Why are there tons of goldbuyers?
Because they get away with it.
When people can trade tens of thousands of gold from one account to another without Blizzard even taking a look how an account acquired that gold in the first place, then it's frankly Blizzard turning a blind eye towards goldbuying.
After all, they can read any account like an open book, they can check from where someone acquired this sort of gold and how, if someone had lots of gold in their mailbox over a period of time from questionable accounts, that's red flag, when they put up an auction for some item completely over market value and their buyer was some shady account, that's a red flag.
At the end of the day, what is happening within WoW is completely transparent to Blizzard, it's just that anything that eludes automated detection will fly past them - and the people who have a monetary interest in selling gold naturally put in some effort to find out what those automated parameters are to avoid them.
Take the most egregious example, something such as Gressil selling for 200k, you can't tell me with a straight that a person tasked with finding & banning players who purchased gold wouldn't find some very fishy activity on an account that acquired a sum of gold that normally takes thousands of hours to acquire.
And honestly, when Blizzard already drops the ball on such easy to spot goldfarmers, then i have to assume that their actions against goldbuyers are very much absent.
It's just inflation occurring, there is nobody actively enforcing these prices.
When someone sets up an auction for tremendous prices and someone who purchased gold chooses to buy it, then that's how it is, there is no "people who bought gold can't buy it" option.
This is not the community the "perpetuating" anything, this is basic economics.
Blaming the community on this issue is like blaming society for fake money, except in this instance, one could at least attempt to verify whether you're given fake money.
Last edited by Kralljin; 2021-06-12 at 04:51 PM.
You just explained how the community is perpetuating it. It’s against the rules but not enforced, so it’s done more often, which creates more demand and more bots. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg, sure, but that doesn’t alleviate the players from their responsibility in not breaking the rules.
4 pieces of pre-bis right now would run me close to 70k. That’s not inflation when the average 100g-200g legitimate goldmaking income would take 20 days /played to afford.
The fact that players are in no position to stop such behavior from others does however.
Imagine if a spec existed that could straight up one shot anything in the game your response to it is:
"Well, when players play such a completely OP spec, it's also their fault!"
This is just shifting the blame and not even attempting to come up with a solution to solve the problem, because the only group of people that is in a position to realistically solve that issue are the people working at Blizzard.
Don't tell me any sob stories about this, i was in favour of a gold reset, but there some people were quite keen on keeping their 5k gold for epic flying, it seems.
Last edited by Kralljin; 2021-06-12 at 05:32 PM.
Fortunately I’m able to differentiate the two circumstances, and like I said, neither party is free of blame. But if people are trying to say “p2w is toxic for the community and game”, I’m just looking at the game and thinking someone buying a boost to start TBC is the least of my concerns.
Yeah, it was just one problem bleeding into a bigger version of that problem. A gold cap on transfer to TBC era would have done wonders, or a complete reset, idk.Don't tell me any sob stories about this, i was in favour of a gold reset, but there some people quite keen on keeping their 5k gold for epic flying, it seems.
The crux is that you ignore that the community is not a singular entity, some people frankly do not have a very big problem with paying real money for stuff in WoW.
Blizzard however is in the position to act a single entity because they are a professional company and frankly, they are the ones who wrote their own ToS, it is one thing not to abide by rules set up by others, it is another to not enforce rules you set up yourself.
I think the dynamic is still very different because the boost is officially sanctioned by Blizzard, there isn't even the possibility of ever being punished for engaging in it, whereas with buying gold, the possibility at least exists.
It's gaining an advantage another player can not receive unless they also pay additional money. If I bought a boost other players can catch up to my character and make it so you can't tell which of us bought the advantage. In a p2w game it would be obvious by one character having the paid extras.
Now WoW does have features that are p2w but for a rather narrow definition of winning. For pet and mount collectors the fact some things have to be bought on the store means there will always be an advantage to players who put down extra cash. Arguably the existence of the token means anyone can grind any shop mount without paying extra, but then we get into the fuzzy realm where you have to look at how much time is saved by paying cash, and if the grind is too arduous for someone to be reasonably expected to complete.
Given time you can gain 58 levels for your character. With pay-2-win mechanics no amount of time spent playing the game will give you the same advantage. Another game I play is MechWarrior online. In that game I can spend hours and hours grinding to buy a new mech, or I can whip out my cashcard and buy it with real money. I don't consider it "pay-to-win" because the money doesn't get you an unattainable advantage, it just saves time.
Boosting created a huge mess a problems. Firstly it isn't fair to those who didn't pay for the boost. Secondly, even if Activision gave everyone free boosts then TBC wasn't designed to have players boosted to level 58, and there will be consequences. Leave the boosts to ShadowLands, not in TBC. You hate playing a game you love to play then I can't help you there except L2P. Play a mobile game, I hear you all have phones.
You feeling personally injured by other people being level 58 through the boost is a YOU problem. It’s created exactly zero problems for the community. No apocalyptic botting sprees, or sudden saturation of profession CDs. Just a bunch of Warriors/Mages switching to Hunters/Warlocks.
Expecting Activision to not do Activision things, pretending Classic was some return to Indie Blizzard, and trying to reshape the definition of p2w is also a YOU issue.
It’s one thing to be like “I don’t like this”, but this whole “go back to retail/another game” while you refuse to just accept that, despite its faults, it’s an enjoyable game.
You wanna complain? Fine.
But to take ownership of a game based on what it was like FOURTEEN YEARS and literally hundreds of employees ago is a little too “get off my lawn” to take seriously.
Personally I have no qualms with the one boost because it is akin to the deal we got since the WoD preorder. The pay to win element can’t be dismissed if blizzard does bring up the option to have multiple boosts per wow account. And yes I checked to see if the boost on a second wow account would “float/exist” for the entire blizz account like how boosts do for retail. Aka like for retail buy a boost for WoW2 it can be used on WoW1 through 8, however for tbcc that is not the case.
And then as for the discussion on the other aspects of boosting. Yes there is an element of failure/lack of returns associated with getting boosts by paying other player with blizzard-blessed gold from WoWToken transactions. However with the predominance of the boosting communities seriously since gallywix’s formation and then demise (yes I know SLB and others were around before then), the degree of failure drops off pretty heavily since said boosting communities police themselves to weed out bad/poor boosters regularly even if they made the initial filter selection process. I have seen some of the dumbest stuff linked to me in discord from those channels and it astounds me how people act like that. Generally, most are being too cocky for their own good going headfirst into something they can’t handle and then ruining it for everyone.
Biggest concern I have for boosting is how it diminishes completion points for the majority of the population. Like it would be very interesting to see how many people genuinely complete AotC, CE, duelist, elite, KSM (and with the upcoming 20s achievements) without a boost or handout from friends. Also as of now, there are 18412 characters last I checked having 2072+ io (lowest score possible for no time remaining for all 20s). When they put out that announcement there were 12119 characters having that score. So you can get the idea that we had 50% population growth.