The Players Blizzard Truly Failed With the Boost

Is this really what you think the issue with retail is? As far as retail goes, these are all minor things in the big picture. I can confidently say that tokens/boosts and whatever else the shop sells is not the reason the majority of people have grown unhappy with the state of retail. There is so much that has changed in the actual gameplay of the game itself that people take issue with.

btw. one thing that people ignore or dont include in their deliberations regarding wow, generally, mmorpgs, generally, and gaming, generally, is the state of the global economy. since the 2008 housing bubble crash, the accumulated wealth of billions of people all over the world has been siphoned into the accounts of maybe 300 corporations.

blizzard is fortunate to have survived it but to do so, because so many people lost their jobs and savings, they had to come up with a system where people who still have jobs, essentially pay for people who dont have jobs via a sort of ingenuous pay to win system…et.al, tokens. the economy is much worse than the news says, and its not getting better since covid has furthered decimated jobs with no end in sight. that blizzard seems desperate for money is more indicative of the state of the global economy and not the state of the game.

No, they wouldnt, because they know it wasnt part of TBC.

I think the hate will be shortlived, most wont care.

How exactly does a boost set someone up for a poor user experience? Also - is “new players” really the target audience for TBC classic?

You make alot of assumptions that don’t make alot of logical sense.

If you think the split between pro- and anti-boosters is bad, you’ve… never been on the forums.

Mmm… I get why you would think that based on that post. Apologies if I started to get more rambling as the thread went on, yesterday wasn’t the greatest for sleep for me unfortunately xD.

I will clarify:

Generally when Blizzard makes a change to the game, class spell tuning, for example, they do so at the behest of some portion of the community and their staff identifying an issue. That change will obviously split the people affected, as some number of folks will always resist change of any kind, genuinely believe the change is wrong, or not want their toy taken away because it is fun for them to be above the competition.

Then you have systems changes for new expansions, patches, and so forth, that again, are generally done at the request of some percentage of players and staff, or is part of new creative endeavors on Blizzards part.

… A monetization of a service to skip content is entirely different on the grounds that it requires a real life money to get the “solution” to an entirely in game problem, when the philosophy of having all the solutions to problems and goals in an MMO are to be found IN the MMO and not externally is more in the spirit of what classic set out to achieve originally, and is expected by those that wanted that purely internal mmo experience. I’m not trying to speak for everyone, but obviously a big part of the ire that the anti boost people are trying to articulate is that these kind of services give us no option to have that kind of experience in WoW if they’re introduced to classic. We can’t go to modern and we can’t go to classic now because blizzard decided money supercedes the importance of the precedent that they set for themselves in classic.

I’m also pretty sure that they flat out SAID that Classic is classic, and those types of in game options would never be offered because that’s not what classic was about.
Edit: Here is at least 1 instance. https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/ct08c7/welcome_to_the_rclassicwow_subreddit_ama_with_the/exiano5?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Well, if you feel that way, you are more than entitled to. I’m concerned with retail systems creeping into classic, just like they had in the current game. If you look at the history of the game, when payable services entered the picture, the game began its decline, and they never rolled them back. Once it’s in, it seems to stick. Is it entirely the reason behind the decline? Of course not. But to act like it wasn’t a key point of change to the philosophy of making the game, is in my opinion, delusional.

I really hope so. But again, it’s not a position we need to be in, in the first place. RAF would have been more than enough to satisfy both sides with 0 need for conflict, imo.

In the hopes that I don’t have to copy and paste all of my posts for the entire thread, I believe my reasoning is evident in said posts. Blizzard also said that the boost was targeted at new players looking to play with friends of I’m not mistaken. While TBC as a whole may not be targeted necessarily at a new audience, the boost certainly is, and blizzard will ALWAYS be happy with new subs, regardless of who they think will primarily be playing long term.

Edit: Quote by Kaivax directly: "Character Boosts are not in keeping with Classic. We don't want to break any hearts." - #10 by Kaivax

… It’s “for” new players, man.

