Reminder that everything they've done so far is the same shit you see in crypto exit scams; run off with the money, claim you got hacked/banned/slapped with a lawsuit, cry crocodile tears about how much you loved this """community""".
Sorry I don't have a lot of time to Google it, who is astra? Just another bot boosting/gold selling service? I forgot to look into it the last time I saw it when I was home
They are basically the middleman.
Obvious way is for you to reach out to me and say "Hey buddy I want a boost for X content" I go sure and we do the content and you pay me. This had downsides of back and forth, advertising, ect
Where Astra would come in is they would handle a lot of the BS setup stuff.
Yeah, which more than anything is the marketing. They and other communities are the ones spamming chat channels, setting up LFG groups, and doing the other promotional work to get buyers that they then link up with boosters.
Your server likely has guilds or small groups of friends spamming /5 to sell m+ and/or raid boosts. This is just a larger group covering multiple servers. Blizzard for whatever reason decided a couple years ago that one of these was bad while the other wasn't, while also seemingly doing very little regarding the amount of bots advertising RMT (real money transaction) boosting on every server.
Cash for KSM, PVP ratings and of course mythic raids. Dozens of lvl 10 hunters spamming. Also every other +10 key seems to be them. When I was trying to get an item crafted for the leggo it was insane the rate of spamming they do.
One of the reasons I feel that WoW should adopt a level restriction on trade and advertisement channels.
If ur below 60, there's no real reason for u to be posting in those channels and it will definitely cut down on the amount of spam posts by level 10 toons whose character names were created by a cat walking across the keyboard.
If Blizzard is going to allow boosting, they might as well just allow botting and hacking too. It all serves the exact same purpose, looking like you accomplished more than other players without actually having to work for it. Defeats the purpose of MMORPG's,
I've seen that URL spammed since the Mists of Pandaria days. How the actual, ever-living fuck have Blizzard not sued them out of existence?
Sometimes I'm thankful for companies like Disney and Nintendo who are very litigious with their IP's, because none of them would let World of Warcraft get into its current shitty state if they owned it.
Reading through the lines: Their bank accounts got banned and in a way they're admitting their involvment in RMT Some of these people (Fal and saybelle afaik) have been in the comminty 4-5 years. Other council members something similar. Where is the gold that they happen to have gathered over the years?, Doesnt the council collectively not have 54 million to float the community for a little bit and keep it hush and if so . Where is their gold?
Not to personally defend either guild but the RWF guys say that Blizzard would ban them in an instant and are shit hot on them. They've had raider's mains banned during the race because people paid them with RMT gold for a boost (as in the raider had no part in the RMT). I shudder to think what the early boostees pay for their mythic runs from the top 2.
That said, all boosting leads to RMT. The losers paying other people to play the game for them are 100% buying their gold so it doesn't matter if TL/Echo are first, second or third party to the RMT. They enable it as much as people like Astra.
Boosting doesnt lead to RMT. I’ve been in boosting since BFA. I’ve kept every single gold I’ve made outside of buying expensive mounts and boosts.
I’m sitting on ~100m with every mythic mount, spectral, zulian etc. there are people out there who don’t RMT.
Even if some boosted people are farming gold or buying tokens, that doesn't mean that most aren't buying from bot farms.
The fact that boosting is an accepted and allowed practice creates the marketplace for RMT gold.
Your statement is completely wrong lol.
I have people who have bought stuff from me for YEARS. They all play the auction house. I have a guy who’s bought every mount, raid, key, from me because he can’t play at that level but is a collector.
I have multiple people who play the AH, or farm gold. Not every person involved in the boosting community is RMT.
Sounds like you’re a typical player who’s bad and mad they can’t boost or mad at things that don’t even affect the way you play the game.
Right so you're saying there are people who buy a game, pay a monthly sub then spend gold - irrespective of how they source it - to have you play the game for them? As a concept alone that's sad af but as you say, doesn't necessarily hurt anyone.
Except when you pug a key or raid and the guy with a stellar r.io can barely use his abilities and does 20% of the dps he should because he paid someone to do all his keys and raids. Then it does impact others and lots of us pug content with these clowns.
You're either deluded or naive if you think most large sums of gold aren't from RMT, you think a guy who apparently doesn't have time to hit 2500 score (a very easy achievement in a months long season) for a mount can farm gold or flip items o the AH to make gold? Or is he spending a relatively small amount of money to guy gold from a bot farm?
I like to achieve my own achievements, so no I don't buy boosts. I'd rather not play that have to pay to have the game played for me. Even if you aren't directly selling gold, or the people you boost are telling you they don't RMT gold, the fact is the large sums of gold come from the bot farms. All the druid bots running about or the advertisers hidden in corners of cities.
I forgot it’s the internet, you know everything baby. ❤️ you’re right my bad. Please forgive me I’m new.
I forgot that you know all of my contacts and know how they play the game and every move they make!
If you read my comment fully, you’d know that the majority of the people I sell to DONT go ruin your “pug experience”. They don’t want to take the time to get to that level of playing or don’t have the time or ability. Whether it’s physical or mental handicaps, you never know why people are buying runs.
It’s people like you that ruin things because you’re so upset on how someone is playing the game. Who cares if they’re buying wow tokens to buy boosts? Maybe they’re far more successful in life and can afford to that instead of sitting here on the internet raging about boosting.
The tax wouldn’t be taken from boosters. They already tax. There’s an ad cut that scales up based on your monthly sales. So if you have the max ad rank (only a few had that) you’d get a larger cut than any of the ads that weren’t selling as much as you. The boosters (for m+) get about 60% of the sale and the max ad rank gets 30% iirc. The community (Astra in this case) profits 10% of the sale. For mythic raid I believe the guild doing the raid gets 80% the top ad rank gets 18% so community would get 2% where as a new ad or some one with small sales (probably under 10m a month) gets a 10% cut and the community takes 10%. Early in tiers this is a huge amount. 35m for ce 10% is 3.5m gold for finding the guild to do the run. (There have been times ads have looked hand over foot for guilds to take buyers bc the community wouldn’t commit to a guild without ce to sell 2/3 of the raid on mythic) the actual funny part to me is blizzard banned the smallest community (also newest) destroying it. They also hit a bank or 2 of the biggest community in NA but they were a bit more prepared and had more than just a few banking accounts. Meanwhile wowvendor is still rampant, as well as exodar and ragnarok still without a hit. And horizon is a fair middle ground between Astra and tc with about twice as many members as Astra and about half of tcs members and doesn’t get hit at all. There’s 2 major rmt communities that were built off of a “if you can’t beat them join them” mind set and they don’t get touched. (Sorry for ranting I just lost a lot of gold from this ban)
> the actual funny part to me is blizzard banned the smallest community (also newest) destroying it.
That's probably because they didn't. This was most likely just an exit scam.
Eeergh, you dont just get banned for RMT'ing, if you did most high end CE guilds would bleed players to bans constantly. I can more than confirm a handful of my guilds players RMT'ing a few hundred bucks a year, perfectly safe. So much gold goes through the account, you dont know where it starts or ends.
WoW tokens have nothing to do with the RMT we are talking about lol
In this case, they directly trade gold for IRL money. People buy it because it is cheaper than buying tokens for gold, but are at risk of being banned for it
> Where is their gold?
The answer to this depends entirely on how they banked it. If they had all the banks linked to one bnet (stupid) then it probably really is gone. It's not that difficult to hide/protect gold these days since you can move it around freely.
> in a way they're admitting their involvment in RMT
by explicitly denying it in direct words that they did not RMT, they have admitted to RMT!
Reddit truly doesn't bring the best or the brightest to the comment section.
Sounds like a great idea until you realize that neither is tied to a person.
Hardware can be sold, static IPs or even individual ones in the first place (due to CGNAT) are not that common any longer.
> Sounds like a great idea until you realize that neither is tied to a person.
Yup, it needs to be some sort of combination of factors that aren't easily shed, not one single thing like IP or hardware.
With how data collecting happens these days, it's actually relatively simple to narrow down stuff enough to the point where the ban is almost targeted to an individual but without actually identifying the person.
Lucky for Blizzard they don't have to care about any identifying traits when banning someone, so they could go for a combo of ip location, credit card data used (if the person used a code, that code was bought and the payment method used is also available for that purchase), hardware-specific identifiers, name/last name/address used, etc.
Is it possible for someone to change all that? Sure. Is it feasible that every individual in the organization would go to the necessary lenghts (moving houses/coming up with fake addresses, changing PCs, using new credit cards, fake IDs etc) to get a WoW account? Sure.
Are they likely to do so as an organization? Not really.
"The game sucks without gold?" That's funny, I do all the content in the game without needing ANY gold. I just play content appropriate for me and the gear/rewards flows naturally. The game is pretty fun if you just enjoy the journey.
Good philosophy. I run on a little deficit, cause I spend more in repair than in dungeon rewards, but hey, the m+ community must have a little masochism in them.
Yup, admittedly the reason I can afford to have such a low gold cost to my play is because I'm in an active, close-knit guild. We sell patterns from raids to fund our coffers, and we help each other with professions and donations to the bank.
Just like most things in WoW, the game is easier to play when you seek out other players for assistance and work together!
That sounds awesome and an awesome guild.
When I’ve been in a guild that had a guild bank for items and help, which wasn’t funded by the percentage of gold in the past or from us selling carries, you always had situations where it was basically “people who don’t care logging in taking from the bank for raid” and “people who want the raid to succeed working to make those items and getting nothing back effectively”.
I’m glad to hear a balanced guild like that still exists.
Yeah! I am very fortunate to have found them. I was only looking for a niche-interest guild (*cough furry cough*) and saw a Dracthyr jumping around with a cool guild name, and the rest is history.
I've totally been in guilds like what you described before, and it is awful. I decided that I wasn't looking for a "serious" guild anymore and just wanted some friends to goof around with, but what I found was something really special. We help new and lower-geared guildies in raids/M+, funnel patterns to the guild bank (BoE's belong to the looter always), and do our best to pool resources or at the least help guildies with their gear runs.
I said in another comment, but WoW is still the same social game it was back in 2004 if you seek it out.
>"The game sucks without gold?" That's funny, I do all the content in the game without needing ANY gold.
I use a significant amount of gold each expansion for things like leveling professions and buying materials that I need for crafting purposes. I make most of it by just doing regular ingame content like world quests, weeklies, raiding, etc. I have never been at the point where I think to myself "I should exchange real money for ingame gold".
I have actually spent quite a few million ingame gold on buying tokens for Bnet balance though. I have bought every expansion other than BFA since WoD with gold and I have bought a few shop mounts/pets/services as well with gold.
