World of Warcraft clamps down on boosting but players doubt it will stop
Blizzard has implemented a new policy that tightens the restrictions on World of Warcraft boosting, in which players help each other clear content and obtain rare items and achievements in exchange for in-game gold.
In a post on the game's forums, community manager Kaivax wrote, «As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.»
According to Kaivax's post, Blizzard will issue warnings, account suspensions, and permanently close any accounts that are found to be a part of a boosting organization, which commonly operate across several servers via a consolidated Discord server.
The new policy specifies that individual players or guilds of players will still be able to use in-game chat to buy or sell «in-game items or activities for in-game currency.» This line in the announcement has led some to point out that the new policy won't eradicate boosting entirely.
Instead, Blizzard is attempting to crack down specifically on the large-scale communities of people that have taken advantage of how purely gold-based transactions don't violate the game's terms of service, and the ability to convert in-game gold to game time (via WoW Tokens) or Battle.net balance to be used on other games and services.
These boosting communities have a surprisingly elaborate process. They hire players to advertise their services on various servers. A buyer contacts them and pays them gold that is then paid to a «bank», or representatives of the boosting community. From there, boosters, who are paid with in-game gold from that bank, take on the job of getting players what they're after. All of this happens across multiple servers and is reported
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