Well, to be fair – the new or retail players interested in buying the boost will just quit one month in anyway.
The problem is the long lasting effect on the severs that those who stick around and play classic will then need to put up with the fallout from it.
End of the day, people who don’t have time or interest in leaving to 1-58 will quit within a month at level 65, and activision will get a nice $75 bucks ($15 for 1 month, $60 for the boost) out of a player who otherwise wouldn’t have touched tbc.
It’s a cash grab. That’s it. With many negative side effects for those who dont want it in the game.
Back when I played D&D, leveling was incidental. My characters were unusual either because of an anomaly in their background or from an unusually bad roll on one of the attributes which defined that character, or maybe because they had low strength and very high intelligence but wanted to be a fighter and not a mage. Nowadays, if Moonguard’s Lion’s Pride is any guage, RP isn’t a whole lot more than running around in your skivvies yelling ‘eff me’. I am aware there are exceptions but, compared with how it was 40 years ago in D&D, it seems rather pale due to the limitations imposed on a game that centers around fixed attributes and interactions. Wow is about leveling. It’s my perception that, if someone wants a boost, let 'em have it. By the time I reach level cap, they’ll have gotten bored and quit and I won’t have to deal with them, and I sincerely believe they will get bored just like they’ve already gotten bored with SL.
How many “new” players do you think there will actually be? C’mon now. As for keeping new players that do try it, Boosts are an incentive for them to play. Your selfish reasons aside, this is a net positive for the game like it or not. New players. New people to group with. etc.
It’s up to the community to embrace the newer players and to teach them how to play. It’s up to the community to dictate the culture of the game. This is a PLAYER dictated experience. Just like how the players now, dictated the Classic experience.
It’s not on Blizzard. It’s on yourselves.
All this pretend caring about the game itself is tiresome. Boosts. No Boosts. Everything is selfishly driven. And that’s totally fine. Most things in life are. But spare me the pretense.
Since boosted characters will likely replace gear rather quickly, being that they’re supposed to only be in vanilla dungeon blues, I imagine the vitriol will be aimed simply at bad players that other people just assume are boosted characters being played by somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Too many people assume that just because you leveled up a character from 1 that you means you have any basic idea what you’re doing, but I’ve met plenty of people who defy that expectation.
Setting aside any other potential issues of the boost, this also seems mostly like a toxic community issue. People who want to be toxic to others aren’t going to be deterred by boosts not existing.
To be fair there’s plenty of people who don’t like playing D&D starting at level 1 as they consider the first few levels of D&D to be kind of boring.
Granted it’s not the same as starting at level 58 in TBC, but the basic concept is there.
And yet the question stands. This is a video game with limited replayablility, not an actual RPG where a game master can set up a unique experience every time. So, uh how about we lay off the hyperbole?
I guess I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Generally speaking, people tend to exhibit “toxic” behaviors in response to some sort of stimulus. While the threshold for that behavior is going to be very low in some people, who will behave that way in response to almost anything, the fact that the “stimulus” in this case is generating so much emotion in the playerbase would lead me to believe that even people with a higher threshold of tolerance to that stimulus will cross that boundary as well. All people are capable of being toxic, depending on the input and circumstance, not just the group generalized as “toxic players”.
I do have a question to pose to the pro-boost crowd, though:
It seems like people are interpreting this issue as two sides of the same coin, with one side simply pro boost and the other anti boost. This, it seems to me, is not correct for the following reason.
Blizzard DID say there would be a boost. The result was immediate pushback from a sizeable portion of the playerbase, which I believed CREATED the pro boost viewpoint altogether.
If blizzard had NOT offered the boost, and said they were keeping classic, well, classic… Would any of you currently defending and advocating for the boost have taken to the forums with the same vigor to go on the offensive and try to push Blizzard to add one?
I ask, because it seems to me that at the very least, Blizzard created the pro-boost mentality the second they announced it, where it really didn’t exist before. There might be the odd post on the forums complaining about leveling times or what have you, but that almost always had just been responded to with, "then go play retail. "
If this is correct, isn’t the anti-boost sentiment more legitimized by the precedent or already had, and pro-boost arguments made more flimsy by the lack of support until Blizzard artificially created it?
The stimulus in this case is going to be a bad player. Boosted characters aren’t going to be very easy to spot once they get into Outlands because their gear is going to get replaced very quickly and there is no other realistic identifier of what makes a boosted character.
We all know that bad players are going to get hated on even without the boost. That’s just how those people in the community have always behaved.
