So these organizations just end up forming guilds together and boosting that way, with branches on multiple servers under the guise of “we’re a guild”.
Just wondering if this is even police-able, and I’m someone who wants boosting highly regulated and almost gone if possible. Posting boosts shouldn’t even be allowed in LFG channels or group-finder at all, should be limited to /trade, or another trade interface.
The middlemen / advertisers can just join the guilds can’t they?? I might be missing something, interested to hear how this EULA change can TECHNICALLY crack down on it.
It seems like they’re going to have to attack this at the level of incentives. This means removal of WoW token and cracking down as much as possible on other forms of gold sales. Potentially fixing the economy in other ways as well.
Then Blizzard will update their policy like they did before. They did it several times in regards to Multiboxing. They gave themselves quite a leeway in doing that.
I don’t think removing fun or the sense of progression among competitive players is the solution lol. The point of all of this is to help nudge players towards having more fun. Sometimes people have mentally unhealthy fixations with things like being viewed as successful that actually get in the way of their own true enjoyment and progress. This is a good reason why someone might buy a boost as opposed to dealing with some friction in learning to play and network in an MMORPG to beat content fairly. They might even agree at times that it would’ve been more fun to “earn it” in game, but just be unable to resist whipping out the wallet.
Blizzard is only trying to curb orgs linked to RMT. They’re not interested in stopping boosting but instead decoupling boosting and dark money. It is far easier to track shady activity from guilds compared to massive interconnected cross server orgs. If something fishy happens with gold then there are less excuses to hide behind for a guild compared to an organization that is managing funds across dozens of servers.
They could have increased sub to $20 years ago, honestly… if they do enough of a good job with content and getting GMs hired back up to take care of the game integrity then I think they can 100% justify a sub increase.
The reason people would be outraged right now by sub increase is because the game is already full of MTX AND Blizzard’s ability to get out and design great content consistently has been lackluster for several expansions.
The token was created to stop gold seller scams so they are unlikely to get rid of it, without something else to replace it. Their only other option would be to get tougher on boosting, but I also don’t see that happening. They’ll keep everything in that gray area that they’ve keep multi-boxing in.
My understanding is they don’t track or police guild bank funds and transfers, and actually from what I’ve heard in TBC this is one of the most common ways people get gold. My point is that these communities may potentially continue to exist and simply change their framing from boosting communities to guilds, I’m having a hard time seeing how Blizzard can really differentiate the two, but I hope they have the tools to do so.
At this point it’s pretty arguable that it caused a lot more harm than good. There was already fair bit of skepticism around gold-buying back in the day, it was far less mainstream than it is now where you can literally just buy from Blizzard (meaning WoW token CAUSED more gold buying than it ever stopped). I don’t see any reason they can’t just expand whatever team they have to ensure that gold sales are researched and dealt with. They seem to be doing pretty well on TBC, minus the guild loophole which COULD be closed. It’s actually pretty obvious when it’s being done if they would bother to track it.
Blizzard is also in no way responsible for someone getting CC scammed or whatever on a third party site. That’s just not their responsibility. There’s always going to be some portion of the player base that attempts to evade detection, they only need to do a GOOD ENOUGH job of keeping up with it. The idea that a few kids got their parent’s card scammed and so we need to undercut the entire WoW economy with Blizzard sanctioned RMT seems like an awful argument.
I think they just really need to re-evaluate WoW token.
I don’t know what more harm it caused? It’s caused chat spam. Put it in a different window. Problem solved. Any harm is to the legitimacy of what a person earns themselves and that’s their own problem.
The token allows more people to afford to play.
Blizz has taken some responsibility for scams. Which is their choice. They don’t want to see players get taken for a ride. People want to buy gold from a legit retailer. It works out for both parties.
No they don’t need to re-evaluate it. They’ve cracked down on boosting communities. Boosting in guilds and among friends hurts no one.
Fact is even if boosters make guilds and the advertisers are in those guilds, the problem they were trying to address is still solved. Blizzard wanted to get rid of HUGE communities, those with 50k + players. Even with guilds, the scale on which boosting is possible will be reduced drastically. The GM even addressed that cross-realm boosting IS allowed, their target were ORGANIZATIONS, not advertisers nor boosters. Those organizations had so much gold they could be considered like a central bank on alot of realms. Now, if Mike makes a sell on Area52 and has some friends on Illidan willing to do that boost, those friends on Illidan will be paid by Mike in Area 52, not to a multi bilionaire middleman. Thats actually really efficient.
Chat spam lol?? I mean that is annoying don’t get me wrong but that’s not the damage people are most frustrated with when they talk about this issue. The annoyance comes from the fact that it makes WoW feel P2W. We’re not on even footing IN-GAME. Yeah sure there are other factors like time, maybe someone is missing a finger which makes it harder to play etc. - but those are externals factors somewhat outside of Blizzard’s control (although they do add accessibility features like for color-blind visuals) and honestly the world is never going to be “perfect”.
Pay to win however is totally avoidable on the development side. Being able to skip over participation in the economy makes people a lot less creative. It’s up to you, farm, maybe sell personal carries, focus on professions, do dailies etc… but at the end of the day to get gold to influence your power level to the extent that you can (enchants, consumes, BoEs, crafting materials for armor etc.) you should have to PLAY the game. I think it’s very clear the damage gold buying does.
I’m not sure how it allows more people to afford to play, if you have the time it takes to farm a token you probably have the time to do literally one to two hour’s worth of work at a POORLY paying American job to pay for a whole month of sub time. If you can’t, you definitely have bigger fish to fry than worrying about how you’re going to play WoW. The sub model is tried and true when you don’t interfere with it. It directly ties development incentive to the live game. When you start shifting majority profit to MTX, it creates an incentive for the developer to actually take the path of least resistance… which is fine for a little while, but eventually it eats away at your playerbase, hurting everyone.
It’s not even P2W because you still have to get lucky with drops. And again these are people doing it to themselves.
It does allow more people to play. I myself have used it to resub during times I couldn’t afford to pay to play. It has a legit use. I’ve also used it to buy expacs and stuff from the store. All with gold. From the token.
Sub model isn’t tried and true. Less and less games are using it.
MTX has become popular because it makes more. Love it or hate it.