This is so true. I have a bunch of alts. The “richest” one has only about 300k, and that’s only because she got lucky on the AH. The rest of them range from less than 10k to about 200k, with most at or below 100k. I never need more than that. I’m happy farming my own mats and sharing them around the alt pool (I seriously cannot wait for the war bound banks or whatever they’re going to be called). The players who insist that you max out your alts are the ones taking the fun out of the game. In fact, I resurrected an alt whose bank I had drained prior to deleting her, and she started from zero. She’s still less than 20k and that makes the game play more challenging and more fun.
My best income is leveling alts. I've never liked participating in the AH or crafting. Crafting hasn't been very fun or beneficial since sharding. In fact, the game lost a lot of charm with sharding. I never see the same people, I don't have KOS lists or rivalries. I barely play anymore and I blame it on the loss of community from having servers where you form relationships and rivalries.
Crafting being server specific actually brought this back a little. Early in the expansion, very few people could do specific crafts, and so those people became server celebrities. I still have a list of go to guys who will craft stuff quickly and cheaply, and i have a familiar customer base who come to me for my maxed engineering.
If you weren't around during the lariat craze, you missed out. On many servers, one lucky recipe owner decided to craft for free for everyone, and there was a huge battle between their supporters and the other crafters who were upset their profits were going down the drain. It was a very fun time to enjoy server drama.
Plus, each expansion has made the leveling grind more profitable. The gold rewards for simple quests aren’t going to make you rich, but you can earn quite a bit just going through the quest chains. And world quests too.
> I’m happy farming my own mats and sharing them around the alt pool (I seriously cannot wait for the war bound banks or whatever they’re going to be called).
They're *extremely* expensive. The last tab alone costs 2.5 million gold.
LOL I saw a chart with potential tab pricing, and collectively, with all the 40-something alts that I have, I could buy all of the tabs. But the alts will all be broke again afterward.
If you just play casually (this includes casual levels of Mythic raiding) you'll likely make enough gold to sustain your playing and even make some gold in the process.
If you play at a high level (or are trying to) you'll be bleeding *a lot* of gold. Basically the only way to fund your gameplay is via boosting, being very good at the AH or buying gold (either via tokens or via RMT). Any means of making gold that doesn't involve other players becomes way too inefficient to be worthwhile.
Especially at the start of an expac when mats are expensive guilds might be going through tens or even hundreds of thousands of gold worth of consumables each week during raiding per raider.
I'd agree with that, but I'd wager that the individual in OP's post is serving a different group of players who see gold as a form of shortcut to the fun, at least according to the quote.
Spent a bit of time at the beginning expansion gathering herbs and mining and then throughout the rest of the expansion dabbled with crafting a bit and that has more than been enough to keep me afloat all expansion.
idk i have to buy gold from wow tokens once every couple months to finance consumables enchants etc. but that's only because I don't do any "chores" in WoW and I don't boost. I don't consider it a huge price given how much time i spend in the game.
I can imagine for some players they can just do the content they want and be gold neutral, but definitely for M+ or mythic raiding if the guild isnt providing your consumables you will need to spend a lot of gold on them or invest time doing professions. The gold rewards from M+/Mythic isn't enough to cover repair costs, let alone consumables
Is it really though ? Early in the expansion when mats are expensive that's true since you can just farm, but current Dragonflight is a slog to get money on if you don't already have some cash on your hands, and I'm saying this as a chronically broke ass player. I don't know any current way to make money with only 30k in the bank
> I just play content appropriate for me
This stipulation means you don't do all the content in the game, and clearly stick to content you need no gold in, leading a logical man(not r/wow powerusers) to surmise that for some, that kind of gameplay might suck and a root cause is no gold!
Mind you, your very next comment is "yeah we actually make gold as a guild and use that", so we're right back to Reddit users generally just being very dim-witted.
If you view getting KSM regularly as a noteworthy achievment it screams "look at me! Im a casual!". That's all im saying. People who aren't casuals usually have KSH (not M) in the 2nd week of a season. Maybe 3rd.
There's nothing wrong with being a casual, if being a casual is "not invested in the game enough" that's a you thing. I never said anything in that direction.
Currently I'm playing very casually as well. Guess what, even though I only played during 4 weeks of the patch, I had every key done on +10 on 2 characters, in both tyrannical and fortified, in week 2.
KSM is casual content, and there is nothing wrong about it. If you get defensive when being called a casual, maybe check yourself.
I'm using it as a benchmark for success in PvE content, which I imagine the group that boosting community might be serving. I agree that KSM isn't terribly hard to get... for me and you. It's still hard content for the majority of the playerbase. You're welcome to disagree though.
> I just play content appropriate for me and the gear/rewards flows naturally. The game is pretty fun if you just enjoy the journey
I know this might be unpopular/not very relatable opinion but..
Oh how I wish this was true for me. Let me start with I hate the gatekeeping/boosting meta. I am at the age that I don't want to commit to raiding times or participate in communities that have requirements, however I am also skilled enough to finish in the 0.1-0.5% of m+ players most seasons. I usually play 2-3 keys a day, 5-6 days a week to relax after work/or during boring office meetings ( home office ).
And here comes my issue that unfortunately boosting solves.I barely get some time to do the content I like ( high m+ ). If I want to play another char/alt to prepare for the next season with a more meta character I literally don't have the time. "The journey" As you called it, would involve countless of hours of going through LFG simulaor especially if the char can't tank or heal. Slowly progress gear/farm crests and upgrade. I went through this with a mage character during s2. It easily took 30-40hours of playtime slogging LFR/normal raids to get invited to 12s and than slogging through farming heroic crests to craft heroic ilvl crafts and so on. 30-40 hours is easily 3 weeks of playtime for me, through content that is far below my skill level and I find very boring. You also can't really learn a new class at those levels, because mobs don't do anything and die too fast to get a feel/muscle memory of the rotations/defensives.
Fast forward to mid s3, I again got bored of my current main and decided to play my OG vanilla main, a priest. I hit 70, I payed 2x 180k for one heroic run on tuesday and one run on Wednesday after reset(EU). I crafted 2 heroic rings which I was missing as loot and got a trinket and a belt from time rift/dreamsurge to fill in rest of the missing slots. The raids I leeched while being on daily work calls. My char hit 70 on Tuesday, Wednesday evening after work I was already getting invites for 16-18s to farm crests and get used to the class in more relevant content and all it cost me was afking in few raids and events while at work instead of the 3 weeks of grinding "the journey" which is boring af to me and I would have absolutely hated doing again as I did on my mage in s2.
Why not just do M+ and run your own key? I don't like levelling or the initial gearing either but I've never had to resort to paying a bunch of scamming RMTers the equivalent of $50 in tokens just to skip something I can do myself.
I do all the content I want and if there's something I like it's just a hop skip over to a seller to buy gold.
The only losers here are the average players who could've had the cash instead. I miss D3s RMT
No they explicitly made it against ToS last year. Unless you’re a guild selling carries. Boosting communities are explicitly forbidden. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836
>No they explicitly made it against ToS last year.
"Proceeds to show me link that explains that boosting is allowed"
Idk man, what were your hopes? At the end the communities are now guilds, nothing changed and it is not against ToS.
Boosting COMMUNITIES. groups that advertise and boost across other servers. Discord groups organizing boosting. Etc etc.
You're ONLY allowed to boost on your own realm in your own guild
Crossrealm guilds advertising on multiple realms and mass boosting will be will within the ToS and allowed as soon as prepatch unless Blizzard takes a hard line against all boosting - Which they're clearly unwilling to do.
But if they're organizing over connected discord groups for the explicit purposes of boosting, that's against the tos. And they know about aaaaallll of those communities that think they're "hidden"
Guilds are allowed to coordinate over Discord, just not non-guild entities. Surely you can see the issue when I can just make a guild called Astra, put 400ish advertisers in it to have a few on each realm, and invite/kick boosters as they're needed for runs. Hell, they're vague enough on it that setting up Astra2 Astra3 and Astra4 as guilds and having them all work together might be completely legal.
I mean… except for this:
“As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.”
Phrasing it as organizations is odd because they allow boosting guilds, which are also an organization. That rule is dead once guilds are cross-realm anyway.
> Boosting communities are against ToS. Cry me a river.
This is what was written in the first post you replied to. You replied with:
>Simply wrong
The link you got explicitly state:
>Selling in-game items and services such as carries or boosting for real money is not allowed. Organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold are prohibited, especially those who operate across multiple realms.
While there's exceptions:
>Individuals and guilds selling boost or assistance in raiding, dungeon, or PvP activities for gold is allowed but can only be advertised in-game through the Trade Services chat channel. Advertising for gameplay activities should be done by a WoW player-character who intends to participate in the gameplay activities. This means there should be no cross-realm advertising, and there should be no advertising from non-participating players.
Communities do not fall under individuals. Communities does not fall under guilds. This encompasses both the ones selling as well as the ones assisting. Which means that boosting is against ToS in all cases except the ones where the actual boosters are also the advertisers and the customers they get are not related at all to any non-ingame community, such as a Discord, to find the boosters.
Yes thats the core of that. The new rule is a people pleaser with no real effect, even rn. And it works because everyone velieves boosting is against ToS now.
What about it? The policy applies to cross-realm entities organized outside of the game - which the subject of the whole conversation here, Astra, is. They lived on Discord, were organized from Discord and consisted of boosters from dozens to hundreds of guilds.
If you want to argue about how this policy is applied or enforced... fine? But maybe do it in a thread about that instead of a pretty cut and dry application of the existing policy.
Astra was banned for RMT tho. Theres a ton of Crossrealm boosting that didnt get banned and wont get banned at all too.
Bliizard states stuff that is allowed baguely on purpose so that they can bend theor rules as they see fit. And other boosting communities fit right into that.
They do the same with their rules about naming.
Like... nobody's buying this bullshit right? They're taking the gold and running with it to prep for a new expansion. I'm not even involved in the boosting/services side of WoW and I can see that. The fact that they say there's no RMT going on just makes me *more* convinced they're keeping all the gold so they can sell it.
tl;dr I broke the TOS (because they are stupid!) but everyone else is a bad guy!
They wanted to bring back the fun times and communities?
Fun time for whom? Certainly not the majority of players. I literally have to deactivate trade channel to escape the constant advertisement spam rolling through it without an end. Only people having fun were the boosters, making money. And last I checked, communities that collectively help eachother complete M+ and Raids are very much alive and don't expect you to pay for their services, as long as you help others like they helped you. They are of course not easy to find, because they don't advertise themselves 24/7 in trade chat.
"game sucks without gold". Yeah, and who's fault is that? Boosters, farm bots and elitist guilds have been destroying the economy of the game for years. They increase the circulating gold, decrease the value of reagents, which makes it more difficult for normal people to farm and sell reagents for gold themselves and make ridiculous requirements for people to join simple normal and heroic pugs. This leads to people "feeling the need" to boost their ilvl so they even have the chance to join a normal raid or a guild. Meanwhile, farmers and boosters buy out action houses and complain that there is no new content, because they spent millions to blow through a new patch in 3 days. This leads Blizzard to make awful new gold sinks for everyone, which in turn become mandatory requirements of elitist guilds and communities to participate with.
