Jeff said a while ago that there was no need to report them because they had their own systems for picking them up. How does this work though, when boosters are using alternate accounts to do their boosting?
They just make a new account, presumably paid for by the person buying the boost, and carry on boosting… Without any perceivable penalty to their main accounts, or subsequent booster accounts.
And it’s absolutely rife in this game because of this.
It’s seems odd as well, that even OWL players were only fined and given a short suspension when caught; when “real cheats” using bots/hacks are supposedly banned permanently. Surely boosting, is itself facilitating cheating?
I know a paid professional booster. So I can tell you how they actually ban these players.
So to start, boosters go on peoples accounts in order to boost. Normally they will look for large win streaks, and change of IP address on each individual account, and flag the boosters IP accordingly.
There is a workaround to this, they don’t ban duo queue boosting, at all. So as long as you are grouped with a player there is 0 chance of getting banned. That’s why the amount of solo queue boosters has gone down since they made this change.
I don’t know what the reason for this is, but I do know it’s a thing.
To your point about the pros. Most of the low fines are casual boosting, for free stuff. The bigger fines like OGE got were paid boosting cases. I assume they avoid banning these players mid season because it’s hard to find players, and a team could be completely useless without them.
How to fix boosting
Chipsa said a while back
To fix boosting you need to pay your tier 1 and tier 2 scene, these players dedicate their lives to overwatch so much that it’s their primary and only source of income, but they still get paid nothing. They turn to boosting to pay their bills. Blizzard gives their pros nothing, they are forced to find other methods of earning money. Pay them and 80% of your paid professional boosting scene is gone. The game will be fun again.
So they go after those looking to be boosted, and not the boosters themselves. No wonder nothing is actually changing, and indeed it seems to be getting worse. By group-boosting I guess it makes it even more efficient, as well as safer for the boosters.
I don’t think paying boosters not to boost would really work; they’ll still have time to get that extra side-money. Didn’t stop literal OWL players.
Well. The bans did do something, it basically made boosting very slightly harder to do.
And like. You should understand, basically every pro player has boosting history and that is basically guaranteed.
Take Shanghai dragons for one, their players scrim 9 hours a day every day for the entire season, there’s barely time for a job. They need fast income.
Boosting pays a lot. There are a lot of players looking for boosts, this pretty much means the average income of a booster is about 60-70 dollars/hour depending on the rank (their speed of boosting)
I don’t think boosters boost for fun, most of them do it because they don’t really have a choice, either give up professional overwatch or continue it as a booster.
A lot of these kids very obviously have a significant investment in their hardware, internet connections and so on. They are not doing so badly for themselves that they need to do this to eat.
Most of their hardware is provided by the teams sponsors. It basically comes with the house they live in.
Income is still necessary. If you heard OGE’s story and apology for his actions he basically stated, originally he basically had no choice if he wanted to go pro.
They go in believing blizzard’s promises that they’re entering a career.
If Blizzard doesn’t hold up their end of the deal and pay their athletes, that’s blizzard’s wrongdoing. The company is making millions of dollars off the backs of their esports athletes. Not paying them a living wage (on top of overworking them to the point of physical injury and depression) is appalling.
The boosting issue is because of an underdeveloped pro scene. They don’t need to pay them to stop cheating, they should have been paying them so they would never have to look to boosting.
Imagine ‘dedicating’ yourself to a VIDEOGAME expecting to get paid. This is their very first mistake… Whether they’re children or grown adults, it’s the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard. You play games to have fun and kill extra time, if you do, however become really good then sure, start attempting to go pro. Whoever boosts is just a low life who doesn’t want to do real life stuff like going through the process of finding a job and whatnot. Ban Hammer on them all!
That like defeats the purpose of going pro in overwatch.
This is basically like blizzard saying hey if ur good, make your career overwatch, but like we won’t pay you for your career. Most pro scenes do pay their players, most if not all.
Like overwatch is a video game but they still are running an esport with a league.
They make it look like it’s a good opportunity for new players, but they don’t make anything from the league and once they’re in, they aren’t getting out.