Why doesn't blizzard crack down on boosters abusing lfg?

[Kandi]

Good question I report everyone I see that says go to this web site and yet they stay in business its all about the money at this point.

[unbound]

Because they don't want to pay GMs. Same reason they got rid of master loot. Same reason botting is out of fucking control. Pure greed.

I would add that people selling runs for gold probably generates token sales for Blizz as well.

[psyquest]

All it would take is one intern banning people spamming WTS groups and they could easily make the system far more useable without their games grouping tool resembling a gold selling site.

Why don't they do it?

Blizzard is falling into the same trap as twitch. Basically they have a rules and some people bend them to the max. Unfortunately this is has an impact on the game and has been having an impact for many years. The essence of what an mmo has been destroyed by this type of behavior.

Now, unless it is gold selling, blizzard wont do anything. For the community and the game as a whole, it is far too late. The harm is done.

[Golden]

When MMOs start making really weird decisions, I've found this video to be very enlightening.

[Lochton]

we don't anymore, but last sub report during WoD - again a trend that blizz established in first place, it was lower than even classic itself, WoD was that shit that sub numbers dropped the lowest since start
the leak of data in BFA also confirms that wow has low sub, a leak that annoyingly ppl were arguing if it was accurate or not, ignoring the fact that blizz data literally leaked credit card numbers among other data, and it annoys me a lot how blizz got away with it by a customer base that was busy attacking each others how accurate sub numbers is

But the leaked data in BFA didn't confirm anything? I mean. The numbers were that, numbers. They could not be confirmed or backed up. But that is a different topic than this thread.

[rhorle]

You owe me some braincells for this post.

What does that even mean? You found the way it actually works to be to hard to think about?

[whywhatwhowhenhow]

Because it all works in their favour. The boostees buy gold from Blizzard to pay the boosters.

It didn't happen by accident that boost spam went nuts over recent years. It's by design.

[rhorle]

Because it all works in their favour. The boostees buy gold from Blizzard to pay the boosters. It didn't happen by accident that boost spam went nuts over recent years. It's by design.

The gold is bought from other players though. Boosting went nuts because of the large gold stock piles that exist in the game and not solely because of the token as it started in WoD before the token was even a thing.

[Malania]

It's clear they just hate you all. That's all, they're tired of your shit and are trying to ruin the game for you all specifically. They made lists and everything. Truth.

[whywhatwhowhenhow]

Don't be so naive.

It's totally intentional to milk the whales.

Anyhoo only adding my 2 pennies. Not gonna argue with the spastics here. If I said the grass was green, some cock would chirp in saying it was blue.

[bigbleach]

Well, for one, they'd be banning accounts that aren't at all connected with the characters actually doing the boosting. They likely don't have a budget for paying boosters just to discover who the boosting players are and, even if they did, they wouldn't necessarily know which of those players are receiving the real-life money, since those discussions are held outside of the game.

It's not against the terms of service to boost players and, assuming the boosters remain anonymous when communicating on discord, it's not feasible to figure out who is actually receiving the real life money. How would you feel if your guildy asked you to boost someone, maybe even paid you gold for it, and then you got banned a few days later because your guildy sold the boost for real money?


It's not as simple as "hire an intern and gg".

So, if I'm not mistaken, blizzards stance on groups doing that is, if 1 person is caught, the entire group that did that specific run, receives the same penalty/punishment. I'm not gonna look for the blue post, I believe they said it sometime during BFA.

[Drusin]

They don't look for chat/premade finder rule breakers they let players decide what they find inappropriate.
You don't report then it's fine

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Only way anything will be done is if a certain % of people dip and put it down as the reason and don't come back for a bit. Because that affects the bottom line. People being mad in forums and still paying? What is here to see? Move along.

[I HATE CHAOS]

The gold is bought from other players though. Boosting went nuts because of the large gold stock piles that exist in the game and not solely because of the token as it started in WoD before the token was even a thing.

That doesn't make it a positive ... Also given how popular boomkin botting is I'm not sold its mostly player gold.

Regardless them letting lfg be shit up is negative.

[rhorle]

That doesn't make it a positive ... Also given how popular boomkin botting is I'm not sold its mostly player gold.Regardless them letting lfg be shit up is negative.

If it isn't player supplied gold why bring up bots? Those are "players" supplying the gold. Also I highly doubt many bot just to buy tokens. They don't get much from it for the risk since if Blizzard bans the account you lose all game time or blizzard balance.

[Tziva]

Can you link the mod? I thought lfg was protected from filtering I know I personally have been trying to filter groups via region for a few expansions now and the best i've managed is using a mod that adds a flag to each players tooltip box.

