Boosting communities gone?

[Cæli]

Boosting is 100% preventable and should be banned--both for gold and real-life currency. It cheapens raid achievements and it de-motivates players towards working to complete content when they can just pay for it.

players who want to "complete" content are already demotivated the moment they realize they can't complete anything because there is always new content
at least boosting allows them to reach a higher completion %
and no it can't be banned because too many things can be defined as boosting, and gold is freely tradable

[Gorsameth]

No I just respond when people quote stuff I already talked about.

Plus it's pretty obvious tokens are going to hurt more than benefit in the coming months.

Once the game pass bnet merger happens Tokens will allow you to buy gamepass and ms games and I doubt Microsoft is going to want that to happen.

again every dollar spend via the token is more then a dollar for Blizzard. Why would MS be against you buying Gamepass for 13 bucks, instead of 10 bucks?
How is that a bad thing? That you can buy tokens with ingame gold is not a problem, because every token on sale is a token someone bought with real money.

[sponge5307]

With estimates calling for nearly 10 Billion dollars since its inception, I think WoW has most mobile games, including DI, beaten. That's billion with a B, so DI would have to continue its current earning potential for long time to even come close. If they keep making a million a day, that's what 27 years before they catch up? Its getting late so math may be off but its a long way to go.

But how much was invest into WoW development so far? Server? Maintenance? Is not cheap to develop an MMO vs run of mills mobile games. That's why it feels over the past years WoW doesn't feel as epic as before? Can't say for sure I don't work for blizzard but just seeing how poorly thew newer expansion vs expansion from before you can tell development was not on par with them.

[Relapses]

But how much was invest into WoW development so far? Server? Maintenance? Is not cheap to develop an MMO vs run of mills mobile games. That's why it feels over the past years WoW doesn't feel as epic as before? Can't say for sure I don't work for blizzard but just seeing how poorly thew newer expansion vs expansion from before you can tell development was not on par with them.

WoW's team has increased every year since its development inception. That doesn't happen with a video game that is failing to achieve its market viability.

[Soikona]

WoW's team has increased every year since its development inception. That doesn't happen with a video game that is failing to achieve its market viability.

Is there a source for that? They say they increase their team size, but they don’t mention how much they lost before they increase. For arguments sake, We don’t know if they lost 150, and then recruited 100 more.

[sponge5307]

So you want to play an MMO without putting the time commitment needed to play it.

To me it's more like an issue of "i want everything immediately without putting any actual effort on it". I'm not bashing you, you're free to do whatever you want and if it's allowed it's just what it is.

The side effect is that most people do the same, and it means more and more less skilled players are obtaining rewards they shouldn't get giving the impression that stuff is baseline when it actually isn't. Plus most people playing through boosts are not staying, they just get to whatever goal they set their eyes on and the leave, meaning they don't bring anything useful or relevant to the community and/or game.

As i said in another post, we reap what we sow. The only thing you bring to the game is skewing the data Blizzard bases its game development on.

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That's basically it. In the end it's up to Blizzard to enforce whatever policy they want. If boosting was against their game design, and don't want it to happen, they should take the matter in their hands and actually make it so through bans or whatever.

The fact the only measure they took was to limit boosting to a server scope (with mixed results) and creating a dedicated chat channel for offering these services, makes me think they actually know most people do that and removing the practice would net to a loss overall. So they try to "hide" that into specific channels you can opt-out of so the experience isn't "tainted" for players who don't like boosts. Basically "if i don't see it it doesn't exist".

Fortunately i have actual friends i play with and that's the biggest driver for me. If i had to play solo/pug all the time i would have stopped playing along time ago (but that's just my opinion).

players who want to "complete" content are already demotivated the moment they realize they can't complete anything because there is always new content
at least boosting allows them to reach a higher completion %
and no it can't be banned because too many things can be defined as boosting, and gold is freely tradable

Yea they really can't enforce boosting. So are they going to ban just people using gold or real money for a boost? What about streamers having their follower boost them for free? Or friends boosting their friends? How do you tell the difference? Demand prof? How is boosting defined?

Just an example Naguura is a really nice and funny wow streamer and also an MDI caster clearly a live streamer and there is a video of her admitting she is getting a boost in PvP and there are even youtube videos so do blizzard ban her for it? She most likely didn't pay anything to get boosted but still, you can tell she clearly did not much about PvP and would not have reached her rank without someone boosting her. Again nothing against her and her videos are great but she admitted to getting a boost. So does she get a free pass coz she is a streamer?

