No boost for accounts with existing lvl 60, change my mind

Oh, they do go through that quite often, I’d imagine. They just continue to produce more, is all. If they stopped farming gold, that billion would be gone pretty quickly, especially with an expansion launch.

Do you have any idea how many billions of gold will be spent in the first week of TBC?

There are more than 10k players on your realm, and they have multiple characters. Some items will be going for 80k gold.

You’d be surprised how much people are willing to pay, particularly the people with lots of money but little time. It’s sort of why boosts are being offered, actually: to capitalize on people with lots of money but no time to actually earn anything for themselves.

That said, I do agree that not many people are dropping that kind of money. It’s probably fairly rare. However, small purchases of a few thousand many times over? Those are very common, I’m sure.

And yet players with level 58+ characters can still pay for it.

The boost was put in to get Blizzard more money, and “new players” is the excuse apologists will accept so they can monetize the game further at the expense of its quality.

only no-lifers think like that you might be able to spend 20 hours a day in your basement playing wow some of us have real lives

well lets just make everyone start at lvl 1 again no gold no anything . im good with that. love the “earn” anything HA HA another no-lifer

Why should I have to restart just because you’re lazy and want to pay money to skip the game?’

Ah yes, a no-lifer because I suggested that people should actually have to play the game to earn the rewards therein.

Go away, retail troll.

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“If this is made for new players who want to play with their friends”

The operative word in this assumption is ‘if’. This is a reason that (most likely) marketing came up with, but it’s my perception that the bottom line is ‘they’ are not making as much money as anticipated and need to find ways to optimize their cash options to convince corporate execs that ‘they’ should continue to exist. Wow is waning. I’m beginning to doubt that it will last long enough to see WotLK classic.

And the “if” is true. Blizzard says it’s for new players who want to play with their friends.

There’s a lot of my friends, for example, who maybe didn’t really play Classic when it first came out, right? So now they’re behind, and they’re interested in playing the Burning Crusade. This was, for a lot of people, their favorite expansion that we’ve done. We want to make sure those people are served, too. One of the ways we can do that is provide a boost to people that are interested in coming back that maybe aren’t interested in doing the Classic WoW experience but maybe wanna hop right into Outland as quickly as possible.”

“Yeah, so, the team – we spent quite a lot of time discussing it because we want to make sure we respect the time and people who have been playing Classic for two years but also we want people to be able to enjoy Burning Crusade. They loved it the first time and maybe missed Classic, so we are gonna offer a level 58 boost for purchase, but it does come with some restrictions. It’s gonna be one per account, it’s not gonna be usable on Blood Elf or Draenei, it’ll have some dungeon blues, it’ll have level 40 mount skill, no professions. The basics. Basically your Outland starting kit.”

“That’s cool. I mean, that’s a really great way to jump into the game, for sure.”


That’s the full quote for the boost in the deep dive that was aired during Blizzconline. Certainly seems like it’s for new players to me.

Let’s look at the official page for TBC.

"I have never played WoW Classic but I’m interested in Burning Crusade Classic. How can I join my friends?
If you don’t have characters ready for the journey beyond the Dark Portal and are interested in adventuring in Outland with your friends, we will offer an optional Level-58 Character Boost service closer to the launch of Burning Crusade Classic.

This boost will not be usable on Classic Era realms or on the new blood elf or draenei races; in addition, players will be limited to boosting only one character per World of Warcraft account. Further details, including details around pricing and availability, will be announced at a later date."

Wow, that certainly reads like it’s for new players. Especially the part where it says “I have never played WoW Classic.” What about some blue posts on the forums?

“… avoid minimizing the accomplishments of existing players or skipping any new content at launch.”

Existing players. As opposed to… well, NEW players.

Well, the new players coming back for me want to play alliance, and I don’t have any alliance toons. Therefore I will use the boost to play with them.

Also I had been dual boxing for all of classic and want to cut down to 1 account. I wouldn’t have a mage on the main account, and if I boosted one I’d have a 58 mage in awful gear instead of a 60 mage in raid gear. The 60 mage would never be played again, and I would continue on this new mage.

Point taken. It’s my perception that this is not the only reason, only the one that’s been given officially for the boost.

The real reason is money, obviously.

I suppose the point of the “if the point of boosts is” arguments is to point out the inconsistency in that reasoning, e.g. it’s for new players but veterans can use it, and they’re charging for it when a free boost would mean more new players.

I don’t think anyone making these arguments actually cares to have the boost modified in this way; they’d rather the boost didn’t exist at all and are using these compromises as a means of proving that proponents are only interested in being able to pay to skip content and don’t actually care about new players.

I don’t think you realize how big a billion is.

If every single one of those 1,000 players wanted to buy gold, they would need to buy a literal million gold each to deplete the supply.

Even assuming around 50k costs/character, you would need 20 characters per account to need a million gold.

Again, this is the amount they have RIGHT NOW. With NO FURTHER FARMING.

Makes sense to me.

It’s the same as it has been since 2014. You had to pay a charge (the price of the new expansion) to get a boost. No player ever got one for free. Additional boosts cost money.

It’s the other way around: TBC is a free expansion (the first one that WoW has ever had). But Blizzard is choosing not to give “TBC plus a boost to TBC” to anyone for free.

