Advertise as a “real player” by mistake like some people already have done (and complained about it here) ? instant or near to instant ban
Advertise as a booster that does RMT’s ? All good bud keep on going
Didnt know it was possible to defend this mess, well done defending what cannot be defended
I’m not defending anything. I am explaining objective and obvious reality. We don’t need inefficient labor thrown at an issue. What’s needed are effective solutions. Someone manually banning these accounts will not work. It’s that simple.
The reason for it not working is incredibly simple - leveling is too easy and quick. These RMT boosters are constantly training new accounts to boost spam from. You ban 1, there’s 2 right there taking its place. Multiboxing is allowed. Have you seen the video of the guy multiboxing 100+ accounts at the same time? That’s what Blizz is up against, my dude.
It’s not just about having rules, but about having working ways of enforcing them.
If you thought I was defending anything, your IQ must be less than your level.
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But it’s not new accounts or characters.
I’m using WorldQuestTracker to blacklist boost advertisements in the LFG, less than once a week. It blacklists the groups leader, nothing else.
Today was another day of me blacklisting and most “WTS” advertisements (roughly 20 - 25 out of 30) were already blacklisted, which means they’ve not been banned since I’ve blacklisted them the last time, which I genuinely can’t remember when it was, I’d assume roughly around the 11th of may, since that was the last time I’ve posted in the “Share your LFG Boost Spam Screenshots” post, other than today.
If it were genuinely people constantly getting banned and leveling new characters after buying new accounts, it would be losing money for those boost advertisers. They’re just not getting banned.
The problem is they would be losing less than they make. This is why manual banning can’t really work. The absolute cost is 3 tokens per account. That’s all they need to buy 1 month sub and Shadowlands. But they make so much more from boosts for gold and for real money. None of them risk their main accounts, because that’s where all the real investment lies. You can look up the rio of the boost spam accounts, you’ll see they never have rating. 3 tokens for a boosting community is nothing, mate. They spend money on these accounts, but that’s basically marketing investment. And that’s why manual bans won’t work. An automated solution needs to be developed.
That or… we need some investigative journalism. Someone infiltrating these RMT boost communities, taking names, servers, guilds, then writing it all here for Blizz to ban the lot of them.
I genuinely don’t believe they would. Perhaps I’m underestimating earnings, perhaps you’re overestimating earnings, who knows? Neither of us can provide and proof.
Go through “advertisement” reports once a week. Ban every first time offender one day, second time offender a week, third time offender a month, fourth time offender 6 months, up until a permaban. You can even automate the length of the bans, very easily. Just have a tinder like system. Swipe right to ban, swipe left to pardon.
Let the intern, Kevin, do it once a week for a few hours. Even if they’re not getting rid of the people creating “WTS” spam posts in LFG, they’re at least earning a lot more money than not taking any action whatsoever
Check my post here
For a few examples of people not getting banned for breaking ToS, for repeat offenders.
I’ve occasionally seen LFG spam posts with rio, but yeah, you’re right, most of them don’t have any.
Automatically ban everybody who has “WTS” or “SALE” in their LFG post from making any new posts?
Let’s be real, it would not be that difficult to create a bandaid solution, up until a better one was found. But again, it’s about them doing nothing.
That would be something Blizzard would have to do. It’s not up to us players to fix an issue by spending our own money. Let them spend a few hundred bucks, 1/100th of Ions paycheck, on buying a full mythic boost, and ban the entire guild afterwards. Again, it would genuinely not be difficult whatsoever, yet they simply don’t care. They refuse to take action.
The easiest solution would be to hire 10-20 GM’s that would go around banning bots and accounts spamming WTS adds, but that would require small investment, something that Activision wont do, if they wanted, they would have already dealt with this problem. They just dont see enough profit to do so.
The money they make is insane. RMT boosting is an industry, with companies that have offices, run marketing campaigns on facebook, instagram, they offer sponsorships, etc. The same was true for gold selling back in the day - you could rent an office with the money you made selling gold in WoW.
They also probably don’t buy expansions as they need them. They probably buy them in bulk from some of those key reseller sites that offer insane discounts. Currently Shadowlands can be found for $26 in some parts of the net.
The boosters will find a way to circumvent any word filter. They do not need to use WTS or SALE to get the message out. I don’t like the idea of the word filter, because currently, the boost messages are quite clear - WTS, SELLING, etc. You don’t have abstract symbols and word structure that serves to get around the filter, and that will happen the moment filters get applied. It will degrade the average user experience before it hurts boosters at all.