Or how about a raid invited their friends/bf/GF/their mom into a heroic raid who died on every pull? Should he/she be banned then?

How will blizzard determine if one is paying with real money/in-game gold/bitcoin/ etc while others are getting boost coz of their online status ie streamers/famous person/ or just friend and family boosting their friends and family for free? How would you define when boosting isn't allowed or allowed?

WoW's team has increased every year since its development inception. That doesn't happen with a video game that is failing to achieve its market viability.

I am not saying WoW is failing and going to fold. With the recent walk-out/a developer for priest and druid open admitted to quitting and then the fire of in-game GM's over the years I find it hard to believe the development team has increased in size at all. Is WoW losing money? No, but are they profitable as say during BC/Warth/MoP? Most likely not since they stop publishing players' numbers and came up with different ways for revenues ie Game token, 6 mon sub with mount, different pack for race/side/guild change/server change etc. Different in store mounts. But we don't know how much is spent on each item since blizzard just give a number.

[Relapses]

Is there a source for that? They say they increase their team size, but they don’t mention how much they lost before they increase. For arguments sake, We don’t know if they lost 150, and then recruited 100 more.

Blizzard never releases these figures for obvious reasons; but if you just look at the number of people credited each expansion it's increased significantly since WoD. Regardless, that statement was more of an empirical observation which counters @sponge5307's ridiculous notion that expansion quality has something to do with the number of people working on the game.

I am not saying WoW is failing and going to fold. With the recent walk-out/a developer for priest and druid open admitted to quitting and then the fire of in-game GM's over the years I find it hard to believe the development team has increased in size at all. Is WoW losing money? No, but are they profitable as say during BC/Warth/MoP? Most likely not since they stop publishing players' numbers and came up with different ways for revenues ie Game token, 6 mon sub with mount, different pack for race/side/guild change/server change etc. Different in store mounts. But we don't know how much is spent on each item since blizzard just give a number.

My guy, do I really need to link you Activision's stock price which increased tenfold since the days of MoP? That wouldn't be happening if WoW was even close to losing money. They stopped reporting subscriber numbers because that shit never fucking mattered to players in the first place. You're trying to connect dots that don't exist.

[sponge5307]

Blizzard never releases these figures for obvious reasons; but if you just look at the number of people credited each expansion it's increased significantly since WoD. Regardless, that statement was more of an empirical observation which counters @sponge5307's ridiculous notion that expansion quality has something to do with the number of people working on the game.



My guy, do I really need to link you Activision's stock price which increased tenfold since the days of MoP? That wouldn't be happening if WoW was even close to losing money. They stopped reporting subscriber numbers because that shit never fucking mattered to players in the first place. You're trying to connect dots that don't exist.

My guy Activision making more money doesn't mean they will hire more devs. Lots of companies making record profits are still laying off staff. Also, they added more ways to make money than just sub-price alone and the price of each expansion has also gone up every year with different editions. You either increase the amount you make or reduce the cost to increase revenues. So yea stock price/increase revenue != more dev are being hired.

[Relapses]

WoW tokens with Blizzard sponsored RMT boosts, plenty of whales in the sea willing to fork out hundreds to complete content. Easy to have 1/10th the player base when you can milk the whales of your game and still profit when you've reduced costs.

In SL it was easy to justify a WoW token to buy legendary materials if you're not someone who sells gold boosts or farms resources. You could get by doing regular gold farming content and daily SL content, but then you're not doing end-game content while you're able to play. WoW player base got older and has more responsibilities and I'm probably not the only person who can get gold more efficiently by going to my job than actually farming gold in WoW.

I make about 300k/hour via WoW token translation, try farming that much gold consistently in an hour... Blizzard knows this and will gladly capitalize on it. The only efficient way to beat that is selling gold based pvp boosts, which I morally disagree with boosting and will never participate in (Blizzard unfortunately thinks otherwise).

Whales are not keeping this game afloat and you're out of of your fucking mind if you think they are.

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My guy Activision making more money doesn't mean they will hire more devs. Lots of companies making record profits are still laying off staff. Also, they added more ways to make money than just sub-price alone and the price of each expansion has also gone up every year with different editions. You either increase the amount you make or reduce the cost to increase revenues. So yea stock price/increase revenue != more dev are being hired.

Please don't use your own shitty argument against me. My issue is that you're taking your opinion (game quality went down, therefore fewer devs) and using it as a measuring stick for WoW's profitability. This is not how the real world works and nobody gives a shit what you think about WoW's expansion quality.

