Preserve the Health of the Game: Disable Dungeon Boosting

WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King Classic Discussion
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Note: This thread is about Dungeon Boosting, where a level cap class mows down mass amounts of mobs quickly while low levels AFK to soak up the experience and loot. This is not a thread about the Level 58 Boost.

In the spirit of the game, and plea to preserve the health of Classic Burning Crusade and/or Classic Vanilla, this thread requests in favor of disabling the Dungeon Boosting mechanic.

How?

A simple suggestion is to obliterate any and all experience gained in a dungeon when one or more players’ level is far beyond that of the dungeon level.

A high level or level cap player’s presence should reduce experience gained to not be worth boosting.

This removes dungeon boosting while not laying a single finger on a classes’ farming capabilities, allowing them to continue to AoE grind or farm to their leisure.

What did we discover during Classic WoW?

A new meta became born, Frost Mages with absurd AoE leveling, AoE grinding, and AoE killing capabilities used this un-AoE-capped toolkit, resulting in Dungeon Boosting.

Players pay the mage gold, and the mage kills the dungeon.

But what did that result in?

  • Players not playing the game.
  • Oversaturation of greens and BoEs on the AH.
  • Players buying gold to level boost quickly.
  • Gold farmers playing mages to get easy BoE epics to sell and gold while farming it.

Frost Mages have surged in player usage and is a gold farmer favorite in Classic WoW. I have spoken to one where the workplace has people share the frost mage accounts to cycle boosting for gold selling.

Not only have gold farmers picked up on this, they are also using bots now to boost people in ZG.
https://i.imgur.com/tkE0kBA.mp4
Snippet of an automated bot fly hacking to boost in ZG.

A simple Google search shows (not clicking these):

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"FAQ":

  1. There is an AoE cap in TBC, mages won’t be boosting anymore.
    Rank 1 Blizzard can be used with Flame Strike. It will take more concentration but this is still doable.
  1. Prot Paladins will now be boosting kings.
    We can nip this in the bud by the party exp change while not touching their kit at all.
  1. This doesn’t change Mages or Paladins from AoEing dungeons.
    No, it doesn’t. Some people enjoy soloing dungeons and AoE grinding for some fun gold. Most boosting services in game have Free For All loot, which allows the 4 other people (or sometimes even the mage, too!) to loot corpses. A person single farming is limited by their own bag space and will have to clear it often. This would also reduce oversaturation of BoEs and will increase their rarity/value on the Auction House.
  1. Disabling Dungeon Boosting will increase Blizzard’s profits.
    We’ve seen they very much enjoy their income. Dungeon Boosting is fast and takes the character to endgame quickly. The person is likely to suffer burnout or ‘see it all’ in a much shorter time. Less time playing = Less subscription money.
  1. Disabling Dungeon Boosting will hurt Gold Farmers.
    Many gold farmers have turned to using Frost Mages in Classic. They are able to soak gold boosting people while reserving BoE Epics for a high gold sell. They will still AoE farm dungeons, but they will no longer have that constant gold flow from people buying boosts, AND again, they are limited by their own bag space.
  1. Disabling Dungeon Boosting will hurt Gold Sellers.
    Outside of GDKP/etc, if dungeon boosts are no longer worth their time, gold buyers have one less reason to buy gold.

Overall this would benefit the health of the game.

Are you for or against Dungeon Boosting? Why or why not?

33 Likes
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i often help guildies get quests, items, attunements done, on my max level mage. i enjoy it and so do they. what you need is something more equitable. maybe tune it so the fewer people, the better the xp, rather than what it is currently, where the more people in your group, the better the xp, resulting in boosters selling runs of multiple people. if they can only run 1 person at a time, it loses its profitability.

3 Likes
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Now that you’ve educated me on dungeon boosting, I’m going to do it all the time.

Thanks!

13 Likes
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Take advantage of the warts before 2.4.3 hits.

5

Prot pallie, baby!

Every consecrate makes me richer.

6

https://youtu.be/wjRvkPazwAI

2 Likes
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It would be an easy fix that would accomplish a lot to restore the integrity of the game, if only Blizzard would do the right thing, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

8 Likes
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While i understand your point, there’s also the other side. I don’t like levelling, I only got my second 60 ~3 months ago because i dislike levelling that much and I can see many others sharing my opinion on levelling.

If we can’t dungeon boost our characters to 58-60 then, while i can’t say definitively a lot less people would be playing their characters.

I for one have never paid for a dungeon boost, whenever i get one it’s free because it’s being run by a friend or a guildie. Levelling is pretty much the same wherever you go.

Kill guy(s), collect thing(s), go to a place, talk to guy, interact with a thing and then go to the next zone to repeat.

It takes too long to level a character, 4+ days of in-game time is a big commitment, over one hundred hours of play time needed to get ONE character to 60. It took me 14 days of play time to reach 60 on my mage, granted that i started day one of classic so everything was hectic and slow but that’s my point, it’s slow and monotonous to level.

With the AoE cap change in TBC prot paladins take the reigns like you said above, they could change it so that they’re also effected by the AoE cap and they might do just that I just think that people wouldn’t make and level as many alts if that change happened.

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This will be contrary to the already scaled penalty for outleveling the content, so I doubt it’ll ever happen.

10

No.

#10char

2 Likes
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Agree on everything. Dungeon boosting is just as broken as the ectoplasmic distiller was and should be fixed.

10 Likes
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The penalty was obviously put in place to discourage boosting or carries, and if it is no longer accomplishing that function, because modern players playing certain classes/specs have discovered ways to AoE pull so many packs of mobs that the penalty is overwhelmed to the point of irrelevance, it could be argued that an adjustment to the penalty is warranted.

IMO, it would fit within the notion of #somechanges to fix obvious exploitable flaws in the game design.

8 Likes
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No thanks boosting in dungeons is great

1 Like
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Yeah, and as soon as they implement this the forums will be flooded with people claiming that blizzard is only doing this to force them to pay for a boost and other hogwash.

They are in a lose lose situation so they might as well leave it as is.

15

I think anything that hurts gold farming and selling is a win in my book.

6 Likes
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Just make participating required to get xp, not necessarily loot.

But if you’re a puny weakling elf you die instantly and never revive

17

I for one am for this idea. We are all well aware that leveling sucks and is a time sink but that is the classic experience. To level fast by a cheese or bending the rules hurts the community as a whole. You think leveling is slow and horrible, try leveling when you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s and all the zones are dead. Good luck getting a group together for a rare quest or dungeon quests.

On a side note I am curious of the opinion one might have on dungeon boosting vs the paid boost blizzard is offering? IMO blizzard is doing you a fav and saving you some gold and possibly IRL money.

But hey #nochanges if it interferes with my gold selling opportunities.

8 Likes
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Sure… discourage, not outright destroy high level friends helping out low level friends.

Making it steeper? Perhaps.

But to make boosting inferior to questing or leveling “normally”? It would need to be reduced to nearly 0%, or very very close to it, which completely undermines the high friend/low friend thing. Diminish it too much and you can actually harm low level players by helping them cruise through a variety of quests and/or dungeons, since now they don’t get any XP from slaughtering a bunch of mobs but since the quests are completed, they’re stuck grinding mindlessly somewhere instead.

“Don’t group with high level friends” is a solution, but not one I see Blizzard accepting.

19

When I needed help in a dungeon, it was to complete a quest, finish it, or to go for loot drops.

You help out your friend with an objective and get to spend time together.

That’s the pay off getting someone much higher level to help you. Why aren’t they able to find folks of their own level to complete it?

1 Like
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That’s not the only reason you get together.

That’s irrelevant to the punishment for playing with people they know.