I’d like to propose an approach to the issue of Carry Ad spam. Obviously paid carries (for gold only) is a tolerated practice. I personally feel it’s in conflict with the spirit of fair play and promotes a pay to win atmosphere. But I also realize it’s a reality of gaming.
What I do object to is the massive spam of carry ads polluting the chat channels. Further, we see these ads also polluting the dungeon group finder, which actually has been expressly forbidden by Blizzard.
I’d like to propose that a new tab/channel be added to the group finder specifically for these carry ads. These could include Raids, M+, and power leveling carries. This would keep the adds in one location and allow for cleaner chat channels and group finder. It would also facilitate the connections of buyers and sellers for these services.
Now I’m not sure how much UI work would be required to adapt the group finder to add this channel, but I think it would be a nice benefit to the whole community. It helps buyers and sellers get connected more efficiently. And it helps keep the spam away from those who don’t need or care to see it.
I’d like to see comments (constructive please) from the carry sellers and buyers as well as from those who’d like to see the spam reduced.
Adding another channel to promote players to advertise gold-only carries there wouldn’t solve or reduce the amount of spam, it would be just another channel they ctrl+v paste their spam into. They will still post in every possible channel that has a large player population.
They could however extend that chat channel post limitation into every non-general chat channel, might convince the spammers to post into a designated channel if they were limited to having to choose trade chat or this new channel.
I’ve done quite a few gold carries ranging from Masked runs, M+ and raids. I almost never felt compelled to spam and would just post once with a competitive gold price. I stopped doing 5 mask and M+ carries as the gold was too low to be worth it, I also play on Area-52 and the Trade chat is spammed to death mid-day so I just left Trade chat.
But with a designated location for carry advertising, Blizz could make carry ads in chat a violation subject to a silence penalty, just like they did for ads in the regular group finder tool. It’s not completely gone from the group finder, but it’s been dramatically reduced.
In group finder, the simplest thing might be to permit more sophisticated search terms, so you could add “-carry” to remove the carry ads from your listing.
I’m on a lower population server, one of the benefits of which is that we don’t have carry spam in chat, so I have little to offer there.
Ya, I’d support better searchability. Negative searches and more filters would be much appreciated.
Adding a designated channel for this won’t fix the issue, as people will just avoid that channel. And that’s not what advertisers want. They want their ad in front of you as much as possible to get you to buy their product. As such… they’ll just spam in both places.
Just like how tradechat is still often used to look for groups in classic, even though it isn’t really supposed to be a LFG channel.
If you ever find yourself on the receiving end of a scam “carry” the word Blizzard will use is “unsupported” transaction to refer to what you participated in and why they will not refund your gold.
What you are advocating for- Blizzard coding an in game clubhouse of sorts for these transactions to be advertised- could definitely be construed as “support” and I doubt it’s a line they’re going to cross as long as their stance when people get scammed remains the same.
Unless carry ads in chat are met with silence penalties.
That’s a good point. It would definitely put Blizzard into the position of being officially supporting carry services. Which would mean that they’d have to control the transaction. And I don’t know how that would work.
What oher ways do you think carry services could be facilitated while keeping the ad spam out of trade chat and the regular group finder? I report the ads in chat as much as I can, but it’s just so pervasive on my server. The ads roll faster than I can right click report them.
Well one of those situations is completely out of your control so if you like wasting your time focusing on things outside of your circle of influence carry on.
This exactly. However I feel that carries are so pervasive at this point blizzard may as well support them and introduce an official support system with protections for both buyers and sellers.
I don’t believe Blizzard is capable of designing an auto silence feature that works, they can barely implement the most basic of content without problems or player abuse.
Warframe has a pretty reliable auto silence feature that just times you out from the channel, I believe they just have a bunch of blacklisted phrases or words that the channel is scanned for. It’ll silence and remove your post in a couple seconds, something like this could work for WoW and would allow them to remove player initiated silencing if they get it working.
It’s funny but that is a good question. I know several people who’ve hit gold cap selling 5 mask vision carries, one of them even on two separate characters.
If you’re a good player carrying is a stupidly easy way to make a ton of gold.
