Without community boosting I suspect the paid boost will make a lot of money. In the context of blizzard decisions in both retail wow and their other games I think it’s very naive to think it will stop there once the shareholders see that money.
I didn’t level an alt in classic til there was mage boosting, and if it goes so too does my interest in leveling a new character from level 1.
This won’t fix the “dead” open world in older zones. The older zones will be temporarily populated with this XP boost paired with end of expac excitement just like what happened with the end of classic as people were leveling characters for tbc
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ok, so you are assuming they will do rmt changes to monopolyze rmt
Yes, based on the fact that last time they did wow the exact same pattern happened and it led to rmt. Also based on the fact every game they have made since merging have led to rmt. Why would the shareholders treat this differently.
I also think for the record that community driven content within the game using the in game economy and currency is exactly what you want to happen in an mmo and what makes them great. I think it was the rmt that turned them into something so unpopular. I don’t want an mmo where community engagement is scripted and the economy is a token gesture as a front for micro transactions like retail became.
ok, thats a whole other conversation
and yes, it could make sense
I’m not convinced that is the sole reason. It may be the primary one, sure. But I think there are still plenty of players that view boosting/power-leveling as something that cheapens the overall play experience with or without the involvement of RMT.
Sure, there are probably people who don’t enjoy boosting absent rmt.
I don’t enjoy when people use the gambling add on in raids but I don’t care either because it’s an open world community and there having fun and it’s not hurting me. I don’t really like boosting either.
I totally see the point that you miss out on exploring a great world by doing it. But i can still go out and enjoy that world so whatever, there happy and it doesn’t hurt me. I do get upset when rmt supersizes it to such a degree that the entire atmosphere of the game shifts around it, where bots are everywhere farming gold to fuel the boosting community and gdkp supply and demand. Where my gold gets devalued by it and a boe costs 20k instead of 500g cause bot generated gold which gets bought drives prices up that much from rmt buyers. I want it to stop but I can see rmt is the real issue and blizzard ignoring that and instilling themselves as the rmt operator ultimately fixes nothing and just lets the process continue.
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There’s already an XP nerf in TBC (1 to 60 was made easier to level) and there’s gonna be another one in Wrath on top of that (1 to 70 made easier), so add 50% to THAT, not on original Vanilla XP values (which SOM uses before the XP buff is calculated). The 50% bonus XP added on top of previous XP nerfs will be huge.
I wonder if a multi-DING is possible. Perhaps in the single digit lvls. If so, I hope it does the golden light animation+sound effect for each one.
It is not a whole other conversation. That is this conversation. There is a history of this happening. Looking at you, retail.
This isn’t a single-player game. All of a player’s in-game actions carry consequences that can warp the environement for others that they may never encounter. Boosting affects players outside of the 5-man group.
We’re getting an XP boost and a 2nd level boost. I guess there’s just no escaping retail. Lazy players want the game to be faster and Blizzard complies yet again. Do you not already level fast enough in wrath? Let’s just make new characters start at 60 now. Why even bother with 1-59 anymore if everyone is going to boost past it?
and there being no boosting isn’t going to improve it. Raid loggers who never play the game will sleep at night knowing their game has been improved, and won’t notice that there isn’t an increase in low level characters leveling the “approved” way.
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Perhaps I’m missing your point but I would posit that removing ways to circumvent the leveling process (a thing viewed as a negative) would enhance the overall experience. Perhaps it doesn’t make it better, only less-worse.
Obviously people see leveling as a chore, and not something to be savoured…which is why Blizzard began things like Recruit a Friend that sped up leveling to an absurd degree, kept cutting XP down expac by expac, sold boosts, gave us RDF.
Less alts, less players will not make wrath more enjoyable.
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Who said anything about banning?
You can still help him, he just won’t get good exp for mobs he barely or didn’t help kill, which seems fair enough. Quest XP won’t be diminished.
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Some do, some don’t. With regards to in-game boosting it seems like Blizzard is taking the side of those that don’t. For what it’s worth I don’t like purchaseable Boosts from Bliz either and its part of the reason I won’t touch realms that have it.
This is a petty nit-pick but if only the number of alts decrease, the total player count remains unchanged.
In a technical sense I agree with you but in a practical sense I don’t. Part of what makes an open multiplayer world engaging is the freedom of everyone to interact with that world they want they want to, within the context of how the world was designed to operate. Not everyone will
Enjoy that but that is nature of an open world multiplayer community. People creating a service in the game, using the in game economy and currency put there FOR people to do that is perfectly consistent with how mmos are designed to run. I would put to you if you find you don’t like being in an environment where other people actions effect you then an mmo isn’t the game for you because that is LITERALLY a core intended feature of an MMO. There is room of course for intervention if something really gets out of hand and grows into something it wasn’t meant to and there is nothing wrong with that but I honestly think The community boosting situation was fine until rmt got involved, even if there were some people who didn’t like it. Not liking something is inevitable in any open world group environment and not grounds on its own to intervene. Unlike community boosting though which isn’t explicitly outside normal expected behaviour within an mmo rmt explicitly is but Unfortunately greed won and blizzard choose to protect and embrace the damaging rmt so they can profit from it and ban the community engagement instead. I would have at least liked to see them ban and genuinely try to police rmt to see how community services like boosting and gdkp turned out. Blizzard just straight up sided with rmt and As I said, I really do think boosting would have been fine without it and I also don’t think the blizzard shareholders will be able to hold back from aggressively implementing more paid services if the char boost is very profitable, which it should be now that there is no competitor. I think this situation is a lose lose.
It’s a lose for community innovation and engagement and a lose for classic wow as a whole if the blizzard greed ramps up with the money that’s about to flow in from the boost service.
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the pop may stay the same, but the number of players doing content will drop because a main will always do less content with pugs
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Okay how about a hypothetical: these anti-boosting changes remain implemented and Blizzard also removes purchaseable boosts from their store. Personally I would have more respect for their consistency on the issue if they adopted this approach.