At first glance, most will think that someone paying another player to help them get some gear isnt a big thing. But…
The knock-on effect is that we get players into mythic keys who have high IOs. Often higher than my own, but do not know any of the mechanics in a dungeon and are often just barely above the tank in DPS. Sometimes even below.
Now this IMHO isnt a big deal at all for Raid. I mean, heck. If selling an AOTC run here and there helps support a guilds raid by adding funds for raid consumables. More power to them. But in mythic keys, OMG its painful.
Now I dont run anything higher then 20s. Normally happy to just pop 19 into the search and see what groups are forming for anything in the 18-20 key range. But when I see someone with 2700+ IO and a number of runs under their belt. I want to assume they know the mechanics and same for everyone else in the group with similar IO and gear. But lately this hasnt been the case at all.
Before you say, but they are banned??
IF that is the case, why am I constantly seeing 20 or more advertisements in LFG when looking for keys!!!
If you pug, then you accept that you might invite people who got carried to their io score. It comes with the territory and has been a thing since 2004. Carries are accepted by blizz (for gold).
No, because when friends carry someone to help them out. They are normally also gave some coaching during the runs. Majority of the time they will talk to them and told how to do mechanics. The difference in paid runs, is essentially your told to just stand there and they do the work.
Yea its funny, they ban GDKP. But when I played TBC Classic, they did nothing about the bots or gold farmers. For months you couldn’t find more than 1 to 3 terracone herbs during an entire afternoon for alchemy. Despite no one being in the zone that you could see. It simply was druids under the ground flying of course. Then you always had players camping the front of dungeons waiting for it to reset before they went back in to farm.
GDKP isnt and wasnt the problem. It was how the gold was being made that funded them. So in typical Blizz fashion, they cut the top off a weed instead of trying to pull the roots out…
Yes exactly. Hence why I find the idea of “fleeing” to literally any variant of a classic server to “escape carries” as it were, to be absolutely hilarious. As far as I can tell, the carries, botting and exploiting going on in every single form of classic is far and away worse than anything that’s happening in retail right now.
Retail has rampant farming bots in ZC and AS and a few zones in BFA. That’s about it. Everything else is mostly relegated to the trade services channel. Bad to be sure. But nothing like the schadenfreude going on in SoD, classic etc.
Are you running your own keys? You can check Raider IO to see who got carried before you invite them. They’ll have a terrible track record in the lower keys but suddenly their high keys are amazing. Stuff like that.
At any rate, the fact that some people do not know how to form groups for themselves is a Player issue. If you want a premade group where you are sure of everyone’s skill - form a team that runs consistently.
Or be more discerning before you invite people - ask them about mechanics, if you are darn nervous about who is in your group.
That’s exactly what I did, hence SoD. There isn’t even a services channel there.
As long as it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind for me. You can’t ignore retail carries, they are prevalent as soon as you enter Valdrakken, or any city really, in trade chat etc.
It got too annoying to deal with, adding every variant of these to my spam addons.
That’s the problem I have with retail, and why I’ve stopped playing it- what’s the point when most people are just paying to get through the content?
Boosting is encouraged.
I can’t help but see it as a marketplace where people are selling off portions of the game, AoTC here, Gladiator there. Nothing off the table that can’t just be turned in for gold.
It definitely hampered my enjoyment, so I left.
Services that involve PvE carries shouldn’t exist in an MMORPG, but that’s just my opinion.
No token in SoD either, which further incentivizes people to just ‘buy’ instead of ‘play and learn’, but learning is hard, so I don’t blame people for just paying for cool stuff instead. It’s an older game so there’s a lot for newer players to learn, can’t blame them for skipping the game as a whole.
You can. That’s all just a big projection post. You found retail too hard and couldn’t afford to get carries. So you went to an easier game. No shame in that.
It is like paying a guide through treacherous terrain that you couldn’t navigate on your own.
If one has the money, and the group has the skill to carry, it sounds fine to me. The group has to be pretty decent to play at a high level while carrying dead weight, so there is some skill involved.
Most people are playing. They’re just stuck at a low skill level and don’t realize it. Or they got lucky and ended up getting into a group that was good enough to carry them, and they didn’t realize it. Or, get this… They did their key, got a win, and now the key is out of their skill level.