What boosts?
A 15 key? Easy as FCUK to complete.
A raid? Join a guild.
People buying boosts should go and play FF14/ New World like everyone here is advertising.
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So your post is a contradiction then. Elite wouldnât need a boost but somehow they are entitled? So weâre back to my first post. 
Blizzard is CIVILIAN company . Civilians do not have right to conduct police investigation ok.They can only observe while making sure to not brake law, and wait for felony-ist to make mistake and unveil itself.
Sometimes i wonder is average wow player even from this planet.
Itâs not a planet, itâs a disc xD
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If you look, lots has been done about botting over the years. How do we know? Because in every ban wave we get tears from those who have been banned or from friends of those who have been banned and âknow their mate canât have cheated 'cause heâs a good guy, honestâ.
The problem is that it is a never ending battle because people cheat, always have done and always will do. Therefore bots will always be around whatever the games company does to stop them.
The changes in patch 9.1.5 will have no effect on boosting adds, nor are they designed for this : the goal is to force some people to get authenticators by removing some of the game features for players without authenticators. I can guarantee that there will be just as many boosting adds after patch 9.1.5 than before.
that some shady ppl that work for blizzard doing some shady stuff under the radar, would not surprise me.
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âThe Players and Daily login numbers are estimations based on subscriber numbers and online sentiment.â
With sub numbers no longer being public, I seriously wouldnât trust a single word this site says about WoW. What even is âonline sentimentâ supposed to mean?
That website published how they estimate player counts a few years ago, and rather than face the justified criticism that itâs pure nonsense and unreliable they instead removed the explanations and carried on.
Fyi it uses reddit activity along with âsentiment analysisâ which is a very unreliable way to guess how people are feeling about the topic to guess how many people currently play the gameâŚ
That kind of data is completely unreliable as even games who publicly share their sub count were widely inaccurate, and to begin with a good part of the reddit community doesnât even play the game.
It manages to attribute thousands of daily players to closed games or to countries that no longer exist, as well as failing to be consistent on their own rankings (last time i checked it announced that Blizz was n°2 with 2M subs while claiming it had more than 3M daily players, congratz folks)
A wild guess would be about as accurate as whatever trash they publish.
Indeed but how do you even manage to find what part of these MAU come from WoW players ? All i see is that Blizzard is bleeding players, but between OW slow death, HOTSâs failure & HS running out of steam itâs kinda hard to draw the line.
Legion was massively more popular after 7.2, yet Blizz lost 10M MAU in that same period. Around what many players consider to be the best part of modern wowâŚ
Iirc boosters are actually the biggest clients of other boosters, at least thatâs what a booster on the woweconomy reddit claimed.
A bot looks at the words you use and try to guess how you felt about it.
For example :
- âI hate this game, this is the worst expansion everâ => Bad, because âhateâ is a fairly straightforward emotion.
- âOh boi do I love spending 45h grinding the maw hours upon hours for drip-fed rewards, thanks blizzard ! /sâ => Amazing, that player definitely love the game. And âloveâ is also a fairly straightforward emotion right ? Guess the devs mustâve done something great with this âmaw grindâ
Cuz yeah, the bots struggle to draw the line and usually fail to notice sarcasm.
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And⌠how could that be used to estimate player numbers? This confuses me.
hilarious is that, you dont see basic logic , that they do not invest enough or even encourage boting and boosting
In competitive game I care what Johny do next door. Meanwhile we have to do chores etc. someone just bypass it? Banning bots each 6 months? what approach is that? Damage has been done in those 6 months.
And since what times real money boosts are allowed?
I never felt like i need to buy boost 
nothing in game is pushing you to do it
maybe not for 10 + year players. Try climbing in arena as new player.
My bets would be on gathering sub-reddits activity, process the messages to get the overall opinion âtons of positive posts => Good situation etcâ & associate the known playercounts to build a training dataset. The sentiment analysis is most likely but a few parameters in the dataset, with others being the number of daily threads, posts, new members etc.
This is where you have a massive flaw : How do you associate a player count to these data if you donât even know how many players were there to begin with ? Afaik FF14 never shared their sub count for instance. So they either made these up or used data from other games to fill the blanks.
That step is usually crucial in machine learning as it tries to find patterns between the parameters and the mentioned player count. If you randomly inputed them or used values from another game then you already have inaccurate results.
As for WoW thereâs also the issue of the data perhaps not being relevant anymore. If you for example used the google query data to do the same thing the vanilla data may not work at all as most of the tools currently online didnât exist back then which would result in far less wow relates queries & thus a dataset being biased.
Letâs make stuff up and say that you have a reliable â1 query per month per playerâ youâd think ânice, i just have to look at the number of queries & iâll have the sub countâ.
Then you take the current data with icy veins, wowhead, the forums, reddit etc and suddenly you have 150M Wow related queries per month. The machine learning will blindly guess that we currently have 150M players cuz he learned from vanilla data that 1 query = 1 sub.
Now imagine if for FF14 we took this flawed analysis and said âit worked for WoW, so now iâll take the FF14 related queries and say that 1 query = 1 playerâ. You now have an even more flawed analysis for ff14 & this only goes downhill from hereâŚ
Most boosting services are probably not based in the US and their owners are probably not putting their names on those sites. If their site is run on a US provider, they could probably ask them to shut that down. But when the sites run on servers based in Russia, what can you do? Blizzard is not some kind of an authority on the internet that can shut down any site they want. You just donât seem to know how that works.
ban perma involved players? maybe lets start with that?
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I can sort of feel it if you were to get into arena mid-season on a new when even people at your own rating are going to be way higher-geared more often than not⌠but itâs more of a flaw with current PvP gearing than some deliberate attempts to make people pay for boosts, I feel.
That data is not relevant whatsoever. I meeean⌠thereâs going to be a plenty of players who do not at all touch places like the forums/reddit. Many of my in-game friends are like this. They wonât go around the forums and keep posting positive stuff about how much theyâre loving the game monthly.
But if youâre right and thatâs what âonline sentimentâ is supposed to mean⌠then I donât trust the site XMB posted whatsoever. Might as well take out a tarot deck or roll the dice to estimate WoWâs sub count. 
Thatâs a better approach, and theyâve done it in the past (banned gold holder accounts, which basically destroyed one huge boosting community entirely). But you canât just go around banning every account out there, or youâll end up with casualties. That being said, Blizzard probably could spend more time on this, but Iâll agree with you that they probably donât care enough to spare the resources to do that. And well, they probably make a lot more on legitimate gold boosting anyway where no real money is involved.
To be fair the google data could work if we had something reliable to tie it to. Thereâll always be outliers but itâs better than nothing. For instance you could also use the WoW API data & try to find something reliable enough to get a decent analysis. But i honestly doubt itâll work well as there are always more to the equation than merely the number of playersâŚ
Counter example would be rated pvp. If you look at legion, BFA & SL data on rated pvp youâll most likely find that there was a massive drop off in legion because of the templates, that it was basically dead in BFA due to gearing & its systems and that it was amazingly great in 9.0 due to the pvp vendors and that it was the best way to gear a character at that point especially through RBG.
I honestly doubt that we could make a Machine learning algorithm work on this data because itâs success wasnât really tied to the player count but rather how PVP gearing worked during these expansion.
But the reddit data & sentiment analysis is definitely a terrible idea. Thereâs not necessarily a link between an active reddit and a successful game.
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