The dungeon boost leveling meta in Classic WoW has been one of the two largest influences for players to purchase gold from shady RMT websites.
The dungeon boosters themselves are often selling the gold they make providing the service. This mean they’re selling the gold to the player, and getting that same gold back from the player, in an endless cycle which harms the community at large.
Additionally, the dungeon boosting meta makes your in-game boost less attractive since players can just get mage boosted to 58 in a weekend. I don’t personally support the paid boosting service, but this isn’t about my feelings, it’s about business, and mage dungeon boosting is affecting your bottom line.
In TBC, a new mechanic is introduced to channeling AOE effects which splits the total damage after 10 enemies are affected. At first this sounds like it will break the mage dungeon meta, but testers have already theorized it will not.
The use of the spell Flamestrike, whose ground effect is not affected by this AOE damage cap, has allowed mage dungeon testers to continue the same 500 enemy Maraudon pulls they were already providing.
Please introduce a hard cap to damage provided by AOE effects at 20 enemies. After 20 enemies are affected by damage, the 21st and beyond enemy is unaffected by both damage and spell effect (slow) and can approach the mage at full capacity. This would strike a huge blow to the AOE dungeon leveling meta and place boosting dollars back in your pocket, which means a simple code change to TBC Classic is money for you without additional development time needed.
Please go a step further and apply this AOE damage cap to ground effects at a rate of 20 enemies. This will help stymy the protection paladin dungeon leveling meta that is already being hatched as a replacement to mages by players for TBC. It may not stop it entirely, but it will help.
Additionally, there are a number of pathing tricks used in the game which in Blizzard days previous would have been fixed and referred to as “pathing exploits”, even attracting bans for certain players throughout the game’s history. Please fix these. They are not healthy for this game.
Blizzard, if you have the game installed, please walk out to any level 20-30 leveling zone and look around. What do you see? Do you see players leveling? or do you just see bots? With the dungeon leveling meta, the only people out in the real world are bots who are enjoying a no-competition landscape because every real player is in a dungeon, paying the gold they bought from those bots, to boosters who sell that gold back to them.
Some pathing exploits just off the top of my head:
If anyone can think of others, please tell me and I can list them
- Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, left side fountain
- Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, torch stick near Mograine causes evade exploit
- Zul’gurub bridges, enemies cannot reach you on the guard rail even though it’s only a foot off the ground
- Slave Pens first boss, enemies cannot reach you on the wall ledge even though it’s just a few feet off the ground
- Mages can use invisibility and blink to reach the Chess encounter and solo it
Maraudon is not technically a pathing exploit, so changes to the spells themselves are necessary to stop it.
Aside from bots and RMT, mage dungeon leveling has been the biggest bane to the integrity of Classic WoW. Now that we’re in the era of #somechanges, I think we can justify a small edit to this terribly unattractive practice. Allowing something like this makes Blizzard seem like an amateur company who lets cheaters and exploiters run wild on their servers. I hate that feeling of low quality.
Additionally, Sabetha in these comments has suggested an alternate change which is to “make high level characters leech so much XP from low level ones while in a group” so that dungeon boosting is simply not worth it.
PLEASE Blizzard. PLEASE do something about this.