99.9% of messages in trade chat is people asking for gold to boost you.

[epigramx]

Use the mother-fucking-auction-house.

I don't get why you are so personally determined to avoid a usable trade channel. Do you want criminals selling gold for real money?
It's pretty transparent most boosters are doing it as a job to defraud Blizzard.

[Echo of Soul]

Have you considered blocking or filtering these people from your chat window?

Ignoring the problem doesn't remove the problem.

[Garymorilix]

I don't get why you are so personally triggered to avoid a usable trade. Do you want criminals selling gold for real money?
It's pretty transparent most boosters are doing it as a job to defraud Blizzard.

I don't get why you're so triggered.

Who the fuck do you think you are? You have literally 0 affiliation with either Blizzard or your made-up criminal gang.
So what do you care, eh?

It's not like some imaginary gang of WoW boosters will gang up on you unless you pay them for gold.
This is fucking ridiculous.

I do not fucking care who sells gold for what because it does not affect me at all.
And it won't affect you at all either.
So get off your god-complex bullshit and type in /leave trade.

[Jester Joe]

I didn't say only the top 20 does legitimate boosts, or that only extremely hard core people do it.
But it's pretty obvious all that spam is mainly sourced in criminals selling gold for real money.

Except you're giving no reason as to why you think it's "obvious".

It's easy to sell M+ runs if you have a solid 4 players, and it's a good source of gold. It's pretty clear why it would be popular with many players.

[Spazzix]

I've made a lot of gold from doing boosts, but honestly even I think it has started to create a negative game environment. I'd say boosting is far more detrimental than multibox farming and probably even worse than botting, if only because at least botting was kinda, sorta kept in check by it being bannable (obviously there was still lots of it happening, but it would get cleaned up from time to time).

WoW tokens by themselves aren't so evil and boosting by itself isn't so evil, but when you put the two together it is straight up pay-to-win that is absolutely no different from going to an in game shop and buying the most powerful items in the game.

The fundamental concept of selling a service for gold in an MMO isn't an issue. You can imagine the rich, but soft, noble trying to buy clout and fame by paying some hardened, veteran warriors to take him on a dragon-hunting expedition. That's all well and good. Problem is that because of all the cross-realm, sharded, lfg tool, "invite me invite me here's an achievement link now invite me" nonsense that is WoW you lose the other half of that role-playing scenario. The half where word spreads of the noble buying his fame and where everyone loses any respect for his accomplishments. Instead the accomplishments just become worthless for everyone.

Keystone master, full mythic raid clears, 2400 may be be pretty trivial for some players, but for most those are pretty decent accomplishments. But now when a player earns it legitimately, the ach simply gets thrown into the sea of KSMs, cutting edges, and gladiators were purchased.

I think it's just as easy to say "don't allow boosting" as it is to say "don't read it, don't play the game, don't whine". Boosting really does sees to erode the game as a whole and brushing it off as people whining is a failure to see the bigger picture.

The problem with resolving all complaints by assuming that it's the individual's problem and not the game's:
Why not just allow a /kill that can be macrod on any character? It instantly kills the target. Boom, perfect balance between all spec. No need to waste developer resources tuning numerical values. No need for complicated mechanics that occur after the first 0.1 seconds of the fight (since the mob will be dead). Hey I even solved the boosting issue since now any player can go find an icy vein's guide on how to type /kill into a macro—they won't need boosters to help them!
Don't like it? Don't play! Stop whining.

[Azerox]

Activision loves that, brings in the token money from al the simps.
Thats what WoW is all about these days.

[TheRevenantHero]

I don't get why you're so triggered.

Who the fuck do you think you are? You have literally 0 affiliation with either Blizzard or your made-up criminal gang.
So what do you care, eh?

It's not like some imaginary gang of WoW boosters will gang up on you unless you pay them for gold.
This is fucking ridiculous.

I do not fucking care who sells gold for what because it does not affect me at all.
And it won't affect you at all either.
So get off your god-complex bullshit and type in /leave trade.

Obviously you care a lot because you're cursing up a storm and raging at his comments. It's clear you're a booster and that's why you're getting bent of shape. And he's mostly right. Boosters are a plague on a community.

[BrintoSFJ]

Yeah. Why should we care that criminals are selling gold for money? Why should we care that the global trade channel is unusable?
/s

Criminals? What the hell? Who is a criminal? Boosting for gold is legal gameplay and advertising it in trade chat is allowed by blizzard. Why are you calling them criminals? And why would you call them criminals in the first place? Ridiculous!

[Drusin]

Does anyone like this kind of situation that has developed in the game in the past few years?

Nope, that's why I have addons to filter it out

[epigramx]

Except you're giving no reason as to why you think it's "obvious".

It's easy to sell M+ runs if you have a solid 4 players, and it's a good source of gold. It's pretty clear why it would be popular with many players.

The fact it's easy makes fraud easier. People that commit fraud usually do it with easy means; they are not waiting to become members of Limit first.
You can tell the largest part of the spam if fraudsters that sell gold for money because they have turned it into a cold operation with cross-realm alts.

[Garymorilix]

Obviously you care a lot because you're cursing up a storm and raging at his comments. It's clear you're a booster and that's why you're getting bent of shape. And he's mostly right. Boosters are a plague on a community.

