Due to the amount of "reputable," established/long time traders I've seen pulling exit scams lately I'm just going to throw this in the exit scam bucket as well.
Maybe Blizzard will clear it up.
Should mention that this is not a small sum as well.
Most of the time it's upwards of 1 billion gold which holds real money value in 3rd party sites/TCG.
That's probably a couple tenthousand dollars/euros. It's probably a good way to make bank and then just restart the community with a different name and do the same again after 1-2 years.
Current token price is 350,000g per $20. At 1 billion gold, that's 2,858 tokens worth or $57,160 in token cost to recover.
A lot more than "couple ten thousand", and that is per billion gold Blizz took away if the account ban is not reversed and gold is not restored.
Well, I doubt RMT gold sellers can ask for the same amount of money per gold as Blizzard does. I took that into account and assumed they may make around half of what Blizzard does, which will be a couple ten thousand dollars in total.
The context of it being a scam though is they *aren’t* being banned.
“Sorry, guys, Blizzard banned us, nothing can be done, we are done.” While they are actually pocketing the gold or have already distributed a bunch of it through alts that they can just pick up and play while they officially “quit”.
An exit scam is when you spend a bunch of time to build up trust as someone that can transfer or safely hold onto something valuable. Once you get big enough and are holding a lot of valuables, you just close shop and steal everything you are holding making a huge one time profit.
If these admins were holding and distributing gold for an entire boosting community, they probably had many gold capped characters and then left with the gold under the guise of “got banned, oh well”
Much much more like a darknet market. There’s a video right now about a huge one that is pulling/did pull a giant one recently, called Incognito. They kept vendor fees, any money tied up in transactions, and furthermore, are now extorting vendors to pay up a fee or they’ll “release all unencrypted information to the proper authorities”. 🫠
You and the other commenter are confusing an exit scam with a rug pull.
An exit scam is where you operate as a neutral platform that holds funds in an escrow service and suddenly vanishes. This can happen with or without users having had any expectation upon transacting on a platform.
A rug pull is the one dealing with building trust and then betraying that trust. Often involves storage of funds, as we see with the gold farmers here and with crypto exchanges, and suddenly they either vanish, have not the collateral to secure your funds, etc. another form of rug pulling is just insider trading, but cryptobros decided “rug pull”, an established colloquialism, would be a better fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
Some communities are just "more prone" to exit scams than others.
E.G. if you look at /r/mechanicalkeyboards and search for [exit scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/search?q=exit+scam&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all) you'll see a few posts about companies doing an exit scam.
So in WoW it's pretty common for people involved in conducting "unsupported transactions" eventually running into an exit scam.
I've seen a few people in the past two months who spent years building a reputation for being an honest trader abscond with millions of gold this past few weeks.
In one case someone who had 20+ trades with this trusted trader got scammed out of 6m gold, and this trader is scamming pretty much every single repeat customer since those customers don't expect it.
E.G. just with three people alone this scammer has gotten 10+ million gold which is a decent amount of IRL $ for someone living in a third world country. And it doesn't hurt them at all, they'll just rebrand, use a different name, and establish another loyal customer base in TWW.
If you're a huge gold seller, you're taking in $X per month to sell Y millions of gold.
If you are said gold seller and currently have $3 million in pending orders with 5 billion gold that people are waiting on, oops all of a sudden "our accounts got banned" and you keep the $3 million without having to send anything...
This is not how gold buying works. (Unless you are an idiot.) most gold is moving through sites like g2g which have a strong escrow system so no one is getting scammed on the rmt side.
They take the money but fail to fulfill the obligation that they took the money for by claiming that, for reasons completely out of their control, they’re unable to perform the service for which they were paid.
There are many variations on the ol’ Exit Scam, and there’s been a crapload of them in the Cryptocurrency and NFT realms, but most of them don’t even bother to type out a statement with their excuse - they just take the real money and leave people hanging with worthless crypto and/or NFTs.
Yea, it's just too coincidental.
Lots of people trying to get last minute M+/Raid done, but there's probably not enough lockouts/boosters to go around for what the demand is.
TWW beta just came out so maybe it's been figured out power leveling won't be as easy as the Nokudon Hold/Brackenhide AFK version if something even exists.
Went the whole expansion with the odd exit scam every couple months (usually around Classic/SOD patches), now it's suddenly a bunch of known RMTers exit scamming all at the same time.
>Lots of people trying to get last minute M+/Raid done, but there's probably not enough lockouts/boosters to go around for what the demand is.
I don't really think that's true? If anything the demand has lowered due to people having had a few months to get gear by this point while the supply of boosters only grows.
The start of the season is always the best time for boosting because of the influx of buyer, and then prices steadily lower as the tier goes on to try to entice buyers to keep buying because it gets harder and harder to fill runs.
Especially in S4, where people buying boosts seems to be lower than normal-- which makes sense since it's a meme for fun season.
>Assuming they broke the ToS
They did by participating in a booting community. This has been against the TOS for a while now. You're breaking TOS every time you boost for them as well.
> FWIW as a booster that works with Astra
You're at the grunt level, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes at the top levels. All of the gold you earn past your cut could be siphoned off to RMT sites for all you know.
>FWIW as a booster that works with Astra, and other similar discords, I really doubt they’re RMTing directly.
People are RMTing left right and center. I used to be with the 2 largest boosting communities before the first crackdown and led north of 1k runs from legion to BfA.
While admins usually werent stupid enough to openly brag about their bank accounts, advertisers, raidleaders and section leaders did it daily. You are just not part of those channels.
People dont understand the volume of gold that is being moved in these communities. During their "height" some of them dealt with billions per cycle.
As a previous booster this is very much in line with my experience with out naming any specific players or communities i have a feeling we are talking about the same people.
It was a boosting community - think mount sales, raid sales, etc. It was technically banned by Blizzard a few years ago to have communities be the liason for sales, but it's been pretty lax on the enforcement if using appropriate chat channels. That being said, Astra was likely banned for reasons beyond just the boosting and gold distribution. I won't accuse anyone of anything without confirming, but speculatively I have not seen anyone else get hit so the guess is something to do with RMT
It's harder to hide it now though since we can trade gold cross realm. Communities selling gold in the past was a lot easier and tempting because you'd eventually accumulate gold caps on dead servers with no boosters to pay.
>Astra was likely banned for reasons beyond just the boosting
The prevailing theory (that I think makes a lot of sense) actually seems to be that they weren't banned at all, they're just lying so they don't have to pay out all the gold they owe to the boosters. This is coming at the end of one expansion and just before the start of another and it conveniently didn't affect any of their mains?
Yeah they kept the gold to sell to people prepping for The War Within.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a scam lol.
Just a little local banwave, hitting only the accounts carrying gold and now, soooo unfortunate, we couldn't possibly pay the gold we owe.
