Incorrect this 100% a blizzard caused issue. At the bottom of it all is real money.
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Not watching that guy sorry
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It is a step in the right direction! I think this will go a long way in making realm a little more friendly and welcoming versus if you want to do stuff, pay me. Hopefully they keep up enforcement, because those elements will not want to go easy.
welcome to the world of RMT. Expect a hike in RMT trading and advertising.
Hope you like the change.
Did you read the announcement? Boosting it’s self is not going away.
Just go to any major town and see if the trade chat is actually better, lol. It still has boosting spam, but now it has racist jokes, anal jokes, thunderfury jokes and scams, lots of scams. Wonderful policy update
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Yeah, but they are doing something at least. They are targeting the organizations or communities that are the worst offenders. The communities are the ones making it a business enterprise. So it is a start. Is it ideal? I would like to see all boosting go personally. But, at least they listened to the folks who wanted them to speak on this or take some action against boosting and how out of hand it has gotten.
What qualifies a middleman? Now how is that gold supposed to be handled? How is it meant to be moved to the players? No matter how you twist it… there is always a middleman.
I’m taking this to mean that whoever is advertising must be in the group doing the boosting. So if you advertise and then you carry it’s good, but if playerX plays matchmaker and hooks up buyers to sellers without being in the group doing the carrying that’s where you run into issues.
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And you think a guild run is going to have the player hand over the gold to someone in the group? Doubtful. It’s likely to be handed over earlier to someone who is advertising who reserves the spot for them (aka the middleman, but in this case he’s in the guild).
I think the issue becomes when the middleman becomes the matchmaker. Not that he’s taking the gold early then carrying later. It’s where he hooks up a buyer to a seller without doing any of the boosting. That’s why the matchmaker is in the original description. The whole purpose of this seems to be just to get rid of people whose only existence is to hook up buyers to sellers without doing the carries themselves.
Tell us you don’t know how to read without telling us you don’t know how to read.
Boosting isn’t banned.
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Yeah, somewhere in another response I described the Boosting Communities as the Lyft/Ubers of WoW. They connect the buyers with the sellers and skim a percentage off the top for their “service.”
Correct. The investigations by various non-blizz folks have proven there’s a few folks making 6 figure incomes that operate the infrastructures these ‘communities’ use to get away with the real money part of the operation.
I half-suspect the boosting communities had ‘insider’ assistance and as blizz rids itself of the ‘bad actors’ they have also discovered an internal network of folks participating in all of it.
As an aside I have never paid for a boost, but I am not against a guild using carries to be able to compete in world firsts and the like. That said this problem would not even exist if blizzard just went back to building games ‘by gamers for gamers’.
Ever since the record loss of subs during wod’s flying fiasco, a record loss that still stands today, and the person directly responsible for that loss gets promoted? The game hasn’t been designed by gamers for gamers, but rather by bean counters for stockholder reports.
Let’s hope this is the beginning of the death knell for modern wow and gamers will once again be attracted to work for this company. As it is some folks are not putting their time working for actiblizz on their resumes.
Guilds use the exact same practice. People don’t put their time to advertise for the whole guild for nothing… this is the point. Guilds are now just micro-communities, and also unaware where the line is drawn.
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This is why the language was left purposefully vague.
As someone who has been boosting for years and has met people on both sides of the fence from the market discords ect… i can assure you, those who are RMTing and making cash profits, are laughing and happy today… they’re business just went skyhigh.
Meanwhile the working families… those on disability ect… who struggle to afford for their subscription, are now questioning whether they will be able to play the game. Was boosting a problem? Yes. Was this the answer? no.
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first - there was RMT - the advertisements for which could be seen on some fan-sites that provide addons or guides, etc, , but sell their banner space to carry communities and gold sellers.
the ‘bidding race’ that competing RMT gangs enter into on the web steers their storefront to resemble more and more closely an official site, or a more safe site than the other guys.
maintaining these sites probably became unfeasible for most RMT gangs when official Tokens could simply act as the $$ → Gold market.
Among the remaining RMT gangs, those that were able to provide ‘carrying’ did not have any sort of exclusive relationship with the players who do the carrying, so they had to start competing for first access to the carrying players.
- consider a hypothetical, single, 1 RMT gang, with a website, and 500 boosters that can serve an entire region of realms. this gang would be able to transition to a fully in-game model of boosting in exchange for gold, and could totally abandon the customers that dump $$ into its website. it could basically just let the website act as a scam bucket collecting cash!! and nobody would ever know that the GOLD ONLY communities are, in fact, the same ‘communities’ that used to use a website as a storefront.
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- since there may be multiple RMT gangs with scam buckets, and they may be competing for the loyalty of those 500 boosters, the gang most ready to compensate boosters on their home-realms will create a significant advantage if they can concentrate demand on those same home-realms. there is no need for the real-money to ever reach the boosters, instead, the real-money is used to drive demand on specific realms.
So - second - enter the spammer.
The spammer just wants some extra gold. They are given an account by the gang, to log in and spam, probably on a certain realm (?). They aren’t totally aware that their actions drive demand - their goal is generally to sit passively and find customers . The gang rewards their loyalty to the cause by giving them more accounts to spam with and find more customers - of course, it is simply dollars from the scam bucket, showing up on our screens. One spammer uses multiple accounts, simultaneously, to consume a chat window. The spammer viciously steps on their colleagues, the other spammers, lest they fail to put their bonus accounts to work.
ahem .
nobody ever needed a boost.
Bottom line I agree with this. The real solution is to hire some talent that are also gamers who aren’t as clueless as this modern wow team is. Short term the RMT folks probably are dancing a jig, also the crooks too. Those boosting ‘communities’ appeared to have created a trouble-free safe way to buy your boosts and offer your boosting skills.