Blizzard, please start banning pilots/RMT carries on retail arena like you did for TBC

Community General Discussion
1

For those of you who are unaware, Blizzard recently unleashed a banwave/DQ for teams/players in TBC who were caught piloting, RMT boosting for real life money, etc. It turns out that there was so much blatant cheating going on that for Oceanic realms, there were no Infernal Gladiator (rank 1) titles handed out.

The same needs to happen for retail arena. It’s time. The RMT boosting problem is arguably worse on retail for a few reasons.

  1. The gear gap is much more massive on retail. You need to hit certain rating milestones to be able to upgrade your gear - 1400, 1600, 1800, ending at 2100 for the final tier. These rating tiers make it way more enticing for people to buy boosts. Conquest gains for the gear are also insanely low.

  2. Arena playerbase is much smaller than it usually is due to the unfriendly Systemslands and how long it takes to get a character that’s actually functionable in PvP, Alliance LFG is a ghost town, Horde LFG has more advertisements than actual groups looking to play.

I could go on, but I don’t want to distract from the main point of my post. There are players who are making a full time job out of selling arena boosts for RMT.

Just giving a few examples:

There is a R1 Windwalker who has 10,000 games played this season already selling boosts. The season has been out for roughly 46 days, that’s around 217 games A DAY. Let’s underestimate and say each game takes 1 minute sitting in queue, 1 minute in the arena prep room, and 1 minute of actual arena gameplay. These values are grossly underestimated because queues past 2k can often take 4-5mins, matches can go 3+ minutes. This player is spending 10 HOURS A DAY boosting for real life money. I’m sure doubters are going to say “well hurr durr how do u know hes boosting for RMT” but I already know - A good friend of mine gave in, bought a 2100 boost for real life money from a certain famous website, and received this WW as his booster. I report them both repeatedly but nothing happens.

There is a certain streamer DH who is paying r1 players ON STREAM $100 an hour to attempt to get him Rank 1.

There are tons of booster accounts specifically made during this expansion, have 0 pvp achievements/regular achievements, yet have thousands of arena matches played with Gladiator S1/S2 Shadowlands. Hmm, I wonder why these accounts exist? They are burner accounts made to sell RMT boosts.

Last season there was a certain Rank 1 Priest and his buds that were just short of Rank 1 range, and was able to pay a 3200 rated team real life money to take some rating from them to get them in Rank 1 range. The arena community picked up on this, sent in many reports to Blizzard and they did nothing.

The list could go on. I can link so many check-pvp pages of blatant booster accounts but sadly naming and shaming is against CoC.

Bans need to happen. The integrity of the ladder is lower than it’s ever been. Boosting is insanely rampant and you are very likely to queue into a boosting team due to the arena population being deader than it’s ever been.

Please do something.

54 Likes
2

Gonna give you a bump. Sick of boosters, even ones doing it for gold.

It’s almost as if Blizzard design the current arena gearing system to sell as many boosts as possible.

25 Likes
3

Boosters aren’t the problem, people being lazy is!

4 Likes
4

Murderers aren’t the problem. People should run away faster!

37 Likes
5

It’s laziness but also horribly designed systems that encourage buying tokens/RMT boosts. Blizzard has also turned a blind eye to banning people who RMT.

1 Like
6

What is piloting??

1 Like
7

People logging on your account and playing for you.

1 Like
8

That’s crazy, people give out their account info??!?

9

Yeah, the main RMT sale sites are used so frequently that they are extremely trusted.

10

Your account gets actioned when you log in from another geo location. People have had this problem using VPNs.

11

Yeah, and they simply unlock the account, give the booster whatever code, and the boosters use VPN as well.

12

When they did pilots on peoples real accounts they used software that ran on the customers PC and allowed the booster to mimic their MAC address, IP address and other hardware information so that it looked to Blizzard like the booster was logging in from the customers PC. They did this for years evading bans on pilots. Only in Legion did Blizzard start really cracking down on that, so now they just pilot a character on a new account and transfer it to the customers account later. Nearly zero risk there unless the booster is really dumb about it.

2 Likes
13

Yeah, but it’s a bit like the War on Drugs here. You can go after 100,000k users in a given city or you can go after 1,000 dealers. Sure it’s a game of whack-a-mole with the dealers, but the math still works out better and eventually they’ll get the message.

I will say that the measures anticipated in 9.1.5 will help a bit.

1 Like
14

While I’m not usually against players doing things the boosting imo should be stopped.
But with it encouraging token buyers its actually making blizz money so like YouTube banning creators for stupid reasons while allowing mobile games to post sexual content that breaks the rules.

Its all aboit greed and money and the only real way itll change is if the players as a whole stop buying tokens…

Which…yeah doubt it’ll happen sadly. XP

15

What the OP is talking about has nothing to do with tokens. It’s entirely RMT on an outside website, which is why it should be bannable if Blizzard actually paid attention. Boosting for tokens isn’t bannable.

1 Like
16

LOL, made me spit water all over my keyboard.

As far as boosters, there really is now way to get rid of them unfortunately. They can fight RMT as much as possible but there is a 3rd party community out there and some things are happening between 2 people and there is no way to root it out. In addition, there is a gold/cash value on the backside of boosting so it’s not something that can be rooted out when things are happening away from Blizzards eye and they can’t see it happening, there has to be some proof in order to ban people.

Not saying this shouldn’t be brought up and concerns shouldn’t be aired, just making sure folks realize there is limited capability to fight this. Where there is a will (and there is), there is a way. As a libertarian i don’t see the problem, let folks spend their money the way they want but i understand peoples consternation about it.

1 Like
17

They most certainly can. Target the behavior not the people.

If your acct has EVER earned rating above 2k, only other people with that same achievement can earn rating with you. IE if you’re under this classification and join some newby who pays you, they’ll gain ZERO rating (automatic win for other team)

Bam you broke PVP carries in one fell swoop.

2 Likes
18

If you can’t see the behavior because it’s hiding on a 3rd party website or wherever, then you can’t get the proof to ban people.

You will also break the PvP community, they won’t use a sledgehammer. Also given time people will find work arounds.

1 Like
19

Hope this gets a lot more traction. This expansion of Arena turned me off hard in S1 just doing arenas with friends, mostly dropped it in S2 due to S1 meta carrying over and the stories heard in the Arena forums.

Not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to sell for gold, but the boosting in general is out of control. RMT needs to be acted on swiftly and gold boost advertisements need to be reduced.

Sorry to bring up boosting in general when you are specifically targeting RMT arena, but I am hopeful new PC culture Actiblizzard might do something a little more since out of the way paintings and 4 expansion old raid bosses are on the list.

1 Like
20

This has always happen , watch most of these ppl get their Gladiator title