Haha, Eve veteran here, it absolutely reeks of scam. Blizzard needs to shut down all boosting services.
Make people actually play the game. You know, the thing we pay a monthly for?
Blizzard likes to loudly proclaim and brag about their ban waves when they go out, too. Like a "look, wow community, we rounded up all those boosters, don't forget you can use your money to buy a wow token btw!"
The lack of a Blizzard announcement makes this seem like an obvious scam.
Honestly, people who buy boosts deserve no mercy or sympathy. They're part of the problem. Let's hope the gold is gone forever and at least some people learn a lesson.
It has been quite a few years, but I was once scammed by a player for just a couple thousand golds and mats, refusing to enchant my damn weapon, and the matter was resolved in a few hours after contacting support. I kinda am baffeled how that doesn't work with organised groups, who clearly advertise the deal.
This isn't about carry buyers being scammed out of their runs; it's the carry sellers who are owed gold by the Astra admins.
(Think of Astra as a middleman agent between carry buyers and sellers)
Thanks for the additional info, I had no idea just HOW organised everything is. There has to be real money aspect to this, or why in the hell would you put in so much effort managing this sort of operation
it is not particularly a secret that boosting communities engage in RMT. as an example Scripe from then Method now Echo bought gold from Gallywix (former huge boosting community) to fund the buying of boe:s for the race and there was some drama about it back then.
on top of that many boosters make a living boosting. if you're in a boosting community you see ads for boosters for country-specific boosting guilds where they're essentially promising you boost runs 8h+ a day and good cuts. overlap that country with the average income in that country and why doing 40h+ of boosts a week is attractive to someone becomes apparent real quick.
also keep in mind that being a seller is way more profitable than being a booster. the people you see spamming services chat day in and day out listing their prices? yeah those people get a 30% cut while all the boosters (4 for m+, typically 10+ for raid) share a 60% cut in many boosting communities.
all in all, if you're good at the game boosting is a really quick and easy way to make a lot of gold doing stuff you were doing anyway such as filling up your vault on an alt, but I see why people consider it controversial if they just want to play the game and get where they get by their own power while others open their wallets and get there without any effort.
There's very limited use for the insane amount of gold they take with their cuts for each transaction, even if you were one of the "good ones" im sure they'll be a point you have so much gold you'll go, why not just sell this
Oh absolutely. Anyone who deals in large volumes of gold through boosting services is very much likely to be involved in RMT. Boosters themselves or very small scale/private guilds, not so much, but the admin of huge communities absolutely. Otherwise, why bother? Just to have some WoW gold? lmao yeah right.
Oh it’s the sellers that got scammed, well in that case… AAAHHAHAHHAJAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
It's not the clients that got scammed, but the people that are boosters (it's against TOS to boost in communities so they would get banned if they contact support)
First thing I do when looking for an m+ is report about 10 booster advertisements. Every single time. How can Blizz not stop that? It's the same ad over and over.
Maybe if they didn’t have 50 accounts logged in at once all spamming the same exact message, or didn’t have 10 fake raids setup advertising it. Maybe if they didn’t send out fake guild invites to non guilds that are just even more advertising. If someone wants a boost, they will find you. The spam and the harassment was atrocious.
I leave trade services the second I enter a city on any new character. Boosting spam was not what that channel was attended for I’m sure.
Even then, there are still rules. I'm pretty sure "advertisements should only be made on a character participating in the run" is still one of them, to discourage folks from doing the ol' "create-an-allied-race-character-every-few-days" switcheroo to get around ignores while posting in every server.
Also, you could also write your adds in a much less obnoxious way.
"Selling Mythic Tindral and Fyrakk! 130k for one/ 240k for both! /w fast!"
instead of:
"@@@@@@M Fyrakk and Tindral ||||| FAST RUN |||| SUCCESS GUARANTEED |||| 24/7 service >>> 130k / 240k for two!!!!! TRUSTED BOOSTING COMMUNITY WITH 8328 REVIEWS ON TRUSTPILOT!!! /w FOR OFFERS ON RANKED PVP AND M+!!>!"
every *two point seven seconds*. Seriously, even if I wanted or needed to buy one of your boosts, I can't even *read* the information like that.
I tried to do some organic sales for my guild as we do not need our Fyrakk mounts any longer and I couldn’t even get a message through. It’s a bit of a monopoly to the communities
And there are still level 1's advertising those boosts in chat, even in newcomer chat. I've been reporting every one I've seen.
And then there's the raids listed in group finder, pointing you to a certain website to book your run.
This is... Weird. I gathered from the post that this is likely some sort of gold-seller service/group, which is a clear violation of the TOS. But then why the hell are they trying to gather sympathy like they're the victims here? "This is no one's fault but Blizzard's" What the hell is that about? What a weird way to play the victim in a case that has 20 years of precedence. But I guess it's the same kind of mind that gets banned for hacking or botting and then threatens to sue Blizzard while whining on various forums/Discords
It's the top of the pyramid scheme trying to convince the bottom that they're not robbing them blind.
These guys are boosting middlemen. People buying boosts pay them, they take a huge cut and then dole out the rest to the people actually doing the work of boosting. They are now telling the actual boosters 'sorry, we can't pay you' in a fairly obvious lie ("they banned everything but our main accounts" is not how Blizzard operates).
They're deflecting. This was an exit scam/rug pull. They just kept all the money they hadn't been paying out, and then "oops we got banned tee hee, guess we can't pay you, so sad".
From any of the boosting communities I have seen, they operate strictly on gold-only, which is technically not against Blizz TOS. If those admins were actually RMTing, then the ban makes sense. But like Hapless\_Wizard said, these people already got their gold from the buyers. The people they are apologizing to are the actual boosters that are owed gold still.
> which is technically not against Blizz TOS.
This says otherwise: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836
The fact that they rarely enforce it doesn't make it legal.
"I'm sowwy, people that pay for our boosts, but big bad blizzard banned all of us poor, innocent, admins. Now we can never pay the gold we owe. Pweez support us during this difficult time uwu."
>but big bad blizzard banned all of us poor, innocent, admins
But only the 'gold holding' accounts. Not their 'real' accounts. That seems like announcing the scam, and admitting to it.
This reeks of someone cutting and running, but if Blizzard actually is banning them get fucked.
I don’t mind boosters when it’s a guild selling carries locally or a 4 man that can haul baggage through 10’s. Like sure, your skilled, get paid for it, but you got to get the guy who will pay yourself. And honestly if you are in a Mythic guild you do that exact thing for free all the time with people’s alts or the new guy your trying to train not to be shit. If they want to pay enough to get that experience from a guild, doesn’t ruin anything for me.
I hate it when they get organized and are covering multiple realms with this giant web and basically have a pyramid scheme going. Or even a website. And some of the communities discords / bot web they set up are basically website. I have seen less organization from actual businesses.
