Maybe this change was Blizzard unstated attempt to get people play the game less and be more healthy.
I agree that boosting seems rather exploitative. I refuse to believe skipping most of a game is something the game devs would intentionally put into their game.
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Name checks out.
I guess when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing.
Being powerful enough to help your friends is part of the game. There is an xp limiter in place already, the easy fix to excessive boosting would be to tweak that.
I know and I hope Blizzard does. It wouldn’t stop a high level from entering a dungeon with a lowbie and just clearing their quest requirements.
Yes, but it also shows that the instance cap isn’t targetting boosting per se.
It’s targetting professional boosting, gold sellers, bots and probably top grinding players. I honestly think it’s a panic reaction to the fly-hacking zg bot vid we saw that went viral. But the effect on regular grinding playstyle players cannot be a surprise even to them.
Note on the fly hack vid – dude still went through with it and paid to get boosted from that guy. We have got to stop supporting this behaviour as a player base.
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Definitely a possibility.
I should hope not though, being that there are numerous behaviors that are more prevalent now, but were in vanilla.
i.e. raiding in general, there are way way more people doing so hitting every lock out; the amount of Premades in PvP; the amount of people in bracket stacking discords to control PvP ranking; use of excessive consumes; pre collecting all materials to instant ring AQ; server coordination of world buffs…
It’s a long list and targeting things to change won’t do anything but make the game less and less like vanilla. Starting with mega servers, and cascading to the numerous changes we’ve had thus far.
I think there is a distinct difference between the mechanics of Vanilla, and the Vanilla experience. They’ve alread added things to try and “recreate” the Vanilla experience.
Now I personally don’t think it is remotely possible to recreate the Vanilla Experience, not with 15 years of theory crafting and guides for every raid and dungeon, and starting with patch 1.12. But, really, I don’t care. I did the raids and dungeons in Vanilla (Didn’t finish Naxx then, but very few did.) Now I just wander around and enjoy the old world.
But Classic isn’t Vanilla and, IMO, they do need to make whatever changes are necessary to try and keep it close for the average player. Perhaps this is one of them in addition to helping with bots.
Now I wouldn’t object to them addressing pre-mades, but then again, IMO, instanced PvP was worthless in Vanilla and didn’t start improving until BC.
I’m sure Blizzard knows exactly how many players hit the 30 instance a day cap, and, obviously, they don’t feel that inconveniencing them is an issue.
Maybe, I feel the more the base game itself is changed, the further the experience from how vanilla felt.
As you said we can’t change player behaviors, and changes to the game in an attempt to influence it has further unknown consequences. Such as the population increase exacerbating faction imbalance and open world farming, or removing AV queue time Premades has resulted in a 0% win rate for Alliance in AV, layering to accommodate populations facilitating layer hopping to reset farms or avoid PvP.
While they may have run analytics to determine how many would be impacted, I’m less confident about that - they also conducted analytics that determine they could remove layers, only to add them back a few weeks later when many servers jumped back to massive multi hour queues that they stated were fully unexpected - which shows a failure on their behalf to conduct effective player behavioral analysis.
I think part of the layers issue was the extrodinary circumstances of the pandemic. But I’d be pretty confident that they’d look at impact of something like the instance limit prior to implementation. However, unless they decide to tell us we’ll never know.
But then so long as I can visit the old world, before Cataclysm, I’m a happy camper.
While it definitely impacted population catalyzing longer queues, the mega server implementation always had this risk. For instance, when the AQ event occurs having mega servers may also drive the need for layers. Changes to the games infrastructure always have repercussions.
Yeah - the info we get is generally pretty vague, so we’ll likely never know.