Im not suggesting that at all. Classic was a joke too with all the shenanigans that went on over there.
Boosts happen because they can - no one cares, not blizzard, not the players. Everything youre talking about is just proof Brack was right all along.
There have been blue posts here that claimed blizzard had banned tens of thousands of accounts for selling gold
and there has been video proof that their claims are bull. Just like that whole “banning frees up the name and for some reason, the bots choose to use the same exact name”. Guess they also someone get the same exact level progression and items they had before despite those being world drops as well.
They say what they say for PR and do nothing.
I wouldn’t say bots abused the boost as much as people say. The gear you start out with is complete garbage so anything a bot does is gonna be limited to just node gathering. Which Blizzard could easily fix by making nodes more common and spawn faster. Plus majority of all that gold selling is gonna be from level boosting and not node farming since you’re gonna be making more gold per hour boosting than node farming. Which Blizzard could easily fix by making leveling easier and not take 100 hours to get to max level.
The thing with WoW leveling in Vanilla and TBC is it was deigned so it consumed massive amounts of time, something people now and days don’t have considering most of WoWs playerbase is now in their 30’s and actually have crap to do.
I do agree though on the boost limitation though, hell I went from 1 account to 6 just to level new classes. Leveling 58-70 isn’t that mind boring but 1-58 even with the pathetic 25% nerf to exp to level up from 20-60 is nice…it’s still not enough to make new players come into the game or have people make alts.
I thought it would ruin TBC Classic. It’s terrible for the community, terrible for the game in general, and horrible for the long-term health. And it turned out even worse than I thought it would. But Blizz made some quick $$$$ and that’s all that matters to them.
I was mostly against it at the time but eventually came to realize it wasn’t so bad. I think it helped bring some people back in the game, and people realized that 1-58 is such a small part of the game. 58-70 is the real meat and bones of the experience as far as learning to play the character well, so it didn’t really hurt anything
This is exactly why MMO’s are dying and why people like you just straight shouldn’t have an opinion.
WTF are you smoking my man. The boost single handedly kept TBC from being more dead than it already is. The boost is doing wonders for population. People are boosting alts, doing dungeons, forming alt raids, pugging, etc. A large portion of the population wouldn’t have a second 70 if the boost didn’t exist, and they’d just raid log mains.
People are so blind and ignorant, hard to believe i play the same game as you.
I guess I was/am for it. A few of my RL and OG TBC friends came back solely because of it, which is cool.
It sent a REALLY bad signal to the community. This kind of thing breeds entitlement. It LITERALLY undercuts an insane portion of what the game was designed for, anyone arguing for the boost just purely does not understand game design and player psychology whatsoever.
The problem is that it’s a great source of short term cash infusion for good looking quarterly shareholder reports… so even if there were any talent left at Blizzard aware of these facts, it doesn’t matter, they would be helpless and told to shut up and sell the boost to players at Blizzconline.
We know it fed heavily into making bots far more profitable, which affected the economy, that’s old news… but Blizzard can conceivably deal with bots WHILE taking their boost money (not that they did a great job early on of this). The main issue is how it affects leveling, community building, and the new player experience.
Classic has been sold primarily as a nostalgia product. The ONLY marketing they’ve done has appealed to nostalgia. They have done precisely zero marketing on the games own merits, designed for new players.
If you’re a newer generation gamer looking to play the best MMO in the world (it’s still WoW classic, sorry weebs - your game is big due to an extrinsic cultural phenomena + Blizzard’s mismanagement) and you start the game fresh, the world is going to be severely more empty when the established community of now adults is constantly boosting new alt accounts to min/max.
There’s a lot more that feeds into this unfriendliness to new players than the boost, a lot of that is on the community managers not setting up good hooks and tutorials, the in-game learning systems are basically still OK in 2022 if they had supplemented them… but the active on the fly help from being mixed into an active leveling community was ripped right out. I just explained the entire PvP season transition to a new player in-game the other day and that guy was highly thankful but had zero clue, no thanks to these shortcomings.
If you remember WoW circa 2007 it was a way more diverse community, old man guilds (50s +), school aged kids everywhere (all of us), people in their 20s and 30s. Now it’s literally ALL 30 year old dudes give or take 5 years. I even played with a ton of people from all different countries on my US central servers, and it’s not like there weren’t global servers back then… but now there’s almost none of that. The sample size, appeal, advertising etc. was way bigger. Where the hell are our modern Mr. T commercials?? The nostalgia trip ad was cool or whatever but it’s not going to make ANY sense to a new player who doesn’t even know what an MMO is but COULD be sold on joining one.
You can argue that part of why the population is smaller is because MMOs in general make up a smaller portion of the gaming space now, with so many options available… but if you sell it right, people are still going to be attracted to the most quality gameplay (however that also has to include a slightly more active treatment of the live service from the devs, despite some good changes, there’s a lot missing).
As others have stated the boost also greatly exacerbates faction balance by providing an option that goes against the o.g. dev philosophy in terms of forcing people to get over it and just band together with their existing faction choice via the friction. Which does make a stronger community, that in large part laid the ground for the nostalgia of your original main character in the first place, assuming it was on a faction that you would have at one point been convinced you needed to swap off of but didn’t want to bother re-leveling. Your entire history with the game could’ve gone a different way and the experience could have been a lot more broken up had they offered this in TBC. It’s part of the reason WOTLK was the beginning of the end of the server community feel.