[sponge5307]

Public companies look at subscription numbers like its gold. They'd rather you pay $200/year for a subscription that you could cancel immediately than $300 for a one time service (previous Geek Squad experience) which is a tremendous value for the customer. These large public companies care more for about the board's opinion of the status of the company than the actual profit margins. Obviously profit margins are a large part of the board's opinion, but its more of a consequence of the latter. A company like MS would rather lose profits if it means more subscription services because of the more consistent nature of most subscriptions in terms of revenue.

Acquiring a game with a loyal player base willing to purchase 6/12 month subscriptions and neigh majority who pre-purchase expansions future content is the best kind of subscriber base for a company. I could see MS creating a 6 month bundle for game pass that might only cost like +$5/month to bundle your WoW and Game Pass subscription and see hilariously higher subscription numbers, especially if they throw those games you could get on Game Pass right in your face on battle.net or Windows. The free store mount addition to 6 month subscriptions clearly works, otherwise Blizzard wouldn't keep doing it with every new store mount.

LOL You mean like how MS turns Microsoft office into a sub-base instead of a one-time fee? I love it back in the day pay a one-time fee and use the office till it was basically no longer supported. MS tries to hard to push you to buy new office each year by changing the files. Now they join the sub-service. Or pay a lot for a business liscense. With sub base, a lot of people forgot about it and got charged then remember but is too late.

[sponge5307]

Whales are not keeping this game afloat and you're out of of your fucking mind if you think they are.

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Please don't use your own shitty argument against me. My issue is that you're taking your opinion (game quality went down, therefore fewer devs) and using it as a measuring stick for WoW's profitability. This is not how the real world works and nobody gives a shit what you think about WoW's expansion quality.

Please don't use your own shitty argument against anyone. Please, show us, prof, that more dev and GMs and supports were hired. I really love to see that. Without it your comment is just as shitty as mine and no one gives a shit what you think about WoW's expansion quality.

[Relapses]

I wish I could agree with you but we have no way of confirming otherwise without a major leak from Blizzard Activision. The big complaints about Retail for most of Shadowlands was participation, in a time where a lot of people have had the most free time in their lives (pandemic lockdowns). Blizzard has gone full inquisition on RMT boosters because they directly affect Blizzard's bottom line. Every RMT boost done are potential WoW tokens not purchased. From my understanding, Blizzard reports to shareholders every WoW token as a subscriber since its technically game time. Its genuinely possible that shareholders see inflated subscriber counts, that would otherwise spell alarm, because of WoW tokens.

RMT has always been against the rules. Why is their enforcement of a rule that's existed since Day 1 suddenly an issue only because the WoW token exists? Again, you guys are connecting dots that don't exist.

[Relapses]

Gold boosting is RMT with extra steps where Blizzard profits off of it. WoW tokens were originally designed to compete directly with gold sellers, gold boosting isn't against ToS unfortunately, no matter how that gold is obtained when used for boosting, is beneficial to Blizzard. Technically if WoW tokens are 200kg and a boost for X content costs 400kg, then it costs $40, no matter if that person uses farmed gold or WoW tokens to get that gold. Blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to stamp out RMT boosting and increase WoW token purchases which they can enable easily through systems like Legendary crafting.

Step 1: Increase the need for gold to complete end game content through BoE systems like legendary and crafted gear. In SL you physically needed X amount of gold to touch endgame content because of the legendary crafting system. Doing this without gold would've required such an incredible amount of alt character play and time investment and still would've likely resulted in time delays.

Step 2: Incentivize boosting content with time gated non-casual rewards that are easily obtained through self-played boosting like AOTC mounts, Slimecat, KSM mount, deterministic gladiator mounts (no longer an end of season % reward), 100% drop rate mythic mounts, prestigious cosmetic rewards, titles. Also include upon that high tier rewards that players can stride to that would incentivize them to buy a boost for the mid tier reward like KSM so they could strive for the top tier reward like Tormented Hero. This goes the same for rank1 pvp titles, where the nature of it being obtainable at such a high end incentivizes players to buy gladiator boosts to make their ability to obtain the absolute top tier reward more likely. Same goes for Famed slayer, if someone buys a cutting edge boost it makes them more likely to get into a group that could get Famed slayer one day.

Step 3: Profit.

Streamers drive player activity and get away with a lot. They technically perform RMT boosts whenever they do subscriber boosting. These people pay streamers in real money laundered through Twitch subscriptions to have boosts done, but I imagine Blizzard comes out positive when it comes to player activity statistics and the monetary gains associated with such.

I'm not going to sit here and demand that Blizzard to change this to make the game less boosting and WoW token enabling, but don't be delusional and think that its not the case and that Blizzard will ever change that.

