I’ve seen a lot of people state boosting and instance farming are intended targets of the 30 instance/day cap. This is due to the verbiage used in the instance cap post, which states:
Thereafter this post, a secondary post that shed light on a recent ban wave was named:
ACTIONS TAKEN TO ADDRESS EXPLOITATIVE GAMEPLAY
This thread specifically discusses automation/botting:
There is no mention of boosting, instance farming, or even pathing in any way. In fact, the portion in which they describe botting then uses the term exploiting synonymously in the conditional sentence.
Being that there hasn’t been any clarification, this leads to my question:
tldr;
Has anyone received a penalty for boosting, instance farming, or using mob pathing?
I am almost certain exploitative gameplay refers to the bots that were fly hacking. Blizzard doesn’t want to say fly hacking until they fix it so people won’t google how to do it. I have no proof, of course. This is just my opinion.
Lots of armchair devs claiming they know exactly what they meant, though. It’s always conveniently the things they don’t like about the game, AMAZING!
Apparently farming dungeons for gold is bad and unhealthy, and we should all pick up mining/herb and go flood the world zones and camp the already scarce nodes for hours instead, since you know, that’s a lot more healthy and vanilla like.
I would think it’s similar to this as well. I know a lot of people boosting/pathing to AoE and don’t know anyone or haven’t heard of anyone getting the hammer.
This change was about botting. No one got banned for instance farming or boosting. The people for this change would gladly let blizzard limit their playtime to 6 hours per day, because who needs to play that much right?
Haha, vanilla like and healthy should never be side and side. The r14 grind was so much worse in the original launch rip
Fully agreed by the way, while this doesn’t impact me personally I don’t understand why the conversation around this change has devolved into: "you play too much in a way I don’t like, you "
Oh grinding rank 14 for 15 hours a day for 6 months is completely healthy and vanilla like, but farming gnomer/SFK/ stockades all day for boe’s to sell crosses the line. We should all be out farming all the mobs/node spawns in the open world like the bots do, because it’s in the spirit of vanilla to make 5g an hour or less. Says the people with level 120 avatars posting as monks and demon hunters on these forums.
They didn’t ban them because they were using the game mechanics available. So what Blizzard did was change those mechanics to limit them. It’s pretty obvious to me. The forums had a very vocal minority complaining about boosting and instance farming. Then this happens? Not a coincidence for sure…
There was also a large portion of players discussing bots and posting videos of them. What was the factor that catalyzed the change in this multivariate system? It’s hard to say.
Yet in the thread specifically detailing ‘exploitative’ gameplay, they only discuss bots.
Think this is probably accurate, excluding the “vocal minority” part, which nobody knows.
There were a lot of complaints about paid boosting taking over the game and making group formation for leveling dungeons more difficult by making fewer people available to run them as intended. And complaints about LFG chat being flooded with annoying pay for boost advertisements. Some people think such pay to win behavior is disgusting and bad for the game. Paid boosts, like GDKP raids, also fuel the gold buying business, which is responsible for most of the bots everyone is complaining about.
So Blizzard placed some slightly stricter limits on such behavior (in addition to the 5 per hour rule already in place). I think it was a good move.
Regardless, boosting has never been something that blizzard has endorsed. If an update unintentionally kills it, that’s unfortunate, but it’s not something that Blizzard has historically cared about or tried to protect.
I think most are bluffing and just being melodramatic. They can still do what they were doing 6 hours/day and 42 hours/week. Boo hoo, they can now only spend 42 hours a week farming in this way. It’s not much of a limit.
Well maybe they are bluffing. I wasn’t. Posting here as we speak unsubbed. Never had a high level mage either, never boosted anyone. People on here are so dense that they think everyone here is some sock puppet account complaining because they are boosters. Umm, no sir, farming dungeons for fun/gold has ALWAYS been a huge part of the game, boosting is actually quite new on the scale it’s on atm in classic.
If blizzard truly wanted to go after boosting they could have done so in many other ways other than a blanket change that affects everyones gameplay in such a way. You guys are so blind and don’t even understand this issue at all.