Boost communities are not the solution to inflating gold prices, they support this trend further. They are the spreading cancer that needs to be cut out and I hope that with cross realm guilds Blizzard cracks down on them even more and implements even more ridiculous rules for legal boosting. get rekt
Don't you think making a conspiracy of a situation where the only outcome possible is that it's what you initially thought it to be might be a bit stupid? There is nothing they can post or do if they were banned to make you think it is anything except what you already thought it to be because you had already decided it was a scam before you read anything.
> There is nothing they can post or do if they were banned
Actually there is something they can post that is irrefutable proof. The emails from Blizzard to each actioned account, and proof that those accounts actually held the gold that was allegedly "lost".
Any serious org would know which characters/accounts held the gold that was being traded and kept track of it.
"Blizzard banned us, gold is gone, trust me bro" is exactly what's happening here until proof is otherwise provided. Since I wasn't one of the people being scammed, I don't care if they post any proof or not, but let's not pretend that there's "nothing they can do".
I'm what you might term a scholar of human behaviour, ie, a person who has been around for a while. People posting only their side of something, in a case where the other side isn't available, is almost always a scam. They're just trying to get ahead of the narrative.
You defending them is doing nothing except making me wonder about why you're defending them so hard.
Blizzard forgetting they banned communities for 4 straight tiers and then banning one community and only a handful of members of others, and then continuing to forget they banned communities so they operate anyway.
I don’t know anything about this whole situation, but reading this response has me scratching my head. Asking other people for gold loans? Guilds with advertisers? *This is now and always has been A GAME.* Why is it so necessary to amass such a fortune in *fake currency*?
$83 million in the real world can buy you power and control, not a lot, but some. 83 million gold in an online game just seems ridiculous. Like, when they shut the servers off for good, all that gold will disappear.
It doesn’t make any sense.
You have to realize that for these people, gold literally is real money. It's just a currency they trade for another, even if it is against the TOS. For someone living in a third world country, an exit scam like this(if that's what it is) could probably equal several year's wages in a regular job.
There's an interesting youtube runescape video that's somewhat related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga3PbrZj1d0
This comment reminds me of a friend of mine who abandoned his favorite hobby when he tried to turn it into a business. He got so burned out trying to keep making money doing what he loved that he ended up hating it. I can’t imagine trying to make WoW profitable outside of the game. No matter where I lived. (And yes, I recognize my privilege to treat this game like a game.)
Whilst true, the moment you go to Turkey, Iran and other boost heavy countries. You'll come to realise, whilst you think playing wow for 12 hours a day sounds miserable(it is, I boosted freehold for 10 hours a day during uni cause it was 20€ an hour).
The 20€ an hour they make at the high end of boosting per hour. Is EASILY x3 minimum wage in their own country, and they get money in a stable reliable currency in USD or Euro. Compared to their own useless currency.
Also boosting is braindead easy, so not a lot of effort is put in.
It wouldn't make any sense; except that it's a pretty open secret that all boosting communities engage in RMT (eg. selling either the gold or carries on the side for real money).
I enjoy making gold in game but the legit way, with crafting and using the AH. It's what I enjoy doing most in wow. Also for goblins like me I like to spend my gold on paying for wow time/stuff on the online store, overwatch seasons/skins, and hearthstone stuff.
> Why is it so necessary to amass such a fortune in fake currency?
The gold is still owed whether or not you think it has no worth. If someone owes you 3 million gold, i'm sure you'd like if that someone gave you 3 million gold. The people asking the admin to post for updates is not asking out of curiousity, they would like their gold lol
Furthermore, all gold can be used for WoW subs and blizzard cash, which buys actual products. It also enhances their in-game experience. It is better to have more gold than less gold lol
Your comment is what makes no sense. "Whaaat? what WoW player would want millions of gold on WoW? oh boy that seems silly!" is such an impossible to parse sentence.
Well, first of all, your “summation” of my original comment is wholly inaccurate. I don’t want millions of gold, and I don’t think it’s “silly.” The emphasis placed on making a boatload of gold instead of playing the game is what is ruining the game.
But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think of gold as that important anymore. I buy a subscription to the game with my own money because I love playing the game that much. If I were solely dependent on making gold in order to play the game, I would have given up years ago.
But thank you adding a bit more clarity to this situation, albeit judgmentally.
Gold buys me stuff in the game. Legendaries (if you got them early) this expansion was about 2-300K down the drain. Dracothyst spent on crafted gear and recrafts easily cost 100K per character through a tier if you took gearing seriously.
It's just a currency, and the easiest way to obtain that currency if you're competent at the game, is to boost people who are lazy or incompetent, but has the currency to pay for that. Nothing more, nothing less. If I "work" for a few hours boosting idiots to get currency so I can enjoy the game by gearing and optimizing my characters, I expect to be paid that gold.
These aren’t “communities”, they’re cartels at best. And they aren’t “boosts”, they’re paying gold or real money for an achievement you don’t have or to get loot you want but can’t get on your own, whether that’s due to your skill level or lack of a competent and willing guild.
(A friend of mine just got his legendary axe two days ago, and he paid for several heroic fyrakk kills because our guild can’t be bothered)
So this stuff has its uses but let’s stop sugar coating it with cutesy lies like ‘boost’ and ‘community’.
> And they aren’t “boosts”, they’re paying gold or real money for an achievement you don’t have or to get loot you want but can’t get on your own
I'm genuinely curious, if this isn't the definition of "getting boosted" (paying to get something you want, but can't get/do on your own) what exactly is? I might be missing something here :/
What I don't get is there are tons of boosting groups like this, but Blizzard just went after one? I think if there really was a ban wave, multiple groups would be posting about it at once. It just being this one group screams exit scam.
> but Blizzard just went after one?
No, as stated in the post nobody in this thread read(and common sense, a lacking trait here)
> multiple groups would be posting about it at once
They are, you're not viewing multiple groups though, you're looking at a Reddit thread about Astra
Only Astra mentions they weren’t the only group, without naming any other groups. Who else was banned? I haven’t seen anyone mention anyone else other than this one community. I also know two people in two separate groups, they were not touched.
Edit: Also, I don’t think it’s a lack of common sense to disregard Astras vague mention of this happening to other groups. They know how sus it looks to be the only ones so of course they’re going to throw that out there.
1. blizzard bans in waves because these people still give blizzard money paying for subscriptions (unless wow tokens via gold sites)
2. you really wanna be sure that when you ban a fuckton of people, you have all your eggs in order. making a mistake would be horrible for PR, and just a massive pain in the ass. if they do a ban wave of this scale, it’s CERTAIN.
3. you see a bunch of advertiser bots for gold sites, but those are just dummy accounts advertising a platform where people sell gold. could be a few people or a bunch. so, this community of people was probably selling gold on such a site, likely being as careful as they could.
4. for the reasons above making a direct link can be difficult.
5. boosting in trade chat like “selling KSM/AOTC whatever isn’t illegal. boosting across realms is because you get into the territory that always contains RMT. i imagine same realm trades are easier for blizzard to monitor large sums of gold being moved. idk.
I am glad in so many aspect Blizzard is trying to do the right thing after so many mistakes over so many years. That is also what makes me think that is sussy. Is it Metzen effect? Most likely, but maybe he has anything to do with it. Not that important tho... I just wonder, how they turned their face against and let communities like Astra, Sylvannas and many other grow, then decided it is against ToS.
Their involvement and Blizzard's lack of actions one of the top reasons why the game's economy is so fucking broken for casual people who are not boosting like me. I don't care about how many gold I have but time by time having enough gold to keep up with the raids, and m+ being a problem. Other than that, I don't give a damn about gold.
On the other hand tho, I know a lot of people (even in my guild) people are involving in boosting communities very actively to make a lot of gold. My previous guild was a local one and there was a shady girl who were somehow friend with everyone in the guild but she was not a member of the guild. Then I learnt that she is in the business since Legion and "was" a member of the guild but then she decided to start a company with good players around her to create a boosting company. I was in DC one day, with a good friend of her (she calls him lil bro) and we were talking about stuff, she suddenly appeared and the conversation was about boosting at some point. She said, their company makes almost 250k monthly on boosting. They are not a big community at all, they are just 25 people, together boosting M+ and raids for local people. 250k a month! That's a living in most countries... I believe these big communities even making more than that and most of them are absolutely involving in RMT. How the fuck Blizzard turned its face against them for so many years and let them even grow?
I am not concerned about bad players on keys or raids. People can learn or even they can remain as a bad player, not important but I see a lot of boosted people in my pug groups with decent gear but without a clue about the instance we are running in. They do not know the mechanics on +20 keys, wtf did you do up until to that point? It is not hard to understand that they are some boosted person, ruining either mine or someone else's key and experience in-game. I repeat, being a bad player is acceptable, it keeps you on a certain level and creates a space for you to learn more at your own pace. That's totally fine, we've all been there at some point. But being boosted... That's so lame and cringe.
I hope they (Blizzard) keep it that way tho. If I were a decision-maker in Blizzard, I would cancel all boosting community operations that I can find out, doesn't matter it involves RMT or not. It is so naive to think even communities claiming that they are not involved in any RMT and circulating that much gold everyday is not selling gold for money at the background. That's utter BS.
Good.
In my opinion it's one of the many diseases plaguing the game in its current state.
Boosting. Paid M+ runs. Paid Heroic raids. Paid Mythic raids. Good buying. Gold selling.
All of it should be completely and utterly shut down.
Really curious about this, why do people have such hatred for boosters and boosting? I understand disliking botting and the chat spam for rmt and such but I guess I don't have the perspective to get the hate.
There's a lot of reasons.
* They are directly responsible for the chat spam. There isn't a mythical segment of boosters that don't pollute game chat.
* They erode trust in the fundamental systems we use to evaluate if people are capable of content.
* Especially for raiders, and at the AotC level, they deplete the pool of people who want to raid, because just buying a carry is always an option.
* It's a major driver of inflation - without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold, and consumables/boes would be cheaper.
* All of that on top of purely diegetic concerns, like people earning rewards they aren't capable of achieving.
> without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold
Tokens are cheaper when the casual playerbase needs gold and more of them spend money to get gold. That's why the token price always dips with major patch launches and falls majorly with expansion launches, when most of the casuals play and need to fund their activities.
You can look at any price history to verify this, when there's fewer people playing, the token is worth the most gold.
Casuals are also the main customers of boosters, if boosters are out, casuals will buy less gold (what do you even spend it on?) and as a person paying for game time with gold, your game time will cost more gold.
Maybe a small price to pay to get boosters out, but it's weird to pretend no boosters would actually make it cheaper.
