No MMO has been able to completely remove gold sellers. If they didn’t offer a payed boost, people would just be repeating the same process of paying for gold and buying boosts off prot paladins.
While you are correct, these problems stem from the source of blizzard being unable to crackdown on botters and gold buyers/sellers sufficiently. I am also a realist, if they haven’t done a single thing in all of classic vanilla, it isn’t happening in TBC. Either they don’t have the resources to tackle the level of botting happening right now or are just willing to accept that the problem is too big for them to deal with.
A few people in my old guild openly admitted to buying gold on a regular basis. I report them every time I see them and include screenshots of them admitting it.
Sadly, nothing has come of it, so I’m inclined to believe Blizzard doesn’t care. If anything, adding paid boosts seems totally congruent with that: they like the idea of people paying real life money for in-game benefits, so long as they get paid for it.
Alright. And?
Okay, so this is a “they’re going to cheat, anyway, so Blizzard might as well profit instead and make it not cheating” argument?
But even the people who are cheating to buy gold are still having to pay someone to actually play the game. They still have to log in and get boosted over 100+ hours. Even the gold they bought still has to be earned by someone playing the game (or a bot, I suppose).
Even assuming EVERYONE being boosted bought gold (which is horrendously inaccurate), it’s notably better than instant 58 with full blues, training, and a mount.
“playing the AH” is a zero-sum game. if half your guild isn’t doing it, none makes any money at all.
I don’t understand the anger. Guys, if half the raid is boosted, our enjoyment of the game remains the same.
Only the 1-58 leveling is less crowded. However, without boosts, the 1-58 zones are still empty. Nothing is changed with or without the 58 boost option.
That’s assuming the only people active on the AH are your guildmates, which is inaccurate, and that also assumes that all of them have little free time and thus require time-efficient money making methods like playing the AH, which is also inaccurate.
Or how about… legitimate players actually boosting other legitimate players?
Why do you presume there can only be services effectively bought with real life currency? That’s such a horrendously false dichotomy.
Not saying its how it should be, just how it I see what it is.
More than half the people I know who buy boosts just sit at work with a remote desktop up to check on progress. Hardly can be considered 100 of hours when it just happens passively while people just go about there days without doing anything different.
You are right not everyone buys the gold for boosts. But everyone that I do know that has bought boosts also has bought gold (still only a small sample size of ~10). When you consider that the first quests that you do in Outland give gear on par with BWL/AQ raid gear, you could start naked as the day you were born. Unless you are a naxx raid geared character you will basically be on the same power level as everyone else in the first day or 2 of questing in OL.