This is an issue and Blizz needs to crack down on false reports and mass reporting to get people squelched.
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I have seen people “brag” about that too. It’s a shame that people try to get others punished for using a chat channel as intended. Now, I can understand excessive messages, but I have seen people say they report anything and everything that smells like “boost” to them, regardless of where it’s posted.
Going back to the boosting community ban: The justification given back then was:
This was before the Trade (Services) channel existed. I think a few months after the boosting community ban is when they decided to create the separate chat channel. Since that chat channel now exists, the original issue should no longer exist.
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Boosting was not banned. Boosting for real-life money was ALWAYS against the rules. Boosting for in-game gold was ALWAYS unsupported and continues to be so today. Details on the Advertising policy can be found HERE
As long as the boosting group follows those rules, they can continue boosting for gold.
I want to remind people to right-click and report spam in the Trade channel and recommend they do so frequently. This accomplishes two key things:
- It helps lead the poster’s account to a squelch and later a silence affecting the entire battle.net account. This forces these elicit sellers (for real-life money) to move to another account.
- It helps Blizzard to detect hacked accounts as these ads tend to be done on stolen accounts.
Lastly, I don’t see how allowing legitimate boosting posts (for gold by a person participating in the run) to be in the trade channel will help reduce spam. If anything, it would increase it.
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Great post, but I want to be sure you’re aware that the subject of the thread is boosting communities and not boosting in general. Boosting communities were banned January 2022.
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Communities? I thought it was still peachy to purchase things like a raid boss kill or whatever from guilds as long as it’s done with in game gold. Did these communities get banned? A lot of people I know bought their immortal runs from guilds.
The OP is referring to this:
These communities, such as Weekly Disappointment and Starlight Boosting, could no longer operate in-game when this announcement was made.
This was before we had the Trade (Services) channel.
The OP is simply requesting the blanket ban on boosting communities be removed.
Not banned, hence the quotes around the word “ban”. But heavily discouraged since you cannot simply have a few people taking care of the logistics while others do the actual run.
This was supposed to reduce things like trade spam but the channel they created to advertise such services is almost entirely level 1s or 10s telling you to go to an external website, so a good chance of being straight up scams. And of course since Blizzard can’t keep up with the bans, it doesn’t matter how much it’s against the TOS.
So, legit in game services by guilds or friends is allowed, but they were trying to remove the sketchy third party boosting services or RMT? See I did notice that, trade and services are both filled with sketchy level 10’s spamming third parties and I do report what I can for that. The frustrating part is with me for example, I want the black proto drake but I missed the opportunity to obtain it with random groups. No one is doing it anymore so I am worried the only way to get it now is to have to pay for a guild run.
Single-realm guilds are fine. The details are in the blue posts linked here, but what was banned were cross-realm consortiums advertising, providing middle-man services, etc.
This also includes such communities that played within the rules, were gold-only, etc. It was a flat ban on boosting communities as a whole, regardless of whether a given community was following the rules prior to that policy change.
Technically, the wording is this:
Organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold are prohibited, especially those who operate across multiple realms.
It was absolutely the RMT people they were going for as well as those who spanned multiple realms with “For gold…we promise!” but when you contacted them, it was no longer for gold. Blizz was just covering their butts since these organizations were actually not boosting for gold but would advertise on every realm.
Again, as long as those posting boosts for gold follow the rules, it’s really not an issue. I don’t see the use of “communities” in the rules as it would seem to be more of a player-made term. I’m not sure how you might define “community” in this context, but I think I see it from a different lens. I see it more as the organizations pretending to be following the rules until you had to contact them on discord, etc.
And no, I do not believe this particular rule about organizations should change. They were, and really still are a plague.
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Did you ever purchase a service from a boosting community before? I used a few reputable ones and RMT was never a part of the discussion. I won’t say “None of them were RMT!” because I didn’t use every community that was out there, but I will say there were definitely ones out there that played by the rules.
