Absolutely. Blizzard wanted to actually make everyone 100% equal in PvP with the release of Legion with their templates but the community actually insisted on having advantages with better gear. The community wanted this, sadly. Thus Blizzard decided to give you a 1% stat boost for every 10 ilvl you have. (Actually just 0.1% for every 1 ilvl, but you get the gist).
100% agree there, that’s not my point though.
I think it’s a double morale people have.
Imagine there was an option in the in-game shop of WoW where you can just buy a full 226/233 set for 200 euros.
People would scream at the top of their lungs for this to be bad for the game and even threatening to abandon the game altogether in masses.
Yet, this system essentially already exists in the game… it just takes, as I’ve mention, one extra step.
Boosting isnt the problem per se, and don’t think you should ban it. Its the gearing itself that’s the problem.
There would be way less qquing and way more playing if the end game gear would be “time” gated rather than “skill” gated.
I really don’t have a problem with guilds running m+, raid boosts, pvp boosts if they can. I DO have a problem when the gear is locked behind some imaginary skill line like in 2s where you see a booster one shotting everyone and making it really hard to even play the game, let alone learn it. Even skirmish is full of overgeard ppl.
If you “unlock” gear and make in accessible to everyone, boosting wont matter so much cause we will all get the same gear in the end. Its the matter of time.
Other way to go would prolly be scaling of the gear by your highest dungeon/mythic/pvp mmr…so you cant do a +5 with 220 ilvl, rather your gear scales to the loot ilvl of the dungeon, in this case 194. So if a group of 4 ppl that has a skill to boost someone through a 5 with 194 ilvl on time, ffs let them boost.
Im not setting this as a precise on scale everything down to this and that. There should of course be tweaks so all can progress normally. But the point being should be “if you have the skill and not the gear to boost, boost away my friend”.
But in general, boosting by itself is not the core issue. If the game gearing system would be more rewarding by just playing the game and not feel like a game shop, the boosting wouldn’t affect the game so much and would not be the big issue like it is now.
Time gating, imo, is a bad thing. You can see this in SL right now. Everybody is complaining about having to wait for their GV to get some upgrades.
I’d agree with you if you are talking about…let’s call it effort gating…
Time gating, in it’s current state is: “You get X only once per week”
Effort gating would be: “You can get as much as you want if you keep grinding stuff”
For PvP it’s true though. Gear gating behind skill is ironically stupid. Why would better players need even better gear? They’re already stomping worse players anyways.
I agree. The game would be more fun if we could just play the game for the gameplay rather than having to hunt for numbers in order to be able to play the game.
Yes, however the main criticism of the Legion system wasn’t that there was no progression, at least not from higher rated players. It was that there was no customization, which is totally different. And the end result with the 0.1% per level template boost, arguably that made things less equal than they ended up being in WoD - in WoD, after a certain amount of time, we all had the exact same itemlevel, whereas in Legion, those who did m+ and pve generally had higher ilvl, which meant some of those +0.1%s accumulating to make a difference. There were also other sources of power discrepancies that made many pvpers discontent with the Legion system, myself included, such as the artifact power infinitely farmable crap. PvPers in Legion were also completely screwed when they went outside in the world, even when engaging in world pvp, which was also an issue.
Those are the reasons why I am advocating for the WoD system and not the Legion system.
Absolutely, it’s a matter of presentation, not of substance. But appearances matter, and in terms of real results, statistics suggest that far fewer players purchase boosts than, say, store mounts, despite the alleged increased desirability of tangible player power over cosmetics. Arguably, the fact that there are extra hoops to jump through actually does a very good job deterring people from buying boosts.
You’re right. High rated players never complained about power difference. It was mainly low rated players who wanted to “stomp dem low geared noobz”.
I agree, nothing to add here.
Well yeah. I’m not saying there is a huge amount of people buying boosts. I’m also not saying that there would not be more people buying gear in the shop if it was possible.
I’m saying that I think it’s weird people are not demonizing boosting as much as they would demonize the in-game shop.
P2W gets thrown into discussions pretty quickly nowadays, for example in Hearthstone. It has been a debate since the release of HS.
Yet, I kind of miss the discussion in WoW. Sure, HS is a PvP game but there are also other MMOs, like BDO, that had/has an in-game shop in which you can buy gear and players were outraged and left the game.
All I’m saying is that I think it’s weird that the boosting services already are somewhat “accepted” by the community of WoW, while an in-game shop, most certainly, would be demonized as hell.
i like the “name” - but yeah thats essentially what i was going for, you rounded it up nicely.
Item lvl should not be defining trait in the game…skill should. Put me on a mage and give me 226 ilvl and set me up against Xaryu, Venruki, Raiku etc…i wouldnt last long…those guys dont need ilvl on top of their skill.
