That makes the assumption they only have one WoW window up at once. Which, especially during certain times would be very easy to keep up with chat on multiple servers. The other part of this, is doing like they used to do in Classic-Wrath which was… Do it while playing the game and of course from tickets. Because back then, they used to be in-game while doing tickets however now they’re really not. It’s all web-form tickets and not just for WoW, for all Blizzard games at least and perhaps some Activision.
The whole thing of the matter people push “They can’t do this stuff because of cost” when they at the very least did a better job of things earlier on than now.
and yeah I use Global Ignore list for classic because I actually need to use LFG channel but there’s certain words I won’t filter like Summon because legit groups use those. My GUI says ‘blocked 234,497 spammers’ and that’s just for boosts.
It wasn’t my idea I was just pointing out what it would cost to have people monitoring server chat all day every day.
The issue isn’t that reports aren’t acted upon it is that boosting is considered a trade act and is therefore not an offense. It is a bannable offense in the LFG, although from what I hear that doesn’t stop it happening either.
As for spamming stopping out of fear I am not so sure. People have been punished for breaking the rules, we get enough threads complaining about being silenced here, and that doesn’t seem to stop people. It might work but I wouldn’t hold out hope tbh.
How dare you?!
Gather friends or guildies who are kind hearted enough to carry you and help you to PvP and M+ and Raid?
You are destroying the game!!!
REEEEeeeee
Fully support this, also support them banning any other means of “boosting” since I know some boost their followers/subscribers on twitch too which would be also technically a form of payment too.
tbh just DQ anyone whos clearly boosted/carried. They have the records I’m sure they can just clean sweep ban 90% of casuals with the “elite mog” probably aslong side with bannign the boosters.
Don’t know if you support it, or support also getting rid of free boosting, but we don’t take anything, no sub, no follow no nothing. You post a request, and you get a boost, and you can leave.,
Open the Group Finder tool. Search for “wts”, “boost”, “sale”.
You will find on average 30 to 50 listings at any time, people selling boosts for either cash or gold.
There once was a time when companies would run bots in this game on an industrial scale to farm gold. They would then sell that gold on third party websites. They would advertise those websites in-game, and it would result in them being banned.
I once repeated the name of a gold seller website in the trade chat in a conversation that went something like… “I wish they would stop spamming that -website link-” I was instantly kicked off the server with a 7 hour time ban. I had to wait for the time to expire before I could log back in to the game.
With most of those old bots running on flying mounts, when the Pathfinder achievement and extra requirements on flying came in, virtually all bots were wiped out. So those companies found a new way to make gold in the World of Warcraft. By selling Boosts!
There are a number of so called “boosting communities” which you can easily find on Discord. In them you will find tens of thousands of players. Speak to anyone from these “boosting communities” and they will swear-blind that the community will only accept a price of gold in exchange for boosting services.
These “boosting communities” who claim to only accept gold, all use the exact same language and systems for selling their boosts as you will find being used on third party websites which sell boosts for real money.
For example, terms like “self play” and “vip loot traders” or “loot match traders” and so on.
For one thing:
Literally anyone who has enough WoW gold and time, can set-up a website with e-commerce and a paypal payment system. Then pay people from the boosting communities with a sum of gold, but charge the player receiving the boost “real money” for the boost.
For another thing:
It would seem that the ones who lead these “boosting communities” probably do run websites which accept cash for boosts, then get the players from the communities to do the work of boosting for a price of gold.
On top of that, the ones selling boosts for real money, do not need to do any work themselves, as within the “boosting communities” there are payment structures, where someone running in-game advertisements will be paid a percentage of the gold taken for their time spent advertising. Someone else will be paid a percentage of the gold taken for using one of their characters to do the “in-game trade” with the player who is being boosted to “collect the gold” from them. Then the players involved in running the boost, will take their cut of the gold too.