It’s defined by the context of that very same blue post:
I have in the past used and been a part of legitimate community for it.
It’s a good payout and organised very well. Discord call is made to organise roles for the carry. Gold only. That is from the selling runs - end.
The reason these were shutdown is unfortunately even in these situations gold obtained was being used for RMT on the other side of the fence aka being sold for $$$.
With individual groups this can still happen but not nearly to the same extent.
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If I had to guess, most players would prefer if even for-gold boost advertising was banned… let players who need for-gold boosts seek out reputable raiding guilds and such to buy said boosts
There’s just so much spam/clutter in chat channels in both Classic and retail, I’ve played long enough (roughly since 2006) to remember a time when most chat channels were still regular/everyday real-life human being players talking versus all the “automated” copy-pasted RMT messages spammed by low-level bots nowadays
Idk, to me it just detracts from the immersion somewhat when I log into the game (regardless of Classic or retail) and see a steady “waterfall” of chat spam with “WTS boost”, “visit such and such RMT site to buy a carry!”, “whisper me for details, WTS boost”
Really really seems like it’s a minority of players that regularly buy RMT boosts/fund these boost-advertising bots in chat channels. I’m guessing the majority of the playerbase never buys boosts at all, and if they do it’s usually a one-time AOTC carry for a mount (for example)
The highly-commercialized “industry” of boosting with constant “waterfall text-spam” cluttering up major chat channels just seems out of place in WoW to me… idk. I was just thinking back to the old days when major chat channels were used primarily by real-life human being players instead of automated WTS bots lol
I’m just going to post again the part that keeps getting left out, because quoting one sentence of an entire article is cherry picking to make it seem like there’s some sort of victimization going on.
World of Warcraft accounts found to be in violation of this policy are subject to account actions. These actions can include
Organizations operating across multiple realms and excessively advertising non-traditional in-game sales are contrary to the terms and conditions of the Blizzard End-User License Agreement (EULA).
/1 is General Chat
/2 is Trade Chat
/3 is LocalDefense
/4 is Trade (Services)
anything after those are ones you’ve created, or something an addon has created to function.
I’m all for people playing the game however they want to…as long as it isn’t harming anyone.
I think boosting communities fall under the category of not harming anyone.
I don’t consider people who perceive they’re being harmed by them as actually being harmed. They “feel” harmed anytime people “beneath them” have success. It makes it difficult for me to care about their feelings.
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I’m not surprised unfortunately. Some bad apples led to Blizzard burning the bushel. Although, their stated reasoning was more or less excessive advertising in-game.
The way you described the Discord usage falls in line with my experience as a client. I would pop on the community’s Discord channel and request a service. The gold transaction was setup and logged via chat messages in-game. The transaction was a trade in-game with gold.
From my perspective as a client, this was a very safe way to purchase boosts. It is nothing like that now unfortunately.
This is a little difficult to do, especially on small realms. The perk with a boosting community was that they had a game-wide reputation. If Bobby on dead RP realm Earthen Ring was scammed out of a carry by a community, that entire community’s reputation was at stake.
Now, not only is it difficult to find someone who doesn’t raise four different red flags, but it’s difficult establishing reputation. There is no game-wide word-of-mouth like there was with communities.
Back to your suggestion: I would love to be able to post “LF boosting community” in /5 so I could check them out in their Discord with thousands of users and posts. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been an option since January 2022.
I’m inclined to agree with this.
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This has gone off the rails a bit. The entire point is that the ban on cross-realm communities where you generally had some people doing the admin work and others actually running the boost has done nothing but make it so that RMT and other predatory forms of boosting are more profitable as they are the only game in town and do not care about getting banned.
If Blizzard would straight ban all boosting I’d be all for it, but this wishy-washy whatever they have done is annoying to legitimate sellers, does nothing about spam, and is actively enriching RMT.
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