Because in any game, ever, there is a large portion of the playerbase that is either lazy or just not good, and if an easy avenue exists to just throwing money at gear/achievments, they’ll use it.
Pay to win has always been a thing in gaming, regardless of the form it takes.
This game has actively challenging content and requires you to do it for the good rewards, but has left the back door open for P2W in the form of boosts.
You literally can’t eliminate the root of the issue. What you can do, however, is the absolute bare minimum of enforcing your own ToS by cleaning up the LFG tool as a basic QoL service to the rest of the playerbase.
I filter the stuff out so it’s whatever to me as far as trying to find groups, but it’s still an issue of inconsistent enforcement of their own rules. Additionally, it contributes to the ever-ballooning issue of carry culture that spills over into actual Raids and M+…where boosted folks then tank other people’s content.
The problem will never be solved, but holy cow Blizz could do the bare minimum here ya know?
The whole “we can’t eliminate the issue, so we’re just gonna let it spiral out of control and not even enforce our own rules” has always been a bizarre mindset to me.
Wouldn’t a pretty easy and effortless way to fix this is to ban keywords in the LFG title/description that these bots/boosters commonly use? e.g. ban “WTS”, “sell/selling”, “carry/carrying”, “boost/boosting”, “.com”, etc etc.
No normal and ToS-abiding player is going to be using such keywords in the LFG system anyway, so I don’t see how this wouldn’t work.
I once got a 2 week ban for posting “LF feral druid for keys” in LFG. And yet it’s perfectly okay to have boosting spam in there.
(I paraphrased my posting. I was searching for a player for Mondays at 6 PST for a static group. The GM that banned me implied that using group finder to find a team for future runs is against the community guidelines. He linked the community guidelines and obviously that was made up BS because there’s nothing in there about using LFG today for a run next Monday.)
Come on now. You only have to open the Premades to see them, page after page of them. Far more people see it in the game than will ever see it on that one post in this one forum.
Something needs to be done and Blizzard is dreadfully slow at doing it.
Yes, stab yourself in the eye so you wont see the Bad and you end up blind. Blocking it doesnt remove it and ignoring doesnt fix it.
I don’t care if people buy it. They have a services channel for the explicit purpose of advertising boosts/carries for gold.
Blizzard isn’t in an arms race with anyone when it comes to policing their own LFG feature of ads because they aren’t doing a damn thing. We aren’t expecting Blizzard to hire Tom Cruise so he can go all Mission Impossible on some foreign group of RMT sellers. We’re just asking them to do the bare minimum to filter them in LFG.
Which isn’t as big of an ask as people make it out to be.
I’m honestly wondering if Blizzard really cares about the state of Dungeon Finder ads anymore, three years ago I tweeted at them with a screenshot of a [WTS] listing that had been up for five full days, and as far as I can tell the only thing they’ve changed since then is they’ve removed the ‘Created’ timer from listings.
i’m sure the sites totally don’t ask people to sign up, and absolutely don’t ask for any payment other than gold… right?
why don’t you go visit a couple of them and find out?
see how many keyloggers you end up with.
get back to us
Just saying security has changed quite a bit over the last 20 years.
Remember a couple years ago when they ban waved people for paying to have their toons ran through mage tower?
How do you think they confidently and quickly managed to do that without a giant hassle with false positives?
Finger printing installs and machines.
So they know which unique machine and which unique install an account is run from. And suddenly they see all these accounts not doing mage tower on their usual machine, but from machines that are just running multiple accounts through mage tower.
I don’t think account theft is that much of thing any more. Used to see post after post about it back in the day. Don’t really see them very often these days.
Feel free to submit your resume to Blizzard, so you can tell them exactly how to fix the issue of spam bots in a game where accounts are free to create and you can pay for a sub with gold.
Obviously the producers can’t fix humanity, but they could go a long way in helping players to feel less compelled to use these services in the first place, imo.
The producers could minimize the status involved with high-end content. A lot of players pride themselves on being good at the game, but when a real challenge comes along like inviting a less-geared, or less-experienced player to a raid/mythic, they shy away, only inviting the players with pre-approved status.
It’s the about field where the links to RMT sites are.
What they need to do is enforce their rules. And not punish customer and make their game experience worse to make blizzards enforcement easier.
Haven’t been able to set the title since they required that you give up your phone number and install their app on a phone. Because that was the magic bullet that would end all this.
Sure didn’t, endless accounts setting that field with RMT sites, and I still can’t use it.
Coming from New World people would legit sell raid runs because of how inaccessible it is lol. There are even plans from adding matchmaking but I don’t see that going well.
Blizzard taking action is only part of the problem.
The other half is the community encouraging boosting while doing nothing to discourage it. “alt run AOTC only” or “alt run 3k only” type stuff rewards the RMT and punishes people trying to actually play the game.