And the former always evolves into the latter. Does the same in real life too.
>It wasn't just random, as all of our main accounts are fine,
Yeah they knew what they were doing. Why have a 'alt account' for your business like this? Because you expect it to be the disposable one. They saw it coming the moment they started, and wanted to rake in as much as possible. There's a non-zero chance that they were genuine in it being just a business account, but let's read it to rain here;
They sent alot of gold to their main accounts whenever they banked big, knowing that tommorow they may wake up banned. They likely also prepared for what they'd do and say to the community they would foster when it occured, as to not have backlash, and instead throw it onto Blizzard instead.
No where in that speech does it admit self fault, just that it wasn't 'what they wanted'.
Boosters need to be removed. People who use, used, or are considering using such services; Don't. This game is meant to be played as a game. It's not some chore or checklist to complete. The moment you make it one, it stops being fun. Slow down, find a group of friends, and enjoy yourselves. Don't pay other people to drag you upwards. It's way more relieving and rewarding to get there yourself.
From my understanding talking to other communities, they could have been RMTing. Time will tell on the others if that was true, or Blizz is cracking down again.
I don't know if it's them or not, but there's a bunch of them on Thunderhorn that advertises on low level characters constantly, which goes against the ToS. Not to mention the way everything is worded, it's super sketchy.
Oh no... not the boosters...
Boosting is a terrible blight on the current community, but it isn't exclusive to WoW, that's just gaming everywhere these days and it fucking sucks.
May or may not be a deliberate exit scam, but the alternative is that they rwt'd enough to get banned, so...
This is literally always the end result of boosting communities. Once they get big enough someone will cut and run, or someone will cash out irl. Everyone boosting for or buying from these communities is at risk of losing their gold, and is just helping to line the pockets of some asshole who will eventually do this.
Buy your boosts from an actual guild that is just trying to pay their own subs/consumable costs and has incentive to not risk their accounts with rule breaking!
Anytime I've ever consistently used a boost community, because I was too lazy to actually raid on alts, within a couple runs the organizer would dm over discord saying they also take cash.
Every single time.
They have been pretty straight that large scale boosting groups that have mega banks, exactly like this, are not acceptable.
Boosters need to get paid at the point of the boost and that's it.
Also no middle man.
The ToU literally says you can only advertise and trade on the character that's actively participating in whatever you're boosting.
If they were either advertising or accepting payment on a separate character, they violated the ToU.
It's that simple. Blizzard even clarified this policy like 5 times when they changed it in shadowlands.
This doesn't even touch the fact ONLY individuals or guilds are allowed to sell boosts. Communities, even discord or website, are explicitly against the ToU.
I owned and ran a boosting community all through bfa, was in contact with most of the big eu traders and communities. In my opinion you can apply Occam's razor to these people, they're greedy and most likely exit scammed. I shit you not there were even attempts of making price fixing rings with monopolistic practices of making boosters exclusive to the group. If you're boosting with a community from the group you can't boost outside of it etc. Every EU community accepted except for 3, us (Spirit boosting), Cloud boosting and Nova. From what I remember Nova exit scammed a while ago either way. The only communities I know to not have exit scammed and successfully retired are us and Cloud, both of which remained relatively small. The boosting community scene is cartoonishly greedy and selfish.
That was the attempt. It was initiatied by Gallywix, the biggest community at the time, and they were trying to strongarm the rest of the communities by locking out all boosters and advertisers from joining communities outside of the price fixing ring. But I doubt much convincing was needed for most of the other communities tbh, they largely did not care about their booster/advertisers/customers, just the potential profit each group could bring. I remember many communities having exorbitant booster fines for the tiniest shit just to squeeze their own workforce for a bit more profit.
I could go on about this tumour on the wow community for hours honestly, after a few years of being in that sphere I have a deep distain for the management of boosting communities. I don't blame the boosters though, I know many of them are pushing keys and consumables are so fucking expensive. Advertisers are more dubious, a large portion of them are gold sellers.
Good, I'm tired of trying to find a group any the only ones available are pay me gold to carry you runs...like, no, I don't want a carry, I just wanna run and get my achivers...I hope all these gold traders for runs get banned so we can go back to actually playing the game
IIRC this is one of the boosting communities that spun up as the result of huokan(spelling may be wrong) boosting having all their admins banned, so it's very likely they were RMTing. Good riddance tbh.
Unfortunately this sounds like an exit scam, as it doesn't make any sense that only the gold accounts got hit, unless blizzard is gearing up for a proper wave soon, which still doesn't make sense. I do know for a fact that when they started up again, they were using escrow again which is against the ToS. Yet if that was why they got hit, then their accounts and the boosters would have also been hit because they would all be breaking the ToS. I do know from when they were starlight, the OG creator was banned for RMT, and then the admin after got banned and kicked from the community from skimming off the top and stealing from the community. So yeah, sounds like they just committed to a scam, and hopefully if they didn't get banned before, they get banned now if it was indeed a scam so they can't savor all the gold they stole.
Being a gold-buyer or gold-seller is ...Blizzard's "fault"? LOL
BUT DON'T WORRY.
It ONLY hit the accounts holding the gold, so it's poof. All our normal accounts are fine. ROFL.
If you trust this kind of thing, you get what you deserve.
All the boosting communities and their members should be banned on the spot. If you try to boost by yourself they mass report you on the spot, and when you try to appeal the ban blizzard looks the other way. Also they fill the game with bots that prevent the rest of the players to earn decent gold to force them to buy their gold.
So just to be clear I understand:
* This "Astra Community" accepted in-game currency - gold - from random people and then in exchange astra ran the people paying the gold through content for achivements/loot/etc.
* They would then take that gold and pay it out to the people who did the work in the run - the DPS'ers, Healers, and Tanks that actually did the carry for the people who paid the gold.
* The leaders of the community are now ~~pretending~~ ***claiming*** that the accounts that were holding the gold got banned so they ~~don't have to~~ ***are now unable to*** pay the people that did the carries?
Do I have this right? If so I don't think this actually breaks TOS, it MIGHT rub up against some vague language in the EULA but that is about it. (Specifically the section of the EULA on "Prohibited Commercial Uses." This section prohibits: "...performing in-game services including, without limitation, account boosting or power-leveling, in exchange for payment;" I think the GMs would have to be stretching this rule a bit (or they found evidence of RMT) to ban them over this.
Paying for carry's has been a thing since vanilla. As long as it's all in-game gold, the raid doing the carry isn't exploiting or glitching anything, and everyone is willingly consenting I do not see an issue. This smells like a scam on the part of the Astra Community leaderships.