I have trade chat literally disabled on all my chars.
I don't know where you get that I am a booster, I sit on like solid 200K and that's it and I do pug content mostly nowadays.

But here is a solution that could stop boosting services:
Don't be grade S tier fucking trash at the game.

You'd be surprised how the booster numbers would plummet if people could actually play this fucking game.
But when you need to pay 100-200K gold for a +10 run cuz you suck so much it is easy to see why even semi-competent people would be interested in boosting the literal trash bin levels of players.

So there, solved it for ya, L2P.

[Zantera]

As someone who hates boosters and people who buy them, I would definitely be for any action that cleans up trade chat, the groupfinder or whatever else. But the sad reality is trade/general chat has been like this as far as i remember (all the way back to TBC) and if they haven't done anything by now they probably won't do it in the future either.

[epigramx]

I don't get why you're so triggered.

Who the fuck do you think you are? You have literally 0 affiliation with either Blizzard or your made-up criminal gang.
So what do you care, eh?

It's not like some imaginary gang of WoW boosters will gang up on you unless you pay them for gold.
This is fucking ridiculous.

I do not fucking care who sells gold for what because it does not affect me at all.
And it won't affect you at all either.
So get off your god-complex bullshit and type in /leave trade.

If you don't care, then stop commenting here. You obviously don't care that criminals exist or that the global trade channel is unusable.

[Jester Joe]

The fact it's easy makes fraud easier. People that commit fraud usually do it with easy means; they are not waiting to become members of Limit first.
You can tell the largest part of the spam if fraudsters that sell gold for money because they have turned it into a cold operation with cross-realm alts.

Except if it was on that level of ease, Blizzard would have banned the people doing it already by now. Example, the Gallywix community.

[Garymorilix]

If you don't care, then stop commenting here. You obviously don't care that criminals exist or that the global trade channel is unusable.

What do you want to use the trade chat for? Still no answer.

[epigramx]

I've made a lot of gold from doing boosts, but honestly even I think it has started to create a negative game environment. I'd say boosting is far more detrimental than multibox farming and probably even worse than botting, if only because at least botting was kinda, sorta kept in check by it being bannable (obviously there was still lots of it happening, but it would get cleaned up from time to time).

WoW tokens by themselves aren't so evil and boosting by itself isn't so evil, but when you put the two together it is straight up pay-to-win that is absolutely no different from going to an in game shop and buying the most powerful items in the game.

The fundamental concept of selling a service for gold in an MMO isn't an issue. You can imagine the rich, but soft, noble trying to buy clout and fame by paying some hardened, veteran warriors to take him on a dragon-hunting expedition. That's all well and good. Problem is that because of all the cross-realm, sharded, lfg tool, "invite me invite me here's an achievement link now invite me" nonsense that is WoW you lose the other half of that role-playing scenario. The half where word spreads of the noble buying his fame and where everyone loses any respect for his accomplishments. Instead the accomplishments just become worthless for everyone.

Keystone master, full mythic raid clears, 2400 may be be pretty trivial for some players, but for most those are pretty decent accomplishments. But now when a player earns it legitimately, the ach simply gets thrown into the sea of KSMs, cutting edges, and gladiators were purchased.

I think it's just as easy to say "don't allow boosting" as it is to say "don't read it, don't play the game, don't whine". Boosting really does sees to erode the game as a whole and brushing it off as people whining is a failure to see the bigger picture.

The problem with resolving all complaints by assuming that it's the individual's problem and not the game's:
Why not just allow a /kill that can be macrod on any character? It instantly kills the target. Boom, perfect balance between all spec. No need to waste developer resources tuning numerical values. No need for complicated mechanics that occur after the first 0.1 seconds of the fight (since the mob will be dead). Hey I even solved the boosting issue since now any player can go find an icy vein's guide on how to type /kill into a macro—they won't need boosters to help them!
Don't like it? Don't play! Stop whining.

And you touch the true reason Blizzard allows this. It makes them money. It's disgusting that the trade channel is unusable - and obviously most of the spam is from fraudsters that sell the cold for real money - but it makes them money because they sell a lot of tokens too with real money themselves.

[ActuaryBro]

What do you expect from a pay to win game? Blizzard encourages this, they want you to buy boosts because that means you will buy their tokens.

[Daedius]

How hard is it for Blizzard to make the ignore function ACCOUNT WIDE???

[epigramx]

Criminals? What the hell? Who is a criminal? Boosting for gold is legal gameplay and advertising it in trade chat is allowed by blizzard. Why are you calling them criminals? And why would you call them criminals in the first place? Ridiculous!

I said the majority are obviously fraudsters that sell the gold for real money. Obviously a modest minority are legitimate boosters that keep the gold in the game to progress their characters.
You can tell they defraud Blizzard because of the cold professionalism that is going on; e.g. they make alts and go cross realm and never do their own guild runs.

[bigsav1]

I don't get why you are so personally determined to avoid a usable trade channel. Do you want criminals selling gold for real money?
It's pretty transparent most boosters are doing it as a job to defraud Blizzard.

I'm sorry but they aren't "criminals" because they aren't committing crimes. Stop using that word.