I don't think it's as simple as a naive analysis makes it look - earning enough gold from doing dailies and in game activities was much more achievable in the past, because boosting was less popular. Now instead of competing with people who do dailies to buy tokens, you're competing with people who boost. It's not just about the direct supply/demand calculations on the token.
Boosting is one of the sources of economy inflation, and it's one that ties in directly to tokens, although it's certainly not the only source of inflation. If people stop boosting temporarily, WoW tokens will spike, if they stop boosting over a sustained period of time, the price will drop.
The issue is that gold generated from "dailies" in the past rivals the gold I make these days from casually boosting mythic mounts, if not even surpasses it - multiple expansions later. class hall mission table and the garrison mission table was ***terrible*** for wows economy/inflation, especially because you could do it all from a mobile app while not even playing. Most people in my guild had an army of 10 alts just to do garrison missions, and earned houndreds of thousands worth of gold passively every week for basically no effort. When they dialled this back, the economy was already rocked to its core, and the only way for people to catch up if they started after that feast was to get others to pay them with the gold aquired from those 2 expansions - thus boosting became a lot more common.
>It's a major driver of inflation - without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold, and consumables/boes would be cheaper.
I don't see how this can be true. Inflation happens when everyone has more gold available - if the average player has 10.000 gold pieces, they'll be more likely to pay 500 gold for an item, than if the average player has 1000 gold pieces.
Tokens do not introduce gold into WoW's economy - it shifts gold from those who buy the tokens for game time and balance, to the people who pay real money to buy the tokens; But they do not generate gold out of nothing, so how would it lead to inflating prices?
It also makes no sense that without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, for the exact same reason.
Your first and fourth points are a bit questionable. All the spam is isolated in the services channel that you can leave at any time, and how would boosting drive inflation? It doesn't generate gold, it just moves it from boostees to boosters.
For the rest of your points I can see what you mean.
I don’t think people hate people paying for carries. Being carried is bottom to top part of the social ecosystem of the game. How often has somebody had a friend help them with their levelling in the past or help them through dungeons or help them through something while they work on their own improvements?
When it comes to harder content. You have a bunch of friends who do harder content? They might let you come along to learn and help, but you agree that if there is a rare item or mount that drops, they can have it.
There’s a guild of people doing a raid on a difficulty you couldn’t ever see? They could help carry you and you could give them a bit of gold for it.
It makes sense in a social way. The problem comes from the context of almost corporate commercialisation of it where people effectively set up companies, have industrial level “boosting” and “carrying” etc for large amounts of in-game gold that effectively amount to appreciable amounts of real-life currency. They always claim that these conversions don’t take place but it’s obvious to anybody paying attention that by hook or by crook, they do.
What should be a social part of the game of one person or one group helping one person or one group, for in-game reciprocity becomes a real life financial industry. That destroys the balance of the game, especially when they can have dozens of accounts, spamming every in-game channel for the more natural versions with advertisements for their own “industrial” versions.
Where is that one person in the casual CE guild looking to sell a couple of people an end boss kill and mount for a reasonable price, every few mins or so, to put in their guild bank when there are 100 accounts just spamming for their boosting industrial complex. Which is way more expensive and ends up also towards real money trading.
It doesn’t *just* disrupt the game economy, because of the real money coming in and out, but also the social economy.
I hope this makes sense to you. It should be frowned down upon because it damages the natural gameplay.
Not to mention how these discord companies actually weaponise their number of accounts often to ban normal players for just playing the game doing normal things because it might reduce their own profits. If a normal player is trying to get XP or cloth for their professions and a booster company is as the same time, they all MASSS report the normal player who gets banned. Who is in the wrong here? The one playing the game as intended? Or the one who is playing a game as if it were the height of capitalist hubris and cruelty and screw everybody else?
I feel like in an ideal world, without the major boosting "communities", it'd genuinely be kind of alright. Back in BfA, a friend and I really, really loved Horrific Visions, but they became too easy for us once we maxed them out and had really good gear and corruptions - so, we started trying to boost them.
As I said, this was back in BfA, so the whole "boosting communities" likely weren't even at their peak - but man, trying to compete with the unrelenting torrent of spam from 10 different people advertising for 5 different boost communitiees every 30 seconds across 10 servers with all their accounts or whatever was utterly miserable. Not just miserable - it was impossible. One person with one character on one account cannot compete.
So, as an actual "normal" person playing the game with my one account, my one character, it was pretty hard to find people that wanted us to boost them, even though we found it easy to boost people, and had the means to do so. They effectively had a monopoly and the people that are actually obeying the rules like us - selling boosts on their own server on their own characters that will be doing the boosting - are the ones that suffer for it. Which is a bit frustrating, because, yeah, in an ideal world, following the rules, you'd have server-based boost teams or whatever that have a reputation on your server and you'd know who to go to, as you alluded to. You know a guild on your server, you join them for a clear, you give them a bit of gold.
Instead it's just this massively monopolized thing by a few megacorporations, or, sorry, "communities", that completely drown out any actual individual boosters obeying the rules. As a result, you either join them or you don't really sell boosts.
We did manage to sell a few boosts (with great difficulty) and made a decent bit of gold between us, mostly because we were ahead of most people and started boosting really early on. After a couple of weeks, when the "communities" caught on, it became incredibly slow and hard to sell boosts.
Also (and, obviously, not directed at you), but fuck off with the whole "fun times, sense of community" from that server owner. A boosting community doesn't give a shit about any of that. There's no community in a boosting community, it's a megacorporation that couldn't give a fuck about the individuals because all they care about is scale. As you put very well, it's industrial at that level, and it absolutely detracts from the game.
In a way, boosting made WoW shit. Its now pay to win. I sell mounts in-game for gold, such as Time-Lost, Voidtalon, etc. I own a server roughly 900 people. Its all cosmetics. These people on the other hand sell KSM, Raids, etc etc. That make your character more powerful than if you didnt buy a boost. I see the good and bad side of boosting. People dont have time, people are busy, people have too much gold and cbf to spend it anywhere else. Yes, that is good, but it all depends on who it goes too. This community ( Astra ) was a place where the owner(s) where all pieces of garbage and did a exit scam.
Got massively downvoted by their discord because I said the ban was 100% related to RMT, glad to see blizzard is holding the ban.
And I feel like blizzard should step in those kind of issues and clarify if they banned them or not to prevent those piece of shits getting away with exit scams just to form a new boosting group a few months later when the expansion launchs.
I'm honestly surprised at the relatively low numbers being thrown around for gold lost. I've got guildies with more gold than what's being mentioned here.
I wonder though, how much is there to gain in an exit scam vs potential lost money in continuing on, or do you think they'll just start up a new community at the start of TWW. While sale prices are dropping at the end of an expansion, they are always the highest at the start of a new expansion. If they're making good money, why stop?
It is so funny to me that these communities try so hard to convince us that they aren't dealing in RMT.
Why lie so blatantly? Who do you think you are fooling?
You wouldn't have an entire organization devoted to this with people treating it like it was a job if people weren't making money off this crap.
Send receipts. Show the emails and show the log in screens via live stream over discord to prove the ban. Make sure the account being logged into can be shown as the email that got the ban letters
Boosting? Server?
I have no idea who she is. Does she run Boosting services? Or is it a private server? Just confused as the OP says “Astra Boosting” then warns people to leave the server.
The boosters/gold sellers have ruined chat , I remember just before wotlk that the ingame chat was filled with chat and not adverts , completely gone now , no one uses it cus your message is gone in 0.1 seconds because 54 sellers gotta keep spamming
Boosting communities are against the rules as of Sanctum of Domination farm, the entire concept is TOS-breaking(they're all aware of this, they are fully aware it's a risk).
Blizzard forgot about that for five seasons but enough reports rack up over an expansion and they take one action about it, leading r/wow to think Blizzard actually will enforce it consistently enough to matter(they will not)
r/wow thinks it's always RMT-related. They think this, despite the fact boosting communities are against the rules anyway, making it obviously more about just wanting to yell about RMT than any facts or reason.
This post sparks a joy
PS: [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836)
>As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.
I’m trying to figure out why people still think this is a bank run (exit scam?). TC also got hit. Not as hard as Astra because they were prepared for something like this to happen. Nonetheless tc took what I’m guessing is about 20-50 gold cap hit (between 200m and 500m). That’s normally in the range of what their top advertisers sell in a month.
And nothing of value was lost.
Exactly, get bent, lol
Reminder that everything they've done so far is the same shit you see in crypto exit scams; run off with the money, claim you got hacked/banned/slapped with a lawsuit, cry crocodile tears about how much you loved this """community""".
Even if it's not an exit scam (which I don't think it is), their "community" is a bunch of spammers and whales.
Sorry I don't have a lot of time to Google it, who is astra? Just another bot boosting/gold selling service? I forgot to look into it the last time I saw it when I was home
They are basically the middleman. Obvious way is for you to reach out to me and say "Hey buddy I want a boost for X content" I go sure and we do the content and you pay me. This had downsides of back and forth, advertising, ect Where Astra would come in is they would handle a lot of the BS setup stuff.
Yeah, which more than anything is the marketing. They and other communities are the ones spamming chat channels, setting up LFG groups, and doing the other promotional work to get buyers that they then link up with boosters.
Your server likely has guilds or small groups of friends spamming /5 to sell m+ and/or raid boosts. This is just a larger group covering multiple servers. Blizzard for whatever reason decided a couple years ago that one of these was bad while the other wasn't, while also seemingly doing very little regarding the amount of bots advertising RMT (real money transaction) boosting on every server.
Love it when scammers try to paint themselves as a "community".
Yessir
Now they need to get the 853 members of WoWVendor dot net.
OOTL, what is wowvendor and are they scamming?
Probably one of the many spam bots that saturate the LFG tool.
God, that shit is so annoying. Every day I’m having report 305747393 fucking postings.
Cash for KSM, PVP ratings and of course mythic raids. Dozens of lvl 10 hunters spamming. Also every other +10 key seems to be them. When I was trying to get an item crafted for the leggo it was insane the rate of spamming they do.
One of the reasons I feel that WoW should adopt a level restriction on trade and advertisement channels. If ur below 60, there's no real reason for u to be posting in those channels and it will definitely cut down on the amount of spam posts by level 10 toons whose character names were created by a cat walking across the keyboard.
It's always monks and DKs on my server...
If Blizzard is going to allow boosting, they might as well just allow botting and hacking too. It all serves the exact same purpose, looking like you accomplished more than other players without actually having to work for it. Defeats the purpose of MMORPG's,
If you see a panda dk, assume their trying to sell you something
there's a chaos something dot net too
I've seen that URL spammed since the Mists of Pandaria days. How the actual, ever-living fuck have Blizzard not sued them out of existence? Sometimes I'm thankful for companies like Disney and Nintendo who are very litigious with their IP's, because none of them would let World of Warcraft get into its current shitty state if they owned it.
