The Players Blizzard Truly Failed With the Boost

all good points till you consider most new players wont even understand the lfg jargon/ui enough to join a group, find the dungeon and fail at tanking it/dpsing it/healing it. honestly new players will likely be friends/family members of old school wow players, who will teach them the ropes and be infinitely more supportive of them than new players joining new products.

Don’t have any friends? They aren’t adding LFG last I checked, you aren’t dropping into a dungeon with 4 randos unless you choose to. If you’re a tank, and don’t know a healer


yeah the scenario today is alot different than it was the first time around.

I think that some of those weren’t caused by the tuning of the content, IE long dungeons, and as such can’t be recreated simply by trying to retune the content. And some of those were things very few people genuinely enjoyed the first time around, IE overly long attunements.

This evokes the clash between the Capulets and the Montagues.

I haven’t been this moved by oratory since high school

Bravo!

#Tybaltwasright

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A good time.

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but some are so fun. blizz put so much time and effort into classic dungeons and raids, they were almost entire games in their own right. there are full games on the market that dont even manage the amount of content of brd. and uldaur was like a whole new game world, complete with its own tram, teleportation system and several climates lol

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From a total narrative standpoint, I understand your reasoning totally, and it isn’t a bad point, but the game is still one corpus of content, and one whole game, no matter if you frame it by expansions being seen as separate games, by PvP vs. PvE as separate games, or guilded vs. solo separate games.

The whole point of classic is literally NOT having the game as segmented as modern WoW. Folks wanted classic back for the lack of boosting, catchup mechanics, WoW token, store mounts, etc. The idea that what you see is what you get. I hate to use the most clichĂ© of the anti boost arguments ever, but the goal stated for the classic project was to give players an option to have an experience before any of that was implemented, and if you don’t want that, retail is the option that gives you those choices.

And I believe the argument of, if boost, why not token, still stands. They allow you to skip content you don’t want to do. These systems creep into the game of you let them, and once they’re in, there’s no going back. We’ve seen this before. It’s why classic was made!

This is an opinion, but I FIRMLY believe this is a litmus test to what the community will tolerate, and blizz will capitalize on it financially. If they are thinking, “well, they were OK with us monetizing a boost for classic, they shouldn’t mind the token now too
” shortly after they will say, “well, they accepted both of those
 let’s add the cash shop.”

Why would it stop unless the community firmly declines it? To me, it’s insidious, because they are abusing the fact that humans seek to trivialize their world in any way they can, and profiting from it at the expense of what we were led to believe was the classic experience. To say nothing of literally creating the problem and selling you the solution.

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if this were honestly true, from a psychological standpoint, people wouldnt play mmorpgs at all, because they add unnecessary stressors to your existence. they complicate life and add intellectual, hand
/eye coordination and fine muscle control, workload. they ask you to expend your time doing tasks, some of them quite emotionally and energetically demanding for the dopamine hit of a piece of digital evidence that has no bearing on reality.

I’m sure some people abandoned the wow franchise because it became too convenient for new players to enter the playing field, but that certainly isn’t everyone and certainly isn’t the reason I stopped playing halfway through cata. Personally, I stopped playing because the content itself stopped being compelling to me.

The storyline post wrath is a hodgepodge of disjointed arcs that in some cases are even contradictory to other current arcs or attempt to rewrite history of previous arcs from earlier expansions. I mean, there’s a sword sticking out of the planet. Even if you could ignore the disastrous effects having that much additional mass extending out from a rotating celestial body and the subsequent impacts to the orbit/rotational axis of the planet, the general thrust of the primary story lost all direction.

Along with the story, the underlying source of power allowing players to overcome their challenges moved from augmenting the innate abilities of the character/class to assuming the mantle of otherworldly powers by proxy. The player was hopelessly impotent in facing the enemy without utilizing someone else’s powers.

This is far less fulfilling than if they had integrated those capabilities into each class’s lore. As a shaman you go on some epic quest to unearth ancient knowledge of the prime elementals and achieve some new level of shamanistic badassness. You as a character spent time and effort to expand your own capabilities to overcome and obstacle. Instead, they went full Faustian and had players make deals with supreme beings that granted limited use of their powers. Basically those being could have resolved the issue themselves without player’s involvement, except they were too busy washing their hair to be bothered.

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the same people that want the boosts are going to be the ones crying about the content also taking to long. They were also the ones that, imo, probably paid for a mage to level them.

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not in my case. i am a mage and i only level guild members and then only within reason. like i’m not gonna leverage mauradon exploits to make gold nor to help guildies. i mean, i will help a non guildie if i see someone trying to desperately make a group dungeon run, and a half hour later they still cant make a group, then i might offer to run them for free.

This is what happens when someone lumps everyone into the same pile, it really only takes one to trump their argument.

Worse, the bulk of the boosts are tourists who will join guilds, raid a little, get geared and quit when things slow down slightly


This undermines the guilds in the game and hurts the community.

Theres really no evidence to support any of that.

Classic Vanilla had no boosts and all of what you said happened in Classic.

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i bet not
 my bet is its gonna be mostly used by current classic players, who know how to play the class they are boosting and understand its limitations. for example, i’m arguing with myself over boosting a priest or holy paladin. and you can guess why. :grin:

I honestly don’t think Blizzard did anything wrong. They “got with the times”. Had they kept to the old grindy ways, I think WoW would have died a long time ago. These days the name of the game is accessible.

They made the right business decision imo.

I’m actuallty really glad you brought this up! I personally think there are two sides to human psychology at war here that is the root of our issue.

The one I already mentioned: humans trivializing tasks to procure more freedom from the constant drudgery of hunting and foraging.(i.e: I dunno, agriculture, the bow and arrow, etc.)

The other is something I believe I learned from a YT video by the psychologist Paul Bloom: if given the ability to stimulate any emotional state by electrodes in the brain, most human beings will choose to stimulate the feeling of mild frustration. (My primary example being these forums lol) What this is to say is humans are unconsciously drawn to frustrating activity, then we get a rush when we overcome what was frustrating us.

How this relates to the boost is that if blizz gives up the option to trivialize we generally will. But in doing so, we diminish the frustration-reward circuit that drives the feeling of reward we get from the game.

I think that is why modern wow is so often described as unsatisfying. I mean, too say nothing of the token or boosts, just the catch up mechanics that allow someone to match a friend that’s been playing for months in a couple of days is deeply dissatisfying for both parties, really.

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I agree. I was saying that it wasn’t the various convenience offerings that drove people away from the game but the content of the game itself no longer being compelling.