“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)