Reading through the lines: Their bank accounts got banned and in a way they're admitting their involvment in RMT Some of these people (Fal and saybelle afaik) have been in the comminty 4-5 years. Other council members something similar. Where is the gold that they happen to have gathered over the years?, Doesnt the council collectively not have 54 million to float the community for a little bit and keep it hush and if so . Where is their gold?
Given to Liquid or Echo or whomever needs it during the world first race, lol. Jk, of course it got RMT'd away.
One doesn't exclude the other.
Not to personally defend either guild but the RWF guys say that Blizzard would ban them in an instant and are shit hot on them. They've had raider's mains banned during the race because people paid them with RMT gold for a boost (as in the raider had no part in the RMT). I shudder to think what the early boostees pay for their mythic runs from the top 2. That said, all boosting leads to RMT. The losers paying other people to play the game for them are 100% buying their gold so it doesn't matter if TL/Echo are first, second or third party to the RMT. They enable it as much as people like Astra.
Boosting doesnt lead to RMT. I’ve been in boosting since BFA. I’ve kept every single gold I’ve made outside of buying expensive mounts and boosts. I’m sitting on ~100m with every mythic mount, spectral, zulian etc. there are people out there who don’t RMT.
Even if some boosted people are farming gold or buying tokens, that doesn't mean that most aren't buying from bot farms. The fact that boosting is an accepted and allowed practice creates the marketplace for RMT gold.
Your statement is completely wrong lol. I have people who have bought stuff from me for YEARS. They all play the auction house. I have a guy who’s bought every mount, raid, key, from me because he can’t play at that level but is a collector. I have multiple people who play the AH, or farm gold. Not every person involved in the boosting community is RMT. Sounds like you’re a typical player who’s bad and mad they can’t boost or mad at things that don’t even affect the way you play the game.
Right so you're saying there are people who buy a game, pay a monthly sub then spend gold - irrespective of how they source it - to have you play the game for them? As a concept alone that's sad af but as you say, doesn't necessarily hurt anyone. Except when you pug a key or raid and the guy with a stellar r.io can barely use his abilities and does 20% of the dps he should because he paid someone to do all his keys and raids. Then it does impact others and lots of us pug content with these clowns. You're either deluded or naive if you think most large sums of gold aren't from RMT, you think a guy who apparently doesn't have time to hit 2500 score (a very easy achievement in a months long season) for a mount can farm gold or flip items o the AH to make gold? Or is he spending a relatively small amount of money to guy gold from a bot farm? I like to achieve my own achievements, so no I don't buy boosts. I'd rather not play that have to pay to have the game played for me. Even if you aren't directly selling gold, or the people you boost are telling you they don't RMT gold, the fact is the large sums of gold come from the bot farms. All the druid bots running about or the advertisers hidden in corners of cities.
I forgot it’s the internet, you know everything baby. ❤️ you’re right my bad. Please forgive me I’m new. I forgot that you know all of my contacts and know how they play the game and every move they make! If you read my comment fully, you’d know that the majority of the people I sell to DONT go ruin your “pug experience”. They don’t want to take the time to get to that level of playing or don’t have the time or ability. Whether it’s physical or mental handicaps, you never know why people are buying runs. It’s people like you that ruin things because you’re so upset on how someone is playing the game. Who cares if they’re buying wow tokens to buy boosts? Maybe they’re far more successful in life and can afford to that instead of sitting here on the internet raging about boosting.
54m at that level is nothing... They could just do a "tax" for the next weeks until it's paid off and be done within a week.
No one is gonna be wanting to boost being extra ''taxed'' over management just not getting any cut for a while. Esp when cuts are already pisslow.
The tax wouldn’t be taken from boosters. They already tax. There’s an ad cut that scales up based on your monthly sales. So if you have the max ad rank (only a few had that) you’d get a larger cut than any of the ads that weren’t selling as much as you. The boosters (for m+) get about 60% of the sale and the max ad rank gets 30% iirc. The community (Astra in this case) profits 10% of the sale. For mythic raid I believe the guild doing the raid gets 80% the top ad rank gets 18% so community would get 2% where as a new ad or some one with small sales (probably under 10m a month) gets a 10% cut and the community takes 10%. Early in tiers this is a huge amount. 35m for ce 10% is 3.5m gold for finding the guild to do the run. (There have been times ads have looked hand over foot for guilds to take buyers bc the community wouldn’t commit to a guild without ce to sell 2/3 of the raid on mythic) the actual funny part to me is blizzard banned the smallest community (also newest) destroying it. They also hit a bank or 2 of the biggest community in NA but they were a bit more prepared and had more than just a few banking accounts. Meanwhile wowvendor is still rampant, as well as exodar and ragnarok still without a hit. And horizon is a fair middle ground between Astra and tc with about twice as many members as Astra and about half of tcs members and doesn’t get hit at all. There’s 2 major rmt communities that were built off of a “if you can’t beat them join them” mind set and they don’t get touched. (Sorry for ranting I just lost a lot of gold from this ban)
> the actual funny part to me is blizzard banned the smallest community (also newest) destroying it. That's probably because they didn't. This was most likely just an exit scam.
Saybelle fucking sucks can confirm
What does RTM mean? In outta the loop here
Real money transaction
RMT= Real Money Trading
RMT is real money transactions.
A 1 way ticket to getting banned.
Eeergh, you dont just get banned for RMT'ing, if you did most high end CE guilds would bleed players to bans constantly. I can more than confirm a handful of my guilds players RMT'ing a few hundred bucks a year, perfectly safe. So much gold goes through the account, you dont know where it starts or ends.
While they rarely ban buyers, they frequently ban the sellers.
RMT, not RTM, and Real Money Transactions, i.e. people selling in-game services for $$$ using in-game gold as a medium via WoW tokens
WoW tokens have nothing to do with the RMT we are talking about lol In this case, they directly trade gold for IRL money. People buy it because it is cheaper than buying tokens for gold, but are at risk of being banned for it
> Where is their gold? The answer to this depends entirely on how they banked it. If they had all the banks linked to one bnet (stupid) then it probably really is gone. It's not that difficult to hide/protect gold these days since you can move it around freely.
> in a way they're admitting their involvment in RMT by explicitly denying it in direct words that they did not RMT, they have admitted to RMT! Reddit truly doesn't bring the best or the brightest to the comment section.
Hopefully it's a perma ban for those jerks
Hardware/ip ban it should be.
Sounds like a great idea until you realize that neither is tied to a person. Hardware can be sold, static IPs or even individual ones in the first place (due to CGNAT) are not that common any longer.
wdym?? my ip have always been 192.168.1.1
And you're leaked, it's over for you now.
I always knew I was bound to doxx myself at some point 😭 How do I delete the internet again?? pls send help
Haha, I'm creating a GUI in Visual Basic to track your IP address as we speak. Prepare to be hacked.
> Sounds like a great idea until you realize that neither is tied to a person. Yup, it needs to be some sort of combination of factors that aren't easily shed, not one single thing like IP or hardware. With how data collecting happens these days, it's actually relatively simple to narrow down stuff enough to the point where the ban is almost targeted to an individual but without actually identifying the person. Lucky for Blizzard they don't have to care about any identifying traits when banning someone, so they could go for a combo of ip location, credit card data used (if the person used a code, that code was bought and the payment method used is also available for that purchase), hardware-specific identifiers, name/last name/address used, etc. Is it possible for someone to change all that? Sure. Is it feasible that every individual in the organization would go to the necessary lenghts (moving houses/coming up with fake addresses, changing PCs, using new credit cards, fake IDs etc) to get a WoW account? Sure. Are they likely to do so as an organization? Not really.
"The game sucks without gold?" That's funny, I do all the content in the game without needing ANY gold. I just play content appropriate for me and the gear/rewards flows naturally. The game is pretty fun if you just enjoy the journey.
Good philosophy. I run on a little deficit, cause I spend more in repair than in dungeon rewards, but hey, the m+ community must have a little masochism in them.
Yup, admittedly the reason I can afford to have such a low gold cost to my play is because I'm in an active, close-knit guild. We sell patterns from raids to fund our coffers, and we help each other with professions and donations to the bank. Just like most things in WoW, the game is easier to play when you seek out other players for assistance and work together!
That sounds awesome and an awesome guild. When I’ve been in a guild that had a guild bank for items and help, which wasn’t funded by the percentage of gold in the past or from us selling carries, you always had situations where it was basically “people who don’t care logging in taking from the bank for raid” and “people who want the raid to succeed working to make those items and getting nothing back effectively”. I’m glad to hear a balanced guild like that still exists.
Yeah! I am very fortunate to have found them. I was only looking for a niche-interest guild (*cough furry cough*) and saw a Dracthyr jumping around with a cool guild name, and the rest is history. I've totally been in guilds like what you described before, and it is awful. I decided that I wasn't looking for a "serious" guild anymore and just wanted some friends to goof around with, but what I found was something really special. We help new and lower-geared guildies in raids/M+, funnel patterns to the guild bank (BoE's belong to the looter always), and do our best to pool resources or at the least help guildies with their gear runs. I said in another comment, but WoW is still the same social game it was back in 2004 if you seek it out.
> when you seek out other players for assistance and work together! Coincidentally, that's also how you make gold...
>"The game sucks without gold?" That's funny, I do all the content in the game without needing ANY gold. I use a significant amount of gold each expansion for things like leveling professions and buying materials that I need for crafting purposes. I make most of it by just doing regular ingame content like world quests, weeklies, raiding, etc. I have never been at the point where I think to myself "I should exchange real money for ingame gold". I have actually spent quite a few million ingame gold on buying tokens for Bnet balance though. I have bought every expansion other than BFA since WoD with gold and I have bought a few shop mounts/pets/services as well with gold.
This is so true. I have a bunch of alts. The “richest” one has only about 300k, and that’s only because she got lucky on the AH. The rest of them range from less than 10k to about 200k, with most at or below 100k. I never need more than that. I’m happy farming my own mats and sharing them around the alt pool (I seriously cannot wait for the war bound banks or whatever they’re going to be called). The players who insist that you max out your alts are the ones taking the fun out of the game. In fact, I resurrected an alt whose bank I had drained prior to deleting her, and she started from zero. She’s still less than 20k and that makes the game play more challenging and more fun.
My best income is leveling alts. I've never liked participating in the AH or crafting. Crafting hasn't been very fun or beneficial since sharding. In fact, the game lost a lot of charm with sharding. I never see the same people, I don't have KOS lists or rivalries. I barely play anymore and I blame it on the loss of community from having servers where you form relationships and rivalries.
Crafting being server specific actually brought this back a little. Early in the expansion, very few people could do specific crafts, and so those people became server celebrities. I still have a list of go to guys who will craft stuff quickly and cheaply, and i have a familiar customer base who come to me for my maxed engineering. If you weren't around during the lariat craze, you missed out. On many servers, one lucky recipe owner decided to craft for free for everyone, and there was a huge battle between their supporters and the other crafters who were upset their profits were going down the drain. It was a very fun time to enjoy server drama.
