That of course includes the overwhelming majority of people who have ever played classic, because most have quit. People who no longer play will never reach instance cap. I certainly would have hit cap when I was farming MCP one day a week.
Yes, there were plenty of hardcore players, but do you really think that the same percentage per server were playing at the level of 30+ instances a day as are now?
There’s way more hardcore players now than there ever was in vanilla.
… and?
So because more people do something that not only has always been fine, but the actual game design encourages (excessive, perhaps even dangerous levels of play), and we know Blizz intended it to encourage it because of that ruthless decay system. Suddenly it’s not fine?
Is that really your argument, that since there’s more hardcore players now, hardcore players should be punished for being hardcore despite not being punished back in Vanilla?
Since when has ‘more players do it now’ become an exploit. An exploit’s an exploit regardless of if one player or a million do it, and I’ve never heard of playing too many dungeons, being too efficient at them or targetting certain items to be an ‘exploit’.
In Vanilla I spent well over 6 hours a day farming the crusader and lifestealing enchants, the latter being a massive pain to solo. Targetted dungeon farming wasn’t unusual, people did strat orb runs constantly for the gold even in Vanilla, we might not have been as fast but we could still easily do it over 30 times in a day and it was definitely very lucrative.
I’m not sure how the mentality formed that something that’s fine suddenly becomes ‘exploitative behaviour’ if a lot of people do it, but it’s one of the most illogical arguments I’ve yet heard.
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But there’s a line where a simple exploit done by a handful of people becomes problematic behavior if it becomes widespread in a different environment.
Look at PVP for some examples of that. That’s the whole reason why the portals were nerfed in WSG to prevent MCing. Same reason why WSG/AV “unintended” jumps/pathing are being removed or made dead zones.
You’re talking about game systems 15 years ago as if any of them were intended to be brought back later and applied to a different generation of gamers with different mentalities in aggregate.
Nobody was ruining the economy on any server by generating insane amounts of gold or resources 15 years ago. Because there wasn’t excess demand for anything…
Sure there were some people that probably amassed north of 10k gold back in vanilla, but they didn’t buy up crazy amounts of mats and force prices up on everyone else. Because there was no point, because there wouldn’t be demand otherwise to justify high prices.
Yes, you can say that’s just because there were far fewer raiders back then, but that’s the whole point of making changes now, because there’s way more raiders and people are far more efficient at generating gold.
If you were MCing people out of WSG 15 years ago, you probably didn’t get into much trouble. Blizzard didn’t take much action because it was more isolated.
Fast forward to 2020, and the first couple weeks of WSG teams were defending the flag near the portal with a priest there on purpose.
If 5 people on a server of 2000 (of which 10% are raiders) are running 30+ dungeons a day, nobody will notice.
If 50 people on a server of 5000 (of which 40% are raiders) are running 30+ dungeons a day, then it’ll be more noticeable in terms of resources/gold entering the economy.
Supply and demand is just different now compared to 15 years ago. The economy of classic is a lot more strained due to how many people are raiding and need resources.
I’m not passing judgment on anybody who runs 30+ instances a day. Go for it; I’m just saying I understand why Blizzard is trying to tweak the economy of the game by taking action on Black Lotuses and now instance running.
No, I stopped playing at the end of MoP when they announced they were getting rid of flying. As far as I’m concerned, this is the WotLK Classic waiting room.
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I’d say that is an example proving my point. Think about what you’re saying- obvious exploits that weren’t caught during Vanilla were fixed now. Unintended jumps in WSG/AV- how did they fix it? By directly putting up barriers/making it impossible to do that specific exploit.
What did they not do? They didn’t limit you to 6 hours of BGs a day. Why? Because how would that actually fix backdooring in AV or hiding in nearly impossible to reach places in WSG? It wouldn’t, and it’d be insane to say that a BG limit of 6 hours a day would fix it, and it would indeed be a pretty massive change to the playstyle of a lot of pvpers and basically every ranker going for r11+.
The MC portal thing in WSG- again, obvious exploit, again they called it an exploit and they specifically changed that precise mechanic, being able to MC someone out of a BG.
See what happened there?
1- they identified something as an exploit so we knew they consider it an exploit
2- they directly targetted the exploit so it couldn’t be done any more
Now lets look at what’s happening now. They have never said they consider playing 6 hours a day, whether in dungeons or doing anything else, to be an exploit. They’ve done nothing to hamper other methods of making gold, they haven’t indicated that either playing too much or making too much gold through legitimate play is an exploit.
So already, that’s one massive difference.
