Yep, which is why they needed to stay firm and change as little as possible, before the players ruined the expansion.
Too late.
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The players were going to ruin it either way. That’s inevitable in a solved game. I can’t walk through SW without getting a few WTB STOCK BOOST tells. You just can’t replicate the first time experience of millions and millions of new players. There’s nothing to figure out, there’s nothing to test…there’s the right way and the wrong way and players are pretty clever when it comes to efficiency.
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This implies if boosts did not exist the problem wouldn’t exist.
I’m going to take “things that would never happen” for 500
The boost was 100% a factor in entire pvp servers dogpiling onto one faction (horde) with the perceived better racials. People could reroll without paying the cost of spending dozens of hours re-levelling.
That said, the horse has already long since bolted, and removing the boost will achieve nothing at this point.
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How?
1). Boost is limited to one.
2). You can level to 60 in less then 24 hours in TBC classic. Most people did exactly this during pre patch.
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Many people I know (myself included) have multiple accounts. Perhaps even the majority of people I know. Many people I know (not including myself) have bought 2 or more boosts. Buying a boost on a new account allowed you to start over on a new faction without having to lose your characters on the other faction - if you didn’t want to pay for 2 subs, you could just let the other account’s sub lapse. It wasn’t good for faction population health, but the service was there, so might as well use it.
I’ve seen several people on these forums state that they rerolled from horde to alliance at the start of TBC in order to have better battleground queues (poor them). The boost made this easier to do. I can go dredge up the posts if you really want me to but I’d rather not.
From what I’ve heard and seen (anecdotally, yes), the majority of people that did change factions went the other way.
I’m sure you can. But for a lot of us, the price of a boost is worth a far, far less than 24 hours of our time, especially doing something we didn’t want to do, and thus their existence dramatically lowered the barrier to rerolling.
That isn’t an explanation; however.
Let’s say the boosts didn’t exist - are you saying you would have stayed on a dying faction while simultaneously still playing the game?
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Somehow WoW classic survived 2 years without any major pvp imbalance, even though Horde had even more buffed racials than in TBC, such as 25% orc pvp stun resist. Strange that soon after TBCs launch, in which the 58 boost was heavily marketed and advertised, Horde imbalance went from bad to worse.
I’m saying people would have been more likely to just stay alliance, if that’s where their toons were, than if they were offered an easy way to reroll that let them bypass literally dozens of hours of re-levelling. Pretty simple reasoning.
There’s going to be a 68 boost, good luck stopping it
Not really interested in trying tbh. And it doesn’t really hit the same in Wrath anyway. People already have their established arena teams/partners/raid groups from TBC, and Alliance probably has the advantage over horde with racials anyway.
Wrath’s gonna be screwed up for different reasons; just look at the dumpster fire that is the servers we’re going into it with. And OCE pvp will continue to be literally unplayable if they don’t merge us.
And then not play because there isn’t enough alliance…
There was plenty of alliance at the end of vanilla lol wot
WoW had over 200% more population at the original TBC launch than today. (And that comparison includes retail).
If you increased the classic player base by 200% - server issues would go away.
Even if you kept the imbalance.
Let’s do a simple math problem to illustrate why that is irrelevant.
Let’s say 90% of people play horde.
Only 10% alliance.
In 2006 - there was roughly 8 million subs.
This means there would be 800,000 people playing alliance - enough players to fuel multiple servers regardless of low popularity.
In classic - there is roughly 484k daily active players.
That means only 48,000 alliance players. Enough to only fuel a handful of servers.
Just because you didn’t feel these problems in TBC due to sheer population size - doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
TBC still had dead servers, even in its heyday.
People were transferring to bigger servers to make sure they had the best chance to get groups and guilds as much as today.
Only difference is some guilds going for world firsts transferred to low pop servers because of issues with ping.
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Yes. I know this.
My figures were to just point out “dead servers” would be more prominent today than in 2006 - even if faction balance was identical.
if classic started out with double the population then people would demand 81 servers instead of 41 and we would have 40 dead servers instead of 20.
The overall player base is older, more experienced and willing to spend 30 bucks to not suffer the LF1M Tank syndrome on a low pop server.
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I hope you’re not serious. New players aren’t coming to the game because it’s an old game that take a lot of time. Most people don’t really want that.
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That too.
100% agreed.