Boosting in general is an extremely controversial topic in the WoW community, and you’re not likely to find many fans of it, despite gold boosting being entirely WoW-legal (as opposed to the real money version). While the practice itself is contentious, and there are many arguments on why it hurts the game.
First off it the easy way out. The part of an MMO or any RPG really is progressing your character. Yet, with boosting you do not need to learn your class and when you decide that you are all geared out you might think “hey I will start my own raid”, and boy are you going to suck. You going to have other players angry cause you just stand there doing nothing.
Second selling boosts for real money is forbidden but selling boosts for golds is allowed. The token was implemented to give players an officially sanctioned method of gold-buying. WoW has long been plagued by gold farmers using bots as a way to collect and then sell gold to players via various third-party websites, an act which is against the game’s terms of service. Yet, you are still using real money to buy gold but this exchange goes to Blizzard and not gold sellers so it all okay.
Third when selling keys, most are top end players who are mainly just trying to gear alts asap. They then in turn also boost other people in either top end pvp/raids/M+ for pretty much the exact same reason… The economy is so weird in this game, it’s just boosters paying boosters who pay other boosters. It just becomes a cycle of get gold enough gold to avoid the hassle of playing.
Fourth you are not safe from being scammed by a seller, Game Masters cannot restore any of your losses, but will take action against confirmed scammers whenever possible so they won’t scam other players. You take a gamble sometimes with these boosting groups it not common but it happens and you will get no sympathy for it.
Last tokens does give players with mountains of gold the ability to purchase power, albeit in a roundabout way. From expensive new ranks of powerful legendary items to “carry runs” from experienced players through rated Arenas, high-level Mythic + dungeons or higher difficulty raids, each which grant players some of the best items in the game, it’s all available in exchange for gold. However, this gold does not just show up in your bank that means you can go sell runs to make that money or just purchase more tokens with real money. This leads to a situation were you are paying out of pocket to boost your character.
Raid boosting, to be clear, is not against World of Warcraft rules, and in fact is a relatively common practice. The concept is simple: I, a new (or just bad) WoW player, want the swanky loot but have no realistic hope of ever getting it myself, and so I throw a pile of in-game gold at you, the veteran (and good) WoW player, to guide me through the game’s toughest raids. Even if I die along the way, and I almost certainly will, I’ll still get my share of the reward when it’s over. What boosting gives you is it lets you bypass the gear grind. This gives you better access to lower end guilds that may possibly be recruiting anybody with gear. Once you get into this guild, you hunt for those nice parses and repeat this process until your parses are good enough to join a better guild. Now repeat this again and hopefully you get into a guild that meets your goals.
Gold cannot be purchased directly in World of Warcraft, but it can be had indirectly with WoW Tokens. Tokens sell for $20 in the game and can be redeemed for 30 days of game time or $15 of Blizzard Balance—or they can then be sold in the Auction House for gold. Prices fluctuate, but online listings indicate that one token typically sells for a little north of 200,000 gold. If you’re coming into it without any real bank of your own, in other words, you’d have to spend $40 for a full ride through Sanctum of Domination.
Yet, Blizzards’ Denial of Service’s listing states very clearly that “we do not sell for real money,” and that if it catches players breaking Blizzard’s terms of service, it will cancel the run and provide a full refund. But selling tokens for gold is not a violation: In fact, Blizzard’s support page says very specifically that players “can purchase a WoW Token from the Shop for real money and sell it on the Auction House for gold.”
This is apparently contradicts Blizzards’ terms cause if you take out the tokens you are just using money to buy gold.