Same thing is with m+ or raiding.
what i do wanna do is fight with someone that has similar gear and will not one shot me so i can actually play the game and learn, win or lose it doesnt matter as long as its a fair fight.
I think it comes down to how much it dilutes people’s gaming experience. This season excluded, the vast majority of boosting happened in pve, and quite frankly nobody cares that random Johnny the Ret got some better pve gear by being boosted, as long as your dungeon or raid got completed.
But it’s maybe somewhat unfair to say that boosting isn’t frowned upon. It’s easily one of the easiest insults, to say to someone that they are boosted.
Blizzard does not get the share for real money boosts, but in game gold contributes the selling of their gold coin, so as far as the revenue goes up, nothing will be done about boost for gold
Can we consider whether boosting in general is healthy for the game? The point of this game, or so I think, is to earn your own achievements and experience the challenge of the content in a healthy environment. Surely some people will always take the easy route, and probably end up having less fun along the way
But consider:
Why is boosting so prevalent currently? It’s probably a symptom of a deeper issue in the system
Can we agree that boosting in PVP is ultimately detrimental to the average player’s experience? Legitimising it solves nothing
Blizz can release a pvp side game based on WoW’s arena. As it is, pvp exists in relation to the entirety of WoW - the socialization, economy, pve, progression, etc. As long as WoW is an MMO, hiring players to perform services for you should be a thing.
Of course, if Blizz wanted to, they can implement improved gold sinks, like there were in Vanilla, where simply running your top gear set would mean you’re losing more gold than you’re earning. This was the case for so many players.
Tokens would self-balance around less gold being available, and paying for pvp boosts would become less viable, because you’ll have a combination of players having less gold available to them, combined with increased maintenance costs. It’s a shame that wiping in a raid costs 50g for repairs per person. It should cost at least 200g per wipe per person.
Of course that would then expand the illegitimate market for boosts, but those players will fear bans.
I appreciate the point, but you don’t need a separate game just to fix PVP boosting. The major problem is how high ilvl impacts low ratings - you can fix that by implementing gear scaling caps at specific ratings. With that you achieve two things:
Boosting has a much less detrimental effect on player experience
Boosting is less prevalent because there’s less need for it
Then make the game easier for everyone… stop giving 194 gear from Wquests and 187 from LFR when mythic gives you 233… Obviously people are gonna buy boosts to get that 233 gear then.
Why would they ban something that is not against their ToS. We could argue it should be (I don’t think it should be). Unless you are referring to advertising in lfg - they yes they need to enforce the rules more vigorously.
We need to look at why buying boosts is so popular at the moment (in both PvE and PvP) rather than banning it. I’ve only played since Legion and there have been sale runs since I started but they are now far more prevalent in SL (for a raid with no mount, what will a Heroic mount raid be like??) .
Boosts have always been part of the game as long as I can remember. People bought gold from other sources and some still do, they can get more for their money, gold buying is also common in Classic and will probably keep happening in Classic TBC too. Many would like the token to be available for TBC to avoid having to use dodgy third party sites. People obviously don’t tend to need gold as often in older versions of the game.
When the token was brought in, it cut down significantly on how many accounts were getting hacked. Not all hacked accounts were the result of buying gold. People can just get hacked or phished too.
Boosting exploded as a service when Blizzard introduced constantly repeatable content. Cross realm also allows for most of this content to be boosted from characters anywhere and many boosters will take payment for their services on other realms they don’t have characters on. I’m not saying the token has no bearing but the same group of people can repeatedly run Hc Daddy Dena for example, or go do M+ after M+.
The demand for PvP boosts is largely due to the horrendously bad gearing this expansion. They more or less deleted loot in PvE and made the highest weapons drop in PvP. Even some high end PvE players bought boosts in order to be able to get the weapons they needed.
I didn’t play WoD, but I heard it got pvp gear right, with templates or something like that. I don’t mind something like this existing in rated pvp. In general, I think the increase in power from dinging max level to getting bis gear is just too much. This is an entire expansion’s worth of power just in a few months. It’s not as bad as it was in 8.3, but it is still too much.
This is the best suggestion - make the game boring for everyone. When the top players quit because there’s no challenge and nothing worth investing time into, there won’t be anyone to sell boosts.
This is also a good point. Being 1 shot doesn’t teach you anything. We’d still loose against Xaryu but at least we could learn from playing against him. We can’t if we just get obliterated in 1 global.
Oh yes, boosting definitely is frowned upon. I’m talking about the boosting services being acceptable while Blizzard obviously also is making a huge profit off of it while an in-game shop wouldn’t.
But yeah, the issues is much more popular in SL than it was in previous expansions.