Once upon a time in a great game named World of Warcraft, Major Cities would be packed full of players and at the end of a Season there would be a major push for people to complete the end game content.
But that was before boosting communities took over the game.
At one point there was a plague of bots in WoW, most of which were run by third party companies on an industrial scale. These third party companies would sell gold, mostly to top-end guilds who did not have time to farm for the things which would be required to complete the end-game content at a competitive rate.
There was also a market for WoW accounts, where some websites would allow people to sell their accounts. This market was abused by many players who would sell their accounts, (which would then mostly be bought and used by botters), then make support tickets claiming to have been hacked in order to retrieve their accounts.
In order to combat these third party companies, Blizzard would routinely conduct Ban-Waves on accounts suspected of botting. Blizzard would also endeavour to take aim at certain websites which hosted bots and forums for botters, and take legal steps against their owners. This was at a great cost to Blizzard.
So finally Blizzard settled on implementing Pathfinder achievements into the game, and locked the ability to fly behind this achievement. This had a notable affect on stopping third party companies from being able to run bots on an industrial scale, as most of the bots which were the most difficult to detect were capable of using flying mounts. When a bot is bound to using ground mounts, they are much more easy to detect and much more easy for players to identify and report.
So great stuff, no more industrial botting in WoW!
Sadly though, this was not the end of the story. The third party companies which had profited greatly over the years of industrial scale botting in WoW, had amassed enough resources to move on to another method for making money from WoW. That being based around the task of setting up “Boosting Communities”.
Boosting Communities appear on their front to be player made, player hosted, player run communities - who have a love for the game and just want to help people to progress through the latest end-game content. If you ask anyone from any boosting community if they would ever accept real world payments in exchange for boosting other players, they would say “NO!”. They would all state firmly that they only accept gold in exchange for boosting services.
So while that may truly be the case, and these communities may genuinely stick to the strict rules set by Blizzard that no community or guild should sell boosting services for real world currencies, this does not stop such communities and services from being used by third party companies who do sell such services for real world currencies.
In fact, the genuine Boosting Communities who only accept gold for boosting services give a perfect cover and infinite supply of cheap workers to those third party companies - who once sold gold earned by bots but now instead run websites which sell boosting services for real money. Third party companies are now able to take full advantage of the boosting communities who only accept payments of in-game gold for their services. A player visits the website run by the third party company and pays a large amount of money for a boost, then the company pays a dedicated boosting team from some boosting community in-game gold for the service.
One only has to do a simple google search, to find an abundance of websites which sell boosts. They grow in numbers with each expansion. Because while they used to get banned from the game and have the cost of replacing their accounts… Now all they need to do is set up a website, then hide behind the ambivalent cover of “genuinely innocent” boosting communities. They now go without risk.
This is sadly having a very negative impact on the game.
2 months before the end of each season, the game is dead. Dead, dead, dead!
For each and every player who buys a boost for their character(s) there is one fewer player active in the game for the last 2 months of a season. So you can literally see - if you log on during this time - how many players must indeed be paying for such services.
It is killing the game. It is eroding the guilds and communities which have kept the game stable for many years.
It is time for Blizzard to stop being blind to this, stop pretending that boosts are “OK” just as long as nobody is paying with real money for them.
It is time for Blizzard to remove the channel which they added in game to cater to these seemingly innocent communities, which is turned on by default on any new character… the so called “Services” channel. And it is time for Blizzard to start banning people who sell boosts, even for a price of in-game gold.
Blizzard, why do you allow certain groups of players to kill the game like this? Why do you allow third party companies to hide in the shadows and farm cash from your players? Blizzard, you have lost the plot!
If Blizzard announced that any boosters would face being banned, these boosting communities would disband, those third party companies would no longer be able to hide behind them.
Then players would once more look for a guild to join - to complete end-game content with and to make real friends in. The game would once again have a meaningful community.
Now if anyone argues that this is not a good enough reason to ban boosters, then clearly they are profiting in some way from this semi corrupt system which Blizzard has catered to. At least when they were able to bot they would be banned for it.
