Possible solution for the boosting pandemic.

[Empower]

One GM per server. How many servers do they have? Hell let's just assume it's 100 servers.

How much would you need to pay that GM? 40k per year? So that's 4 million Euros per year on that assumption alone just to combat something that actually makes them money.

Good luck, it will never happen.

Why is it the idea of a game having support staff is seen akin to having magic...?

People here talk like they are beaten dogs. It isnt asking for the moon on a string to expect basic moderation...

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And that is just the crew, then you have to think equipment bills, utility, property, maintenance.. Yeah.. price goes higher and higher.

It is a person reading chat and clicking on people and that is assuming the same level of fitness as private servers... I have faith blizzard has better tools then them...

[Lochton]

It is a person reading chat and clicking on people and that is assuming the same level of fitness as private servers... I have faith blizzard has better tools then them...

They do, but what you and others seem to want would demand more than the outcome, unless you believe they can handle it with the already limited support staff, then again, it is only the LFG tool they can ban. In public channels, I guess you want them to run a query on every boost advertiser to make sure it is their main, and not an alt running at the same time as a main, as an advertisement for in-game services is permitted and cannot be banned unless you use a secondary license to post advertisements while doing something else on your main account?

Unless you want full Gestapo, and remove all in-game services except for obvious crafting advertisements, and strike everyone, even kind offers of helping, for posting about boosting?

As for finances and management, their support is already quite limited it seems, and you want to stretch them to monitor all channels? That is about 710 Local Defense Channels, 710 General Chat Channels, Trade chat, LookingForGroup, and on top of that, the LFG system - and the icing on the cake, they'll have to update their forums to not permit boosting, and monitor for boosting threads in all the main, and subforums.

And then we have to multiple it by regions, and multiple it by languages in some regions.

They could monitor for keywords, of course, but that can be circumvented.

Unlike private servers, Blizzard is an actual company, having to run an actual level of business with actual customers, at a much larger scale.

[Julmara]

just add a boosting tab in the group tool and an extra boosting channel under the normal trade chat

[Empower]

They do, but what you and others seem to want would demand more than the outcome, unless you believe they can handle it with the already limited support staff, then again, it is only the LFG tool they can ban. In public channels, I guess you want them to run a query on every boost advertiser to make sure it is their main, and not an alt running at the same time as a main, as an advertisement for in-game services is permitted and cannot be banned unless you use a secondary license to post advertisements while doing something else on your main account?

Unless you want full Gestapo, and remove all in-game services except for obvious crafting advertisements, and strike everyone, even kind offers of helping, for posting about boosting?

As for finances and management, their support is already quite limited it seems, and you want to stretch them to monitor all channels? That is about 710 Local Defense Channels, 710 General Chat Channels, Trade chat, LookingForGroup, and on top of that, the LFG system - and the icing on the cake, they'll have to update their forums to not permit boosting, and monitor for boosting threads in all the main, and subforums.

And then we have to multiple it by regions, and multiple it by languages in some regions.

They could monitor for keywords, of course, but that can be circumvented.

Unlike private servers, Blizzard is an actual company, having to run an actual level of business with actual customers, at a much larger scale.

Full Gestapo for sure. We are past the point of tolerance. There are more ads in wow then there are on virus ridden porn sites.

We are at the point chat no longer really works in anything but party and guild settings. I also find it weird how fucking hard people here shill for blizz doing the laziest job possible. Considering how many cash shop items they spam they could get off their lazy useless asses and get some gms. Hell I will sweeten the deal. They can cut funding from their next infinite power grind development for it and I wont even complain.

[Foolicious]

They could monitor for keywords, of course, but that can be circumvented.

Or just give us an option to ignore messages/groups with certain keywords. Easiest fix in my opinion. No need to spend millions and hire people to review chats.
Let boosters have to play a game of taboo to reach people that don't want to see boosting services.

[roboscorcher]

Banning legit pallies for boosting in Strat is dumb. I am a legit pally and was not banned, so I personally cannot guarantee that they were doing it legit like I do. But if so, it's dumb.

- farming old dungeons to vendor loot is not banned.
- the old xp system is not banned.
- legit boosters are players simply trying to keep up in a bot-infested economy.
- legit boosters provide a service.
- legit boosters playing the game when other players get bored and raidlog.

