On boosting

“Multi-glad selling 1400/1600/1800/2100 boosts on any realm PM”
“Offering Sylvanas SoD HC PM for more info”
“S2 Keymaster LAST SPOT”

Half of these appear in the group finder, even after the changes in 9.1.5 with the authenticator. /2 is supposed to be the legal place, but everyone sees the Group Finder.

Edit: When I say boosting, I specifically mean boosting for gold (or RMT, in illegal cases).

A lot of WoW fans agree that any and all kind of boosting should be gone. Now, boosting has always been around, however, modern design has changed in a way where boosting simply thrives as the best method of farming gold - hiring top players is essentially a game mechanic at this point.

Buy a boost for your weekly +15 chest to get a chance at your BiS item without having to put effort into it.
Buy a boost for 1800 to get your transmog without having to put any real effort into it.
Buy a boost for Heroic last boss to get your Curve to be able to pug Mythic first few bosses for loot for PvP.
Buy Torghast / Visions boosts because it’s simply too boring to play otherwise.

All of this is reinforced by the WoW Token, adding tons of extra Gold into the economy, which indirectly makes catching up a P2W mechanic. You can still get 2100 rating on your own of course, but wouldn’t the entire ordeal have been easier if you simply bought a boost from top players? You can still clear Sylvanas HC with a pug, gearing up along the way, but wouldn’t have it been easier to simply swipe your credit card for a WoW token and hire top players to clear it for you?

The thing is is that so many of the grinds in this game have became so tedious, so monotonous, (farming Azerite Power, bridging the insane gear gaps, RNG legendaries, base legendaries being so expensive that most players are discouraged to farm gold and just swipe their credit cards, and so on, and so forth), and they have became so lengthy that the best way to progress is by buying boosts all the time, because you essentially get to progress while you go off to do the dishes. The emphasis here is on how boring and how lengthy these grinds have became.

Say, you decided to pick up your lvl50 DH that you played a lot back during BfA, and you’d like to dust them off and go at it again. First, you level up, then do all your covenant stuff - buy the renown skip, get your soulbinds, do the weekly anima and world bosses, buy 200ilvl gear and 1 230 piece. You now go off to farm your legendary recipes, send Soul Ash from your main and buy a 235 with the gold you have on your main.

However, you’re still too low ilvl to get into Heroics, and only a few of your friends are online to do M+ or some 2s / 3s, and they’re not too motivated to do low keys or low rating games again. So you go off to do Korthia instead to quickly get Tier4 so you can farm Rifts for ages to catch up on conduits and sockets. After a lengthy session, your friends log on, but they’d all prefer if ya’ll just did a +20, because it’s reset soon and we need the weekly box and the KSM achievement.

So you did just that. But now your DH will not only not get loot, but they’re going to be behind on the Weekly Box. So, after you do your +20, you choose the most efficient method to quickly get a strong Weekly Box: buy a +15 armorstack run. That happens, you get an item, and you log off for the night, hoping for a strong weekly box.

Next day, you get a duplicate in your Weekly Box that didn’t even Warforge. Cool. So you do a bit more Korthia since you are just about to unlock T4 for some Rift farming, and you do that for several hours. You get a bunch of conduits, but most of them are still low level, so you spend your remaining currency on buying a socket so your 259 item can look nice. You go join some low level keys, some people laugh at you for having gotten boosted, but you have a fun time and you get some gear until friends log on again to push M+ on your mains, because the affix rotation is finally not the definition of insanity.

This is when you notice that you completely forgot about Shards of Domination on your DH. But you’re still too low ilvl to raid Heroic, and in the process of going through all the items, you notice how nice the Tier set looks, and you look at it’s Elite PvP variant. Thinking to yourself that you only have so much gold to spend, and that the Shards of Dom are gone in the next patch, you decide to shill out for some rank1 / gladiator players to boost you to 1800 in 3s. You get a bunch of Conquest and Honor out of that, - and your sweet transmog of course- allowing you to buy some small gear upgrades, that puts you in a position to raid Heroic.

