Blizzard has a war on RMT boosters, these boosters do cut directly into the bottom line of Blizzard since gold boosting is just Blizzard sponsored RMT through WoW tokens. Even if someone doesn’t use real money to buy a gold boost, the nature of gold having a real life value puts a real life value on anything sold with gold in game. No one should support these individuals financially, but sadly is the only reason why it exists. Unfortunately there’s a market for people to dishonestly earn rewards in videogames and that’s not Blizzard’s fault.
The problem: Blizzard supports paid boosting of any kind, which not only creates grey areas, but also creates vagueness when there’s no in game stated reward for the ‘booster’. They also aren’t transparent with the player base enough to allow legitimate players to not be hit in the crossfire.
Is helping your less experienced brother with a competitive achievement considered boosting? Does Blizzard think that because there was no gold transaction in game, then there must have been one outside the game? Charity exists, sometimes its unintentional or just coincidental.
The answer: we don’t know and likely never will, unless a CS staff slips up and tells us their real policy/opinion or see real change to CS.
The combination of automated systems, lack of transparency, vague policies, and what I and most people assume to be a dwindling CS staff has created the environment we’re experiencing.
The fix: probably involves Blizzard losing money by either hiring more people, improving systems, or changing policy that cuts into their revenue. Either way its unlikely to happen so everyones who is willing to support such behavior just has to walk on egg shells and hope its not you next time.
There is nothing against the rules for this to happen, so you’re already starting off wrong by calling them “dishonest”. Selling a service for gold is allowed (always has been), but unsupported. The sellers also have new restrictions as to where they can advertise.
No, it’s explicitly unsupported. It’s just not against the rules, as spending gold for an in-game service is exactly as intended.
Grey areas is how not only Blizzard operates, but most companies. The minute they try to lay out everything explicitly, players will dance around those rules and use the equivalent of “not touching, can’t get mad”.
That’s correct. Internal policies, and especially what they use to detect and investigate these situations will never be known.
Nothing is automated, except for a squelch that can happen for chat violations. Also, the warnings people can get when they are reported many times in a short period of time. All account actions are investigated by a Blizzard employee, and manually added.
Also, the CS staff has not been “dwindling”. There was a layoff a few years ago, but those were temporary, as they have added those positions back and then some.
The overly dramatic histrionics have no place here. If someone gets an account action, and they are completely innocent, that’s what the appeals process is for.
If someone continues to get actioned, and not overturned, then they were not as innocent as they wanted you to believe.
RMT is not supported by Blizz and can result in account actions.
Boosts are not supported by Blizz and are 100% unsupported.
Buying tokens for money is allowed. What you do with the gold from those tokens is up to you as a player as long as you’re not violating any rules.
Paying for a boost via gold that has been legitimately earned or received via a token is allowed.
No it’s not. But if your little brother gives you gold that was gotten from illicit means (not saying that’s what happened in your case, just using it as an example), then that can get both of you into hot water.
Why would they? There’s literally systems in the game to help players create groups to play together without the need for any gold to change hands.
What automated systems are you referring to? And no, they’re not going to be specific about how they catch people as that just leads to people avoiding detection.
Most people? Let’s just stick to that being your own assumption and that’s exactly what it is, an assumption. There have been no mass layoffs in about a decade.
If you have feedback, the in-game suggestion feature would be the best place for it.