad when in comes to a 3rd party? But why? They achieve the very same goal.
So then it’s easy, Blizzard should just add bots to the cash shops making them “leagal” so it’s all great, problem solved, easy. And ofc, you don’t want it don’t use it. Perfect.

As for your decisive question on whoever I want to pay the answer is simple NONE! That’s the whole point!
How can you entertain the idea of paying a company for a service that it was supposed to eradicate? What’s going on here?

The goal for the buyer is the same, but the means and more importantly the rest of the peoples effects are not.

Regardless of where a player buys its gold or boost he achieves gold or boost. But if he buys it from RMT facilitator, that facilitator will need to have bots, advertisements etc, this means more random whispers from goldsellers / boost sellers, more bots that interfere in your questing, farming, grinding / out world activity and worst case scenario the need to (re) activate layers.

unfortunatly not everyone is like you, if nobody wanted to pay a goldseller, they wouldn’t exist. Problem is people do want to pay them for their conveniance.

You can’t eradicate convenience, people will choose the easy way, and a lot will pay for the easy way. A large portion of the player base does not like leveling, and buying boosts is convenient. To get that convenience you have 2 choices

  1. get it from a illegal (against EULA) 3rd party provider with the risk of being scammed, with the added problem that they obtain it with activities that are detrimental to the game (Botting and scamming)

  2. get it legally without risk of being scammed without increasing activities that are detrimental to the game.

So yes I’m FOR wow token and boost being in the store, Regardless if it was in TBC or not.

Just 1 thing I wanna talk more about.

I think most people are like me. As I said I don’t wanna pay anyone but that doesn’t mean I don’t do it. Like 58boost, I don’t want it in the game, but as it’s here I’ll use it 100%. So with other stuff.

You again are missing the point. It’s about enforcing the rules, not let everyone do whatever they like. This is more of a convenience for Blizzard as instead of tackling RMT they introduced it legally.

It feels we are going in circles here, and that probably proves that we just can’t come to any agreement.

For the sake of the discussion imagine something IRL. As you know many people are corrupt as this is our nature, seeking the easy way. How it will be if the guverment would make corruption leagal just because that’s how people are? Same goes for most rules and laws.

It’s not 100% the same thing but shares the same core idea.

You’re asking for “definitive proof” of the future? That’s your best argument?
Do you also want “definitive proof” that x diety exists? Come on, you can do better than this…
The purpose of slippery slope arguments is to look at a historic pattern and to recognise similar behaviour in the present.
I struggle to believe you truly lack this basic level of critical thinking.

Yeah, I agree. The core issue is Blizzard doesn’t spend enough money, time, resources, or creativity in enforcing their own rules.

People might be more receptive to a “one-off” boost if Blizzard-Activision didn’t already have an awful track record of exploiting their playerbase. It’s why I stopped playing hardcore after WOTLK. Everything is too easy, has no meaning, and you can pay for almost every convenience. You devalue the underpinning of what makes the game feel meaningful.

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So the issue is clearly to enforce their own rules more effectively. Not to endorse the behaviour officially…

I don’t understand why you support the unacceptable behaviour because it’s officially endorsed. Pandering to people who are lazy at the cost of the community’s integrity and undercutting the meaning of the gameplay only damage the overall experience. This doesn’t make the money-grabbing addition to the game acceptable; if anything it makes it even more unacceptable.

An alternative vision is that they could create additional content at the end of each classic phase and charge for the dlc. This would keep invested players around, and make them money. Also, if they didn’t exploit players and advantage those with money by appropriately enforcing their own rules it would improve their reputation, which also has financial value.

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I don’t think we will see a lot more addition in cash shop (maybe race change etc…).
Either way a lot of people are delusional about their true classic experience. Most people are more concern about the content itself and not the experience so addition with some cash up store are nothing.
And imo, the true classic experience is impossible to retrieve due to obvious raison.

Again, the logical thread which I see so often. “You can’t have perfection, so why bother aiming to maintain the identity of the game, or improve underlying issues”. You might not be concerned about the experience. But the reason classic happened in the first place is because there is huge demand for having something close to it.

I see it as a different analogy:

People are corrupt because they want more power.
Government gives People more power, there is less corruption.

That would indeed solve a lot of the problems, especially the botting and gold selling problems. It still wouldn’t affect whether or not character boost should be in the store, because that one has more factors to consider.

This is not something that i wanna see. Imagine a game where you buy an raid unlock key, or a new pvp season vendor key.

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“This is not something that i wanna see. Imagine a game where you buy an raid unlock key, or a new pvp season vendor key.”

That’s a fair point. I guess a better approach would be develop new content for classic to sustain subs at the end of the final phase.

I use the example of Age of Empires II where a 20+ year old game has grown hugely in popularity with the “definitive edition”, and the community and game development have been really wholesome. An example of ethically maintaining your player base by providing updates, bug fixes and solid content.

If this boost went live it will end in a fully developed cash shop in WOTLK with almost everything retail has, maybe only 5-10 mounts but the rest will be the same. That is the reason why it is so important to stop it now.
It is actually crazy that the worst part of the boost in my opinion is the botsituation and that Bliz is not able to solve that, not even close. Yeah maybe they ban 1000 bots every week, but there are like 5k new ones and now imagine that with the boost… GG

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The boost will not increase the amount of bots maybe slightly reduce it even. Some botters make money by botting and selling level boosts those might get reduced if the price of the boost is below their price.

The most you will see is the level of the bots

So you say that the bots will make so much gold that they will start swimming in gold, thus devaluating the gold prices and because of that they will not make profits anymore and close shop.

Such a genius, the world need brains like that in space programs and stuff man. Why are you here on the forums, go apply to NASA and help the entire mankind!

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One question that may show you, that you train of thought dosent fit properly (no attack here :)) What does a goldselling companie stop from making thousends of bots to farm brd or making profesionsalts. There is a formula that states botting will make those gold seller 86times the amount of money BECAUSE they dont have to lvl them. Yes gold will be cheaper, because they can actually print it, which make the barrier to buy gold even lower (iamgine 1000g for 25 usd) wich will result into more people buying it, wich bring more money into the system wich will destroy the economy. Just wait for like 10 -12 month when a flask will be 500g or something. Or a stack of Ore like 100g+ (Not really how it was way back in the day, right ?). My intention is not to attack you, just to try to show you and others how basic economics will unfold. Hope you have fun anyways, after all this should be the purpose of the game ^^