Blizzard goes communist

Over the past year in WOW I have spent some time boosting people.  In the beginning I sat in channels advertising, and that was a terrible experience.  It took a long time and I got constant hate messages from people who were outraged that I would do activities in the game for gold.  Actually doing the boosting was generally fine, but the sales part of it was the worst.

Later on I stopped trying to be an entrepreneur and joined a corporation.  Lots of people realized that, just like in real life, you can be drastically more efficient by specializing and organizing.  My boosting group had bankers, managers, salespeople, and actual workers.  I did the actual work and was quite happy with my cut, though I am sure the people doing the awful sales part of the job made more money with less skill required.

Capitalism sneaks into everything, it seems.

At first glance this seems harmless enough - why not let people organize?  The issue became that all those salespeople sat in trade chat constantly blasting out "Get boosted by us, bring gold" messages all day.  Anyone joining the chat would get multiple messages a second posted by these boosting salespeople, and anyone else got drowned out.  The group finder was also infested with them, making it annoying to use for everyone else.  Just like in real life where billboards get in your face, capitalism in WOW has its downsides.  There were ways to avoid this - I had a mod to get rid of all the boosting posts in my interface - but your average new user would not know this.

Blizzard decided that unregulated capitalism like this was bad.  Time to give back some power to the workers!  They banned all large boosting groups like mine in an attempt to stop the endless spam.  It is still fine for someone to pay me to beat a dungeon for them, but operating across multiple servers in a large group is no longer allowed.  Take *that*, capitalist pigs!

This has good consequences, but also bad ones.  The good is that chat channels are going to be way less infested with advertising.  The bad is that people buying boosts are no longer buying from a large group that has a reputation to protect, and which polices the behaviour of its members.  I couldn't screw over somebody when I was boosting them from my group - I would get my gold taken away, and eventually banned.  But if I just find a random person in chat and take their gold, I can just walk away with no consequences.  Blizzard can't and won't enforce me running that person through a dungeon.  

People don't love big companies and their customer service people... but they are a lot better than getting totally scammed with no recourse.  There is an advantage to doing business with someone who cares a lot about public perception.

The other big downside is that people who want to buy boosts are now restricted in who they can buy from.  It used to be that these big communities would work across many servers, so even if you were on a small server you could buy a boost from top players on a big server.  Now you are stuck buying from whoever is on your server, and if nobody there is willing or skilled enough, you are out of luck.  This results in more people ditching the little servers to play on the megaservers, which exacerbates an already troubling trend.

I do find it funny that a big company that is thoroughly entrenched in capitalist ideology would so blatantly strike back against capitalist trends in their games.  Much like in real life, capitalism creates extra problems, but it also solves problems too.  

In any case, there is no way I am going back to sitting in chat begging for customers.  I just have to get used to being poor again.  A natural entrepreneur, I am not.