Selling gold for real money?

Community General Discussion
1

Is selling WoW gold for real money a banable offence, because if so, why are these clear gold sellers, aka. Boosters, getting away with it?

How many times can you open LFG, see the boosting advertisements and in the description it says “accepting gold on any realm”. Why are they doing this? Its simple, they sell the gold by realm on third party websites for cheaper than the WoW token.

Say Blizzard sell a WoW token for £17, worth 200k gold one month, boost prices will be 400k. If its worth 250k gold, boost prices will be 500k. Its all in line with real money value. You can then go to a third party website, and the price of gold is slightly cheaper than the WoW token. So Blizzard make £17. The booster/gold seller might make £12.

Some of these boosters also charge hourly, accepting gold on any realm. ‘500k per hour’. If they have consistent business, that could be £12 an hour. Sounds pretty good for playing a game, but its also ruining the game for most.

Not only are there advertisements in game for these third party websites, but you can be watching YouTube and get an advertisement for WoW boosting, or gold selling. Its all linked and nothing is getting done about it.

Boosters sell gold on third party websites to make real life money, whilst not being banned in game for boosting because they’re only charging in game currency, and then they don’t get caught trading mass amounts of gold to random players because they’ll trade it for a fish or something.

So here’s the fix. Remove WoW token, ban boosters, ban advertisers. Its not hard. Surely they can create some sort of filter where if a booster posts in /2 or LFG about boosting it doesn’t send the message or post the group, and sends them a warning instead. Kind of like saying ‘ez’ at the end of Overwatch games, it says something else. That could be what happens instead. Someone tries advertises boosting or a website in /2 and it says something stupid instead.

Anyway… if Blizzard could fix this ‘loop hole’ the game would be better for it.

3 Likes
2

Yes, it is.

Most boosters don’t sell the gold they earn via boosting. Some surely do, and some have been banned for it.

No, not really. They pay their boosters and advertisers from that gold. They use that gold to move it across realms, so they can pay boosters on small realms from gold earned on big ones. They use that gold to give a loan to world first raid guilds, so they can buy BoEs and consumable during the race. There are many, many other ways that gold is used, legitimately.

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The issue is that many boosters now take payment via their streams with donations or subs. How will Blizzard stop that?

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Sounds like something a booster would say… :wink:

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Well its live streamed… so just clip it, send the clip to blizz. Boom. Banned.

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Yes. I boost, for gold, and have personal experience seeing where the gold goes. (hint: it does not translate to IRL money.)

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It’s a private arrangement… then they sub. How will you tell them apart? They don’t stream the boost runs.

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Day 1. OP’s plan given green light. Token removed. Boosts for gold prohibited.
Day 1. Evening. Bots flow in wow spamming capitals and major habs with their rmt services.

Booster spam: not solved
Booster services: not gone

Great plan, Cow.

3 Likes
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But a lot of it does translate to real money. So what you’re doing is frowned upon by the majority of the community, but is legit. But what others are doing are selling it for real money and being recruited by these websites to boost. Not to mention the amount of streamers who blatantly advertise sites such as “blazing boost” which is for real money. So my argument is, why are they not getting banned?

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Well is you read what happens why you try to advertise boosting, that wouldnt happen, because there would be word filters that would progressively get smarter, picking up on what boosters say, making it say something else entirely.

E.g.

‘/2 WTS Gladiator boost 5 mill’ translates to ‘I’m a little tea pot, short and stout.’

So sure people will clock on that someones trying to sell a boost , but they’d never know what boost, try whispering them and it translates all their whispers into something dumb too.

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If its private, how do you know its happening?

If you know, Blizz can know.

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If you have evidence, send it to Blizz.

I wouldn’t be so sure of that.

Lack of manpower, mostly. They don’t want to perma-ban automatically, so every case needs to be reviewed. That requires a lot of time and effort, which in turn requires hiring people to do that thankless job. In the end, hiring enough people would cost more than the damage RMT does, so it’s not financially worth it.

That’s not a scalable solution. They’ll always find a way to circumvent the filters, so it’s an uphill battle, which Blizzard would quickly loose.

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The only way to reduce boosting is to shift game focus from high end to normal mode.
All prohibitive measures will only push 3rd party sites discords and dunno tictocs, machinimas with ads…

Some quote of the topic:

It has been argued that organized crime received a major boost from Prohibition. For example, one study found that organized crime in Chicago tripled during Prohibition.[142] Mafia groups and other criminal organizations and gangs had mostly limited their activities to …, gambling, and theft until 1920, when organized “rum-running” or bootlegging emerged in response to Prohibition.[143]

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I do, nothing happens.

Probably because the majority of players still playing are paying for the boosts.

Doesn’t need to be automatic. A 3 strike policy should be in place. If they get 3 strikes, after being warned after each strike, they should then get banned and have to make an appeal to Blizzard. ‘Automatic’ systems can work.

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RMT Real Money Trading is against the rules and will often get your account permanently suspended. RMT is when someone does not pay in in-game gold but in IRL currency outside of the game.

Accepting gold on another realm is not RMT. Boosters are often happy to accept gold on any realm because the purchases they make from the BMAH or AH are account wide. If they buy an appearance or a mount it will be availalbe on their main realm.

They can also convert their gold to bnet balance and use it to buy services or game time. All of this is not RMT.

Incidentally a boost bought through a community the gold is held and accounted for by the community and boosters are paid the balance owed on a weekly, two weekly or four weekly basis depending on the how the community is set up. Boosters do sometimes have to take payments on other realms because there simply isn’t enough gold available on the realm they have their main on. The booster gets a cut, so does the seller and so do the people who run the community itself.

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If people were buy tokens in vast amounts as you claim they gold we would get for them would be a lot less i have explained this to you before in the past .
But atm the gold is stagnant and has been for a while which means hardly anyone is buying the token .

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Pretty sure it wasnt me, this is the first post Ive done regarding the wow token. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.

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What i said back then …

People are not buying tokens atm as the gold is stagnant i have said this in other threads …

WoWTokenPrices - Price and History Tracker

:1st_place_medal: WoW Token Price & History - WoW Shadowlands 9.1 - Wowmeta

determines WoW Token Price?

While the real money price of Token is fixed, the in-game gold price (how much are Tokens selling for) changes dynamically according to supply and demand. You can not choose how much do you want to sell it for - it is automatically determined by Blizzard’s internal algorithm.

Fewer people buy it for real money / more people want to give their gold for it = less supply/more demand = Token’s gold price rises.

And no idea why you are being sarcastic it seems you fail to understand how the token works.

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I know how the token works. You pay real money, you get in game gold. Simple. You can then buy boosts in game with gold, you spent real money to do so, badabing bada boom, no one cares.

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Well you seem to care as you are asking for the token to be removed …

1 Like