[Lochton]

Full Gestapo for sure. We are past the point of tolerance.

Soooo... So, you want to punish people who help other people? Might as well remove all social features if you want full Gestapo? I mean, you don't need to raid, or have a raid group, or a Mythic+ group, dungeon group, rare group, event group, Arena team, RBG team, or trade with anyone, do you? Let's go full-out single-player. Everyone's chat will be disabled just in case people offer to help someone as well?

There are more ads in wow then there are on virus ridden porn sites.

Can't really reference that, there's less aggressive advertisement than before the token, though.

We are at the point chat no longer really works in anything but party and guild settings.

Do give an example, for currently, chat functions are running fine, even with advertisements of permitted services.

I also find it weird how fucking hard people here shill for blizz doing the laziest job possible.

But there is no shilling comment in my post? I literally pointed out that even their support is straining, adding more, I doubt will make it better.

Considering how many cash shop items they spam they could get off their lazy useless asses and get some gms.

They've not really spammed as many cash shop items as you seem to make it sound, though? As for getting the GMs, would be great, now you just have to find the right people, and location, and training.

Hell I will sweeten the deal. They can cut funding from their next infinite power grind development for it and I wont even complain.

But you would complain if you had to wait longer for the support I bet? I guess the benefit will more be that people not knowing how to act will get struck faster, at least a bigger reward than removal of boosting.

Boosting is going shit but the solutions we come up with are either far-fetched or extremism.

The only current solution would be to hire more GMs in general, not to monitor chats, but to handle reports and already lacking support and customer communication.

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Or just give us an option to ignore messages/groups with certain keywords. Easiest fix in my opinion. No need to spend millions and hire people to review chats.
Let boosters have to play a game of taboo to reach people that don't want to see boosting services.

Luckily/unluckily, we have an addon for that, so they'll most likely not do that, or just give the boosting advertisers a pit to hide in but they'll venture out once they realize no one is watching

[Smallfruitbat]

My solution for boosting is as follows.

1. Legitimize it. -Give them their own tab and chat channel.
2. Clamp down hard on anyone advertising outside of those channels. 3 strikes, first time suspension, second time longer suspension, third time account banned.
3. Clamp down hard on bots.
4. Stop creating systems that force players to buy expensive items from other players (looking at you legendary base items). High price vendor items are fine, but allowing players to control such a market doesn't work.

[TheRevenantHero]

You want Blizzard to waste time and resources on something only you and a minoprity of people see as a problem. Nah. I wou8ld rather spend those resources on developing the game instead of waiting on creating a safe space for people who cannot ignore something they don't like on their own

lmfao what? People who hate boosting are absolutely not a minority. Boosting has literally destroyed servers because that's pretty much all you see now. People get around the LFD restriction by saying they're a normal group then whisper you to tell you it's a boosting group when you apply. So just stop.

[pewpmeiser]

Nah I support boosting. It helps busy dad's like me.

[vian]

Boosts has been a thing since release, it's more visual now.

[Tsarez]

Why is it the idea of a game having support staff is seen akin to having magic...
It is a person reading chat and clicking on people and that is assuming the same level of fitness as private servers... I have faith blizzard has better tools then them...

Because it's overhead, not magic. What? You think that way more than 4+ million € in wages for something like "Monitoring LFG Tool" is something anyone at blizzard can argue for with their higher ups, when the only thing that have to show for would be "a loss in sales from our tokens"?

You've got to understand that we're not dealing with your faithful little indie company who have to monitor like a couple of servers.

Even if they decide to have some sort of AI auto-ban people, boosters won't care... It makes everyone so much money that people will either use 1337-speech to advertise, or just straight out accept bans and create advertising rooms with a ton of throwaway accounts.

Even removing the LFG tool wouldn't help as the advertising would just aggressively move into chat and /y

My proposal: Just allow it all officially and give them their own boosting board. Make it then an officially penalising offense to post on the "regular" LFG boards and their incentive to post on non-boosting boards will greatly diminish.

Facilitate both camps and give them space if each is so annoyed by the other.

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But to cover a server, you would need more than one, though? 7½-8 hours pr. GM, so you need 3 GMs to fulfill a needed coverage of what people expect of GMs to hunt bad boosters. The cost is higher than the results.

