Good conversation overall. Y’all have a great evening.
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I would agree about in game leveling interactions being an important part of the game experience but it’s only relevant for a small window when classic or the new expansion is released and everyone is doing it together. The boosting always comes after that when the
Mages gear so I think it’s mostly mutually exclusive. The world is so big that player interaction for the handful of people leveling after that release period ends I think more or less makes the interaction non existent regardless. This is true even in expansion. I remember leveling Alts in original wotlk during icc and having it be a essentially a solo experience.
Boosting Is 99% mains leveling Alts as well. The people doing already did experience the world and leveling the way it was meant to be done the first time. They just want convenient alt leveling.
I still feel this is just a total cash grab by blizzard and that the part of the community who don’t like it don’t like it because it upsets them people arnt having fun the way they think fun should be had or because they are confusing the influence rmt has on boosting with boosting in its own right.
I’m assuming this is in large part for the fresh servers, really. They’re the one that’ll be most affected by it initially. Not everyone has the time that the people that get to max level first have, and that type of service could be a big boost to bots on those servers. I’d assume that the majority of bots on other servers have the gold distributed widely enough that it’s hard to pin them down.
I wouldn’t care if they temporarily limited
Boosting xp on a fresh server for a few weeks after launch but a better solution is to more effectively regulate bots. Also bots have to level to make gold to so it’s some what self limiting. People knew about boosting when classic released but it didn’t take off until a little bit after. Even with tbc, I might have seen one or two people advertising boosts but it didn’t really start until after everyone got to max level. I think the nature of it already limits
It from effecting fresh servers during the initial period where everyone is Leveling together
LOL god forbid u have to actually play the game now
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It is not a “fair assessment” at all. It is a completely unfair assessment.
I prefer to play with people who actually learned to play their class as they leveled so when stuff hits the fan they dont panic and make decisions that cause deaths or a wipe.
boosted toons are rusty players
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Almost everyone boosting is an alt of someone
Who played the game plenty. New players havnt Earned the gold yet to pay for it unless they buy rmt gold… which suggests cracking down on rmt would fully solve your complaint. But alas blizzard instead made their own rmt paid char boost and banned the competition and now instead of having a noob in your dungeon (which you won’t cause it’s all Alts in boosted runs) you’ll have a noob in your raid since the blizz version of rmt is way more accessible to new players? Been advertised in the launcher and all.
Tell me that you can play every class as effectively as your main.
Given how low the skill floor is in normal dungeons I’m pretty sure everyone can play any class as well as their main in the context of “not knowing what to do and panicking” since that’s an experience with the content issue and not dependent on experience with the class. Further more boosting still exists, they just replaced community boost with their paid boost so how is your perceived issue any less still in the game?
Its not even close to being a content issue. Maybe i need to bop that guy and cant find the button, or maybe i need to drop a frost trap and drop immo trap, or maybe little timmy didnt know where all of his abilities were and had to pull his tremor totem out of the spellbook. Knowing the mechanics is a minimal part of being able to play effectively especially since some can be ignored with minimal issues.
Too many nuances with every class. Just because you can play a warrior doesnt mean you will be good at a rogue or deathknight. Reacting quickly with a correct response is the result of practice and experience. Which you dont get when ur friends boost ur alt or you buy a boost from the store.
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Actually the 50% XP boost reduces your running around quite a bit, you can skip entire quest hubs / zones, saving you hours upon hours of walking. the 50% XP boost will actually boost your leveling speed by more than 2x, probably closer to 4x.
I foresee this change having next to zero effect on RMT, and only serve to make leveling alts more difficult.
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Yep.
it wasn’t this. It wasn’t the dude selling 5g stockade or the 15 g strath the issue here.
also bypasses the big grey elephant in the room. AH. rabble rabble strath boost making 60 g tkaing 4 people. Evil!
hey buddy…see you selling an item a vendor would give 4 gold for 400 gold. whats up with that?
that’s business, dude.
so do you care how your buyers obtained 400g?
Not really.
Okay…so boosters are evil with corrupt tainted gold. Until they buy your 400g item. Fair enough, I guess.
Power leveling never existed in the game like it does today. Back then it wasn’t a problem. Now it absolutely, unequivocally is. Power leveling used to be something that was almost exclusively done between friends or partners in guilds/PvP groups. Now it’s an economy where it’s almost exclusively random strangers. Not to mention, it’s also far more efficient today than it ever was then. A long time ago, getting the low-level players gear from the dungeons used to be an important component of power leveling, because it was a slower process, and powerleveling didn’t completely replace the vast majority of the leveling process.
That’s the important detail. Personal and seldom before, impersonal, efficient and widespread enough to actually hurt the average player’s leveling experience now.
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To be honest, I do not understand why people think power leveling is a bad thing. THe leveling process in wow is not why most people play the game, and many people find it to be probably one of the worst aspects of the game due to how monotonous it is.
These changes aren’t going to do any noticeable dent in RMT, all it’s going to do is make it harder for people to want to bother even leveling alternative characters. The player pool will not increase in a noticeable way on realms that are actually struggling.