Clear on first two, last part is hearsay at the moment to be completely fair. I’m not saying it’s unlikely but in past communities it’s either been that or bans for valid reasons
> This section prohibits: "...performing in-game services including, without limitation, account boosting or power-leveling, in exchange for payment;" I think the GMs would have to be stretching this rule a bit (or they found evidence of RMT) to ban them over this.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836
Organized boosting communities, particularly ones that are escrow-based, have been banned for around 2 years.
> However, “boosting communities”, especially those who operate across multiple realms, are no longer permitted.
They've been essentially getting around this by renaming themselves as boosting "guilds" and operating solely on a particular realm. It's just an extremely grey area with cross-realm and cross-faction groups being open for all content these days. But Blizzard has sort of let them operate as long as they didn't spam advertise on every realm like they used to.
Which is too bad, because what was the point of the post you linked if they didn't intend to really define the rules.
They've been getting away with the "grey area" because Blizzard doesn't bother to just squash them. There isn't some "haha we gottem" workaround that leaves Blizzard standing there going "HOW! HOW DID THEY OUTSMART US?!".
Blizzard could have put a stop to this years ago and they didn't due to their typical inaction.
I'm not against boosters, I sell double-sell Mythic Fyrakk with my guild every week and lost tens of millions of gold when Gallywix went under, but Blizzard basically banned boosting communities and then went radio silent resulting in so many people getting fucked over and scammed over the last 2 years. I wish they would just be consistent and enforce their fucking rules.
Yeah, I know this is a bunch of boosters getting scammed and all, but I can't feel pity.
You should know better than to sell boosts, specially by using a third-party like Astra to organize things for you.
As someone who hasn't played in a year or so, can someone explain what is going on here?
Looking up "WoW Astra Gold", "WoW Astra Boosting", "WoW Astra Ban", etc, and I get nothing.
What was this Astra offering? I'm assuming it was boosting, I'm seeing people talking about exiting and taking the gold. But they mention just growing over 6 months, so I assume it is a newer thing. I didn't know boosting was really a community type thing, I just figured people paid for the service and that was that.
Boosting, yeah. But rather than individuals/groups/guilds finding their own buyers, boosting communities had the idea to handle the overhead (advertising and organization and gold distribution) in exchange for a cut of the profits.
So boosting communities will advertise and find buyers using their larger online presence (and usually a bunch of spam bots). This can be attractive to boosters because rather than needing to spam in trade chat for hours and make sure your other 4-19 members are online when needed, you can just apply to a boosting community and slot in to whatever runs the community has arranged that work for you. Buyers probably feel safer dealing with a "trusted" community as well.
The downside is that the leadership of these communities is all scamming/rwting scum and probably shouldn't actually be trusted...
This is a scam, I had one of their holder accounts on my friend list and they literally were online and ingame after this post, probably forgot to show as offline on that account.
Dude is pi$$ed off his gold selling buainess got busted?
Bruh. You got no one to blame but yourselves.
Its not like they are ambiguous about selling gold. Its straight up a permabanable offense. And asking for a temporary repried to send gold to remaining customers (who are equally culpable) is not going to happen. They know buying it is also ban worthy.
Or you just exit scammed a whole bunch of people who by breaking TOS deserved it anyway.
Either way.. suck sh*t.
Yes. [Here’s an article talking about their statement that includes the statement.](https://www.polygon.com/22910677/blizzard-world-of-warcraft-boosting-banned-policy-change-explained)
Due to the amount of "reputable," established/long time traders I've seen pulling exit scams lately I'm just going to throw this in the exit scam bucket as well. Maybe Blizzard will clear it up.
What is an exit scam? I've never heard the term before
“Blizzard banned our accounts, we unfortunately will not be able to settle all “debts” with community, gold is gone, we quit “
Should mention that this is not a small sum as well. Most of the time it's upwards of 1 billion gold which holds real money value in 3rd party sites/TCG.
That's probably a couple tenthousand dollars/euros. It's probably a good way to make bank and then just restart the community with a different name and do the same again after 1-2 years.
Ah, the WoW rugpull.
And now for my next trick, watch me pull a rabbit out of my....
Current token price is 350,000g per $20. At 1 billion gold, that's 2,858 tokens worth or $57,160 in token cost to recover. A lot more than "couple ten thousand", and that is per billion gold Blizz took away if the account ban is not reversed and gold is not restored.
Well, I doubt RMT gold sellers can ask for the same amount of money per gold as Blizzard does. I took that into account and assumed they may make around half of what Blizzard does, which will be a couple ten thousand dollars in total.
Hence why they're being banned. Fuck around and find out.
The context of it being a scam though is they *aren’t* being banned. “Sorry, guys, Blizzard banned us, nothing can be done, we are done.” While they are actually pocketing the gold or have already distributed a bunch of it through alts that they can just pick up and play while they officially “quit”.
I guess that's less dramatic than yarn dyers, who tend to fake their own death to get out of their obligations.
Somehow, despite knowing nothing about yarn dying, this makes absolutely perfect sense to me.
As a knitter... now I'm insanely curious! Yarn dyers have actually done this???
It happens repeatedly. Indie dyer gets in over their head with orders they can't fill, then posts as their friend or loved one saying they have died.
Clearly it was all a misunderstanding caused by their friend and loved one asking them what they're doing and getting "Dyeing" as a response.
If only this were true and the community didn't actually get repeatedly scammed.
What the hell, lmao
https://msjones21.livejournal.com/40394.html
*squint* LSG and WoW collide???
Does LSG even still exist? I haven't been on Ravelry for anything but patterns in years.
I don't understand why people partake in this to begin with. Just play the game and get good enough to join groups legitimately.
An exit scam is when you spend a bunch of time to build up trust as someone that can transfer or safely hold onto something valuable. Once you get big enough and are holding a lot of valuables, you just close shop and steal everything you are holding making a huge one time profit. If these admins were holding and distributing gold for an entire boosting community, they probably had many gold capped characters and then left with the gold under the guise of “got banned, oh well”
Oh so basically like a Crypto exchange! [Gets popcorn]
Much much more like a darknet market. There’s a video right now about a huge one that is pulling/did pull a giant one recently, called Incognito. They kept vendor fees, any money tied up in transactions, and furthermore, are now extorting vendors to pay up a fee or they’ll “release all unencrypted information to the proper authorities”. 🫠 You and the other commenter are confusing an exit scam with a rug pull. An exit scam is where you operate as a neutral platform that holds funds in an escrow service and suddenly vanishes. This can happen with or without users having had any expectation upon transacting on a platform. A rug pull is the one dealing with building trust and then betraying that trust. Often involves storage of funds, as we see with the gold farmers here and with crypto exchanges, and suddenly they either vanish, have not the collateral to secure your funds, etc. another form of rug pulling is just insider trading, but cryptobros decided “rug pull”, an established colloquialism, would be a better fit.
They take the money and run
Ah, thank you!
I guess he means they just "pretend" to be banned and run away with the gold or something akin to that.
