The thing about boosting is people do it for a variety of reasons. I’m not defending the practice since it’s clearly destroyed trade chat and the group finder and caused hyper gold inflation far worse than the WoD mission table ever could but:
Collectors want that aotc/ce mount. They dgaf about the gear.
A lot of people simply don’t have the time to spend to get geared to be competitive due to the way blizz has destroyed end game gearing over the last few expansions, so boosting is a means to an end.
Blizz has a habbit of forcing pvp players to partake in PvE content to gear up. Pvp players be like, “Sylvanas? Who dis?”.
Due to how boosting is now the best way to make gold, guilds run boosts to add to the gbank for future raid tiers or to repay loans.
And guilds use that gold to pay for their raiding supplies, especially at the start of an expansion when people are selling flowers and fish for 200g each.
Guilds do their own farming, as well, but Blizzard has jacked up the materials costs of potions and feasts to ridiculous levels, starting in Legion.
Where potions used to be 1 flower, now they’re 5. Where feasts used to be 10 fish, now they’re 60 fish/meat.
All part of the “raider tax” that Ion uses to crap on raiding guilds.
Note that I’m NOT talking about Huokan, here. God only knows what they do with their gold. I’m talking about your average run-of-the-mill guild that sells some carries occasionally but isn’t bothering anyone with endless spam.
Huokon turn in-game gold into real money . Not all of it but a lot. I’m not gonna go into the detail here but there are reputable interviews and investigation online that shows the method by which they essentially launder the gold to turn into
Personally, I could care less if someone decides to buy a boost or not. At the end of the day, it’s their gold and they can do whatever they want with it. I think the players that have the MOST problem with it are those with no gold or are basically envious and poor.
They spend a bunch of resources to make the mounts/mogs/pets etc exclusive to the raid. Raiders claim they need these because the raids are so hard. Then on master loot threads they claim its not about rewards its the challenge but whatever. Then they proceed to sell the same “exclusive” rewards and beat that raid like a rented mule. The devs need to spread out the good stuff around the game rather than keeping itt just for the raiders. or ban paid carries.
It slowly turns a gaming community into a play-to-earn community.
Playing WoW for intangible gains (fun, social connectivity, etc) is the core of what a game should be. The moment you change those gains financially, the players in the game stop playing the game as a means of entertainment and start seeing it as a job.
If you get enough of these profit-motivated players, it starts dragging the whole community down.
For me its:
5% “It makes eyeballing a prospective player more annoying since they could be a carry”.
50% “I hate advertisements why are there advertisements everywhere, do blizzard even pay people to moderate the group finder aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”
45% distain for people who play the game for the achievements rather then for the experience of earning them, like what even is the point if you don’t enjoy the content enough to rise to the challenge?
This is 100% my personal take on it, I don’t think its really a bad thing per say, I just don’t see the appeal and feels that third parties are having a bit too much leeway in their free advertising in a subscription game. I kinda miss the days they’d advertise with specially named player corpses in front of the auction house vs this half of my group finder and most of my trade chat is ads thing.
Why do we hate boosting? The spam holy hell the spam is unreal, so much that learnt lua to create a add-on to get rid of boost spam without touching other things because blanket filtering has to many false positives
To be honest, I can’t seem to care about them much at all. One way or the other. I am not going to participate in paid carries and have edited my interface to completely remove references to paid carries from my game’s UI.
Some people think they are pay to win. Even though everyone knows that you can’t really win an MMO. Even if you could than the people buying carries would have to wait until someone else wins so they can be carried.
Picture yourself running a marathon, and while running the marathon you start to realize there are other runners you can compete with or chat with and just do your personal best on this venture. As you get to turn 3 about 6 miles in, you start to think how much fun you had at turn 2 and turn 1, then you look over at the runner running the same pace as you and you say “what did you think about turn 2 and 1” and you guys laugh cause you probably had a similar experience. Once you finish the marathon you see all the runners that participated and even though some were slower then others they had this one thing in common everyone could share parts of there experience, laugh and tell stories. But then your talking to this one runner that placed really high about your fun on turn 1, and then he looks kinda loss. Then your like maybe he didnt like turn 1 how about turn 2, and the runner still looks loss. Then you ask him what was his favorite part and he tells you that driver drove him the whole way and he only showed up for the medal they were giving out at the end. Then you think man he missed the whole point i dont wanna be around people like him.
The term existed long before WoW or paid level boosts from in-game shops. People in Diablo 2 were calling Stone of Jordan runs boosting. They also called power-leveling boosting. The term isn’t being mis-used.
This is the same idea where someone will pay for … s 3 x… they will never get rid of this. So they will punish and crackdown on the rest of the people to stop the few…
Is there really an answer. It’s about ‘currency’ or what you think of as ‘currency’…
the little people will be punished.
The mafia would use the tactic to extort money by telling businesses we’ll keep you safe… when it’ is these thugs who will attack if you don’t pay them to keep you safe.
I don’t mind paid carries in concept, but the ads/spam are annoying and I think it discourages plain-old grouping (noticed this in classic especially.)
I don’t really care about boosts. Sometimes I’ll buy one if I’m bored or if the AoTC has a cool mount I’d like but I think they are harmless and people getting up in arms about them need to go touch grass.
The spam and communities like Huokon are irritating but that’s on Blizzard very poor moderation and tendency to ignore issues until its too late to fix
At least around TBC where you could get a friend that had a mage to take you through low level dungeons and spam AoE on everything for loot and XP. I didn’t start hearing the word boosted being used in MMOs until very recently but I’m probably out of the loop.
Boosting has always been around in WoW and MMOs like it.
. Not all of it but a lot. I’m not gonna go into the detail here but there are reputable interviews and investigation online that shows the method by which they essentially launder the gold to turn into 