Second- if they are actually doing this to curb what is obviously exploiting (fly hacks for example in ZG), or what they’ve never said is an exploit but could possibly be one (using pathing to kite mobs- while they’ve treated it like an exploit in terms of making a pve boss easier, or a pvp boss such as the AV bosses easier- they’ve never taking action or acknowledged that using pathing to kite is something they consider an exploit for anything other than boss mobs). Then they haven’t followed rule two either.
If they had, they’d be directly banning fly hacks or fixing the ability to them. And they’d be saying that path kiting is an exploit, and/or taking action to leash mobs or make them bypass terrain.
However, until they either acknowledge a common action as an exploit or take direct action against it, there’s no reason to believe its an exploit.
And lets say that’s the target- again, unlike WSG/AV a blanket 6 hours of dungeons a day will do quite literally nothing about pathing or fly hacks or whatever else.
And as this also has been proven to do nothing to stop bots, that makes their initial reason for the change a complete lie unless they consider playing dungeons too long to be an exploit (but doing every other activity in the game too long to be perfectly fine- which would make them inconsistent)- and if they do, maybe they should have said that.
There’s both far more supply, and far more demand now for items. Frankly, if players weren’t farming all these mats in dungeons there would be less supply, and thus further inflated prices. Keep in mind the most recent activity that people keep talking about, boosting in ZG, doesn’t actually create gold it only moves it around.
OK, and now we’ve gotten into an entirely different thing- managing the economy. Which first of all- they created the problem of needing to go into dungeons for mats by putting us in worlds that are 3-5x more populated but the exact same size, without adjusting spawn rates. Add to that as you mentioned that most players now are far more hardcore simply because Vanilla WoW had a large casual playerbase and Classic WoW is by today’s standards a very grindy, time consuming game without much casual interest- you have far more players, far more of them are into raiding or use consumes in pvp, far more want to have min/max’d gear.
So of course people would move to instances.
But, that again returns us to the main issue- if Blizz wants to use this to try to reduce instance farming in order to manage the economy… they didn’t say it, they gave no indication that’s the reason, and maybe they should have considered that the main problem- small world with massive population that now all want to raid- isn’t fixed. If they want people out of dungeons and in the world, maybe make spawn rates for things in the world match the size of the playerbase.
And really- if the economy is their goal, they should have said it. That’s my main issue with pretty much every single defense of this change I’ve seen so far. Either you’re making up reasons with nothing to back them up, or Blizz straight up lied about the reason they’re doing this. Not that people would support this change anyway- but it makes it very difficult to even believe Blizz did this in good faith to make the game better when our two choices are-
a) Blizz straight up lied about why they did it
b) Blizz purposefully was unclear and obfuscated their reasoning
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I’ll be waiting eagerly tomorrow, July 1st, for your thread on how you were right and we were all wrong and Blizzard reverted this change.
Or when they blindly oppose things!
No one has posed such an argument… So, yeah… you’ll keep waiting.
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And nothing about this change stops you from playing more than 6 hours a day. It limits one specific activity that people were taking ridiculously abusive levels. So yeah you can still as much as you want, you just can’t spam reset dungeons as much as you want, but then that was a restriction in vanilla as well. And I’m willing to bet most people who are hitting the 30 runs per day cap were also doing something that bumped them up against the 5 runs per hour rule as well.
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Like farming MCP?
Like farming NR gear for AQ in Mara?
Like, trying to be prepared for pve content?
Shame on us for being prepared!
How about we limit BGs to 30/day, after all when you cap out you can go do world PvP for more honor!
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First time I’m really feeling the effect of this change.
Been doing some ranking, hit my honor cap on Friday, raided on Saturday, and I’m left with Sunday/Monday to farm.
Hit 30 both days. Can’t farm, can’t pvp, sadface 
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There are numerous people in this thread suggesting that people farming 30+ instances a day affects the economy. Druids farming MCPs very easily hit 30+ instances a day.
Either consider what “30+ instances a day” includes, or don’t make such a broad argument.
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And Paladins. And Spellhance Shaman.
MCP farming is the only real hurt of his change. Bots are unaffected, really. HoJ/Princess/Chosen Item farmers are finished when their chosen item drops.
Only the MCP farmers are hurt…which includes Paladins. TIGULE? FOROR? DID YOU REJOIN CLASSIC TO NERF PALADINS ONE LAST TIME?
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This change really messes up my grind… Savage Glad Chain arena runs…
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There’s like 50 Paladins in the world using MCP’s in BWL, maybe less.
Because the non-MCP Rets are stupid and still truthfully think AP Ret, like their private Holy Resist (lol) server, is the way to go. Or their guild is deluded enough from private servers to think Nightfall is totally worth it.
Anybody got thoughts on what I should do today? 5 lockouts left for the next 14 hours from farming NR gear.
Live in Winterspring and farm Firewater. I make about 300-400 gold a day from that.
Decent idea, not sure how camped it’ll be today though.