At the end of the day, the boost tells players that core elements of the game are worth skipping, and expects players to log in and setup a level 58 character. This is fine for 30 year old whales with some spare cash to feed their WoW hobby, but it’s terrible for the long-term health of the game when it comes to building a sustainable community.
P.S. the mage boosting argument SHOULD be moot, that should’ve been nerfed early on to be in-line with normal leveling rates while requiring the boostees to participate in combat to prevent AFK leveling. Really a no-brainer.
I stopped reading after this first sentence. Not only because its wrong, but because this is your opinion that you stated as fact. A very large portion of the community was extremely excited for the boost but are also excited for a potentional 68 boost for WOTLK Classic. We wouldn’t even have a community without the boost. I applaud your attempt to make the boost more than what it really is, because you put a lot of effort into it.
The boost was/is wanted by a majority of the players.
Blizzard is a company thats primary goal is to make money and it was nothing short of a genius business decision that worked out well for everyone.
Couldn’t have said it better, people need to realize the reason why there’s so few MMORPGs left in the market is ether they are dead on arrival or its hard to get new people into the game so when you start losing people the server pop never replenishes
There’s a lot of arrogant people and gate keepers that play WoW or the ones who refuse actual good change w/e Blizzard does something for WoW. Yea Blizzard has a crap track record lately so the hate for them is also justified, but whats not justified is complaining about a boost in a game when FF14 ARR, GW2 and WoW all have one.
and you are the reason why retail exists and ppl like you just straight shouldn’t have an opinion 
Player base is full of lazy players, simple.
There’s no way that Dreamsphere guy isn’t trolling. His post is completely ludicrous. Obviously boosting was incredibly damaging to the game. You can even ignore all the community and old world destroying that it caused and simply focus on bots. They’re feasting on boosts, just like any objective person knew they would.
But some people will never admit they were wrong. And yes, Blizz is making a fortune from boosts and businesses exist to make money. Duh, he’s not making some grand revelation with such a statement. The difference is a business that ONLY cares about making money is a problem, or maybe to put it better: they don’t care about HOW they make money.
The old model was to make the best product possible. Best product = more people play = biggest profit. The new model is: milk every last drop from a lazy, stupid, clueless playerbase. Ignore any damaging effects on the product. Don’t worry about the long-term health of the game. Thus we have boosts. And so will Wrath. And the saps will cheer, and the game will suffer.
Agreed, well said
Half the community wanted boosts, so let’s not act like any of you speak for “muh community”.
You don’t speak for me, not many wanted to play 1-58 in a game that starts at 58. If people wanted old content then they wouldn’t have been buying boosts from mages or blizzard. The old world content wouldn’t be a ghost town.
Also something to keep in mind, TBC was one of the least popular for private servers. The rose colored glasses brigade seems to forget this. Blizzard screwed up by not faction capping and all of that but without boosts most servers would probably be dead until phase 5 when it becomes the Wrath waiting room.
Actually only the 1% of forum crybabies wanted boosts.
Hey, I can completely make up nonsense too. But the truth is the majority of players who boosted quit not long after. The mass exodus and empty servers can account for that. Something many of us knew would happen.
Also, WoW starts at level 1, not 58. Just because there’s new content at a certain level doesn’t mean everything before it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter (and ironically the two new races forces you to start at 1). But that’s an irrelevant argument since Blizzard agrees with you. Of course they’re wrong, but again it’s just about quick influx of cash and boosts provide that.
TBC starts at 58 chief, Vanilla starts at one. Everything that existed before the Xpac is meaningless, this is why nobody still runs old raids or dungeons except to farm gold or boost people.
If only 1% of the population wants boost then why are people saying the old world is dead? Why are dungeon boosts still going strong? Why are people still buying boosts from Blizzard?
Seems the 1% is really you people who hate them. But hey, got data to back up your claims?
Hmmm idk. Free but takes 2 days casualy watching shows/playing other games off screen or 55-90$
Costs ~1.5k(Wich is nothing) to reach 45. Then you actually make money while boosting Strat
What is the best? That is your definition of best. I think it’s pretty clear that boosts helped the population of this game - irregardless of why or the type of player. It could be because people are lazy. It could be because people from Retail or old players or boomers or whatever you want to call them get to skip old content. It could be anything. But boosts help keep the population alive.
Fact is, if there is no population, there is no MMORPG. Long term? Short term? It doesn’t really matter. There will be no long term.
Was it damaging for the game? Sure. For the record, I was against boosts and still am. But for me it’s hard to argue that it was a NET positive for the game itself. Not for me personally. But for the game.
And the old model was for a brand new game. The hype was real. More people were being funneled in to try out this cool new hype machine. This is a 15 year old game. There is no hype. There is no significant influx of new players. For me, it’s either I choose between the game completely dying due to no players or the the game becoming something I don’t like, but continue to be borderline playable.
I didn’t like the boosts either but it’s an old game. The influx of no players is minimal, a lot of the people trying it will be old heads with jobs and a life. Most of these players aren’t going to want to shlog through old boring content with quests they cannot solo, dungeons they cannot run and see people leveling fast with boosts.
If there were no boosts, the influx of anyone new or returning would be minimal. Time is your most valuable and fleeting asset. The boosts keep the ever dwindling population from rock bottoming. Maybe the people who think boosts should be removed don’t care if the game dies or not, as long as they get to fill their own desire.