The addon people are talking about is this: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addon...-groups-filter

My default, it hides groups that have been listed over a certain length of time, and it hides groups that have a URL in the voice chat field. It doesn't actually filter based on spam terms but on traits that are common to boost groups. The tradeoff is that you do miss legitimate groups using it, especially if you PuG content where voice chat is often suggested. So it will be somewhat effective, but you may miss real groups. It won't stop the spam but you'll see a lot less of it since it will eliminate those groups that have just been sitting there listed for five hours to advertise.

I used it for a fair while but ended up disabling it because I decided I'd rather see those groups to report them.

With all of wows many problems, this isn’t even on the radar to any rational person

Whether there are "worse" problems is debatable but also probably not relevant. You can be still concerned about something just because it's not the worst issue, and this is absolutely on the radar for a lot of people, especially in the M+ community. Just because it doesn't seem like that big of a deal for what you do and what you use the tool for doesn't mean that it isn't a very impactful negative issue for others. For those of us that PuG a lot, it is super detrimental to our experience to have to deal with the queue being stuffed full of boost runs, which makes real groups much harder and slower to find. On a day to day basis, I'd honestly rank this as my biggest frustration with playing the game. Sure, philosophical objections to design decisions they've made are more "important" but at the end of the day, the thing that is the actual speedbump when I go to play is the poor enforcement of managing group finder spam.

Example: I sell tank runs for gold. You don’t have to pay it, but if you want me to tank your 5 mans you need to pony up that cash in advance.

That would be illegal under your regime, and WoW would have 1 less tank when they need every tank they can get.

I think autobanning based on keywords is a bad idea (the idea you're replying to), but I don't disagree with the rule that makes it "illegal" to sell runs in the group finder. [And this isn't a change; it is already against policy, Blizzard just doesn't enforce it]

I give zero fucks if you want to sell runs or if people want to buy them, I just think you need to do it in /trade or avenues that aren't the Group tool. One guy selling boosts is easily ignorable, the problem is there are three dozen of you at any given time, and those of us looking to make a regular group have to dig through the pile to find an actual PuG group every time we want to make a group. The point of the tool was so players could be connected with other players to do group content together. It wasn't to offer a free billboard to groups selling carries or their services, but that's what it has ended up, to the detriment of people actually trying to build or join regular runs. I don't make any judgement calls about people who do buy/sell, but they need to do them elsewhere like they are supposed to. As I said in another post, I don't even care if Blizzard wants to GIVE you a billboard in the form of a tab just dedicated to services like this, as long as the actual group finding area stays clear.

[sam86]

Are you talking about that Weak aura "leak" that was beyond inaccurate?

accurate or not it happened and they got away with it, that's exactly what i'm talking about, 'nah sub numbers are wrong, no they are right', for f8ck sake data leaked first by security problem from blizz side!

But the leaked data in BFA didn't confirm anything? I mean. The numbers were that, numbers. They could not be confirmed or backed up. But that is a different topic than this thread.

see!
regarding topic, again they won't remove it, because that's how their current profit philosophy works now, get to pocket and fuck morals, blizz is literally fucking their own code about buying gold they showed in hints while loading game for years because now they are the seller

[Marxman]

I think the big crux here is that Blizzard does not want to give their seal of approval to boosting and carries with an "official" channel.

They are implicitly giving their approval by not banning the accounts spam advertising it all over the place. This is not a grey issue. Either ban the accounts, like the rules say you should, or create a channel that is strictly for boost spam. What we have now is a middleground that is the worst of both worlds.

[javierdsv]

Because Blizzard doesn't give a flying fuck about WoW anymore. Just look at the quality of Shadowlands.

I'm looking at the quality of Shadowlands, and it seems fine, guess we are playing different games. A bit stale on content release but that's it.

Also on topic, it is against the rules, you can report them.
Yes, reporting them all would take a lifetime because people doing it are making actual money out of it so they will keep trying endlessly. And this is also the reason it's hard to deal even for Blizzard.
They could start by banning the use of some words in the tool but hey, Ion is busy getting millions for Activision atm.

[cparle87]

It's against the rules posting ads groups in the LFG tool. The funniest part to me is that Blizzard itself changed the name/description of the groups to a protected value so addons cannot interact with that. We had filters working (you could just filter our WTS/boost/sell keywords and most of the groups would disappear), but now they don't work anymore.

I'm kinda against boosts because in the M+ ecosystem especially you find lots of people with boosted rating gating out people that are working to increase it in the "normal way", but in the ned it's not like you cannot play. It's annoying as hell to have to report manually all these groups to clean the interface and actually see the groups i'm interested in, more than half the groups are just boosters spamming the tool.

Ah, my bad. Didn't see the "lfg" part of the thread. Yeah, I remember that protected change. WoD, right?