This is exactly the kind of conspiratorial thinking that I said plagues the WoW community in my post a page back. You have no way of knowing how or why Blizzard does or doesn't do anything but you know that ultimately they're a company that exists to make profit so therefore the WoW token must be why. Logic be damned. Developers simply making mistakes be damned. The token exists and it is the ultimate form of capitalist manipulation so it has to be the token's fault.

I disagree with this shorthand, extremely myopic cynicism, though I do understand why people think the way you do. There are a lot of factors at play but in the grand scheme of things and given what we do know from the admins of actual boosting communities I doubt token sales are even a drop in the bucket when compared to the profitability of other value added services.

[Relapses]

When something is monetized, its required by publicly traded companies to maximize profits from it. Its not conspiratorial but the reality of public companies. I've made no crazy jump in logic, to think that it is must be some level of idolization of Blizzard Activision as an exception to the rule. Any of the suggestions I've made aren't unrealistic or abnormal, its what's expected for a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to increase profits with the consequence of litigation if they don't.

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You can assume a publicly traded company's intent to be 'to increase profits'. That's not conspiratorial but reality. Every action performed by said publicly traded company is therefore designed to increase profits, even if it doesn't in the short term. I was resistant to think that the WoW token would make WoW pay 2 win like everyone screamed about back in 2015. At this point, with the nature of boosting in the game with Blizzard supporting it, its a far less unreasonable assertion. Gold boosting communities wouldn't exist if Blizzard didn't support them, since the nature of the transaction is traceable. RMT boosting by its design isn't traceable, which forces Blizzard to scorched earth entire webs of players in hopes to stamp it out. They're incentivized to do it because it also directly affects gold boosting, which Blizzard benefits from. Amusingly, a lot of that gold is then burnt on the BMAH for ridiculous values, its not uncommon for legitimate gold boosters to have in excess of 100M gold across their account from a short period of boosting.

To expect anything else is genuinely delusional. Blizzard will likely never fix the issue with boosting because they allow it to exist and profit from it, plain and simple.

The only delusion is on your part thinking that boosting has become the sole method for Blizzard to profit off of this game. As I said in a previous post, there's an admin for Gallywix who admitted that even if every single boost they sold were RMT'd they'd have only made a couple million dollars. That's not nothing but when you compare that to the hundreds of millions of revenue Blizzard is pulling in quarterly it is an impossibly tiny drop in the bucket.

Bottom line, the token is not dictating game design decisions. Using backwards ass logic to blame literally everything Blizzard does or doesn't do on its existence is a total copout. It bypasses legitimate criticism of the game in favor of empty gesturing that basically amounts to "capitalism bad." It's WoW's version of "we live in a society." Frankly, I'm tired of seeing it in every fucking thread about every fucking issue the game has.

[Relapses]

At what point is this assumption made? Sole source of profit is entirely impossible for WoW when realm transfers and other character services are automated and streamlined. Clearly its not a sole source of profit, that's never an assertion I've made. To say that 'the token is not dictating game design decisions' is delusional and you clearly have a positivity bias for Blizzard with that assumption. Every avenue of profit affects decisions at Blizzard, which therefore affects game design. The developers are likely not sitting there thinking 'how do I increase profits today' but enforced policies and managers are. This includes when they demonetized gender changes and customization, could be as simple as improving their ESG score which is favorable to investors and likely a net positive financially, otherwise they wouldn't demonetize a source of revenue.

To put into perspective, I'm quite the supporter of capitalism, a huge fan of it you could say, it gives power to the consumer when they're able to use their financial capacity to directly affect a company's policy. If enough people refunded the Dragonflight pre-purchase and the consensus was 'because of X' then I guarantee you it would change. Its not rocket science, its capitalism, which is actually quite simple to understand since its all based off profits. Every action by specifically publicly traded companies can be linked to the intent to increase profits, mostly because the executives are legally obligated to.

Blizzard Activision isn't some magical exception to this, decisions are made by executives which are legally obligated to increase profits. If they made a decision which went against that goal, then they can and likely will be sued by shareholders for neglecting their fiduciary responsibility to increase profits. It can go as far as if a decision they made was not designed to increase profits or if a decision they made resulted in the loss of profits.

There's nothing wrong with capitalism prioritizing profits, its what's lead to the success of the West since the late 1800s. Its why the Soviet Union collapsed and China was forced to converted their markets to a free market structure to stay competitive. It has its positives and negatives, the positives vastly outweighing the negatives though.

This you?

