Slow leveling wasn’t interesting to most people as demonstrated by the data that likely drove Blizzard to changing it.
I’d guess 1% or less of the SoD population actually participated in the discovery of anything. Everyone else just looked up where their runes were. Also amusing that you’d say:
When most of the new things in phase 2 aren’t obtainable without help unless you’re near level cap or at level cap because they hid most of the new runes behind higher level content this time. You had to get to level cap to do any discovering in phase 2.
??? how was that not already the case? Spending 20 hours in SM instead of 40 doesn’t change anything about what dungeons people are doing.
Floodgates? To what? More alts raid logging gnomer? We need more end-game content. We don’t need slower leveling.
SoD was never meant to be exclusively for era players. There aren’t many of you. It was meant to attract a wider playerbase and they decided to see how much classic garbage they could shove down our throats before we left. SoD launched with fewer QoL additions than SoM. They tried to classicify the hell out of everything and see how people reacted. They found out. Slow leveling likely cut the number of alts being leveled to max down by an enormous amount in phase 2 compared to phase 1. Now they’re trying to get some people back.
I’m not sure fast leveling will be enough to bring that many back for long, but at least it’ll be there in phase 3 as well if something interesting happens in phase 3.
I’ve never bought a level boost in any form, I’d stop playing if the only options were buy a boost or level slowly yourself. More people in classic probably buy boosting services than people from other versions ever bought boosts from the shop. In either case it speaks to the lack of interest in the leveling process.
WoW tokens are fine but probably don’t make sense in a temporary game mode.