Given that Blizzard has signaled their desire to remove twinks from low level battlegrounds to improve the pvp experience, I thought I’d bring attention to a new exploit people are using to enter low level BGs with the xp-off debuff.
Basically, you que for a battleground on your twink, while you have another toon with their xp-turned off sitting in a dungeon. When the BG que pops, your xp-off toon invites your twink to group, twink enters dungeon to get debuff and then takes the BG que. Viola, xp-off twink in xp-on ques. Granted yes, its only a 95% xp elimination but if you were to start at say 17 or 18 instead of 19, thats hundreds and hundreds of games before you level out. Obviously undermines the intent behind Blizzards game design.
As this exploit becomes more popular and Shadowlands approaches, I think its imperative to get it fixed because the power disparity between levels will be so much more apparent after the squish. A level 10 player against a level 19 player in Shadowlands would be like a level 20 player against a level 39-ish player today.
Im not one to complain without bringing solutions so I have a handful of proposed approaches Blizzard could take.
My first and less ideal solution is that the game runs a periodic check for the xp-off debuff from the moment the BG starts and simply /afks anyone with it. But these are creative folks. They’ll probably find yet another workaround.
A second idea would be that once you join a group, it drops all your ques even if they’ve already popped and are just waiting on you to accept them.
My third and much better, more comprehensive solution (and one I think is long overdue and would be appropriate in Shadowlands) is to simply remove the ability to turn off XP entirely. I understand why it was introduced and as someone who played twinks way back in Wrath and Cata, I enjoyed its presence. But these days, its causing Blizzard and players nothing but headaches. The feature is being used exclusively by people exploiting it to power level or people exploiting twinks into xp-on battlegrounds.
Just get rid of it. It’s outlived its usefulness. That way you don’t have to worry about this continued exploit arms race. Just nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
There arent any real twinking communities left in retail anyway. Most of them went to classic and those that are left are gonna watch their toons and their brackets get wrecked in the level squish anyway. It’s a perfect time to remove a tool that made sense a decade ago but no longer does anything but serve as an avenue of exploitation.