Maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but if I boosted to get raid item X, I don’t think I’d have any motivation to do that raid again.
Wouldn’t that be a win? The boostee gets what they want, and the booster + raiding community don’t have to play with someone who’s only in it for their own loot?
If the boostee got item x on their first raid boost they would have won the game.
I’m gonna miss the easy gold that came from just doing a few carries here and there.
Wonder if they’ll find a clever method to circumvent the block.
Yes what Xorno said was that Blizzard was referring to paid third party services, to which I told him they were not, I don’t know what part of that you don’t understand?
There are people who will never boost. There are people who will always boost. There are people who will boost under certain circumstances.
The first group will be the ones I can always pull from to join my groups that want to actually play the game. The second group are the ones I can never pull from. The third group are the ones that I can variably pull from.
Boosting directly impacts the number of players willing to join my group/raid team/etc in order to actually play the game. When done in small amounts (vanilla through Legionish…) it wasn’t a problem. When it’s utterly rampant and a part of the normal social dynamic… I do think it has an impact on the gameplay experience for those of us wanting to play… the game…
That’s why I’m not a fan of boosting. It indirectly hurts my game experience.
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I hate the spam everywhere mostly. It’s become incredibly obnoxious.
I see the explanations, but they still make no sense to me.
the only ones I can make any sense of is the raiders who need experienced players to recruit being possibly duped into hiring bad players who got help getting to places they wouldnt make it on their own.
It’s been said 100 times already, but just adding another voice to it:
Boosting is fine in and of itself - a player who amasses gold in a game can trade it for anything he wants. That’s immersive and it could be considered an alternative form of progression. Never had a problem with boosting before the WoW Token.
WoW Token now allows players who barely play the game to get hundreds of thousands or millions of gold by giving Blizzard their credit card, then selling the item Blizzard gives them for a purchase of $20.
This enables pay-to-win and Blizzard profits off this. It’s scummy and ruins the integrity of any achievement you can get in WoW, as technically my Cutting Edge or 2400 Rating is just a few hundred dollars away if I wanted it that badly.
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Its that boosting broke LFG.
Lower end content Heroic/normal raid, Mythics under +15, low rated pvp, have all been heavily affected by boosting.
Its the content people skip with boost. I’ve never bought a boost, but I have noticed just how empty finding a legit group of people at that range to play with is.
Before the ban most of the groups in that range where actually sale ads for boost. Or groups would require already having done the content. From a new charater/player perspective it really kills your options to just simply play the game and progress.
Not everyone wants to have a strict group of people to play with. I pug most content, but carry groups suck such a huge audience away from simply progressing on character.
Its fair to want to skip the grind, but that is literally what wow is about. Nothing else in this game is as consistent as “progression”. Its literally something that is reset every patch, every single one. Boosting skips that, and makes finding legit groups a pain.
Personally once I’m near Ilvl cap I get bored and began the progression cycle again on a Alt. The grind, whatever it is, is the gameplay.
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yeah, that does make the discussion confusing.
I keep thinking of the $60 paid character boost every time this topic comes up. They need to use some other word for this ‘boosting’.
“carries” “carried” fits much better
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Now I wonder…do the people who have those barkers get paid? Either with gold or real money? They’re using their time to be logged into WoW, after all.
WRT terms: until recently, it was “carry” in WoW, not “boost”. I bought a carry in WoD to get the flying moose mount – and the carry was specifically advertised as just that. We were brought in at the last boss so we qualified to get the flying moose.
I think maybe the selling of a le el 58 boost in Classic led to “boost” being used more often.
Because those people that buy boosts can affect no one especially if they are solo players. It has 0 effect on anyone else…
Since the appearance of the WoW Token, real money can be used to achieve progression within the game, which I reject since I consider that ALL the big companies think more about their profit than about the satisfaction of the consumer and the dignity of their workers (we have already seen this in Blizzard in the last months), for which allowing an exchange of real money for progression will eventually affect the development of the game leading to a model in which more people are tempted to use real money to progress, and that undermines the consumer and the creative worker who can never put your creativity to work for something other than milking additional real money from players.
WoW is not an F2P game to have the need to rely on this kind of mechanics. Allowing this kind of thing will hurt the game in the long run.
Then either get rid of the booting or get rid of the token, or make the boosting almost invisible so less people are exposed to it.
If it were up to me I would leave boosting alone and get rid of the Token, but many people depend on the token and will defend it tooth and nail, including those who participate in boosting.
What attached me to the game : at the beginning making friends and doing content together.
Boosting- I have to pay to have friends or to do the content solo.
I explained it above. I’ll try again using numbers as an example.
Assume we have a group of 9 people (arbitrary numbers here).
3 people will never boost
3 people will always boost
3 people will boost under the right circumstances (ease of access, P2W element, everyone’s doing it anyway)
When boosts were rare, hard to perform, and not a part of the normal social dynamic of the game… I could pull from 6/9 of those players to build my groups to do the content.
When boosts are rampant, easy to perform, and a completely accepted social path through the game… I can pull from 3/9 of those players to build my groups to do the content.
That’s why I dislike how rampant boosting has become (or paid carries, or w/e you want to call them). It directly impacts my ability to make groups, which indirectly affects my gameplay experience.
Real money has been/currently in classic used to boost players. The token was created to protect those players from being taken advantage by 3rd party gold sellers and/or protect accounts that got hacked by those same gold sellers.
I for one thank the token for that. It’s also a business decision for Blizzard to make it more difficult for those 3rd party gold sellers to profit off their intellectual property. Blizzard has every right to profit off an OPTIONAL item that they know players are going to take advantage of. The token isn’t the problem. The problem is individual players and how they play the game. Which guess what, it’s their right to do so.
If you can’t pick out the boosters when the apply, there’s an addon for that.
What’s the point of playing a game and paying someone to play it for you? It just seems dumb. Why bother playing at that point.
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It kills a sense of community and organic social interaction in a game that is built around adventuring with strangers and making new friends along the way. It’s really that simple.
It certainly is blizzards fault that the game is the way it is these days however they clearly have the intention to at least try and pull it back to what the core of an MMORPG is.
I mean… that’s all nice and good to say but… if you’re paying money for this game… you’re an adult. What shady website you want to engage with is on you (let’s not go down the “think of the children” path please). They could have also fixed that problem by cracking down heavily on gold sellers. It’s not like the bots are… not obvious…
The real big difference with them offering the token is: a) they make more money (which is the real reason they offered it w/e they say…) and b) people who used to not buy gold because they didn’t want to risk their account/RL information… now buy gold.
Sure a variant of P2W was always here via 3rd parties… but the token legitimizes it… Personally, I’m not a fan of P2W in my P2P MMORPG.
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True, but if the correct way to play a game is to spend obsessive amounts of real money, is it even a game or is it a money milking machine for a group of addicts?
I’m not saying that’s what WoW is now, but I strongly believe it’s headed if steps aren’t taken to reduce the impact of real money in-game. And if you wait for it to be more obvious than it already is, then it will simply be too late, not to mention that the longer it goes on the more it will become considered normal.