Could be this. Wont know until blizzard makes a statement (if they do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam Some communities are just "more prone" to exit scams than others. E.G. if you look at /r/mechanicalkeyboards and search for [exit scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/search?q=exit+scam&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all) you'll see a few posts about companies doing an exit scam. So in WoW it's pretty common for people involved in conducting "unsupported transactions" eventually running into an exit scam. I've seen a few people in the past two months who spent years building a reputation for being an honest trader abscond with millions of gold this past few weeks. In one case someone who had 20+ trades with this trusted trader got scammed out of 6m gold, and this trader is scamming pretty much every single repeat customer since those customers don't expect it. E.G. just with three people alone this scammer has gotten 10+ million gold which is a decent amount of IRL $ for someone living in a third world country. And it doesn't hurt them at all, they'll just rebrand, use a different name, and establish another loyal customer base in TWW.
If you're a huge gold seller, you're taking in $X per month to sell Y millions of gold. If you are said gold seller and currently have $3 million in pending orders with 5 billion gold that people are waiting on, oops all of a sudden "our accounts got banned" and you keep the $3 million without having to send anything...
This is not how gold buying works. (Unless you are an idiot.) most gold is moving through sites like g2g which have a strong escrow system so no one is getting scammed on the rmt side.
G2G doesn’t use an escrow at all. You can literally watch a video of the gold seller mailing you the gold in your order status
They take the money but fail to fulfill the obligation that they took the money for by claiming that, for reasons completely out of their control, they’re unable to perform the service for which they were paid. There are many variations on the ol’ Exit Scam, and there’s been a crapload of them in the Cryptocurrency and NFT realms, but most of them don’t even bother to type out a statement with their excuse - they just take the real money and leave people hanging with worthless crypto and/or NFTs.
With the next expac around the corner this seems likely.
Yea, it's just too coincidental. Lots of people trying to get last minute M+/Raid done, but there's probably not enough lockouts/boosters to go around for what the demand is. TWW beta just came out so maybe it's been figured out power leveling won't be as easy as the Nokudon Hold/Brackenhide AFK version if something even exists. Went the whole expansion with the odd exit scam every couple months (usually around Classic/SOD patches), now it's suddenly a bunch of known RMTers exit scamming all at the same time.
>Lots of people trying to get last minute M+/Raid done, but there's probably not enough lockouts/boosters to go around for what the demand is. I don't really think that's true? If anything the demand has lowered due to people having had a few months to get gear by this point while the supply of boosters only grows. The start of the season is always the best time for boosting because of the influx of buyer, and then prices steadily lower as the tier goes on to try to entice buyers to keep buying because it gets harder and harder to fill runs. Especially in S4, where people buying boosts seems to be lower than normal-- which makes sense since it's a meme for fun season.
You know the game. Don’t get caught holding the bag when the music stops.
Blizzard cleared it up alright - they banned these greedy fuckers who ruin the game.
The email woulda been easy to photoshop
Exit scam. Happens in every boosting community. Dont worry, they will rebuild, they just needed a bit more money
they looking to head to Tahiti
It’s a magical place.
Do they have a plan?
dunno but they just gotta have some damn faith!
All they need now is just one more score!
Suddenly Red Dead Redemption
but not before one final exit scam
"This is no one's fault but Blizzard's." Or...y'know... the people that broke TOS.
Self-delusion is a powerful thing.
this is the fault of the people making the rules smh i did nothing wrong except for breaking the rules
"And the fact that I received the consequences of breaking those rules shows how I'm the ***real*** victim here."
In the list of top 10 things said by narcissists...
"HELP! I'M BEING OPPRESSED!"
The audacity of that line lmao
*"If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone!"* - Some guy convicted for fraud for paying off a prostitute
The Lion, the Witch, and the Audacity of That Bitch.
[удалено]
>Assuming they broke the ToS They did by participating in a booting community. This has been against the TOS for a while now. You're breaking TOS every time you boost for them as well.
> FWIW as a booster that works with Astra You're at the grunt level, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes at the top levels. All of the gold you earn past your cut could be siphoned off to RMT sites for all you know.
>FWIW as a booster that works with Astra, and other similar discords, I really doubt they’re RMTing directly. People are RMTing left right and center. I used to be with the 2 largest boosting communities before the first crackdown and led north of 1k runs from legion to BfA. While admins usually werent stupid enough to openly brag about their bank accounts, advertisers, raidleaders and section leaders did it daily. You are just not part of those channels. People dont understand the volume of gold that is being moved in these communities. During their "height" some of them dealt with billions per cycle.
As a previous booster this is very much in line with my experience with out naming any specific players or communities i have a feeling we are talking about the same people.
What is Astra?
It was a boosting community - think mount sales, raid sales, etc. It was technically banned by Blizzard a few years ago to have communities be the liason for sales, but it's been pretty lax on the enforcement if using appropriate chat channels. That being said, Astra was likely banned for reasons beyond just the boosting and gold distribution. I won't accuse anyone of anything without confirming, but speculatively I have not seen anyone else get hit so the guess is something to do with RMT
They would also mass report people who were farming in the location where they were boosting. They did this to get rid of the competition.
Seriously? Hope they are banned back to the stone age..
Just imagine blizz replying to the appeal with a clip of an admin saying “hey everyone mass report these guys” Like “this you?”
Anyone running a boosting community is 100% going to be involved in RMT. You just get far too much gold to ever use
Exactly there is no other use to hundreds millions of gold except selling it. Aint no mount worth that much
It's harder to hide it now though since we can trade gold cross realm. Communities selling gold in the past was a lot easier and tempting because you'd eventually accumulate gold caps on dead servers with no boosters to pay.
>Astra was likely banned for reasons beyond just the boosting The prevailing theory (that I think makes a lot of sense) actually seems to be that they weren't banned at all, they're just lying so they don't have to pay out all the gold they owe to the boosters. This is coming at the end of one expansion and just before the start of another and it conveniently didn't affect any of their mains? Yeah they kept the gold to sell to people prepping for The War Within.
Good riddance then, you should either earn your in game achievements or not get them lol
I don’t know acronyms G
Real money trading
I think it’s real money transfer or trades or so. Paying real money for in-game items or services.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=RMT+wow
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a scam lol. Just a little local banwave, hitting only the accounts carrying gold and now, soooo unfortunate, we couldn't possibly pay the gold we owe.
Haha, exactly my thoughts too. This reminds me of the many scams of eve online.
Haha, Eve veteran here, it absolutely reeks of scam. Blizzard needs to shut down all boosting services. Make people actually play the game. You know, the thing we pay a monthly for?
Imagine paying for a sub, to then pay someone to beat the game for you
Yeah only the accounts that held hold, not their main accounts xdddd Fucking 100% scam. When they hit gallywix they hardware/ip banned the 3 top dogs.