The joke is that the result is always a net loss for blizzard. They're one of the biggest profiteurs of the boosting community. Where do you think all the gold comes from that people use for boosting? HARDLY anyone actually spends the time to farm the gold. People who are boosted have little time ususally. They're in it for the convenience, so they buy tokens, then the boost.

Getting rid of the boosting community would drastically hurt their bottom line considering how much €€€ they're making selling tokens. And the boosting industry is the biggest driver behind token sales. What else would you even be buying with gold, except for legendary base items?

[TheRevenantHero]

Why is it the idea of a game having support staff is seen akin to having magic...?

People here talk like they are beaten dogs. It isnt asking for the moon on a string to expect basic moderation...

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It is a person reading chat and clicking on people and that is assuming the same level of fitness as private servers... I have faith blizzard has better tools then them...

Blizzard would rather encourage the game's toxicity than fix it.

[Tyris Flare]

There is no solution. So long as there's content that one person can't do, another person will always be there to sell it to them.

It's true but there are degrees of the problem. One of he biggest reasons people boost is because there's no other feasible way for them to get anything if they don't already have friends willing to carry them. Catch-up gear is laughable, m+ is impossible to get into as a dps if you don't already have friends/high score etc.

This is anathema to a lot of people who post here but the thing WoW needs to copy from other games is solo progression. No one should care if solo grinders can eventually get heroic or even higher gear over the course of a 6 month patch. Raiders, M+ players, and gladiator pvpers will have already had that gear months ago. Their effort is rewarded with speed.

The 2005 of model of just having a permanent underclass is another thing that is killing the game. If someone is a high-end player the thing they should care most about is keeping solo players from quitting so the game doesn't implode beneath them.

[Valkyr7]

Terrible idea.

All they need to do is start Battle.net account banning people that advertise in the wrong channels from using chat. Maybe even any merged account on a battle.net.

Silence feature is already Battle.net wide.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Nah I'm gonna bludgeon you with this fact till it sticks in your head even if it means I gotta crack it to do so.

The boosting spam ends when blizzard hires gms to ban them within minutes of posting. The spammers won't win the attrition rate of the cost it would incur on them.

If this didn’t work on gold sellers from classic -Wod why do you think it would work now with boosters?

[TheWorkingTitle]

Full Gestapo for sure. We are past the point of tolerance. There are more ads in wow then there are on virus ridden porn sites

Yep. It's infested both versions of the game. I'd say it's far worse on retail. I'm on a high/full pop server and it's about 20-1 in terms of advertisements to actual trade posts. Chat is unusable.

It was barely even a thing before WoD. Once they officially sanctioned P2W by selling gold, it's gotten worse and worse. Shit, it wasn't even this bad in Legion. BFA is really when it took off, and it's at critical mass now.

Something drastic needs to be done, and soon.

[tomten]

I legit read the title as "Possible solution for boosting the pandemic", had a good chuckle

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My proposal: Just allow it all officially and give them their own boosting board. Make it then an officially penalising offense to post on the "regular" LFG boards and their incentive to post on non-boosting boards will greatly diminish.

Facilitate both camps and give them space if each is so annoyed by the other.

As long as the demand exists this is the only real solution.
If there wasn't such a huge demand for the services, they wouldn't advertise so aggressively.
It's time to realize both is part of the game and do like you say and facilitate both camps so the annoyance can tone down a bit.
I couldn't care less about someone buying or selling boost but the ads are annoying as fuck and makes me hate them both for no real reason other than annoyance.

[Puri]

Just add a own "boost trade" channel and a "boost" category in the lfg tool. Heck, they probably could add boosts to the auction house, complete with own UI and calendar invite. And just let people opt in or out of seeing those channels.

Bam, boost spamming is gone for those who don't want to see it.

[Uvania]

Just add a own "boost trade" channel and a "boost" category in the lfg tool. Heck, they probably could add boosts to the auction house, complete with own UI and calendar invite. And just let people opt in or out of seeing those channels.

Bam, boost spamming is gone for those who don't want to see it.

I agree, theyve done the same with wow token and level boost token previously so why not? the purity of WoW is long-gone.