You do a bunch of the bosses, but you get some BiS items from a couple of bosses that you couldn’t kill during this week. As a last resort, you choose to buy a heroic carry for those bosses, and maybe you get the items, but you most probably dont because you don’t have enough gold to buy traders.

Next week, you run out of gold, and you swipe your credit card to buy some more WoW Tokens, and then you buy more Heroic boosts with it, while you are progressing your M+ score. But the items with Domination sockets on them just simply dont drop. But that gear is a must if you really want to progress to the next level in M+. So, you get demoralized and go to Korthia again to farm Rifts. But the grind was too much, you don’t feel motivated enough to do M+, and you need to go take care of some IRL stuff, so you buy runs again.

You still don’t have a 262 legendary because doing Torghast makes you want to uninstall. You open up the group finder to at least try to make it more fun by doing it with fellow players. You see three ads for selling Torghast. You open your inventory, but you only have 17k gold left.

Tl;dr: The rampant boosting going on is a direct result of the progression loop being horrible, and that the Group Finder is not moderated for advertisements (the small automatic moderation we DO have is super easy to outplay).

In more easy to understand words: (Grinding isn't content, content is content)

163 Likes

TL;DR Blizzard needs to take an official stance on boosting and boosting communities.

I was going to make a post on boosting but you beat me to it so I can put here some thoughts I wanted to go over.

First I will say, I do think a lot of the reasons in your post about why boosting is a problem are not hitting the main point, as well as you only portray boosting in a negative light which I think can be disingenuous to the discussion. I’ll preface by saying I have personally participated in boost throughout every expansion I’ve played, more recently with the uptick in boosting and I feel this has given some perspective on when boosting has become truly rampant.

There are multiple communities with 20 to 30 thousand members, with “advertisers” counting in the hundreds to thousands that will sit on servers spamming trade chat all day long. This has made boosting very accessible, more than any other time in WoWs history. I do agree with your notion implying the game has moved towards a P2W model created by the players but I’m unsure how we come to a solution? Boosting exist in every game, but in WoW it’s unique in how accessible it has become for games of similar models. Boosting also allows people who may not have the time to ever complete the content for an alternative method into doing so, even if that method is frowned upon by the community. Blizzard also supports “catchup” mechanics, if someone wants to experience end-game late into the tier by swiping their card to buy tokens to purchase a boost, does that effect other players? Blizzard nerfs the content significantly after some time and we don’t see players who did it pre-nerf up in arms about it being made more accessible.

Boosting communities have negatives as well, for instance an entire discord community closing down and keeping upward of 1+ billion gold and never paying it out and the user is still running around unbanned, multiple communities being closed down for RMT, ease of scamming by posing as said communities, trade chat and group finders being spammed

What does boosting take away? Will the players who buy boost suddenly do the content? Is boosting providing players with access to “complete” content they wouldn’t otherwise? There’s a lot of questions to be had, but I think one thing that’s clear would be Blizzard needs to take an official stance. Because players have lost billions of gold from scam communities even though Blizzard has access to those communities spreadsheets and have given the communities permission to proceed, but then they stay silent when things go wrong.

My personal take would be boosting is not a problem at its foundation and has existed and will exist in every game, but the accessibility and the rate boosting is happening has become egregious to the point of harm.

31 Likes

Honestly, for the most part, the intent was to highlight the magnifying forces of boosting, which are the awful progression systems and the WoW Token. If that message didn’t come across, then I’m sorry for having worded the post wrong.

I will clear up misconceptions here: I have also boosted. It’s a fantastic way to make gold if you are a top player, and it allows you to connect with people and have a fun time together. However, because of the forces that enable boosting on such a massive scale, the game and it’s community suffered and is suffering.

