original tbc had a constant influx of new players. Classic does not
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*cough Recruit a Friend *cough
And as long as we’re talking about just fine, the boost worked just fine and exactly non of the fear mongering done actually came true.
Please friend can you make a list of what changed and what would improve the game for you? 
Hello friend do you know what things would make the game better for you?
if your argument is that a regular person can’t afford $40 for the boost and it really does take 200 hours, that just doesn’t make sense. At $10/hour, you have to work 4 hours of a job (ok, 5 if you gross it up for taxes) to earn 196 hours of game time.
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I would love completely fresh TBC servers with no level boosts.
For me Classic was my TBC waiting room but those boosts really kill the experience. Took people out of the open world for leveling etc but also it GIVES the person a mount and mount training which was one of the first major milestones a character has in the old game.
It’s just all so disappointing. I find myself playing SOM because it has more of the flavor I wanted but TBC is by far my preferred game. It’s my favorite expansion ever.
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I’m just going to say my personal view on how TBCC failed.
The time sink wasn’t as much as people thought it would be, people dungeon spamming at a higher rate which made leveling waaay faster and knocked out rep farming to do heroics. A lv 58 boost, as much as I hate it, hindered the community more so than it improved. I’ve called this out that the boost would cause players to quit because those players, for some reason, thought leveling was slow. It’s not slow at all, the slow part of the game, imo, was getting gear to raid or pvp at end game. But that’s the thing now isn’t it, a “waste of time” to waste time with something else, no? But I don’t view it that way, I think this is just a fun part of the game, the player base changed over the years from enjoying the game to “oh god this is such a chore having to level”.
Pvp servers will always have massive faction imbalances overall. Yes there’s a few out there that are “even” so to speak, but people want to be playing on the dominating faction. That’s just a fact. I haven’t touched a pvp server since transfers where a thing, and honestly, good riddance. No such thing as a “coming ground” just KoS mob death balls. But to me, this didn’t kill the game at all, it’s more of people not wanting to enjoy themselves and view the endgame as a different part of the game compared to the leveling part of the game. And imo, the leveling part of the game is the best part.
All in all, no one really wanted to play how they originally played. People followed guides perfected through pservers. People where more toxic over little things like wanting to actually CC instead of AoE speed running. To me, it’s the player base that killed it, not the game. The game just isn’t up to par with how the current player base plays decade old content that is known.
Edit add on:
I wish I can love TBCC, I really do, but I just can’t. I’m enjoying SoM more so than I am for TBCC. I loved TBC when it came out, but this rerelease just brought out the worst from the player base, but I have a feeling SoM will be the same to when I reach end game.
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Cheating is fun! Playing the game is boring!..I don’t think you really like this game tbh.
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WoW has always had 2 games, leveling and end game, some people(most of them) prefer end game.
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RAF was a referral recruitment method that sped up leveling, VS swiping credit card for blizzard to generate a lvl 58 for you. That’s a pretty major difference.
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This topic is honestly the perfect example of how delusional the average person is on the forums.
The boosts aren’t the reason realms are dying. Realms are dying because new players aren’t playing the game. It’s really that simple. There is no singular reason for why that’s happening, but saying it’s because of boosts is simply a bias against a feature you don’t like, without any evidence that it’s the cause of anything.
Let’s look at the life cycle of the game. First of all, classic was released in 2019. We’re now more than two years in. Classic got a big surge of players from the lock down in 2020. This didn’t happen with TBC. It’s inevitable that players fade away over time. New players have little reason to jump in because there are a lot of other good games out there. The people who dove into classic 2019 are the same people that are most likely to keep playing it and eventually fall of. New players aren’t being replenished.
The players that wanted to test the waters of Classic and TBC have come and went. There aren’t many of them left waiting to dive in. Many potential players have all ready written off the game.
The entire problem is the average forum classic wow player has unreasonable expectations and miss-attributes cause and effect to particular features they have a bias against.
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Yep, just look how much the pop dropped from vanilla classic launch to vanilla Naxx. And then TBC Classic was a subset of that. Were there boosts in vanilla classic?
i am assuming just the in game ‘gold only’ or rmt boosts helped folks blow through levels?
to me, that is what discourages new players…zone into game and then adverts shoved down your throat. sends the message that classic is ‘pay 2 win’…
I think it’s more that WoW classic in general doesn’t attract genuinely new WoW(or MMO RPG in general) players the same way it did back in the day.
The major factor in dead realms goes back to Blizzard’s lack of a gating strategy for the short-lived, onetime explosion of “tourist” players in August-September 2019.
Most dead realms are the ones that were hastily added back then to offload population, but the sheer number of original servers also contributes to overstretching and risks of collapse. It’s the price of a simplistic, short-term solution.
I’ve read TBC and Wrath in the same sentence in a couple places — they don’t have much to do with each other. TBC is the supreme geek’s expansion, reducing participation every tier by design and absolutely layered with min-max opportunities that allow players to segregate themselves. (Ironically, 58 boosts are the only reliable source of new characters. What are lowbies begging for in LFG? Not leveling groups!)
As we know, Wrath is the reverse. But don’t think that just because players aren’t visible in-game or online, they don’t have their ear to the ground about the next expansion, ready to jump back in.
One sided servers have and always will be a thing in MMOs that feature two factions. Its problem is that it’s a flawed and failed system before it is even launched.
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Leveling during TBC was pretty dead. Once people got past leveling their draenei and blood elves, Azeroth was quite empty. How do I know? I was there!
Fastforward to TBC Classic, sure… we have the level boost. That’s one per account. Hardly an impact. We also have dungeon boosting which is still alive and well.
How’s that, now?
Dead and dying realms aren’t dead and dying due to lack of people leveling… they simply lack players. No one is running dungeons or raiding. The auction houses are empty. They don’t even have bots on them. The paid boost had nothing to do with this.
1000%. Also to people I’ve argued with in the past about there ever being a “classic cata”. The 58 boost pretty much negates any chance at there being one. As a HUGE portion of cata is about old world zones being revamped. a 58 boost pretty much eliminates more than half of catacylsm’s content
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The ‘revamp’ (destruction) of the old world in Cata is a reason that blizzard lost millions of subs because it never should’ve happened. I would gladly pay just to skip that garbage ‘content’ even though I don’t usually mind leveling.
Boosting has nothing to do with dying servers. People are so delusional.
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Boosting 100% is the reason servers have died and nearly everyone migrated to the main big servers. When it was just classic we did not have this problem, there was only a select few servers that had issues. (Trust me on this, I was part of that alliance group that stuck it out on skeram).
Now for TBC the server issues are worse than ever, what happened that changed so much? There’s 1 big thing that changed and it was adding the boosts. So many people bought boosts, even people that had max level characters bought them. You’re the one delusional if you think it wasn’t the reason.