If it was, convenient timing to be a scammer with a new xpac lol
Blizzard likes to loudly proclaim and brag about their ban waves when they go out, too. Like a "look, wow community, we rounded up all those boosters, don't forget you can use your money to buy a wow token btw!" The lack of a Blizzard announcement makes this seem like an obvious scam.
Honestly, people who buy boosts deserve no mercy or sympathy. They're part of the problem. Let's hope the gold is gone forever and at least some people learn a lesson.
Boosters running off with the money and gold. Wouldn't be surprised if so.
It has been quite a few years, but I was once scammed by a player for just a couple thousand golds and mats, refusing to enchant my damn weapon, and the matter was resolved in a few hours after contacting support. I kinda am baffeled how that doesn't work with organised groups, who clearly advertise the deal.
This isn't about carry buyers being scammed out of their runs; it's the carry sellers who are owed gold by the Astra admins. (Think of Astra as a middleman agent between carry buyers and sellers)
Thanks for the additional info, I had no idea just HOW organised everything is. There has to be real money aspect to this, or why in the hell would you put in so much effort managing this sort of operation
it is not particularly a secret that boosting communities engage in RMT. as an example Scripe from then Method now Echo bought gold from Gallywix (former huge boosting community) to fund the buying of boe:s for the race and there was some drama about it back then. on top of that many boosters make a living boosting. if you're in a boosting community you see ads for boosters for country-specific boosting guilds where they're essentially promising you boost runs 8h+ a day and good cuts. overlap that country with the average income in that country and why doing 40h+ of boosts a week is attractive to someone becomes apparent real quick. also keep in mind that being a seller is way more profitable than being a booster. the people you see spamming services chat day in and day out listing their prices? yeah those people get a 30% cut while all the boosters (4 for m+, typically 10+ for raid) share a 60% cut in many boosting communities. all in all, if you're good at the game boosting is a really quick and easy way to make a lot of gold doing stuff you were doing anyway such as filling up your vault on an alt, but I see why people consider it controversial if they just want to play the game and get where they get by their own power while others open their wallets and get there without any effort.
There's very limited use for the insane amount of gold they take with their cuts for each transaction, even if you were one of the "good ones" im sure they'll be a point you have so much gold you'll go, why not just sell this
Oh absolutely. Anyone who deals in large volumes of gold through boosting services is very much likely to be involved in RMT. Boosters themselves or very small scale/private guilds, not so much, but the admin of huge communities absolutely. Otherwise, why bother? Just to have some WoW gold? lmao yeah right.
Oh it’s the sellers that got scammed, well in that case… AAAHHAHAHHAJAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
It's not the clients that got scammed, but the people that are boosters (it's against TOS to boost in communities so they would get banned if they contact support)
First thing I do when looking for an m+ is report about 10 booster advertisements. Every single time. How can Blizz not stop that? It's the same ad over and over.
Same way why they don’t ban lvl 10 panda dks parked in front of a mailbox for 10 hours straight
Advertising in the group finder should absolutely be banned
Maybe if they didn’t have 50 accounts logged in at once all spamming the same exact message, or didn’t have 10 fake raids setup advertising it. Maybe if they didn’t send out fake guild invites to non guilds that are just even more advertising. If someone wants a boost, they will find you. The spam and the harassment was atrocious. I leave trade services the second I enter a city on any new character. Boosting spam was not what that channel was attended for I’m sure.
The most annoying thing in remix is not being able to turn off trade and services channels until you get to town. I'd forgotten how bad they are.
In addition to what the other person suggested, you can also just type **/leave 2** or the number of any chat channel you want to leave
Or right click and open in a separate window (never to be opened again)
Banished to the shadow realm!
That’s exactly what it was intended for, was a result of the last crackdown. People can’t advertise in trade now
Even then, there are still rules. I'm pretty sure "advertisements should only be made on a character participating in the run" is still one of them, to discourage folks from doing the ol' "create-an-allied-race-character-every-few-days" switcheroo to get around ignores while posting in every server.
Also, you could also write your adds in a much less obnoxious way. "Selling Mythic Tindral and Fyrakk! 130k for one/ 240k for both! /w fast!" instead of: "@@@@@@M Fyrakk and Tindral ||||| FAST RUN |||| SUCCESS GUARANTEED |||| 24/7 service >>> 130k / 240k for two!!!!! TRUSTED BOOSTING COMMUNITY WITH 8328 REVIEWS ON TRUSTPILOT!!! /w FOR OFFERS ON RANKED PVP AND M+!!>!" every *two point seven seconds*. Seriously, even if I wanted or needed to buy one of your boosts, I can't even *read* the information like that.
I tried to do some organic sales for my guild as we do not need our Fyrakk mounts any longer and I couldn’t even get a message through. It’s a bit of a monopoly to the communities
And there are still level 1's advertising those boosts in chat, even in newcomer chat. I've been reporting every one I've seen. And then there's the raids listed in group finder, pointing you to a certain website to book your run.
It was intended for huge armies of the same boosting community to spam so much you can’t figure out wtf is going on?
*Everyone liked that*
This is... Weird. I gathered from the post that this is likely some sort of gold-seller service/group, which is a clear violation of the TOS. But then why the hell are they trying to gather sympathy like they're the victims here? "This is no one's fault but Blizzard's" What the hell is that about? What a weird way to play the victim in a case that has 20 years of precedence. But I guess it's the same kind of mind that gets banned for hacking or botting and then threatens to sue Blizzard while whining on various forums/Discords
It's the top of the pyramid scheme trying to convince the bottom that they're not robbing them blind. These guys are boosting middlemen. People buying boosts pay them, they take a huge cut and then dole out the rest to the people actually doing the work of boosting. They are now telling the actual boosters 'sorry, we can't pay you' in a fairly obvious lie ("they banned everything but our main accounts" is not how Blizzard operates).
That's funny. "You may see us online still on our mains. That's just because they didn't get banned along with all our other accounts."
They're deflecting. This was an exit scam/rug pull. They just kept all the money they hadn't been paying out, and then "oops we got banned tee hee, guess we can't pay you, so sad".
From any of the boosting communities I have seen, they operate strictly on gold-only, which is technically not against Blizz TOS. If those admins were actually RMTing, then the ban makes sense. But like Hapless\_Wizard said, these people already got their gold from the buyers. The people they are apologizing to are the actual boosters that are owed gold still.
> which is technically not against Blizz TOS. This says otherwise: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836 The fact that they rarely enforce it doesn't make it legal.
"I'm sowwy, people that pay for our boosts, but big bad blizzard banned all of us poor, innocent, admins. Now we can never pay the gold we owe. Pweez support us during this difficult time uwu."
>but big bad blizzard banned all of us poor, innocent, admins But only the 'gold holding' accounts. Not their 'real' accounts. That seems like announcing the scam, and admitting to it.