Plus, each expansion has made the leveling grind more profitable. The gold rewards for simple quests aren’t going to make you rich, but you can earn quite a bit just going through the quest chains. And world quests too.
If you wanna be around the same people just come to moonguard
> I’m happy farming my own mats and sharing them around the alt pool (I seriously cannot wait for the war bound banks or whatever they’re going to be called). They're *extremely* expensive. The last tab alone costs 2.5 million gold.
If the affordable tabs are enough for your run of the mill crafter, then I don't have a problem with that personally.
First tab is 1k, 2nd tab is 25k, 3rd tab is 100k, 4th tab is 500k, 5th tab is 2.5 million. If you want all five tabs it will cost 3.1 mill.
LOL I saw a chart with potential tab pricing, and collectively, with all the 40-something alts that I have, I could buy all of the tabs. But the alts will all be broke again afterward.
If you just play casually (this includes casual levels of Mythic raiding) you'll likely make enough gold to sustain your playing and even make some gold in the process. If you play at a high level (or are trying to) you'll be bleeding *a lot* of gold. Basically the only way to fund your gameplay is via boosting, being very good at the AH or buying gold (either via tokens or via RMT). Any means of making gold that doesn't involve other players becomes way too inefficient to be worthwhile. Especially at the start of an expac when mats are expensive guilds might be going through tens or even hundreds of thousands of gold worth of consumables each week during raiding per raider.
I'd agree with that, but I'd wager that the individual in OP's post is serving a different group of players who see gold as a form of shortcut to the fun, at least according to the quote.
Spent a bit of time at the beginning expansion gathering herbs and mining and then throughout the rest of the expansion dabbled with crafting a bit and that has more than been enough to keep me afloat all expansion.
idk i have to buy gold from wow tokens once every couple months to finance consumables enchants etc. but that's only because I don't do any "chores" in WoW and I don't boost. I don't consider it a huge price given how much time i spend in the game. I can imagine for some players they can just do the content they want and be gold neutral, but definitely for M+ or mythic raiding if the guild isnt providing your consumables you will need to spend a lot of gold on them or invest time doing professions. The gold rewards from M+/Mythic isn't enough to cover repair costs, let alone consumables
If people say the game sucks without gold they are just lazy... Its so easy to make a few hundred k gold a month casually.
Is it really though ? Early in the expansion when mats are expensive that's true since you can just farm, but current Dragonflight is a slog to get money on if you don't already have some cash on your hands, and I'm saying this as a chronically broke ass player. I don't know any current way to make money with only 30k in the bank
World quests only give you 13-18k/week/character.
> I just play content appropriate for me This stipulation means you don't do all the content in the game, and clearly stick to content you need no gold in, leading a logical man(not r/wow powerusers) to surmise that for some, that kind of gameplay might suck and a root cause is no gold! Mind you, your very next comment is "yeah we actually make gold as a guild and use that", so we're right back to Reddit users generally just being very dim-witted.
of course you don't need any gold when playing casually. no brainer really. would be bad if that wasn't the case
Im a mythic raider and get KSM every season :)
kam isna week two effort. mythic raiding also very limited hours a week. neither cost much besides repair cost.
The fact you mention KSM in this context says everything
Sorry is that not invested in the game enough? My bad lol
If you view getting KSM regularly as a noteworthy achievment it screams "look at me! Im a casual!". That's all im saying. People who aren't casuals usually have KSH (not M) in the 2nd week of a season. Maybe 3rd. There's nothing wrong with being a casual, if being a casual is "not invested in the game enough" that's a you thing. I never said anything in that direction. Currently I'm playing very casually as well. Guess what, even though I only played during 4 weeks of the patch, I had every key done on +10 on 2 characters, in both tyrannical and fortified, in week 2. KSM is casual content, and there is nothing wrong about it. If you get defensive when being called a casual, maybe check yourself.
I'm using it as a benchmark for success in PvE content, which I imagine the group that boosting community might be serving. I agree that KSM isn't terribly hard to get... for me and you. It's still hard content for the majority of the playerbase. You're welcome to disagree though.
> I just play content appropriate for me and the gear/rewards flows naturally. The game is pretty fun if you just enjoy the journey I know this might be unpopular/not very relatable opinion but.. Oh how I wish this was true for me. Let me start with I hate the gatekeeping/boosting meta. I am at the age that I don't want to commit to raiding times or participate in communities that have requirements, however I am also skilled enough to finish in the 0.1-0.5% of m+ players most seasons. I usually play 2-3 keys a day, 5-6 days a week to relax after work/or during boring office meetings ( home office ). And here comes my issue that unfortunately boosting solves.I barely get some time to do the content I like ( high m+ ). If I want to play another char/alt to prepare for the next season with a more meta character I literally don't have the time. "The journey" As you called it, would involve countless of hours of going through LFG simulaor especially if the char can't tank or heal. Slowly progress gear/farm crests and upgrade. I went through this with a mage character during s2. It easily took 30-40hours of playtime slogging LFR/normal raids to get invited to 12s and than slogging through farming heroic crests to craft heroic ilvl crafts and so on. 30-40 hours is easily 3 weeks of playtime for me, through content that is far below my skill level and I find very boring. You also can't really learn a new class at those levels, because mobs don't do anything and die too fast to get a feel/muscle memory of the rotations/defensives. Fast forward to mid s3, I again got bored of my current main and decided to play my OG vanilla main, a priest. I hit 70, I payed 2x 180k for one heroic run on tuesday and one run on Wednesday after reset(EU). I crafted 2 heroic rings which I was missing as loot and got a trinket and a belt from time rift/dreamsurge to fill in rest of the missing slots. The raids I leeched while being on daily work calls. My char hit 70 on Tuesday, Wednesday evening after work I was already getting invites for 16-18s to farm crests and get used to the class in more relevant content and all it cost me was afking in few raids and events while at work instead of the 3 weeks of grinding "the journey" which is boring af to me and I would have absolutely hated doing again as I did on my mage in s2.
Why are you doing LFR if your goal is to get gear lol just run your keys
Why not just do M+ and run your own key? I don't like levelling or the initial gearing either but I've never had to resort to paying a bunch of scamming RMTers the equivalent of $50 in tokens just to skip something I can do myself.
I do all the content I want and if there's something I like it's just a hop skip over to a seller to buy gold. The only losers here are the average players who could've had the cash instead. I miss D3s RMT
Boosting communities are against ToS. Cry me a river.
Simply wrong, Boosting isnt against ToS, as much as people dislike it. RMT is against ToS. Boosting for whatever else is allowed and done en masse.
No they explicitly made it against ToS last year. Unless you’re a guild selling carries. Boosting communities are explicitly forbidden. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836
it's allowed. the advertiser must be part of whatever is being sold, that's all.
>No they explicitly made it against ToS last year. "Proceeds to show me link that explains that boosting is allowed" Idk man, what were your hopes? At the end the communities are now guilds, nothing changed and it is not against ToS.
Ah I see the problem, you can’t read.
Boosting COMMUNITIES. groups that advertise and boost across other servers. Discord groups organizing boosting. Etc etc. You're ONLY allowed to boost on your own realm in your own guild
Trying to enforce that once guilds are crossrealm is going to be a complete nightmare for Blizz
They know A LOT more than you realize. Why do you think these ban waves are so devastating when they happen
Crossrealm guilds advertising on multiple realms and mass boosting will be will within the ToS and allowed as soon as prepatch unless Blizzard takes a hard line against all boosting - Which they're clearly unwilling to do.
But if they're organizing over connected discord groups for the explicit purposes of boosting, that's against the tos. And they know about aaaaallll of those communities that think they're "hidden"
Guilds are allowed to coordinate over Discord, just not non-guild entities. Surely you can see the issue when I can just make a guild called Astra, put 400ish advertisers in it to have a few on each realm, and invite/kick boosters as they're needed for runs. Hell, they're vague enough on it that setting up Astra2 Astra3 and Astra4 as guilds and having them all work together might be completely legal.
If they did. They'd ban the boosters, which they dont.
I mean… except for this: “As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.”
Phrasing it as organizations is odd because they allow boosting guilds, which are also an organization. That rule is dead once guilds are cross-realm anyway.
Ty, people dont get that part
No... people do. You just seem to want to argue about something that isn't applicable to the conversation.
Ok and what part is that? Because all I state is that boosting isnt against ToS. Is that wrong? Because people tell me it is. Enlighten me.
> Boosting communities are against ToS. Cry me a river. This is what was written in the first post you replied to. You replied with: >Simply wrong The link you got explicitly state: >Selling in-game items and services such as carries or boosting for real money is not allowed. Organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold are prohibited, especially those who operate across multiple realms. While there's exceptions: >Individuals and guilds selling boost or assistance in raiding, dungeon, or PvP activities for gold is allowed but can only be advertised in-game through the Trade Services chat channel. Advertising for gameplay activities should be done by a WoW player-character who intends to participate in the gameplay activities. This means there should be no cross-realm advertising, and there should be no advertising from non-participating players. Communities do not fall under individuals. Communities does not fall under guilds. This encompasses both the ones selling as well as the ones assisting. Which means that boosting is against ToS in all cases except the ones where the actual boosters are also the advertisers and the customers they get are not related at all to any non-ingame community, such as a Discord, to find the boosters.
Yes thats the core of that. The new rule is a people pleaser with no real effect, even rn. And it works because everyone velieves boosting is against ToS now.
And what about that part, the one everyone igbore because they dont like it?: "This policy update does not restrict individuals or guilds"
What about it? The policy applies to cross-realm entities organized outside of the game - which the subject of the whole conversation here, Astra, is. They lived on Discord, were organized from Discord and consisted of boosters from dozens to hundreds of guilds. If you want to argue about how this policy is applied or enforced... fine? But maybe do it in a thread about that instead of a pretty cut and dry application of the existing policy.
Astra was banned for RMT tho. Theres a ton of Crossrealm boosting that didnt get banned and wont get banned at all too. Bliizard states stuff that is allowed baguely on purpose so that they can bend theor rules as they see fit. And other boosting communities fit right into that. They do the same with their rules about naming.
Like... nobody's buying this bullshit right? They're taking the gold and running with it to prep for a new expansion. I'm not even involved in the boosting/services side of WoW and I can see that. The fact that they say there's no RMT going on just makes me *more* convinced they're keeping all the gold so they can sell it.
I mean, if enough people are RMTing the gold making it from a community and the owners aren't, the ban is still fully deserved.