Since I don’t have an MBA and years of sales and marketing experience in the MMO industry, it would be ridiculous for me to advise Blizzard about sales and marketing. I see the simple stuff. This isn’t a simple issue.

Every one of those 1,000 players? I don’t think you know how many people play Classic. There’s tens of thousands on each realm.

And even assuming this claim of a billion gold is true (how would they know, honestly?), if they didn’t farm at all, it’d be gone very quickly. TBC’s costs are very frontloaded.

That doesn’t actually refute my argument, though. If it’s for new players, wouldn’t a free boost bring more in?

It’s just for money, and anyone with a brain knows that.

… why would they ever stop farming? Did I say they were going to stop farming? Of course they aren’t going to stop farming. The point is the benefit of the boost (i.e. faster route to content that is worth gold) is negligible, because they have far more supply than demand.

Even with 10,000 players, that’s enough gold for 100k each, out of the gate. Do you think every player on the server is going to buy gold? And that much?

I remember TBC very well. You got the scale all wrong. The “Big costs” are rounding errors to that much gold.

No boost for accounts with existing lvl 60, change my mind
Friends could be on another server. Many people stopped playing during phase 2 or 3 and friends continued playing and xferred to a different server. The entire concept of boosting a new character on a new server saves a lot of annoyance over paying for an account transfer. Especially if there’s a massive flood of requests from people wanting transfers.

Okay, then saying how much they have in stock now as an argument against the idea of botters/gold sellers using the boost is just a non-sequitur and we can safely disregard their current stock as inconsequential.

They’re going to continue farming and selling gold. Saying “they have 1 billion” is not a valid reason why they WON’T use the boost.

… Think about it for juuuust a little bit. I know you want to act like you’re smarter than everyone else, but just try for a second.

I need to continue farming for my business model. My current rate of gold acquisition greatly outpaces demand. There is an option available now to increase the gold acquisition of new bots via a boost. It saves roughly 2-3 days of play time vs current levelling.

I can choose to use the boost, and have even more gold that I can’t sell, for a cost, slightly faster (because the boost is only worth 2-3 days/played, this is important- each boost does not generate THAT much gold).

Or I can continue to use my current methods, continue to have more gold than I can sell, and not spend the money on a boost.

That’s why the stockpile is important. Because with the stockpile, there is no benefit to boosting- you make gold more quickly, but you already make it more quickly than you can sell, and you have a large stockpile to deal with upticks in demand, which as you said, TBC is frontloaded. Once people buy the upfront costs, gold is going to have even lower demand.

The stockpile is inconsequential in that scenario. If your production outpaces the consumption, how much you currently have isn’t important.

Or, I suppose more accurately, you only need so much before any more becomes superfluous. If you want to sell 50k gold, you obviously need 50k gold, but the functional difference between a million and a billion is zero.

If you completely wiped their stock, if they still only need to make 50k a week in order to meet demand, but easily make 60k a week, by your logic, they still would not use the boost.

No, it is not inconsequential- demand is not a constant. It fluctuates with several factors.

The stockpile is for periods of increased demand (expansion launches, for example) and to mitigate loss from bans.

Again- if the boost did more, you would have a point. But level 58 with crap gear just isn’t going to save enough time to justify the costs.

Here, consider it like naxx raiding in classic. If I farmed at a rate for phase 1-5, and had a stockpile of consumables ready to go, I could raid naxx until my group gets through all the learning, and clearing, without having to increase the rate I am farming at, despite using significantly more consumables.

Well, the stockpile is likely going to suffer from those same bans, but yeah, I understand the sudden spikes in demand.

Which is why I think you’re overestimating how much a billion gold is. 6000 gold for flying (slightly less, but it’s an easy number to work with). 1 billion / 6 thousand = 166,667.

Only 166,667 characters have to buy the gold for their flying for that stockpile to be gone. Now add training, profession costs, enchants, reputation items, repairs, respecs. Take a look at how prominent GDKPs are, an inflated economy with tons of new BiS BoEs to sell, profession materials and cooldowns. Then consider human nature. People will just buy gold to have it even though they don’t need it.

They’re going to keep farming gold. We both agree on that. If they didn’t keep farming gold, that billion is gone really fast. It is, as you say, only a buffer for the sudden increased demand.

The argument as to whether they will use the boost or not is not tied to how much gold they have. I believe I’ve seen you make the argument they’d just spin up more accounts instead. In this case, the stockpile is not a valid argument that they will not use the boost, but that they will not take ANY steps to ramp up production, including making more accounts.

So the question becomes… will they ramp up production? At what point do they cap off and say “we’re making enough gold, now there’s no point in farming any harder.” You say they already reached that. Okay, so regardless of whether they’d spend their money on the boost or on more accounts, they’ll be doing neither.

Therefore… the stockpile is not consequential.

If anything, if the stockpile IS consequential, the sudden spike of demand serves as an argument FOR bots/gold sellers using the boost. Sudden demand, stockpile not large enough, need gold NOW. Can’t wait 3 days when people are buying epic flying RIGHT NOW. You think EVERY gold seller has a billion gold ready?