So in short, it is clear that even when gold is the currency being accepted for the boost at one end of the deal, real money is being made at the other end of it. Because once someone has gold capped several accounts from these shenanigans, they have nothing to do with the gold, besides sell it on one of those third party websites at a fraction less than the going current price of a legitimate WoW Token.
Looking back at the Group Finder tool for a moment, we can see the exact same characters posting boost advertisements all day, each day. For both gold and for real money. In these advertisements are often a web-link to some third party website which sells boosts and often which sells gold too.
When you click “report, for, advertisement” it seems that all this does is hide the advertisement from your view. Once you relog, you see the same character and the same advertisement again. As though all your report did was mute it until you relog.
I made a ticket to the games masters to try to highlight to them that the people selling boost for real money, are the exact same people who claim to only accept gold for boosts. And to question why they are not being banned for using the group finder tool for advertising their services.
The response I got was pretty much (I paraphrase) “If the account is used just for advertising then it will be banned. However, if the account is also played on by someone, then it will not be banned nor be silenced from advertising”.
Now considering that the ones who sell boosts for real money, pay people with gold to do the in-game advertising for them. And considering that the ones doing the advertising and boosting, do not want to feel like they are foolishly taking a small amount of gold whilst someone else is making real money from their time, work and effort…
If blizzard did move to ban those who “seem” to be doing this just for gold, they would be swamped with appeals to get accounts un-banned, by the tens of thousands of players who are engaging in these so called “Boosting Communities”.
Does blizzard even have enough staff to handle such an amount of complaints or appeals?
Any account being used for any kind of boosting advertisement should be silenced and/or time-banned, in my honest opinion. Because this boosting side to the WoW community is exactly what drives the toxic attitudes which we all experience in the game.
There are two sides to the WoW community. People who are engaging in boosts (either being boosted or boosting) and people who actually put the time and effort in to progress their characters the hard way. I spoke to someone who was trying to sell me boosts and their opinion is that the two sides to the WoW community are I quote, “People boosting and people being boosted!”
Sadly, the big problem with boosting is, anyone who is engaging in boosting others, even for a price of gold, are incentivised to join Raids & Mythic Keystone Dungeon groups, simply to cause issues or to deplete the keystone. The more they do so, in turn, the more players there are who would consider paying for a boost.
Players who get paid to boost others, will join your keystone dungeon and look for the very first mistake that they can use to try to justify them leaving the group. They will join your Raid and hide behind others whilst they cause wipes… Hindering the progress of any players who are not paying for boosts.
Boosts for gold, boosts for cash, it is all the same. Boosts are the driver of the toxic, elitist side to the WoW community.
Boosters who make a profit, gold or cash, should be silenced or banned.
Best laugh I’ve had all day. If only that was in the slightest true.
Toxic is driven by entitled elitists and people who have less patience than a gnat. Toxic is driven by timers. Elitists have always existed in every game, boosts haven’t changed that.
Demand for boosts is driven by game design. The less rewarding you make playing the game the more the demand for boosts. The more complex the dance around raid bosses the more you drive boosts. Add a timer, increase demand for boosts. Reduce M+ reward levels and create GV, more demand for boosts.
It’s almost like the game model has moved more and more to drive boosting as a way of driving token sales.
Plus the shift to a younger audience who want things now and skip to the latest game every 5 minutes and it’s not hard to see why boosting has become so popular.
Want to reduce boosting? Change the game design. No game has ever succeeded in removing boosting by bans as boosters just adapt and you can’t afford the costs of policing it effectively.
Blizzard can’t afford to pay a programmer write a little piece of code, to automate time-bans for someone who advertises boosts all day in trade?
They have had this system in place before, to ban gold sellers, so they can reinstate such measures.
Also, O-RLY, they can’t afford to pey 1 single GM to search the Group Finder Tool once every hour or so for “WTS”, “BOOST”, “SALE” and silence the accounts or ban them if they also advertise a boosting website?
Are you joking?