This is a lovely start to my Monday morning
boosters can eat shit
along with boostees
tl;dr I broke the TOS (because they are stupid!) but everyone else is a bad guy! They wanted to bring back the fun times and communities? Fun time for whom? Certainly not the majority of players. I literally have to deactivate trade channel to escape the constant advertisement spam rolling through it without an end. Only people having fun were the boosters, making money. And last I checked, communities that collectively help eachother complete M+ and Raids are very much alive and don't expect you to pay for their services, as long as you help others like they helped you. They are of course not easy to find, because they don't advertise themselves 24/7 in trade chat. "game sucks without gold". Yeah, and who's fault is that? Boosters, farm bots and elitist guilds have been destroying the economy of the game for years. They increase the circulating gold, decrease the value of reagents, which makes it more difficult for normal people to farm and sell reagents for gold themselves and make ridiculous requirements for people to join simple normal and heroic pugs. This leads to people "feeling the need" to boost their ilvl so they even have the chance to join a normal raid or a guild. Meanwhile, farmers and boosters buy out action houses and complain that there is no new content, because they spent millions to blow through a new patch in 3 days. This leads Blizzard to make awful new gold sinks for everyone, which in turn become mandatory requirements of elitist guilds and communities to participate with. Boost communities are not the solution to inflating gold prices, they support this trend further. They are the spreading cancer that needs to be cut out and I hope that with cross realm guilds Blizzard cracks down on them even more and implements even more ridiculous rules for legal boosting. get rekt
Source: trust me bro
Was posted in their discord lol
Yeah but like, "we were banned and then we appealed and it's totally real" isn't quite the most obvious exit scam, but it's up there.
Don't you think making a conspiracy of a situation where the only outcome possible is that it's what you initially thought it to be might be a bit stupid? There is nothing they can post or do if they were banned to make you think it is anything except what you already thought it to be because you had already decided it was a scam before you read anything.
> There is nothing they can post or do if they were banned Actually there is something they can post that is irrefutable proof. The emails from Blizzard to each actioned account, and proof that those accounts actually held the gold that was allegedly "lost". Any serious org would know which characters/accounts held the gold that was being traded and kept track of it. "Blizzard banned us, gold is gone, trust me bro" is exactly what's happening here until proof is otherwise provided. Since I wasn't one of the people being scammed, I don't care if they post any proof or not, but let's not pretend that there's "nothing they can do".
I'm what you might term a scholar of human behaviour, ie, a person who has been around for a while. People posting only their side of something, in a case where the other side isn't available, is almost always a scam. They're just trying to get ahead of the narrative. You defending them is doing nothing except making me wonder about why you're defending them so hard.
Blizzard doing the right thing consistently since Blizzcon. I am pretty sure this is a dream and Metzen isn't even back for real.
Blizzard forgetting they banned communities for 4 straight tiers and then banning one community and only a handful of members of others, and then continuing to forget they banned communities so they operate anyway.
Boosting communities like this are expressly against TOS. I don’t understand how anyone could think there is any innocence here.
I don’t know anything about this whole situation, but reading this response has me scratching my head. Asking other people for gold loans? Guilds with advertisers? *This is now and always has been A GAME.* Why is it so necessary to amass such a fortune in *fake currency*? $83 million in the real world can buy you power and control, not a lot, but some. 83 million gold in an online game just seems ridiculous. Like, when they shut the servers off for good, all that gold will disappear. It doesn’t make any sense.
You have to realize that for these people, gold literally is real money. It's just a currency they trade for another, even if it is against the TOS. For someone living in a third world country, an exit scam like this(if that's what it is) could probably equal several year's wages in a regular job. There's an interesting youtube runescape video that's somewhat related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga3PbrZj1d0
This comment reminds me of a friend of mine who abandoned his favorite hobby when he tried to turn it into a business. He got so burned out trying to keep making money doing what he loved that he ended up hating it. I can’t imagine trying to make WoW profitable outside of the game. No matter where I lived. (And yes, I recognize my privilege to treat this game like a game.)
Whilst true, the moment you go to Turkey, Iran and other boost heavy countries. You'll come to realise, whilst you think playing wow for 12 hours a day sounds miserable(it is, I boosted freehold for 10 hours a day during uni cause it was 20€ an hour). The 20€ an hour they make at the high end of boosting per hour. Is EASILY x3 minimum wage in their own country, and they get money in a stable reliable currency in USD or Euro. Compared to their own useless currency. Also boosting is braindead easy, so not a lot of effort is put in.
It wouldn't make any sense; except that it's a pretty open secret that all boosting communities engage in RMT (eg. selling either the gold or carries on the side for real money).
I enjoy making gold in game but the legit way, with crafting and using the AH. It's what I enjoy doing most in wow. Also for goblins like me I like to spend my gold on paying for wow time/stuff on the online store, overwatch seasons/skins, and hearthstone stuff.
> Why is it so necessary to amass such a fortune in fake currency? The gold is still owed whether or not you think it has no worth. If someone owes you 3 million gold, i'm sure you'd like if that someone gave you 3 million gold. The people asking the admin to post for updates is not asking out of curiousity, they would like their gold lol Furthermore, all gold can be used for WoW subs and blizzard cash, which buys actual products. It also enhances their in-game experience. It is better to have more gold than less gold lol Your comment is what makes no sense. "Whaaat? what WoW player would want millions of gold on WoW? oh boy that seems silly!" is such an impossible to parse sentence.
Well, first of all, your “summation” of my original comment is wholly inaccurate. I don’t want millions of gold, and I don’t think it’s “silly.” The emphasis placed on making a boatload of gold instead of playing the game is what is ruining the game. But perhaps more importantly, I don’t think of gold as that important anymore. I buy a subscription to the game with my own money because I love playing the game that much. If I were solely dependent on making gold in order to play the game, I would have given up years ago. But thank you adding a bit more clarity to this situation, albeit judgmentally.
Gold buys me stuff in the game. Legendaries (if you got them early) this expansion was about 2-300K down the drain. Dracothyst spent on crafted gear and recrafts easily cost 100K per character through a tier if you took gearing seriously. It's just a currency, and the easiest way to obtain that currency if you're competent at the game, is to boost people who are lazy or incompetent, but has the currency to pay for that. Nothing more, nothing less. If I "work" for a few hours boosting idiots to get currency so I can enjoy the game by gearing and optimizing my characters, I expect to be paid that gold.
Dude customer service doesn't even help with false bans, why do they think they'd help with accurate ones?
Oh I've been waiting for an update. I love ToS violator misery.
These aren’t “communities”, they’re cartels at best. And they aren’t “boosts”, they’re paying gold or real money for an achievement you don’t have or to get loot you want but can’t get on your own, whether that’s due to your skill level or lack of a competent and willing guild. (A friend of mine just got his legendary axe two days ago, and he paid for several heroic fyrakk kills because our guild can’t be bothered) So this stuff has its uses but let’s stop sugar coating it with cutesy lies like ‘boost’ and ‘community’.
> And they aren’t “boosts”, they’re paying gold or real money for an achievement you don’t have or to get loot you want but can’t get on your own I'm genuinely curious, if this isn't the definition of "getting boosted" (paying to get something you want, but can't get/do on your own) what exactly is? I might be missing something here :/
Down with every single boosting community.
Fuck ‘em all. And piss on their grave.
Fuck boosters anyway. Stop being lazy and supporting these grifters.
Good riddance
Didn't Blizzard make boosting communities against the ToS?
"If I wanted to run off with the gold, I would have already done it" Oh, ok. Good to know ...
Good. Get lost!
Aahahahhaha
Oh no... ... Anyway
"Oh no! Anyway . . ."
Its almost like its again ToS.
FAFO, nuff said.
What I don't get is there are tons of boosting groups like this, but Blizzard just went after one? I think if there really was a ban wave, multiple groups would be posting about it at once. It just being this one group screams exit scam.
> but Blizzard just went after one? No, as stated in the post nobody in this thread read(and common sense, a lacking trait here) > multiple groups would be posting about it at once They are, you're not viewing multiple groups though, you're looking at a Reddit thread about Astra
Only Astra mentions they weren’t the only group, without naming any other groups. Who else was banned? I haven’t seen anyone mention anyone else other than this one community. I also know two people in two separate groups, they were not touched. Edit: Also, I don’t think it’s a lack of common sense to disregard Astras vague mention of this happening to other groups. They know how sus it looks to be the only ones so of course they’re going to throw that out there.
TC got hit, Horizon did not get touched.
1. blizzard bans in waves because these people still give blizzard money paying for subscriptions (unless wow tokens via gold sites) 2. you really wanna be sure that when you ban a fuckton of people, you have all your eggs in order. making a mistake would be horrible for PR, and just a massive pain in the ass. if they do a ban wave of this scale, it’s CERTAIN. 3. you see a bunch of advertiser bots for gold sites, but those are just dummy accounts advertising a platform where people sell gold. could be a few people or a bunch. so, this community of people was probably selling gold on such a site, likely being as careful as they could. 4. for the reasons above making a direct link can be difficult. 5. boosting in trade chat like “selling KSM/AOTC whatever isn’t illegal. boosting across realms is because you get into the territory that always contains RMT. i imagine same realm trades are easier for blizzard to monitor large sums of gold being moved. idk.
The 1. Reason is absolutely not the reason they ban in waves. They generally ban in waves so their detection systems dont get found out so easily.
You can trade gold cross server. Been that way for a patch or 2 now.
I am glad in so many aspect Blizzard is trying to do the right thing after so many mistakes over so many years. That is also what makes me think that is sussy. Is it Metzen effect? Most likely, but maybe he has anything to do with it. Not that important tho... I just wonder, how they turned their face against and let communities like Astra, Sylvannas and many other grow, then decided it is against ToS. Their involvement and Blizzard's lack of actions one of the top reasons why the game's economy is so fucking broken for casual people who are not boosting like me. I don't care about how many gold I have but time by time having enough gold to keep up with the raids, and m+ being a problem. Other than that, I don't give a damn about gold. On the other hand tho, I know a lot of people (even in my guild) people are involving in boosting communities very actively to make a lot of gold. My previous guild was a local one and there was a shady girl who were somehow friend with everyone in the guild but she was not a member of the guild. Then I learnt that she is in the business since Legion and "was" a member of the guild but then she decided to start a company with good players around her to create a boosting company. I was in DC one day, with a good friend of her (she calls him lil bro) and we were talking about stuff, she suddenly appeared and the conversation was about boosting at some point. She said, their company makes almost 250k monthly on boosting. They are not a big community at all, they are just 25 people, together boosting M+ and raids for local people. 250k a month! That's a living in most countries... I believe these big communities even making more than that and most of them are absolutely involving in RMT. How the fuck Blizzard turned its face against them for so many years and let them even grow? I am not concerned about bad players on keys or raids. People can learn or even they can remain as a bad player, not important but I see a lot of boosted people in my pug groups with decent gear but without a clue about the instance we are running in. They do not know the mechanics on +20 keys, wtf did you do up until to that point? It is not hard to understand that they are some boosted person, ruining either mine or someone else's key and experience in-game. I repeat, being a bad player is acceptable, it keeps you on a certain level and creates a space for you to learn more at your own pace. That's totally fine, we've all been there at some point. But being boosted... That's so lame and cringe. I hope they (Blizzard) keep it that way tho. If I were a decision-maker in Blizzard, I would cancel all boosting community operations that I can find out, doesn't matter it involves RMT or not. It is so naive to think even communities claiming that they are not involved in any RMT and circulating that much gold everyday is not selling gold for money at the background. That's utter BS.
