The argument should never been “people used before 3party websites”,yes some used them but then they also got caught and banned.If they found out you where buying golds sometimes GM’s would tell you to “sod off” buy a new account cause its against ToS.
It’s just one of those arguments people hope you bite the bait in some means to justify WoW Token practice.
Token as OP tries to explain with what they did with D3 kinda goes against what they did here and how it’s affecting WoW.Maybe even too late to remove the dam thing.The psychological consequence and habits on how the player base consumes content are well pass savings now and as with everything you would have uproar from the player base.
Just imagine/picture your self the old ladies in casinos that are playing the slot machine.Every one of them has the perfect excuse/justify why they play it.
They aren’t legal if they are stealing intellectual property. They are criminal. They profited off someone elses intellectual property without the rights and/or permission to do so and anywhere in the world that is illegal.
Boosts and such for ingame gold is legal as Blizzard allow it.
Its breach of intellectual property/copyright laws. If you didn’t create it or didn’t get permission to use it from those who did then that is illegal. Not to mention fraud, tax evasion and all the rest. I know someone who used to farm and sell gold on another game. Made a good £50k or so over the course of a few years. That’s intellectual property theft, that’s tax fraud/evasion as he didn’t declare it as earnings. He ended up getting a cease and desist and the evidence sent to his national crime agency to investigate. He ended up paying the tax on it and stopping and it went no further.
generally cease and desist letters are sent out and if financially viable its taken to court.
The issue is gold sellers were based in places like China that weren’t or aren’t friendly with the USA so not alot was enforceable bar mass banning of accounts
I doubt you’re a copyright lawyer so i don’t know what you’re basing these claims on.
How can you possibly know that? Like i mentioned, gold selling is big business now, i wouldn’t be surprised if the larger companies take in monthly revenue in the 7 digits and have full time employees under contract, including lawyers.
Yeah that guy was guilty of tax evasion, not intellectual property theft though, but as i said before, these websites aren’t run by “someone who used to farm and sell gold and made 50k” anymore.
Option 1: multiboxer > farms Gold > sells Gold for euro to shady dealer > buys sub with euro
Option 2: multiboxer > farms Gold > buys tokens for sub
So which one would you choose if YOU were a multiboxer? One is clearly better… And even if you arent a multiboxer, each token that blizz sells is 7 euro in blizz pocket, which in my book is good. I get absolutely nothing if a shady dealer takes their cut.
I am not one of those crazys who go “hurrdur blizz is making money”, of course they are, its not a charity. I want blizz to make money, as i enjoy their products.
I remember as a GM of a guild having to deal with a complaint from a boosting guild because one of my members had engaged their services then left the raid midway through and didn’t pay. That was back in Wrath. The guild in question never did another boost without getting all the gold up front after that.
Saying “it’s a fact” doesn’t magically make it a fact …or try saying it 6 more times, maybe it works.
Also viruses existed long before human civilization, that doesn’t mean pandemics don’t exist and can’t be a problem.
Quantity changes definitions, a puddle and lake are both just water.
Exactly, and puddles aren’t a problem, this thread is about the lake, something very different. Boosting now has very little to do with boosing in vanilla, the comment you’re parroting is absolutely irrelevant. It’s not even an argument, it’s just an observation, what exact do you THINK it proves? that because 5 people got boosted in vanilla now boosting can’t be problematic ever? even if 70% of people stop playing the game and just buy boosts?
This is the whole point of the thread, this is why RMAH was removed, it reached a critical mass.
I know you weren’t talking about quantity, which is why your post has no value, cause you’re ignoring crucial factors that contribute to the current problem you fail to understand.
I am not denying that boosting wasn’t there in old expansions.
“But not at this level”
There were gold sellers, account stealer(mostly) and with IRL money people selling services(very less) but blizz actually took action against them.
Then comes gold token which stopped gold sellers but now they can legally do stuff in-game and make IRL cash. Blizz don’t have to assign resources for them.
Also boosting most likely to happened in top PvP and pve servers only bcoz many servers not even able to clear end game difficulty raid. There wasn’t cutting edge like achivements which can be FoS later. People farm that end game achivements when expansion is over.
And with cross servers it spreaded all over wow.
I think it’s not ethical - not many players will agree with me. Blizz took mid ground.
So every single message in Trade Chat is advertising a trade. Well there’s a thing, fancy a channel called ‘Trade’ being used for trading (in this case dungeon runs)
Guild recruitment isn’t really a trade so why are looking for a guild in trade ? There’s a guild finder tool you can use. You wouldn’t go to your bank and expect them to sell you some groceries would you ?
This actually not many people aware of. From Asian country you can do whatever you want - people can make full living with this kind of stuff due to currency difference.
But if you in US - they will hunt you down no matter what.
The boosting exists at this level because everything is super repeatable. Previously lockouts were all like Mythic raids, there was one raid ID and you could only run it once. Now you can endlessly run normal or heroic and sell boosts continuously.
Mythic plus can be done endlessly with the only limitation being the 10 instances per hour cap.
People conveniently want to blame the token when boosting has gone up in line with the amount of repeatable content.
People bought Challenge Mode boosts for example but you didn’t endlessly want boosts for it. You got the achievement and access to the transmog set and you were done. People selling the boosts still made huge amounts of gold. But due to the more limited nature of boosting at that time it was not as prolific to see it everywhere.
Boosting is done by all sorts from individuals, small teams, guilds, to big communities that can offer boosts at any time, have good track records and can fulfil any order in moments.
If they reverted all the changes to lockouts, and mythic plus was removed, boosting would go back to being something that could only be done once per instance per week and you wouldn’t have the volume of boost spam in trade any more because it wouldn’t be something they could sell 24/7.
All true but people would go pass that with login on to there alt’s,lets not kid our self everyone is sitting at least on 5+ 120 and i subbed maybe 5 months of all bfa,and they are decked 445,80 neck,7 cloak(secon week) now imagine what a guy who is playing it non stop has.The lockout is just wishful thinking.
It’s not just m+ its speed leveling,raid’s(as you pointed out) and pvp boosters.
The bain of the problem is the WoW Token it mainstreamed the whole thing and changed how some people play the game completely,its p2w(skip i dont care) microtransaction system and cause it has also the Bnet balance component to it alows multiboxers to exist and alot of burner accounts.
Boosting was hard before,it for sure was not this mainstreamed + the content not being repeatable made it only harder as you point out.
Everything points as the OP said a change in the philosophy on how some of the systems where designed repeatable/microtransactions with rng components so you dump more and more time in the game.
I would just like to add from my Legion guild mate i heard back then,with the bnet balance and gold trade the boosted account’s on sites that sell WoW account’s skyrocketed.So people are making real life money of the gold in game.