In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW. The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run. Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon. The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.
This pays extremely well. I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game. It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk. The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much. In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.
The booster community is an interesting place. People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far. Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up. They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want. The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups. They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart.
Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot! I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.
I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.
There are downsides to boosting though. The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services. I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable. Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested. However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.
That spam doesn't affect me. Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes. I have it turned off. I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that. For me boosting is all upside. I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities. I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet. The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.
Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else. Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me.
One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money. The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them.
This makes zero sense. If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month. If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month. No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month. All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.
Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it. Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to. If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you. Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.
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