I have stumbled upon one, of I guess, many gold boosting operations. I could not believe the sophistication of this operation.
The impact on the economy of entire servers if not all servers is huge.
Now disclaimer: boosting for gold seem to be ok for blizzard. But I think this rule has met its limit.
The boosting operation has a front, a website. It uses this website to get customers willing to buy boosts. With this, players are encouraged to advertise and bring customers for a cut of the gold.
A discord server is setup. That is the engine of the operation with a sophisticated bot that manage boostees and boosters. A lot of players are recruited for doing the boosts. Every booster has to have a certains RIO or number of boss killed to be able to joins as a booster.
every booster is regarded as a âsalesâ guy with various percentage depending on the number of boosts. An automated system is in place to manage each sales gold balance and also manage gold deductions if the player does not do well âunderstand fails the boost or does not play well enoughâ.
Every single activity at max level is affected:
leveling
island expeditions
pvp rating
mythic+
rares farming
horrific visions
total BMAH items control for all servers in a region
we are talking 100s of millions of golds changing hand. This cannot be without impacting everything in the economy including the price of wow tokens.
The sheer scale and sophistication of these operations is such, blizzard you cannot simply think that this is what you had in mind by allowing gold for boost.
Before wow becomes affected like wow china, it is in our interest to discuss this and get blizzard attention on this.
Ultimately, Blizzard gets the money from the subscription of all involved (boosters and bostees alike), all the money from WoW tokens bought and then sold for gold to pay for the boosts. Getting boosted keeps a fair number of people in the game, who would otherwise unsubscribe.
It is not in their interest to make it stop. Until thereâs a market, people will find a way to exploit it.
Not saying itâs a good thing, but that thereâs little Blizzard can do to make the boosts unprofitable.
This is because you havenât been looking until now.
Incidentally, I just came across one that will get me Duellist in 5 hours. Fast service! Seems reliable, as well. RMT is easily available, also a more complicated and expensive option that stays within ToS by laundering the gold through Tokens.
Glad is also available, but takes longer and is more expensive, ofc.
What struck me particularly was that with the help of my Credit Card, I could be Duellist by this afternoon, and the method and safeguards were so clearly laid out.
Admirable, in its way.
Then I could use that site so much talked about recently to buy much of the best gear in the game and transfer it between realms. A very well organised and efficient site indeed - not pretty, but perfectly functional. While Duellist would cost me the price of a decent dinner for two, if restaurants were still open, getting all that loverly gear would put more of a strain on my card, though, not least because of all the realm transfer fees. But you buy to suit your pocket, I guess.
âKill it. Kill it with fire!â I hear you say?
Not always easy. As Ion says, boosting is endemic, and has been since the start. What is the difference between boosting guildies and boosting for gold? And since the advent of the Token, I find it hard to make a meaningful distinction between boosting for gold and boosting for money, so where can enforcible lines be drawn?
This is the consequence of not removing this cancer from its roots. Now itâs too late. It has spread. It influences the economy, and a lot more. At this point, even if they wanted to remove boosting, they wonât be able to.
mainly because blizz decided to sell gold for money.
So now gold is kind of real life money, meaning all boosts have a real life money value
Since 170k gold equals 13 eur that you would save from your sub.
They just donât care because they earn with it. Simple enough.
It is now so deep rooted in the community that even people asking in forums how to get more gear people just plain answer âbuy a 15s boostâ
Understatement. It DOMINATES the economy. Now that professions have been relegated to trash-tier, and everybody is overstocked with transmog, BoEs, boosts, and the Longboi are the mainline of the economy.
Boosting cannot be removed; but then, it never could. Blizzard certainly could do many things to suppress it, tamp it down, if they wanted to. The problem, though, is all the lovely cash theyâre getting from their cut of The Token and the transfers. Itâs hard, in a tough market, to turn off taps that make you reliable income.
While I am neutral towards boosting in general.
Honestly what would you expect Blizz to do? Its a free trade like any other. Might as well shutdown AH and disable /trade function if we are cracking down on any form of âcommerceâ?
I agree. Some boosting is inevitable, and by no means all bad. I donât have an ethical problem with boosting in the abstract. I have taken boosts and given boosts, and would again.
I do see, though, that boosting has a corrosive effect on the game. Small amounts of low-level boosts have little and limited effect. But when boosting becomes the standard, the whole game is devalued, and all progress becomes worth less.
Long-term, thatâs a real problem. Ofc, we are in the doldrums of last patch, when boosting is easiest and most plentiful - and most visible.
I do expect Torghast boosts to be quite lucrative in 9.0, though.
well, youâre not wrong. The game is pay to win now. buy tokens with money. Pay people to boost you. Pay to get boe. Pay to get mounts, pvp carry, everything.
At this point, all weâre missing is, pay to get things directly from blizzard.
And all that wasnât before? Mounts didnât drop before from final final bosses? BoEs didnât drop before? The token itself was introduced back in wod if I am not mistaken.
So, WoD, Legion. Everything is more or less ok.
In BfA WoW âsuddenlyâ became pay2win?
(Also, I avoid the term âPay to Winâ because it just causes the derailment of any coherent discussion with interjections of âAh, but ak-chuell-lleh, there is no winâ, or specious comparisons with other games, or loot boxes, or whatever.)