Look, I am the first to pick at bad development choices and bad game design, since my study is Games Development. When I say study, I mean, just as my Programming teacher called himself “A student of computer science” when he was an actual professor! I have studied games development for over 10 years.
Boosting has much less to do with game design than people are making out in this topic/thread.
Not banning boosting has far less to do with making WoW token sales than people are making out.
It would be very cheap to effectively “police” the in-game advertisement of boosts for sale.
The cost would come when all those players start to write tickets to complain and appeal their banns. But again, that could be made easier with automated responses. A little bit of code checks the database for “reason for ban” and when the reason is “advertising boost sales” the automatic response is given “you were banned for this reason, the ban will not be revoked.”
When boosters are not allowed to log into the game for 24 hours or so, they will soon stop advertising in-game.
Indeed i report every single player is see selling boosts. boosts for gold are boost for real money. because with the gold the earn they do not have to buy game time with real money so they save this money so in a way boosts for gold are real money and blizzard should ban all of them for life
You increase the supply, the demand will follow.
You decrease the supply, the demand will decline!
It has nothing to do with game design.
Do you follow my logic?
They made it so much easier to boost. You can endlessly run Mythic dungeons, Normal and Heroic raids, Torghast etc. The only restriction is the instance cap. So they space out the boosts to fit in that schedule. PvP does not face any restrictions as far as I’m aware.
Not being locked to raid IDs obviously benefits players as well.
No, it wouldn’t. You need to document with evidence the ‘offence’, prove the link to the account and then implement the ban. it’s not just ‘oh that account is advertising, click ban done’. Otherwise you leave yourself wide open to all sorts of issues down the line.
There have been several instances over the years of games mass banning people permanently and then having to re instate all those accounts a few months later (all done without explanation…).
You then move on to the real cost, which is employing dozens more CS people. You really think people will accept an automated response saying ‘you were banned for x, it won’t be revoked’ when real money is involved? First thing they will do is reply asking the ticket to be escalated, which again means sooner or later a human will be involved who will have to review the case.
24hr ban is nothing. Won’t stop anyone. Make it 7 days, and you give them more ammunition to contest bans and basically make the entire cs department grind to a halt. Then your other customers suffer. And then you get demands for subscription refunds which tie up the finance department.
For someone who claims to have studied games development for ten years your take on the true costs of your suggestions seems quite naive.
And then you need to deal with the accepted position which is that selling boosts for gold doesn’t break the ToS (although advertising in LFR/LFG is apparently not allowed), so you’ll need to rewrite the ToS too…
Well since you point that out, perhaps this design aspect can be looked at.
All I see here is people blaming other game design aspects for the rampant boosting. If they think that it is too slow to gear up, or to progress ratings (pvp or dungeon ratings), that’s ok, their opinion. But that isn’t the reason for the boosting. This is just misdirecting blame for one thing to try to build an argument that Blizzard should change the aspects of the game which they do not like.
While as others point out, boosting has always been a part of every game.
Not at all. Most players don’t want to get boosted, but when all they see in the Group Finder tool is endless “WTS BOOST” adverts spam… it makes them start to think “Maybe I should join them and buy a boost, because I cannot beat them by reporting this spam”.
Depending on your item level, with some people putting item level requirements on their groups, and depending on which content you are searching for… You may see more boost advertisements than real groups. That is a fact!
Blizzard should silence those accounts. They should not wait for players to report them first, before they take a look to see if the account is only used for advertising (then take action) or if the account is being played on and take no action at all.
It is this policy they have which is stopping them from banning or silencing accounts.
You cut off the supply and the demand will decline.
Stop misdirecting the blame for boosts to your most disliked aspect of the game people.
24 hour ban with a warning on your screen which pretty much says “3 strikes and you get a permanent ban” is not “nothing” as you say.
When I repeated the name of a gold-seller website in the trade chat, around 2009/2010 I had a time ban with exactly that type of warning, and I never repeated the link again.