This is why I say an automatic solution needs to be developed. The M+ rating has potential to hurt boosters a lot, while also not really degrading the user experience. To me, fighting boosters at the cost of the user experience is not an option. Look at the fight against piracy - currently, pirates are winning hard. The user experience is so degraded, it’s so destroyed, but the pirated experience is… perfect. AC: Odyssey is designed to be grindy so you buy exp boosts… but in the pirated experience, you just hack your experience. You can just hack the premium currency and get around mtx in single-player games. Systems that hurt the user experience encourage illegitimate ways of playing.
Let’s not forget how great these boosting complaints are for boosters. All publicity is good publicity, do not forget that. We all complain, but our complaints are in fact advertisement.
Thats what happens when companies go full greed mode and introduce terrible game mechanics with microtransactions, then blames pirating for lower sales, which is not even true. This is in no way related to problem of boosters, who actually hurt the game.
The point is degrading the user experience will push users towards illegitimate ways of play. The fight against boosters cannot be at the cost of normal user experience. Yes, boosters need to be purged. The solution however isn’t things that have been tried for 20 years in gaming and have shown to consistently only degrade the user experience. This is why I am against filters in the LFG tool.
As I’ve said, I don’t believe so, you believe so. There’s no proper way to convince either of us otherwise, so it’s genuinely not worth getting into it.
Oh yes, they will. But not before a bunch of their accounts got banned for a few weeks. This isn’t about fixing the issue permanently, it’s about making them suffer at least for a bit.
And well, it is again, about Blizzard being unwilling to do anything, even the slightest of things that requires less effort than a regular internet user could come up within 5 minutes.
I don’t see how “ŴŤŞ” degrades the user experience more than “WTS”.
The average user experience is degraded beyond belief already. There’s more boost advertisements in LFG than there’s non boost advertisements.
But let’s be real, that’s just an opinion, so I wouldn’t mind you saying the opposite.
I agree, hurting the user experience to fight something is not a good thing. But at the same time, I believe creating bandaid solutions would not hurt the user experience.
Nah, the “all publicity is good publicity” is wrong. It’s a misinterpretation of the original statement called “bad publicity is better than no publicity”. It’s to emphasize that getting bad publicity is better than no publicity, which is correct, but a ton of people complaining about something is the opposite of good publicity. It’s just better than nothing.
I do agree degrading user experience will cause negative effects, this already happened in wow, which shouldnt happen. Problem is, blizzard tries to tackle boosters in cheapest way possible and with the least effort. If they actually put even tiny amount of money into GM’s, bot/booster amount would decrease significantly, because they would get banned faster than getting enough money for a new account.
Fun bonus thing, i saw 1 person selling in ah 6k Heavy callous hide, you will never convince me that is a legit player.
աȶֆ ɮօօֆȶֆ ǟռɖ ֆɦɨʐռɨȶ
^This is the future of the LFG tool the moment word filters enter the fray. I am against them because they will degrade the user experience without hurting boosters one bit.
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You know, there is a very simple solution to that, dont allow special letters.
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Yup, I still don’t see how this degrades the user experience more than it already is degraded.
The easiest solution is to just introduce a boosting tab in lfd
Currently, you see clearly readable text. With word filters, it will be the same amount of boosting but written in a much uglier, more abstract way. In fact, it may even become more boosting because of the necessity for abstract writing. Either way, it’s degrading the user experience.
I really don’t get what’s wrong with me saying an automated solution is the way.
How about, and hear me out: Players playing from networks that trigger too many reports/bans are not allowed to buy tokens with gold 
It can be circumvented with a VPN sure, but it’s a step. Blizz already captures hardware ID so what about banning the machines of people from buying tokens with gold if they get too many reports from that machine
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Opinions opinions.
Nothing wrong with that. But given the fact that there’s no solution whatsoever, I’d take anything.
I like it. Again, anything that is more than what Blizzard currently is doing, namely nothing, is an improvement.
However, Blizzard is doing exactly nothing, which kinda sucks.
the wts spam continues in classic
chat has very few non boost lfg dungeon groups
atleast or annoying spam id rather have a account wide ignore
ignore one boost spam=you dont see his spam on all your chars regardless of their level
Yeah and even when they’re looking for a group it uses a GDKP system. Pay for loot lol.
THen Mr. Deeppockets comes along with all his bought gold and sweeps the run.
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