Which as I noted, I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who defy the idea that leveling up your character from 1 will mean you have a better idea of what you’re doing than somebody who boosted.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the boost. I don’t consider as having much of a horse in this race but ideally I would rather not have it.
However I don’t think it’s going to cause toxicity issues that aren’t already there being thrown at bad players. It just much change some of the terminology those players throw at bad players.
To me thats not true. There is nothing that will lead me down that road. Its a video game and I have avenues to avoid that. If ever I feel myself reaching that point I will separate myself from the issue to avoid becoming what I hate. Its a cop out to people who cannot or will not manage themselves
If a person lets this infect them with such vitriol then its because its who they are. And to be honest those people will find themselves on the outside. Classic community sorts itself out. If you treat others like trash the community will cast you out.
But lets step away from this psychological dive and ask ourselves why we would ever make changes for no other reasons than to appease the toxic players? Why should direction be decided by them and what they will and wont do?
His post is also a cleverly cloaked form of victim blaming. It’s the booster’s fault for “causing” the people around them to be toxic. Women wearing revealing clothing are just asking to be attacked. An abusive spouse wouldn’t hit their partner if they didn’t keep making them mad…
There is zero excuse for toxicity. The one exhibiting the behavior, owns the behavior. Period.
They should AT LEAST do something to let players learn the basics of their roles if they boost. Leveling in TBC launch will suck in the open world AND in dungeons because if the healer never played their class without reading anything about how to heal, I will die on every trash pack as the tank.
They didn’t split the community. The people who don’t like boosts are less than 5% of the player base. Everyone else either doesn’t care, or see why it’s a good thing.
Now, this is a video game, so I take it with a grain of salt, but I take accusations like this very seriously, and would hope one would be cautious in making them.
I am not blaming the new players for being the subject of toxicity in any way. I am blaming blizzard for setting them up for a far worse experience than if they leveled traditionally. A more appropriate analogy, using your own as basis would be;
If a land development company invited a group of women studying in the field from a non-western country to visit construction sites around New York, and the uniforms they gave said students were all, as you put it, “revealing”, with the understanding that these construction workers are likely to fulfill their cat-calling, toxic stereotype. I blame the toxic behavior by the workers 100% and would speak out against it always. But I would also blame the company that provided the uniforms, as they set these unwitting and innocent people up for harassment that they were aware would likely occur without any steps to mitigate or correct the behavior of the workers.
I am certainly not saying that it’s the victims fault, the harassment in this case would be entirely on the shoulders of the one forwarding harassment, as well as the entity that put them there, in that circumstance, under different pretenses.
Now, that being said, unless you genuinely believe I am engaging in such a bad faith argument as that still, I would like to focus on in game particulars about this.
Pro-boosters: would you have been quite as engaged in this conversation if blizz had announced no boost? Why or why not?
Edit: In case I have made myself unclear, I do not condone harassment, exclusion, or nastiness of any form towards boosters. I love helping new players get into the game and to explore, but I’m also aware of how bad the boost is for new retail players as is, and would extrapolate that it will be even worse for new classic players.
Were you around for the layering discussions? How about AV 1.5 vs 1.12 or the Alliance exploits of AV? This is the current rage. It’ll pass and the “community” will find something else to be upset about.
As stated in a previous post, I actually do have experience in this, so I beg to differ.
Two different friends, totally different personalities, both boosted characters of different classes…
Both quit inside of 2 weeks. One from player toxicity on random dungeons, the other from not being able to successfully complete content due to, in my opinion, a lack of understanding of his toolkit, and being thrown into content he wasn’t prepared for.
If you have differing anecdotal evidence, as I believe that’s the best we will get unfortunately, I’m happy to hear it! But if this is just your feelings and theories… I regret to say, color me unconvinced.
That’s great an all, but I have experience, too. I was super excited when classic was announced. I logged in day 1, dealt with long queues, 30 second lag, all of it. Was awesome. I leveled the best I could. Got to 42 and logged out for 8 months. I came back during P5 and finished leveling, and did some raiding. I now have 4 level 30+ alts that will probably stay that way for a very long time. I have guildies in the same deal. Everyone has an alt thats like level 30-45 that they just can’t bother leveling because its just so ridiculously slow.
Boosting benefits everyone. You can love classic all you want, I personally have a love/hate relationship with it, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that its not player friendly, especially with us all being adults now. Its just such a slog and a huge time dump, just to get to end game which in itself is anticlimactic.