Before players proceed to flame the very existence of carries…
I play an off meta class - a warrior. It takes me anywhere between 2 to 3 hours to get into any listed Mythic plus key. The longest time I’ve spent was over 4 hours on a boring Saturday afternoon trying to get into a 14 or 15. My IO at the time was ~1,100. When I form my own key, it sometimes takes upwards of an hour. I think this has to do with my class / spec being undesirable. In both instances, these wait times do not include the actual time it takes to do the dungeon. Slightly less than 2/5 of the dungeons I do have some kind of disruption (players leaving, players disconnecting etc.) which makes the dungeon difficult to even complete.
Given this time sink, I calculated that it actually makes more sense for me to spend my time selling on the AH and just purchasing a weekly carry with gold. This is actually quite sad as someone who just wants to play the game.
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Being that they exist they clearly make some kind of sense for both the buyers and the sellers.
Not that I have a horse in this race, so to speak. I’m too cheap to be a buyer and too lazy to be a seller.
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Okay.
That doesn’t make it a healthy thing for the game.
Just means you’re struggling because you’re choosing to exclusively pug content that’s not built for pugging.
Really wish Blizz would crack down and make selling carries, gold or otherwise, against the ToS. Or at least make advertising it publicly against the ToS, like in-game casinos are.
It wasn’t a big deal pre-WoD/pre-Token when it was just “that one guild” on your server, if even that. But with the sheer accessibility we have now, carries have become a fundamental part of the endgame ecosystem, and its freaking awful. It needs to be cut down.
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Agreed.
@OP, carries should never be part of a video game. However, given your reasons of balancing time versus happiness in the game, I understand. It just sucks that this is how the system evolved, forcing players down narrow paths instead of the multiple possibilities provided by online gameplay.
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The concept of carrying baddies for free itself used to be pretty strange to me, like why would you waste 4 people’s time for nothing?
Capitalism working as intended.
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i’d feel too guilty to do it…i like healing stuff & helping players for free, even if it’s nubs and scrubs 
the money i’m missing out on is probably a lot though…
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I read your post to the end. I still do not, and will not agree with someone purchashing, or other people participating in the actual act of carrying someone. It’s not something I can get behind, nor will I ever vocalize some support for it. Sorry. I would instead recommend you find a guild where what you feel makes you undesirable is less of a problem considering you will have hopefully networked with people who are willing to play with you because they enjoy you, as opposed to just the numbers and statistics involved.
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Have you calculated how much time you would save by just joining a guild, making friends, and running keys with them?
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Carries are fine, it’s like paying somebody to do your taxes, you got the money to pay em, they got the know how to get you through tax season.
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Not a very good analogy. You play WoW (or don’t) because you choose to, I don’t know anyone who does their taxes because they choose to do it
OP isn’t actually endorsing carries, he’s just commenting on how screwed up the game balance is that off-meta classes can more easily make money to pay for a carry than they can find a group
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I used to have no gold. Now I have a lot of gold. I approve of carries.
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I don’t really understand why people want to beat a game that badly that they would be willing to pay someone else to do it for them. Even if it’s just pretend currency. Why even bother paying for something if you’re just going to pay another person to turn the game into ez mode. Having said that I also don’t understand why it upsets so many people. You’re own satisfaction and rewards aren’t lesssened knowing there are people who took the easy route. You’re achievement still stands. Theirs not so much.
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is it wrong for me to carry my guildies for free? then why is it wrong to market that ability for strangers. Do you buy things off the auction house? that would be wrong in your book too.
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I talked to someone who pays some degree of attention to the carry scene.
He said that a huge amount of the carries are actually the carriers carrying each other. Basically, they and their advertisement mules make piles of gold, that they then spend on carries on their alts, perpetuating the cycle.
It made sense, and it helped explain why I feel like I see so few people who actually buy carries.
I am not against carries. I am just annoyed by how much spam they carry into the group finders.
If only Blizzard can create a separate group finder from dungeons so those who want to buy carries can just go there, instead of having these adverts make up 70% of the group finder, which we have to scroll through every single time…
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WoW is a free market. The market provides when there is a need desired by consumers. People run into your problem and have no other option, therefore the market supplies ppl happy to carry you for gold. This has been WoW Econ 101 ty.
Yeah, most of the time when we sell Heroic raid carries, the person already has Ahead of the Curve. They’re doing it for gear, likely on an alt.
I specifically state “purchasing”. Carrying a buddy through a raid or something for free is less of a problem. Purchasing any type of carry is bad in my book, and the people who sell carries are just as bad. Also, bringing up the AH is a false equivalency. Selling something such as materials, items, or consumables has absolutely nothing to do with someone purchasing something like a carry through either arena, M+ or something like that, and to act like it does is a strawman which does nothing for your argument.
Why not just ask for blizzard to balance better, if there were no meta classes because everyone was within 2% of each other then carries like this wouldn’t happen.