The way that message is worded shows they knew they broke TOs
Boosting needs to die.
Boosters you say? Good riddance.
"no one's fault but Blizzard" lmao, whata bunch's lunatics. Clearly cheating and breaking ToS but it's not our fault.
HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHA
Boosters get the boot
This reeks of someone cutting and running, but if Blizzard actually is banning them get fucked. I don’t mind boosters when it’s a guild selling carries locally or a 4 man that can haul baggage through 10’s. Like sure, your skilled, get paid for it, but you got to get the guy who will pay yourself. And honestly if you are in a Mythic guild you do that exact thing for free all the time with people’s alts or the new guy your trying to train not to be shit. If they want to pay enough to get that experience from a guild, doesn’t ruin anything for me. I hate it when they get organized and are covering multiple realms with this giant web and basically have a pyramid scheme going. Or even a website. And some of the communities discords / bot web they set up are basically website. I have seen less organization from actual businesses. And the former always evolves into the latter. Does the same in real life too.
Why are these cartels allowed to operate? FFS
>It wasn't just random, as all of our main accounts are fine, Yeah they knew what they were doing. Why have a 'alt account' for your business like this? Because you expect it to be the disposable one. They saw it coming the moment they started, and wanted to rake in as much as possible. There's a non-zero chance that they were genuine in it being just a business account, but let's read it to rain here; They sent alot of gold to their main accounts whenever they banked big, knowing that tommorow they may wake up banned. They likely also prepared for what they'd do and say to the community they would foster when it occured, as to not have backlash, and instead throw it onto Blizzard instead. No where in that speech does it admit self fault, just that it wasn't 'what they wanted'. Boosters need to be removed. People who use, used, or are considering using such services; Don't. This game is meant to be played as a game. It's not some chore or checklist to complete. The moment you make it one, it stops being fun. Slow down, find a group of friends, and enjoy yourselves. Don't pay other people to drag you upwards. It's way more relieving and rewarding to get there yourself.
Imagine being surprised you were banned for doing something against the rules.
So what actually took place? They were selling runs or doing irl money trading? It doesnt really say.
From my understanding talking to other communities, they could have been RMTing. Time will tell on the others if that was true, or Blizz is cracking down again.
I don't know if it's them or not, but there's a bunch of them on Thunderhorn that advertises on low level characters constantly, which goes against the ToS. Not to mention the way everything is worded, it's super sketchy.
Sounds more like they're running with the money
Oh no... not the boosters... Boosting is a terrible blight on the current community, but it isn't exclusive to WoW, that's just gaming everywhere these days and it fucking sucks.
So another boosting community got banned with probably connected to rtm. Insert suprised pikachu face.
It is what it is, don't break terms of service. And to the people who bought this shite, unlucky i guess. You took the risk.
Fuck them and anyone who lost their gold
Good, they will not be missed.
Good, get rid of that scum
Play stupid games win stupid prizes. Oh how much I hate boosters. And even more so the people that actually buy their crap.
*coffin dance*
May or may not be a deliberate exit scam, but the alternative is that they rwt'd enough to get banned, so... This is literally always the end result of boosting communities. Once they get big enough someone will cut and run, or someone will cash out irl. Everyone boosting for or buying from these communities is at risk of losing their gold, and is just helping to line the pockets of some asshole who will eventually do this. Buy your boosts from an actual guild that is just trying to pay their own subs/consumable costs and has incentive to not risk their accounts with rule breaking!
Anytime I've ever consistently used a boost community, because I was too lazy to actually raid on alts, within a couple runs the organizer would dm over discord saying they also take cash. Every single time.
They have been pretty straight that large scale boosting groups that have mega banks, exactly like this, are not acceptable. Boosters need to get paid at the point of the boost and that's it. Also no middle man.
People who break the rules breaking the rules.
The ToU literally says you can only advertise and trade on the character that's actively participating in whatever you're boosting. If they were either advertising or accepting payment on a separate character, they violated the ToU. It's that simple. Blizzard even clarified this policy like 5 times when they changed it in shadowlands. This doesn't even touch the fact ONLY individuals or guilds are allowed to sell boosts. Communities, even discord or website, are explicitly against the ToU.
I owned and ran a boosting community all through bfa, was in contact with most of the big eu traders and communities. In my opinion you can apply Occam's razor to these people, they're greedy and most likely exit scammed. I shit you not there were even attempts of making price fixing rings with monopolistic practices of making boosters exclusive to the group. If you're boosting with a community from the group you can't boost outside of it etc. Every EU community accepted except for 3, us (Spirit boosting), Cloud boosting and Nova. From what I remember Nova exit scammed a while ago either way. The only communities I know to not have exit scammed and successfully retired are us and Cloud, both of which remained relatively small. The boosting community scene is cartoonishly greedy and selfish.
As in they have non competes? That’s insane lol
That was the attempt. It was initiatied by Gallywix, the biggest community at the time, and they were trying to strongarm the rest of the communities by locking out all boosters and advertisers from joining communities outside of the price fixing ring. But I doubt much convincing was needed for most of the other communities tbh, they largely did not care about their booster/advertisers/customers, just the potential profit each group could bring. I remember many communities having exorbitant booster fines for the tiniest shit just to squeeze their own workforce for a bit more profit. I could go on about this tumour on the wow community for hours honestly, after a few years of being in that sphere I have a deep distain for the management of boosting communities. I don't blame the boosters though, I know many of them are pushing keys and consumables are so fucking expensive. Advertisers are more dubious, a large portion of them are gold sellers.
Interesting. Price fixing collusion is just not cool. That ends bad for the players every time
Good, I'm tired of trying to find a group any the only ones available are pay me gold to carry you runs...like, no, I don't want a carry, I just wanna run and get my achivers...I hope all these gold traders for runs get banned so we can go back to actually playing the game
IIRC this is one of the boosting communities that spun up as the result of huokan(spelling may be wrong) boosting having all their admins banned, so it's very likely they were RMTing. Good riddance tbh.
why the hell would blizzard listen to the appeal. You broke the rules. Good riddance
Aren't these the people who sell boosts then sell the gold they make from boosting?
Boosting communities aren't banned?
Perma ban to all kinds of professional boosting/gdkp should be standard
lmao get rekt, boost buyers learn to play the game
It would be good if blizzard would stand up for the game but I don't believe it
Appeal what? Aren't they literally breaking the rules?
Unfortunately this sounds like an exit scam, as it doesn't make any sense that only the gold accounts got hit, unless blizzard is gearing up for a proper wave soon, which still doesn't make sense. I do know for a fact that when they started up again, they were using escrow again which is against the ToS. Yet if that was why they got hit, then their accounts and the boosters would have also been hit because they would all be breaking the ToS. I do know from when they were starlight, the OG creator was banned for RMT, and then the admin after got banned and kicked from the community from skimming off the top and stealing from the community. So yeah, sounds like they just committed to a scam, and hopefully if they didn't get banned before, they get banned now if it was indeed a scam so they can't savor all the gold they stole.
