It’s a problem that not many people are willing to give credit for and most of time you’re met with " No one is gonna buy that amount of boosts " and " boosted players won’t affect your gameplay experience "
Yet, the sadly reality is the number of boosted players in this game is so huge that you always end up seeing one or two every couple of runs.
It’s even crazier when the boosted players are boosted by other means from blizzard with “welfare gear” and the like.
These communities are so huge, and in leagues with the best guilds and are boosting people 24/7, it’s problematic because it is basically filling the game with unhealthy attitude and outright destroying the economy and ruining people’s experience indirectly.
Now to discuss how big of an issue this is then I’ll give a couple of examples.
Gold inflation, and making it hard for people that don't participate in these type of actions / buying tokens / buying WoW gold
Now, how does this work? well it’s pretty simple, I’m a guy that gets 100k gold a week from boosts.
I don’t look at AH prices, and buy up what every I need from consumables, flasks and whatnot, this is evident by flasks being prices at 1k and above, in some cases 2k
While players that earnestly gain their gold, be it by farming, using professions or ah flipping or just doing content are forced to not buy or buy tokens or participate in boosting.
Now, Professions would be a good answer… but no.
Because of the rampantly insane gold inflation caused by this behavior, The market values are actually negative especially at the start of a major patch / expansion.
As in mats cost massively higher than crafting the real thing ( in some cases double them! ), you’d think this is absurd as no one would buy them… but it happens and quite frequently, making farming mats / using professions an frustrating experience because your mats rarely sell because well the prices fluctuate so much.
To make matters worse, the rampant use of botting / multi-boxing that is in action floods the AH, making farming mats simply a pain, and making profit from them way harder.
This results in players playing the game like you always used to do simply not an option, as you will always be at a negative gold income unless you spend an absurd amount of farming… or just buy tokens/sell boosts.
Toxic PuG environments, and making the game harder for people that want to push their way up
This is one of the main problems caused by boosting, indirectly.
Boosted players are flooding the pug queues, you’d invite a 2k rio mage, with AoTC and they wouldn’t even know some boss tactics, it happens ALOT.
Infact it happens so frequently that nearly every group I pugged had one of those, unless it’s a very high key that not a lot of people buy boosts to gain validity for.
This makes pugging around the +10-15 levels frustrating, and frankly toxic.
Because it is no longer accurate, and people joining these are not good enough for them, this causes people to get frustrated and just give up immediately… especially the boosted players as they just can join another group that is willing to carry them.
This causes players to want to filter as much as they want, and to be very demanding on requirements in fear of not being able to finish content which promotes another unhealthy behavior.
Right now, I can level up a freshly 120 character and create a full heroic nya’lotha run and actually clear a good chunk of it, and if I took the time to gear my fresh 120 a little bit and get the cloak I can full clear ( Note : I have done it and I’ve seen people do it )
So how does it happen?
Well, because a lot of people are boosted, directly by buying boosts ( or by getting gear they don’t deserve ) the queues are flooded with super geared people, especially at the start a raid tier.
Do this, log one of your lowest geared 120 characters even if they are super undergeared, and just create a Heroic Nya’lotha group titled : Raden HC
You’ll people in doves, most of which aren’t really good enough for it.
Now, the point of saying all this is… there are legitimate players that don’t look for boosts and actually try and give it their best.
But they are being repelled by the insane requirements being put inorder to filter boosted players.
The boosted players won’t care, as they already got their achievements and gear, and it takes abit of effort to spot one, especially if you aren’t experienced in pugging.
We’ve all seen the type of complaint : I try my best and want to learn, but no body takes me because everybody wants geared people with AoTC.
No one is taking 445 ilvl people for Heroic Nya’lotha, infact no one is taking 460 ilvl people for it anymore, because getting that ilvl is easy and obtained by a lot of people that don’t deserve it, making the game hard for people that actually want to play it and forces them to … buy boosts.
Now even if you have the Ilvl, people still won’t take you, they want experienced people because they want to filter boosted players that got their ilvl unfairly and that serves to repel legitimate players that want to actually try and progress in the game.
Another effect of boosted players flooding the pug queues is that it starts to make people point fingers at each other, making it so that whenever someone fails even if it was a genuine fail, people would get angry and leave.
Devaluing entry level content and making it hard to learn, make it so brute forcing is the way to go
Because players are being boosted in huge numbers, this devalues entry level content and makes it so people no longer try to actually learn and progress as they can just brute force these, and in some cases skip them entirely.
You’ll see much more groups for +10-15 than there is for +2-+7 for example.
Normal Nya raids are rarer than heroic Nya, and in some cases people entirely skip Normal Nya’lotha because they overgear it extremely.
This is because boosted or not, having good gear will just make this type of content obsolete and quite frankly a waste of time.
So what happens if you have good gear and skip normal Nya’lotha…
Yep, you’ll join heroic Nya’lotha with zero knowledge, and it would be hell for you and the others unless you overgear it to the point of brute forcing it.
The same for M+, people wouldn’t bother with normal mythics, +2 or +4 or +7 that much, you can just jump straight to +10… or even 15! without knowing what to do… and it happens so much in pugs!
I’ve seen people tell me to be patient as they don’t know tactics… in a +16! really!?
And it happens quite often, you see a lot of complaint threads about toxic people in M+ or raids, because they aren’t patient with this tank that is doing +13 without even knowing the route which leads me to my next point.
False sense of own ability, and inability to know how good others are
This one is abit self explanatory.
An example of this was simple, we had a leader 478 ilvl Hpala… blaming dps for dying to fail damage on heroic N’zoth so I look at details.
our top healer is 40k hps followed by two others doing 30k hps and said pala at 26.8k hps
I look at death logs, surely out of the first 8 people that died, they died to encounter damage, besides 2 DH that died to aggro from Physcus and basher tentacle.
One of them is said leader that died from… the purple poo that physcus leaves on the ground.
Giving players huge gear, and boosting them to achieve stuff has made players not have a sense of how good they are.
Had a friend that kept telling me they are good and how serious they are, they killed Hc N’zoth before I did!
And when I joined them in a group, they didn’t do 70% of my dps, ignored most tactics and just kept dpsing without paying attention to details.
I suggest that they aren’t as good as they think they are and they should try and improve > boom I’m toxic and elitist.
This behavior can be seen a lot, especially in the form of complaints on reddit or the wow forums or other fansites.
You’ll see tons of people calling pugs toxic, and start blaming others when in reality they are the problem. this is because they think they are good enough because they have the gear / achievements for it, which they got by unfair means such as being boosted directly/indirectly or bruteforcing stuff.
As much as I buy into the fantasy of being a rich merchant that hires skilled adventurers to do you bidding, I think this is rarely if ever the case especially with tokens, gold selling sites and botting being as rampant as they are now.
I think it is super unhealthy for the game, and it ruins the gameplay experience of others directly and indirectly and it deters new players from the game.