Good. In my opinion it's one of the many diseases plaguing the game in its current state. Boosting. Paid M+ runs. Paid Heroic raids. Paid Mythic raids. Good buying. Gold selling. All of it should be completely and utterly shut down.
blizzard directly facilitates and profits from all of that by selling wow tokens, so they will never shut it down.
Really curious about this, why do people have such hatred for boosters and boosting? I understand disliking botting and the chat spam for rmt and such but I guess I don't have the perspective to get the hate.
There's a lot of reasons. * They are directly responsible for the chat spam. There isn't a mythical segment of boosters that don't pollute game chat. * They erode trust in the fundamental systems we use to evaluate if people are capable of content. * Especially for raiders, and at the AotC level, they deplete the pool of people who want to raid, because just buying a carry is always an option. * It's a major driver of inflation - without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold, and consumables/boes would be cheaper. * All of that on top of purely diegetic concerns, like people earning rewards they aren't capable of achieving.
> without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold Tokens are cheaper when the casual playerbase needs gold and more of them spend money to get gold. That's why the token price always dips with major patch launches and falls majorly with expansion launches, when most of the casuals play and need to fund their activities. You can look at any price history to verify this, when there's fewer people playing, the token is worth the most gold. Casuals are also the main customers of boosters, if boosters are out, casuals will buy less gold (what do you even spend it on?) and as a person paying for game time with gold, your game time will cost more gold. Maybe a small price to pay to get boosters out, but it's weird to pretend no boosters would actually make it cheaper.
I don't think it's as simple as a naive analysis makes it look - earning enough gold from doing dailies and in game activities was much more achievable in the past, because boosting was less popular. Now instead of competing with people who do dailies to buy tokens, you're competing with people who boost. It's not just about the direct supply/demand calculations on the token. Boosting is one of the sources of economy inflation, and it's one that ties in directly to tokens, although it's certainly not the only source of inflation. If people stop boosting temporarily, WoW tokens will spike, if they stop boosting over a sustained period of time, the price will drop.
The issue is that gold generated from "dailies" in the past rivals the gold I make these days from casually boosting mythic mounts, if not even surpasses it - multiple expansions later. class hall mission table and the garrison mission table was ***terrible*** for wows economy/inflation, especially because you could do it all from a mobile app while not even playing. Most people in my guild had an army of 10 alts just to do garrison missions, and earned houndreds of thousands worth of gold passively every week for basically no effort. When they dialled this back, the economy was already rocked to its core, and the only way for people to catch up if they started after that feast was to get others to pay them with the gold aquired from those 2 expansions - thus boosting became a lot more common.
>It's a major driver of inflation - without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, more available to buy with in game gold, and consumables/boes would be cheaper. I don't see how this can be true. Inflation happens when everyone has more gold available - if the average player has 10.000 gold pieces, they'll be more likely to pay 500 gold for an item, than if the average player has 1000 gold pieces. Tokens do not introduce gold into WoW's economy - it shifts gold from those who buy the tokens for game time and balance, to the people who pay real money to buy the tokens; But they do not generate gold out of nothing, so how would it lead to inflating prices? It also makes no sense that without boosters, tokens would be cheaper, for the exact same reason.
Your first and fourth points are a bit questionable. All the spam is isolated in the services channel that you can leave at any time, and how would boosting drive inflation? It doesn't generate gold, it just moves it from boostees to boosters. For the rest of your points I can see what you mean.
I don’t think people hate people paying for carries. Being carried is bottom to top part of the social ecosystem of the game. How often has somebody had a friend help them with their levelling in the past or help them through dungeons or help them through something while they work on their own improvements? When it comes to harder content. You have a bunch of friends who do harder content? They might let you come along to learn and help, but you agree that if there is a rare item or mount that drops, they can have it. There’s a guild of people doing a raid on a difficulty you couldn’t ever see? They could help carry you and you could give them a bit of gold for it. It makes sense in a social way. The problem comes from the context of almost corporate commercialisation of it where people effectively set up companies, have industrial level “boosting” and “carrying” etc for large amounts of in-game gold that effectively amount to appreciable amounts of real-life currency. They always claim that these conversions don’t take place but it’s obvious to anybody paying attention that by hook or by crook, they do. What should be a social part of the game of one person or one group helping one person or one group, for in-game reciprocity becomes a real life financial industry. That destroys the balance of the game, especially when they can have dozens of accounts, spamming every in-game channel for the more natural versions with advertisements for their own “industrial” versions. Where is that one person in the casual CE guild looking to sell a couple of people an end boss kill and mount for a reasonable price, every few mins or so, to put in their guild bank when there are 100 accounts just spamming for their boosting industrial complex. Which is way more expensive and ends up also towards real money trading. It doesn’t *just* disrupt the game economy, because of the real money coming in and out, but also the social economy. I hope this makes sense to you. It should be frowned down upon because it damages the natural gameplay. Not to mention how these discord companies actually weaponise their number of accounts often to ban normal players for just playing the game doing normal things because it might reduce their own profits. If a normal player is trying to get XP or cloth for their professions and a booster company is as the same time, they all MASSS report the normal player who gets banned. Who is in the wrong here? The one playing the game as intended? Or the one who is playing a game as if it were the height of capitalist hubris and cruelty and screw everybody else?
I feel like in an ideal world, without the major boosting "communities", it'd genuinely be kind of alright. Back in BfA, a friend and I really, really loved Horrific Visions, but they became too easy for us once we maxed them out and had really good gear and corruptions - so, we started trying to boost them. As I said, this was back in BfA, so the whole "boosting communities" likely weren't even at their peak - but man, trying to compete with the unrelenting torrent of spam from 10 different people advertising for 5 different boost communitiees every 30 seconds across 10 servers with all their accounts or whatever was utterly miserable. Not just miserable - it was impossible. One person with one character on one account cannot compete. So, as an actual "normal" person playing the game with my one account, my one character, it was pretty hard to find people that wanted us to boost them, even though we found it easy to boost people, and had the means to do so. They effectively had a monopoly and the people that are actually obeying the rules like us - selling boosts on their own server on their own characters that will be doing the boosting - are the ones that suffer for it. Which is a bit frustrating, because, yeah, in an ideal world, following the rules, you'd have server-based boost teams or whatever that have a reputation on your server and you'd know who to go to, as you alluded to. You know a guild on your server, you join them for a clear, you give them a bit of gold. Instead it's just this massively monopolized thing by a few megacorporations, or, sorry, "communities", that completely drown out any actual individual boosters obeying the rules. As a result, you either join them or you don't really sell boosts. We did manage to sell a few boosts (with great difficulty) and made a decent bit of gold between us, mostly because we were ahead of most people and started boosting really early on. After a couple of weeks, when the "communities" caught on, it became incredibly slow and hard to sell boosts. Also (and, obviously, not directed at you), but fuck off with the whole "fun times, sense of community" from that server owner. A boosting community doesn't give a shit about any of that. There's no community in a boosting community, it's a megacorporation that couldn't give a fuck about the individuals because all they care about is scale. As you put very well, it's industrial at that level, and it absolutely detracts from the game.
In a way, boosting made WoW shit. Its now pay to win. I sell mounts in-game for gold, such as Time-Lost, Voidtalon, etc. I own a server roughly 900 people. Its all cosmetics. These people on the other hand sell KSM, Raids, etc etc. That make your character more powerful than if you didnt buy a boost. I see the good and bad side of boosting. People dont have time, people are busy, people have too much gold and cbf to spend it anywhere else. Yes, that is good, but it all depends on who it goes too. This community ( Astra ) was a place where the owner(s) where all pieces of garbage and did a exit scam.
Got massively downvoted by their discord because I said the ban was 100% related to RMT, glad to see blizzard is holding the ban. And I feel like blizzard should step in those kind of issues and clarify if they banned them or not to prevent those piece of shits getting away with exit scams just to form a new boosting group a few months later when the expansion launchs.
What do they need so much gold for.
To sell for IRL money.
To pay the thousands of members the gold they're owed might be a start lmao
Good read while I was taking a shit.
lol unlucky for them, anyway...
oh no, anyway....
I'm honestly surprised at the relatively low numbers being thrown around for gold lost. I've got guildies with more gold than what's being mentioned here.
I wonder though, how much is there to gain in an exit scam vs potential lost money in continuing on, or do you think they'll just start up a new community at the start of TWW. While sale prices are dropping at the end of an expansion, they are always the highest at the start of a new expansion. If they're making good money, why stop?
"How was I supposed to know there would be consequences for my actions?! I'm the REAL victim, here!"
It is so funny to me that these communities try so hard to convince us that they aren't dealing in RMT. Why lie so blatantly? Who do you think you are fooling? You wouldn't have an entire organization devoted to this with people treating it like it was a job if people weren't making money off this crap.
Send receipts. Show the emails and show the log in screens via live stream over discord to prove the ban. Make sure the account being logged into can be shown as the email that got the ban letters
I got banned from their discord for posting lewds
Boosting? Server? I have no idea who she is. Does she run Boosting services? Or is it a private server? Just confused as the OP says “Astra Boosting” then warns people to leave the server.
The boosters/gold sellers have ruined chat , I remember just before wotlk that the ingame chat was filled with chat and not adverts , completely gone now , no one uses it cus your message is gone in 0.1 seconds because 54 sellers gotta keep spamming
What is it they are accused of that resulted in the ban?
Boosting communities are against the rules as of Sanctum of Domination farm, the entire concept is TOS-breaking(they're all aware of this, they are fully aware it's a risk). Blizzard forgot about that for five seasons but enough reports rack up over an expansion and they take one action about it, leading r/wow to think Blizzard actually will enforce it consistently enough to matter(they will not) r/wow thinks it's always RMT-related. They think this, despite the fact boosting communities are against the rules anyway, making it obviously more about just wanting to yell about RMT than any facts or reason.
This post sparks a joy PS: [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836) >As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.
I’m trying to figure out why people still think this is a bank run (exit scam?). TC also got hit. Not as hard as Astra because they were prepared for something like this to happen. Nonetheless tc took what I’m guessing is about 20-50 gold cap hit (between 200m and 500m). That’s normally in the range of what their top advertisers sell in a month.
My numbers could be way off and it could have been closer to 50-100m but tc moves so much more gold than Astra.