Step one: - Dear Blizzard please ban the dungeon boosting.
Below is a soul cry for a dying game and some ideas on how to make WoW great again.
Problems:
Classic servers are dead.
TBC servers 1-58 locations are dead empty. Everywhere.
Dungeon boosting.
Boost to 58lvl - Bright idea, but as we know the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Rumble: Designed for people who purely want to enjoy the TBC content – makes sense if the Classic (Vanilla) servers were alive! Make a character in classic WoW, have an authentic Vanilla fun (settle down, pervs), level to 60, transfer/clone and go enjoy TBC. - Brilliant! But that’s not the reality.
TBC just launched and all low level locations are dead empty. The whole purpose of the WoW classic project was to return the spirit of those good all days of 2004-2007 with world PvP, making friendships, leveling together through challenging locations etc
Currently, the players who want to play the game have 3 choices: to buy 58 lvl, buy a dungeon boost, or go single player mode till 58 lvl.
The game needs amendments and somewhere rebalancing to revive the traditional spirit of WoW - Which is a fun character progression with a bunch of other people, low lvl BGs, world PvP and world Events ex. PvP raids.
That’s what this whole project was about!
Developers have concentrated so much on the looks of the classic game and the technical side completely forgetting about the spirit of good old WoW. I believe that now the effort needs to be put into reviving the spirit of the game.
Bring people back to Classic WoW, fill it with life once again.
The classic zones had their time. Did you expect them to stay booming with activity forever? That’s not how low level brackets work. Even before the portal opened, low level brackets were already deserted and most people were carrying to do dungeons. The dungeon carries btw are the result of a dead world, not the cause of it. The world was already dead at that point. You either got a carry, or you simply didn’t get a group. Now you’re trying to stomp on a solution to the problem rather than the problem itself. The reality is that there’s no solution to this problem. Sooner or later, everyone will level up. The new races brought some life back to the world… but it’s only temporary. Death knights will do the same with outlands, but again, only temporarily.
I do see a lot of people playing alts. But they’re all in stocks/SM/Mara. I believe if they did do something about boosting people would run dungeons again.
Players don’t have to level up in a specific zone either? You have many areas that are level specific but very far away. So the having a very large world is partly to thank for that. You don’t have as many terrible players in Classic either that spend years in lowbie zones…
They have 1-3 people working on the game tops. Of those people, it’s clear they’re in over their head and know very little about the game, or the people playing the game.
They’ve had a year or more up until now to address boosting in the game. It was super popular during classic. And guess what? IT’s not the negative for the game you think it is. Boosting keeps servers full and people playing. There is very little to do in the end game if you don’t many alts. Players who only play one character end up quitting.
The population for TBC is around 350k right now. IT’s going to continue to go down in phase 2 as many people hit a brick wall on tidewalker, kt, and vash. We’ll very likely lose as much as 1/5 of the player base to this wall. Bt and Sunwell, get even harder.
Boosting is what keeps people around. As long as people can roll alts easily, they’ll keep playing. The moment you take that away, server populations fall even further. You’d see as much as a 50% population decline. If not larger. Boosting is what kept classic wow alive all these months.
Even now, players are transferring in mass to the most popular servers as their realm slowly dies. If you think boosting is a negative for the game it just shows you don’t really understand the population dynamics at play.
I would have to agree with Blizzard providing character boosts. The level boosting currently in game is mostly gold farmers. Yes, there are some players boosting people as well and some of them are gold farmers as well, selling their profits on gold buying sites. Removing their most profitable method of gold farming would improve the game.
Next, increasing players options to play different classes could help the shortage of some classes for the lower level TBC content. Having to buy a tank or healer to enjoy a lower dungeon experience is ridiculous. Most players have played WoW in retail, classic, or other servers and have experience playing multiple classes.
Last, and we can only hope this happens, Blizzard offered boosting will provide a source of income that should be returned into making improvements in the game, such as hiring a few more people to find and remove bots and gold farmers.
Bottom line is boosting is happening. It can either fund groups selling gold that effect the games economy or it can hopefully be effectively used to improve the game play.
Personally, if I were to level to 58 the traditional way—I still wouldn’t touch any dungeons until Outland. Questing is just faster—and you can get any gear you need from quests or the auction house.
The solution isn’t to ban people, the solution is to make it impossible to do in the first place. Simple changes like:
Exponentially lower, or outright negate, XP gained for everyone in a party from monsters that are gray level to a player in your party.
Change Improved Blizzard to instead just increase Blizzard damage by a few percentage points instead of slowing or make elite units immune to said slow.
I don’t bother with dungeons while leveling because either I level as the healer or tank I intend to be at max (painfully slow) or I sit and not be leveling waiting for groups to form.
You’re just giving another reason to remove it, so we can get rid of spell cleave and have more diverse dungeon groups instead of people searching for mages specifically.
If you need a frost mage with imp blizzard on Nightbane, it’s probably because your mage is playing frost to begin with.
Paladins can’t boost people in Slave Pens and if you read my post properly, you’d see that paladin boosting would be just as undoable as well by simply making the XP gained from gray mobs be nullified.
Something tells me you’re a booster or boostee yourself and don’t actually care about improved blizzard outside of exploiting it.
Improved blizzard is bad game design and like any bad game design should be redesigned to not be bad.