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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

> I'm wondering if someone might be able to give a description of what 'boosting' is, and how it benefits a player?

Bragging rights as far as I can tell.

There are a few games where boosting helps (helped?) you gain higher tier items. In WoW TBC my team would sell spots on our teams. The buyer would stand around in a corner while my 2s/3s partner and I would play 2v3 win maybe 8-9 out of 10 games, and the buyer would then be rewarded with in-game currency used to buy items they wouldn't be able to get on their own. Eventually Blizzard patched the game and changed the rules so that it was not possible to boost without account sharing, so we stopped.

But, as far as I can tell that's usually an exceptional situation, and most of the time it's exactly what you describe - bragging rights that would quickly disappear if you tried to play on your own, because you'd tank your rating.

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to follow up, while blizzard has "cracked" down on real money exchanges a few favored guilds can still pull it off. the method is to charge a large amount of gold in game. this of course if paid out in gold bought from blizzard nets them a lot of real money so it benefits the company.

example, recent highest difficulty full carries, where your character basically just dies at the start of each encounter so you don't screw up the mechanics, was going for more than ten million gold. With blizzard tokens returning about 110k/200k US/EU in gold that adds up unless the player has amassed that. There are end runs on the in game gold with very scripted in game conversations and money exchanged outside of game.

usually the reward is better gear but many do it for the achievements; these have become a cancer in my opinion in the gaming world; to special items like mounts and titles only obtainable to those who can do the content and do it in a timely manner.

Oh to be clear, we only ever did this for arenas, and only charged in-game gold. But even that became impossible when they changed the ranking system. I never did anything but arenas so I can't comment on pulling someone through raids.

We couldn't pull anyone past top 5% or so 2v3, so mounts were infeasible.

I totally believe that a lot of people would be doing that for real money though.

There are other uses besides bragging rights. For example there were quite a few season where if you were in the silver/bronze tier in Overwatch. You'd be eternally paired with people who wouldn't even try to work together as a team. This issue was compounded by what I saw as a bug in how healing classes were awarded for their achievements in matches wrt ranking up. If you had a team of good friends you could rank out of it but without a boost competitive lost it's flair for me. I had a friend play my account with some of his buddies who were really good to get me into gold/plat and the public groups for competitive were much more rewarding. I'm not sure if Blizzard has fixed this ELO hell situation but, that's one anecdotal reason for 'boosting' besides bragging rights.

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