Why should I care if someone who thinks fixing an unintended consequence of disabling xp gain that heavily benefits players over the standard leveling process is predatory? At that point there might as well not be a line in the sand. Just call anything you don’t like predatory. “Omg you nerfed my dps! Predatory business practices!” “Omg you took the servers down for maintenance! Predatory business practices!” “Omg you nerfed the boss after I beat it! Predatory business practices!” It ceases to have any meaning when you apply it to trivial things like this.
Unless they disable the ability to manually level a character, this is far from predatory. You’re kind of like a 13 year old girl who says her life is over because she inadvertently colored her hair orange the day before school pictures are taken.
They just announced a level squish, which will actually decrease the time it takes to level to max (remains to be seen if the number of hours it takes to get from 1 to max is less or the same as it is now).
The idea was and always should be, that Classic will be for those people who don’t mind a long, protracted leveling process to make it more about the journey than the destination, and Live would be all about endgame with a shorter, less grindy leveling process.
This is my chief concern; that leveling will become no longer a viable way to play the game. The nerf is so late in the expansion that there’s no way it’s being targeted at this expansion and rather it’s being targeted at the next and after. If they can make the grind from 110-120 super tedious and give some kind of additional incentive for buying a boost for 10 levels then they will increase sales. Like I said above, this will be no different than mobile games which have some of the most predatory practices in the world.