One group I think we may not anticipate is players who finally get tired of Retail (Like My Son - He does high Mythic + but his group is getting burned out) He notes Dad ( who plays Classic only now) hyped for TBC … He can boost, He has played since Vanilla, knows his classes… and play with Dad.

Sounds like the toxic mindset of players not wanting boosts failed the new players

no, it was the lfd tool, which originally only paired people on the same server, but as wotlk drew near to its end, tourists had left, raiders had consumed all available content and unsubbed till next expac, and the wait for dungeon pops increased dramatically. it wasnt unusual to queue for a random dungeon and a half hour later, still not have a full group…and this is where the game went south - blizzard’s solution was the invention of the dreaded cross realm lfd. this was a disaster waiting to happen.

this was followed shortly by removal of mix and match talent trees. and trim trim trim homogenize-homogenize-homogenize

This is wow the only relevant content is max level dungeons, raids, arena, and battlegrounds, everything else is fluff. It’s utterly irrelevant to suggest otherwise

Oh shoot , I’ve been playing this game all wrong.

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I dont disagree that this is less than optimal for new players, most of them anyway. However, would Bljzzard have failed another crowd worse than they failed new players without the boost?

More irrelevant than that though, are the subjective, emotion based opinions of people that try to gatekeep what is a valid way to play an MMO, if you ask me. Or likely anyone.

I don’t think so. They stated previously that boosts were not in the spirit of classic when we first got the announcement in 2017. If they didn’t add the boost, they wouldnt be failing anyone, they’d be being true to their word, and anyone who demanded a boost would be told the same thing they’ve been told this whole time: If you want to boost, play retail, if you want to play the classic game as it was, play classic.

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It is the anti boosters that are hostile

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If there’s enough push back they’ll make Fresh servers later in BC I’d assume. But eh This ain’t O.G blizzard my man.

You have been if you think anything below max level is relevant

God I love leveling :slight_smile:

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It didn’t. The dumb hostility on these boards only affects a tiny fraction of people, and certainly not new players.

One side is advocating excitement for new players

The other side is making topics asking for segregation and threatening to kill anyone ingame for their choices.

If any one side is obviously lost its probably the one trying to deny other players

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Do you know what the fraction is by chance? It seems that everyone but me has the numbers on this. Interestingly, no one’s numbers seem to match… :confused:

Slicey, I do want to throw you some appreciation your way for being as civil as you have been, and that you seem to be thinking about about all of this in as fair a way as I have seen from the other side… But yet again, I must disagree.

The majority of pro boost sentiment toward new players getting the boost is that they literally don’t think there will be any or they are simply returning players that couldn’t stand leveling in Classic originally. I haven’t really seen folks saying that the boost is a great option for new players, more or less just deflections about their existence or relevance.

Further, I would argue that the boost denies the part of the community that wants TBC done in the spirit of Classic, as current classic is, an option to play the game blizzard set precedent for us.

Also: I hope you don’t think I’m personally advocating for the killing of boosters, I’m pointing out that it will happen.

Ultimately, I don’t even necessarily want to deny people faster leveling. I advocate for recruit a friend 100%, as I think it has the desired effect for new people trying to play with their friends, which blizz stated was the point of the boost in the first place, without adding further Retail monetization that completely skips content.

I really do believe if it makes it into TBC, the token and cash shop will be shortly after. This is the pattern of behavior with these systems that blizzard had already demonstrated, and the token is already technically supported on the Chinese Classic client, and in use there. If we show a culture of support for this on western servers, I guarantee it will come. Why else would they opt for a boost instead of RAF? Money. That’s really it. And if they think we’ll be okay with the token, that is also money, and will be next, and the current pro boost crowd will have nothing to say for it in opposition but, what? An appeal to their personal fondness for skipping leveling, but not grinding gold and gear? That’s obviously hypocritical, and will fall on as deaf of ears as the pro boosters are claiming the anti booster protests are now.