Forget boosts, can we get RAF?

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Since everyone wants to complain about boosts being a thing, why don’t we instead scrap that idea and implement something that actually existed back in TBC?

Recruit-A-Friend

Oh you think a one time boost to 58 per account is bad? Lol that’s not even remotely close as to what RAF had to offer (again, in TBC).

We’re talking:

  1. Triple experience. Yeah. Triple. 300%. For both you and “your friend”. “Your friend” being the second account you recruited yourself to powerlevel insanely quick.

  2. Grant a level. Lol. I know the triple experience spooked ya, but take a gander at this. Also, for every two levels of experience your friend earns, they can grant one level of experience to one of your lower-level characters. L. O. L. So for every two characters you and, again, “your friend”, leveled up to 60, you got a free 60.

Let that sink in. The 300% extra experience gain, combined with the (roughly?) 30% experience nerf from 1-60, combined with the game knowledge people have nowadays (boosting, AoE farming, etc), and you have a recipe for insanely fast leveling.

And you want to know the best part? If you set it up right, you could chain these accounts together. Your main account (A) recruits B, and they are linked. B then recruits C, who are linked as well. C then recruits D, who is linked. So now because D is grouped with C, they both get triple experience. Since C is grouped with B, they both get triple experience. And finally, B is grouped with A, so they both get triple experience.

What does this give us? Four accounts, all in the same group, all getting triple experience, while getting boosted in dungeons. And this was in the game during TBC!

Oh not to mention other perks like being able to summon each other anywhere in the world on a 30 minute cooldown (might be misremembering and it was an hour). Still. Lmfao. You could recruit a friend and park them anywhere you wanted (create a level 1, have your main RAF summon them to say Naxx, and now you always have a free summon to Naxx available whenever you want).

Oh yeah, and whenever “your friend” purchased their first month worth of gametime, you got a month free too. So if you were planning on buying gametime, might as well buy it on your referred account because now both accounts have a month of gametime. Not good enough? How about a dope epic mount for free after they get two months (which, again, really only costs you one)? Swift Zhevra mount originally came from this.

Now please. Please tell me how one (1) singular level 58 boost is somehow worse than this. Because I am all for blizzard removing the 58 boost if it means we get RaF back in all its glory.

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The anti-boosters don’t like to acknowledge how much more busted RAF was.

If they did announce plans for RAF the forums would probably be in an uproar of no blizzard please, you are killing classic and making it retail.

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I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t complain about the system being brought back, since, you know, the point of Classic is getting to experience an authentic recreation of WoW’s early years. I would definitely want it to be tuned more for modern times in the min/max era we live in, but being that Blizzard is implementing a paid level 58 character for the BC launch, I’m not sure they’re very capable of a reasonable implementation.

By the way. This RAF system came out just a couple months before the launch of WotLK, so it wasn’t meant as a way of entering BC content, it was meant as a way of entering WRATH content.

We didn’t have a system like this at the launch of BC and we shouldn’t have one now.

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the point of Classic is getting to experience an authentic recreation of WoW’s early years

I would definitely want it to be tuned more for modern times

Can’t have it both ways there bud. If you’re against boosts, you are pro-RaF, in it’s original form.

By the way. This RAF system came out just a couple months before the launch of WotLK, so it wasn’t meant as a way of entering BC content, it was meant as a way of entering WRATH content.

Not relevant. 2.4.3 came out in July 2008, with WotLK being released November of that same year. We’re using 2.4.3 for everything else, why not RaF?

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You can, actually. I didn’t say anything about wanting the game to be ‘no changes’. From the first day the game was announced at Blizzcon 2018, Blizzard’s stance has been that they wanted to offer a similar gameplay experience to what players had back in the day. And that absolutely means that some stuff has had to be tuned for modern times.

Similar gameplay experience =/= no changes

People back then weren’t aware of some things that were highly exploitable, not only because WoW was a new game, but also because we weren’t to a point yet where there were guides for everything in the game. Look at the world buff meta, for example – That was absolutely not a thing back in the day, and leaving those systems in the game without changes has led to a very different gameplay experience for people today than before.

Let’s not pretend here. You obviously don’t seem to care if the game has a high level of parity in experience today as it did back then, and that’s fine; but what exactly is your argument here? Should we keep things solidly based on how they used to be or should we not? I’m assuming that you’re in favor of the 58 level boost after all.

The RaF system was literally meant specifically for getting people ready for Wrath content and there’s absolutely no reason why it would make any sense to lump that in to an era it wasn’t meant for if it were ever to be brought back.

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So then it’s just the same if I asked that the xp be turned up to 400% or that that system was replaced then by let’s say a one time character boost?

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I’m obviously in favor of the 58 boost and think everyone who complains about it is, to be frank, being unreasonably dense.

You can argue semantics all you want, and I even agree with you to an extent on the purpose behind RaF, but there’s no denying: it was in the game during TBC. That’s a fact.

One level 58 boost somehow ruins the integrity of classic in most anti-boosters mind, yet in my mind not implementing RaF ruins the integrity of TBC classic.

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Also RAF was 100% exploited pretty heavily when it came out. I guess your argument is just that it will be more? That’s not that great of a point but sure we’ll go with it.

The point is in all these threads people are asking for boosts to be removed but just ignore the fact that RAF existed. I’ve said a few times in these threads why aren’t anti boosters advocating for RAF to replace it. If you’re really against it you should be callin for original RAF.

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Honestly don’t really understand what you’re asking, but I’d be happier with a 400% EXP boost if it were capped at 58 and only usable on a single character. I’m pretty much always going to be much more in favor of people having to do SOMETHING to level rather than just buying a level 58 character.