I’m afraid there won’t be a “true” solution, since there is no way Blizzard will ever pull the plug on the WoW Token - it is simply too profitable for them, with the only way of removing it is making a WoW2. Of course that raises the question of “well why would I bring up boosting as an issue?” the reason being is that at least this post can show Blizzard that their progression systems also enable boosting massively, given how unfun they can get.

It’s something that at least can be mitigated.

After everyone started unsubbing, that is, to get them to sub again.

It doesn’t take away anything. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s purely beneficial. The issue is the fact that it’s indirect P2W. The fact that one of the main reasons why boosting continues to thrive is because the content otherwise is not fun to engage in. That the game can’t stand on it’s own legs for 13 euros a month + box price for an expansion + multiple store items + real life merch + BlizzCon tickets, and so on, and so forth.

Yes.

9 Likes

I’d like to approach this topic from another angle. From the perspective of a booster.

TL:DR You aren’t able to really support your gameplay by playing the game, additional gold injections are required.

Boosting has been around for a very long time. I distinctly remember doing it back in Cataclysm, however back then it was a novelty to do out of demand and nobody to meet it.

However, in more recent times (with Shadowlands being the worst offender) it’s feeling more like a necessity in order to simply be able to afford to raid and play the game. The cost of raiding has gone up ~5x purely from alchemy, then we also factor in that if you want to get a legendary ready it can cost more than 1 entire WoW token. If these costs are toned down (via resource acquisition or reducing the cost to craft) then the necessity to boost is also removed and it goes back to being a novelty to buy elusive items.

There’s also something else to consider and that’s the actual cost of getting a boost too, with so many players boosting the prices have been driven down to the point where it’s actually more efficient to purchase a wow token and get a boost rather than either engaging with the game or farming gold via traditional methods in-game. You start to value your time based on other content you do (as you should do with anything you spend your time on as it’s the most important resource you have). If I do a raid with a PuG it’ll take me ~3hrs with no guarantees of it actually being a full clear. In 1.5h I could make enough gold boosting and then buy a boost with a guaranteed full clear and have designated item traders. It’s a no brainer. Why wouldn’t you do this transaction of time?

I see the WoW Token being called out as a culprit for boosting but I don’t feel that is the case. It’s very simply a way of bringing gold selling in house in a way that is traceable and market-led. I personally have no issues with it at all and think it’s quite healthy for the players. It does allow the player to accelerate their gold acquisition which is something the game was lacking. However, when it becomes a necessity for playing and itself a barrier to entry for gameplay that’s a big no-no.

22 Likes

I’d say this is a pretty clear stance.

Agreed. The only real way to combat boosting that I can see is to lower the gold cost to raiding and doing content. Most boosters I know are either whales hoarding gold and paying for their sub and BMAH items… or raiders/M+ers just looking to not farm tedious chores to have the gold to raid/M+ and be efficient with their time, which in my experience is far more people than the whale category. If there was far less cost to playing content, most of those folks wouldn’t be boosting.

12 Likes

I’d say this is a pretty clear stance.

Not entirely. They’ve done multiple initiatives to push away boosting advertisers, like spamming trade chat on a new account with no max levels would be muted, and they’ve recently began suspending them. They’ve taken action against big communities for RMT(Gallywix) but then didn’t take action when Catnip deleted the Phoenix discord and took over 2,000,000,000 gold even though Blizzard had access to their spreadsheets. When discords ask Blizzard for permission to begin a sales discord due to the amount of gold being transferred and needing spreadsheet access to audit. My point is more they’re inconsistent from a public perception on how to treat boosting communities and a more clear response would be beneficial.

I wouldn’t say that stance for in-game advertising is an official stance considering their actions that haven’t been listed are inconsistent. That post also mainly focuses on RMT(90% of it).

8 Likes

My problem with boosting is not that exists; people are free to use their in game gold how they want. My problem is the in game advertising of it. If I’m looking to join a pug raid I don’t want to see 10 boosting service raids posted. I report them every time.

22 Likes