It’s smiliar, in my opinion, to the salem witch trials at this point… oh no! We don’t like RMT, anything that remotely has any connection even vaguely with RMT is the devil and we must burn it at the stake! Oh… we didn’t actually catch any RMT (Witches) just a ton of innocent bystanders. 
Most people are not going to just start leveling characters “normally” with this gone, they will either just buy boosts (Which is what blizzard -actually- wants) or they will simply get an addon to help them just optimize their leveling path and ignore everyone else. Assuming people even continue to make alts.
Not everyone views leveling as some sacred rite of passage everyone has to trudge through, especially not people whom have been playing the game for 10+ Years and leveled countless characters up before.
The game , and everything in it is Blizzard’s IP. They can sell their gold for $$. Players cannot. If Blizzard wants to sell boosts for $$, then that is their prerogative.
WoW is an RPG, and the whole point of RPGs is to invest time/effort into becoming stronger or gain more resources over time. That’s literally what an RPG is. The only type of gameplay in WoW that I can conceive of that doesn’t necessarily follow this basic design principle is roleplaying, though most people who roleplay aren’t doing it on level 1 characters. Even in roleplaying, this game design is usually pivotal.
I have no problem with the fact that you think differently than I do, or that you don’t value the leveling process in WoW, but I also think you have a distinctly incorrect way of looking at the game. Whether that comes from being a Retail player, or because you’re someone who’s played the game for many years before and you just don’t want to redo that part of the game, or whether you’re just not a fan of this RPG style of gameplay, I can’t be sure. But this is the cornerstone of RPG gameplay, and it’s the cornerstone of WoW’s gameplay.
I think the effect it will have on cheaters will be non-zero. This is one of the primary areas where cheater gold is circulated. It’s not where the largest amount is moved per capita or per “unit of boost”, but it’s more than enough to be a serious problem. After all, the amount of money people spend on sitting AFK while being leveled up is quite a lot. Especially at the higher levels, people are spending many thousands of gold to finish the leveling process, and there are literally thousands of characters doing this. You’d have to be utterly insane to think that all of the gold spent on this is actually farmed fairly without cheating. Even if it did come fairly from GDKPs, that’s still a very dirty source of the gold.
Besides, the point of this isn’t just to stop cheaters. Dungeon carries in their current form are an exploit that harms the game directly. Not just indirectly through the cheater gold being circulated.
I think people generally get very upset about this because they love WoW, and cheaters/boosters actually tangibly affect the game they play. It really sucks when I’m leveling my characters to be spamming for dungeons and I see a ridiculously long list of role and level-appropriate players who would rather sit AFK at an instance portal than to just play the damn game. It sucks when you only earn your gold fairly and without cheating, and you have a hard time affording materials and items on the Auction House because the prices are inflated by cheaters, but I don’t have an inflated amount of gold in my pockets if I haven’t sold a bunch of stuff on the Auction House. All of the rampant cheating only makes the game worse, and many of us just want to relax and play the game without running into these stupid hurdles that only exist as a result of people who would rather cheat or exploit than to just play the game the way it was meant to be played.
I think the backlash is also exacerbated by the fact that Classic is something many of us never thought we’d get. Many people literally begged Blizzard for over a decade for “legacy servers” while they watched Retail become even more unrecognizable. And now that we finally have the opportunity to get the old experience again, we can’t just have nice things because everyone is so utterly desperate to circumvent the game’s design at all costs. Luckily this game hasn’t been entirely ruined by all of this stuff, but the experience has definitely suffered because of it.
If we ONLY lose cheaters and exploiters, I’d be perfectly happy with that. I honestly don’t care if every booster in the game quits over this. I’d much rather have the server populations dwindle a bit and for the people left to actually enjoy the game than to be surrounded by people who don’t like it and mock me for doing so. 
I don’t see how their presence is a positive thing. If anything, their presence just guarantees that Activision Blizzard will never stop attempting to sneak more scummy monetizations into a game that was literally not intended to have them.
- You can only buy 1 boost per account. If people are desperate enough to waste their money with multiple subscriptions just to avoid playing the game, I really don’t care. That’s up to them.
- With the 1-per-account rule, I would actually think that Blizzard stands to gain more in subsciption fees. In my experience, a lot of the people who try to skip the game actually don’t like it. And they’re usually the first ones to cancel their subs once they’ve rushed through the current content. It’s also been my impression that most of these people don’t actually know how to play the game efficiently, so if they have to level, it’s going to take over a hundred hours to hit cap.
I would guess that it’s actually a better financial move in the long run to require people to actually play your game to progress in it.
It’s very difficult to level entirely without player interaction. And I don’t think it will be much more common for people to level with guides than they do now. Besides, even with the picture you paint, it sounds much better than people sitting AFK in dungeons and already ignoring everyone else anyway.
You’re not wrong. But I don’t understand why you’d even say that. I don’t want exploits to be removed from the game because I want everyone to go through their “rite of passage”. I’d just prefer to play this MMO with people who are actually playing the game. That’s it. The game was designed for people to level up in it, and I’d like to see people actually do that. If they don’t like playing RPGs, they should move on to a different game that isn’t designed this way.
If they were free, sure, and just doing it to help boost the max leveled toons to help the community, but we all know why they are charging for boosts.