You’re conveniently dodging a lot of what I said. Maybe keep the discussion alive by addressing some arguments I made, I think they were pretty good.

Where were the semantics?

You know what else was ‘in the game during TBC’? The Wrath pre-patch. So should that be available at TBC’s launch too? I’m not really following your reasoning here.

That’s perfectly fair. So maybe when we’re about to go into Wrath, the system that was intended to help with that should be brought back. That’s not something we’re disagreeing on.

Absolutely I think it would be exploited more. Are you aware of the way people have exploited stuff that they didn’t change in Classic? It’s made for a dramatically different experience, which is specifically what Blizzard was trying to avoid from happening.

Honestly, that’s a different discussion entirely. If we’re talking about a level 58 character boost, talk about that. Checkmating people who weren’t aware of the RaF system might be satisfying, but it’s not actually an argument in the discussion about THIS boost we’re talking about now. It’s more of a judgement of peoples’ knowledge about the game.

RaF existed, but it existed for the sole purpose of speeding people into Wrath content. I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill you choose to die on, there are much better arguments for the boost than desperately trying to make it seem like the pre-Wrath EXP boost should be brought back for pre-BC for some reason. xD

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You know what else was ‘in the game during TBC’? The Wrath pre-patch. So should that be available at TBC’s launch too? I’m not really following your reasoning here.

Am I talking about the wrath pre-patch at all?

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What you said was “it was in the game during TBC. That’s a fact.”

All I could assume was that the argument you were making was that anything that happened from the beginning to the end of WoW’s BC era should be done today in BC Classic.

I’m asking if that blanket logic applies to the Wrath pre-patch, which, just like RaF, did indeed exist during BC. Or was that point you made not actually a point you wanted to make?

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So people who have no idea of the authentic TBC experience are trying to talk as if they know the original TBC experience, and are trying to aggressively tell veterans what it was like.

And we should just ignore that? Nah, clap back time.

Also RAF is a counter to their arguements and claims about how things work or are in-authentic.

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See my point at the 400% was to point out that you were changing the argument by saying less originally and I was saying well it goes both ways. I’m not trying to be combative here but that isn’t some kind of compromise. If they did RAF it should be the full 90 days up to 70 with 300%, anything different and we can go both ways. I can argue for longer or more xp and you could do the opposite. The point is really the best “win win” or “lose lose” is to leave it in changed.

I’m also not trying to say “I gotcha” to people who might not know RAF was in TBC but I have brought it up in other threads and it tends to be ignored.

I think you seem pretty reasonable and I’m just trying to point out to others that I think a 1 time (and this is really what it should be) boost is actually not terrible because I know how exploited RAF can be especially once people did it in much later expansions.

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Also RAF came with the sunwell patch so pre patches are kind of a different comparison. But we are using the 2.4.3 patch for better and worse so we should probably hold things to it.

Maybe an argument could be made to hold off on something like RAF or boosts but realistically we know for blizzard the grab is always at the start of patches and that works the best for them. There is no changing that or arguing against that because more than our opinions is their bottom line and what works for them so the time line for this would HAVE to be at the start.

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I mean, do you follow this stuff at all? Or are you just not aware of the way changes are being made to the game to preserve the original experience? Like the world buff meta. Was that a thing in Vanilla, or is it a product of the times we live in?

I really don’t understand what you’re saying here – Do you think someone needs to be a ‘veteran’ to know that things actually have to be tuned to preserve a similar experience?

I mean, it’s pretty simple. You couldn’t buy a level 58 character back then. And even in comparison with RaF, that system was launched just a few months before Wrath released, and a handful of months after BC was essentially over.

Like I said, it’s a nice “gotcha” but it really isn’t an argument at all.

I mean, there’s a pretty decent handful of things that absolutely have to be changed to maintain the whole point of Classic, which is getting a similar experience to back in the day. If players back then were as good at exploiting things as they are now, they would’ve been patched back in the day. Even stepping back from the speculation though (because you could always say we can’t know what they would’ve done), ‘no changes’ has turned out to be a really terrible idea, and it’s one that Blizzard has learned from if you look at their philosophy on changes for BC.

Either way, the world buff meta didn’t exist back in the day, and releasing the game without that part being tuned for modern times has resulted in a vastly different experience. An understanding that we must have in this discussion is that the arguments against the 58 boost are NOT inherently a demand for no changes. Only people who don’t know what they’re talking about would ask for no changes.

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If their entire argument is #nochanges then they aren’t worth interacting with anyway since you know what happened back then? Changes.

They claim things like it invalidated the leveling experience, well so did RAF. Bots will love RAF way more than a boost, so on and so forth.

Just because it had a different mechanic for doing so doesn’t mean the outcome was significantly different.

So yes, it is a solid argument because it counters all their justifications in one fell swoop,

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But aT LEasT You hAD To PlaY THe gaME

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An important distinction here, people who demand no changes are not people who dislike the level boost in principle. There may be a lot of overlap in those groups of people, but they are absolutely not the same.

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Ya I’m for changes for sure, I don’t want to have to go LW on my alts too if I plan to play them. But we can’t chop something down heavily like RAF to a cap of 58 ( I know it was just an example you used). I don’t think the boost is an amazing idea but I understand blizzard is looking for cash but the game isn’t free, so if the one time boost is what they want in exchange for no RAF that would be much worse than sure do it.

We can have changes for sure but the issue is we have to give and take, meaning just saying no boosts or RAF is not really a comprise. The lack of people asking for RAF makes the boost really the compromise here so there is no lesser ground because that is it.

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