WoW tokens with Blizzard sponsored RMT boosts, plenty of whales in the sea willing to fork out hundreds to complete content. Easy to have 1/10th the player base when you can milk the whales of your game and still profit when you've reduced costs.

...sounds an awful lot like you're trying to spin boosting as something that Blizzard "sponsors" simply because the token exists. I disagree with this notion on its face for the myriad of reasons I've explored throughout this thread. The token existing is not Blizzard's tacit support of boosting. In fact, it's barely anything at all. It's a way for people to use virtual currency to pay for a fucking subscription. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't give a flying fuck about your raging boner for capitalism because that's not what's being discussed here. You're very clearly implying that Blizzard is using the token as a way to be in bed with boosters and this wanton cynicism is one of the biggest issues with modern WoW discussion. Instead of talking about real fucking problems with the game, people like you and all the other "WOW TOKEN BAD" players in this thread use the token as a symbol of everything wrong with the game, the end-all be-all of issues. Instead of the shades of gray where actual legitimate feedback is able to be heard by developers, we spend our days in threads like this reducing the argument into a single binary absolute statement: Remove token, WoW is saved; don't remove token, WoW is living in a society.

I'm just so fucking over the whole thing.

[sponge5307]

This you?



...sounds an awful lot like you're trying to spin boosting as something that Blizzard "sponsors" simply because the token exists. I disagree with this notion on its face for the myriad of reasons I've explored throughout this thread. The token existing is not Blizzard's tacit support of boosting. In fact, it's barely anything at all. It's a way for people to use virtual currency to pay for a fucking subscription. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't give a flying fuck about your raging boner for capitalism because that's not what's being discussed here. You're very clearly implying that Blizzard is using the token as a way to be in bed with boosters and this wanton cynicism is one of the biggest issues with modern WoW discussion. Instead of talking about real fucking problems with the game, people like you and all the other "WOW TOKEN BAD" players in this thread use the token as a symbol of everything wrong with the game, the end-all be-all of issues. Instead of the shades of gray where actual legitimate feedback is able to be heard by developers, we spend our days in threads like this reducing the argument to a binary absolute statements: Remove token, WoW is saved; don't remove token, WoW is living in a society.

I'm just so fucking over the whole thing.

LOL simple fix for blizzard to prove that. Just change their financial report instead of adding wow token sales as sub revenue change to wow token revenue. Then every shareholder can see how much is wow token making for the game. But nope blizzard decided to add wow tokens sales to sub revenue. Why would they do that? Since you are a such blizzard fanboy I let you answer that question. Still waiting on providing solid prof to show blizzard is hiring more devs, GM and support staff for WoW.

[Relapses]

LOL simple fix for blizzard to prove that. Just change their financial report instead of adding wow token sales as sub revenue change to wow token revenue. Then every shareholder can see how much is wow token making for the game. But nope blizzard decided to add wow tokens sales to sub revenue. Why would they do that? Since you are a such blizzard fanboy I let you answer that question. Still waiting on providing solid prof to show blizzard is hiring more devs, GM and support staff for WoW.

Why in the actual fuck do we need to know that? What benefit would it have? Even when we knew what subscriber numbers were, nobody ever used them correctly. They'd just look at the fucking graph and say shit like, "look, this is the patch where they nerfed Warlocks and the game lost 500k subscribers. Blizzard should NEVER nerf Warlocks ever again." We don't need more of that shit. The less we know about how Blizzard's financials work, the better. But the real important thing is that the less we argue about pointless bullshit like whether Blizzard is actively promoting boosting in the game, the more we can start having actual discussions about how to improve it.

[Relapses]

Is reading comprehension not your strong suit?

I've already stated that the described intent, which you can verify yourself, from Ion on the WoW token was initially to combat gold sellers and effectively kill their market. It obviously still fills that purpose but its evolved since then.

It hasn't. Everything that's "evolved" from the intended purpose of the token is imaginary in-your-head bullshit that you're continuing to drone on about as if it has any merit to the discussion. It doesn't. Your conspiracy theory sucks and the rest of your word salad isn't worth my time responding to.

Policy is not being dictated by the token. End of.

Have a nice day, friend.

[Cynical Asshole]

Write more fucking novels, please. Everyone reads them.

[Relapses]

LOL, I'm not your friend, guy. Keep your ignorant bliss on the way the world works, its a lot more comfortable, easier to bare.

Aw shucks, really? I thought we were off to a swimming good start.

Hey, maybe one day I'll "evolve" enough to be enlightened like somebody who enthusiastically simps for capitalism.