“Cheap solutions” is Blizzard’s long-standing problem with addressing behavior issues in WoW. If there is a problem with players boosting for RMT, then the players boosting for RMT need to be addressed and nothing else. Of course, this can only be accomplished with human monitoring. But that costs Blizzard money in payrolling a human being. So, since they can’t possibly afford that, they go for a cheap solution that wrecks the game for non-offending players and is largely ineffective at the same time in terms of stopping the problem players (offending players will always find a way to dodge the cheap solution).
Welcome to Blizzard’s history…
Sigh. Why are corporations and governments always run by morons?
I dont think these changes were intended to stop RMT as much as the action of boosting itself. I mean yes, Blizzard is incredibly cheap with their support staff. But I do think they actually want to stop boosting and its not a side effect.
The first problem with this summary is assuming the goal is to create a likeable and effective platform. The goal is to maximize profits to meet fiscal expectations for those with voting power over the business. Activision-Blizzard is not a game development studio, they are a for-profit business using gaming as revenue.
Don’t expect to see passion in dev work outside of indie players trying to get into the game, and don’t hold on when they inevitably sell to the AAA studio who will consume it and milk it for all it’s worth.
Your question doesn’t make sense as a response to my post. Human monitoring DOES work. But that’s not what Bilzzard has done, which is why I posted what I did.
If the solution given solves the problem how is human monitoring the only solution? You said the only solution was human monitoring. It clearly is not.
I believe Blizzard specifically stated the changes to dungeon mechanics were to stop RMT boosting. Either way, the right solution for either (RMT boosting or boosting in general) is human monitoring of the game.
I understand the profit motivation. But how can a product’s profitability be divorced from its likeability? I stopped paying for WoW after Mists because I didn’t like the game. So Blizzard lost profit because its game wasn’t likeable. While there is always some margin for error, is it not defensible to say that the less likable a game becomes, the less profitable it will become? Is not Classic WoW a testament to this relationship (Blizzard earned profits it would not have earned had it not done Classic)?
Yeah, I’m sticking to my guns here. If WoW wants my money, they will pay attention to the game’s likability. Or they’ll lose my money again.
It’s not uncommon to purchase a recipe that’s perceived as too big to fail. They knew it would take decades to run into the ground before it would stop generating reasonable profit. At which point they’ll either discontinue or sell it to the next highest bidder.
I’m not saying it’s right, it’s just what you expect from a AAA studio at this point in time.
The problem that many people are experiencing (myself included) is that levelers can no longer run dungeons that are even slightly too low for them.
In my case, I tried to run Stockades at lvl 33 in order to finish two green quests I had for the dungeon. Sure, I wouldn’t get xp from the kills, but it would be worth it just to finish the quests and clear them out of my log.
But after the “boosting nerf” I was sapping the xp from the rest of the group so badly that they all bailed after the second pull.
This further impacts the way I’ve been playing with my friends, since we all just got back into BC and re-rolled on a server to start from the ground up. We have 10-or-so lvl spread between us, which means we can no longer run dungeons together, despite the fact that no one is getting “boosted”.
It’s a totally botched attempt to fix a problem that I’m not even a part of.