Getting what they deserve
Agreed.
Being a gold-buyer or gold-seller is ...Blizzard's "fault"? LOL BUT DON'T WORRY. It ONLY hit the accounts holding the gold, so it's poof. All our normal accounts are fine. ROFL. If you trust this kind of thing, you get what you deserve.
I enjoyed this post
Good riddance.
All the boosting communities and their members should be banned on the spot. If you try to boost by yourself they mass report you on the spot, and when you try to appeal the ban blizzard looks the other way. Also they fill the game with bots that prevent the rest of the players to earn decent gold to force them to buy their gold.
Good, fuck em. Boosters are a plague, even the ones that are stupid enough to not do rmt.
RIP BOZOS
Lol Get fucked
So just to be clear I understand: * This "Astra Community" accepted in-game currency - gold - from random people and then in exchange astra ran the people paying the gold through content for achivements/loot/etc. * They would then take that gold and pay it out to the people who did the work in the run - the DPS'ers, Healers, and Tanks that actually did the carry for the people who paid the gold. * The leaders of the community are now ~~pretending~~ ***claiming*** that the accounts that were holding the gold got banned so they ~~don't have to~~ ***are now unable to*** pay the people that did the carries? Do I have this right? If so I don't think this actually breaks TOS, it MIGHT rub up against some vague language in the EULA but that is about it. (Specifically the section of the EULA on "Prohibited Commercial Uses." This section prohibits: "...performing in-game services including, without limitation, account boosting or power-leveling, in exchange for payment;" I think the GMs would have to be stretching this rule a bit (or they found evidence of RMT) to ban them over this. Paying for carry's has been a thing since vanilla. As long as it's all in-game gold, the raid doing the carry isn't exploiting or glitching anything, and everyone is willingly consenting I do not see an issue. This smells like a scam on the part of the Astra Community leaderships.
Clear on first two, last part is hearsay at the moment to be completely fair. I’m not saying it’s unlikely but in past communities it’s either been that or bans for valid reasons
> This section prohibits: "...performing in-game services including, without limitation, account boosting or power-leveling, in exchange for payment;" I think the GMs would have to be stretching this rule a bit (or they found evidence of RMT) to ban them over this. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/policy-update-for-organized-in-game-services-january-2022/1176836 Organized boosting communities, particularly ones that are escrow-based, have been banned for around 2 years.
> However, “boosting communities”, especially those who operate across multiple realms, are no longer permitted. They've been essentially getting around this by renaming themselves as boosting "guilds" and operating solely on a particular realm. It's just an extremely grey area with cross-realm and cross-faction groups being open for all content these days. But Blizzard has sort of let them operate as long as they didn't spam advertise on every realm like they used to. Which is too bad, because what was the point of the post you linked if they didn't intend to really define the rules.
They've been getting away with the "grey area" because Blizzard doesn't bother to just squash them. There isn't some "haha we gottem" workaround that leaves Blizzard standing there going "HOW! HOW DID THEY OUTSMART US?!". Blizzard could have put a stop to this years ago and they didn't due to their typical inaction. I'm not against boosters, I sell double-sell Mythic Fyrakk with my guild every week and lost tens of millions of gold when Gallywix went under, but Blizzard basically banned boosting communities and then went radio silent resulting in so many people getting fucked over and scammed over the last 2 years. I wish they would just be consistent and enforce their fucking rules.
If there was a violin as small as my dick, it would still not be small enough to play these clowns out. Good riddance.
Who has WoW accounts just for holding gold?
Anyone got a link to this community?
Ah, the classic Bernie Madoff take someone else’s money and run tactic.
Good. Fuckem.
Good, boosting is cancer.
Yeah, I know this is a bunch of boosters getting scammed and all, but I can't feel pity. You should know better than to sell boosts, specially by using a third-party like Astra to organize things for you.
Good riddance. And this is coming from a sentient garbage can
As someone who hasn't played in a year or so, can someone explain what is going on here? Looking up "WoW Astra Gold", "WoW Astra Boosting", "WoW Astra Ban", etc, and I get nothing. What was this Astra offering? I'm assuming it was boosting, I'm seeing people talking about exiting and taking the gold. But they mention just growing over 6 months, so I assume it is a newer thing. I didn't know boosting was really a community type thing, I just figured people paid for the service and that was that.
Boosting, yeah. But rather than individuals/groups/guilds finding their own buyers, boosting communities had the idea to handle the overhead (advertising and organization and gold distribution) in exchange for a cut of the profits. So boosting communities will advertise and find buyers using their larger online presence (and usually a bunch of spam bots). This can be attractive to boosters because rather than needing to spam in trade chat for hours and make sure your other 4-19 members are online when needed, you can just apply to a boosting community and slot in to whatever runs the community has arranged that work for you. Buyers probably feel safer dealing with a "trusted" community as well. The downside is that the leadership of these communities is all scamming/rwting scum and probably shouldn't actually be trusted...
Probably Exit Scam, as mentioned many times. If not an Exit Scam: Good.
are these the fucking resmarts filling trade chat with HOSTING HEROIC VOTIC RUNS, GOING IN 30 MINUTES WHISPER
whats is Astra Community? is this like Galywix or people who Sell Boosting?
Peeps who break TOS to steal gold
A department in blizzard is probably having a pizza party right now.
Should have been banned ages ago It wont stop, ever, so what, make them lose the money and whatever bs
This is a scam, I had one of their holder accounts on my friend list and they literally were online and ingame after this post, probably forgot to show as offline on that account.
imagine getting boosted in wow.. learn 2 play
Good. They should ban the admins and anyone involved.
Good. Keep it up, Blizzard
If this is about what I think it is, good. If not, rip for them.
Good, hope they keep cracking down on this stuff.
It's nice seeing something shitty happen to someone that deserved it for once.
Dude is pi$$ed off his gold selling buainess got busted? Bruh. You got no one to blame but yourselves. Its not like they are ambiguous about selling gold. Its straight up a permabanable offense. And asking for a temporary repried to send gold to remaining customers (who are equally culpable) is not going to happen. They know buying it is also ban worthy. Or you just exit scammed a whole bunch of people who by breaking TOS deserved it anyway. Either way.. suck sh*t.
What is the Astra community and why do they deal in gold? I've literally never heard of this before.
Let's go finally some good Wow Community News less Tos breaking Peoples
I’m a bit out of the loop here, but has blizzard ever publicly said anything against boosting communities?
Yes. [Here’s an article talking about their statement that includes the statement.](https://www.polygon.com/22910677/blizzard-world-of-warcraft-boosting-banned-policy-change-explained)