The two big problems with boosting

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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  1. it takes players out of the world and puts them inside instances
  2. it raises 60s who have no idea how to play their class

Finding dungeon groups anywhere within the 20-50 range is much harder because tons of people are just buying boosts instead. When leveling my hunter recently, the only dungeons I ended up running were RFC, WC, SM Cath, ZF, and ST. Couldn’t find a group for any others, even at peak/primetime hours. So not only are the leveling zones less populated, but legitimate players have a harder time finding dungeon groups. I find it puzzling that people criticize retail for allowing you to level by sitting in town and spamming LFD dungeons, but then turn around and say that boosting is perfectly fine and shouldn’t be changed, when it is effectively the same thing: Sitting in dungeons for the whole leveling experience.

And the second point, is that it raises people to 60 having little/no experience how to properly play their class. Half the point of leveling is getting to know how your class works. Boosting completely circumvents this and lets you just /afk your way to 60. Many times I’ve grouped with people that seemingly had no idea how to play their class; warrior tanks who were using rend instead of sunder, priest healers spamming flash heal and ooming themselves quickly, hunters using arcane shot and not aimed shot, etc.

“but boosting was always a thing, even in 2005!”, will be the clockwork response, and yes, it WAS a thing back then…but nowhere near as widespread or common as it is now. You didn’t have 10 different mages spamming “WTS mara 1-pulls” in LFG chat at all hours of the day and night, back in 2005. You didn’t have organized boost groups with 1 mage and 4 other people, doing massive 100+ mob AoE pulls by abusing pathing.

The problem with boosting is not that it exists, but that it’s widespread and organized.

If I were to fix this, I’d just make it so that if there’s a greater than 9 level difference between any two group members, all EXP gains from kills are reduced by 90%. So you can still boost people for gear or to complete quests, but mass-aoe-pull exp farm boosting will be dead. This shouldn’t hurt any legitimate groups, because I can’t think of any situation where there’d be someone 10+ levels higher than the dungeon, still trying to run that dungeon…other than for quests/gear, at which point they’d likely be getting reduced EXP anyway, due to the mobs being green.

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It exactly is kids from retail doing this nonsense, wasn’t a thing on private servers, leveling new alts in the world and fighting through STV never got old.

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Some guy got 120k exp in ~24 minutes today in one of my runs. Not hard to see why it’s so popular

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When the content is so painfully dull why wouldn’t you pay to skip it?

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I have 5 level 60s. I can play each of them well. It’s amazing how many skills are the same across classes. Ohhhh heal button where should I put it, oh same spot as the other healer I use. Fear? Guess where it’s going. Lol at thinking playing a class at max level is hard or has a big learning curve.

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It wouldn’t be solved with a magical ban of boosting, the game is in end stage people aren’t really doing dungeons period, a lot of people are either pvping or raid logging.

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Doesn’t running instances in general take people out of the world? What about sitting in town? Or heck logging out?

I’m lost

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Yeah classic characters are so in-depth.

They need to level 1 to 60 so they know their two button rotation when they raid

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Stop telling me how to play you fascist

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it def was a thing on private servers

just in a dif way.

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Because this isn’t retail where buying your way through things you don’t like is the norm.

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I think that’s because it’s mostly retail players who have driven and expanded the boosting the meta. They’re used to buying boosted characters in retail, so they don’t see anything wrong with it. Same goes for buying gold and other pay to win schemes.

I think some of the issues with Classic could probably be addressed by separating the subs, which would get rid a lot of the retail players who don’t even like or respect Classic, but are bored with retail (go figure) and have nothing better to do. Those people are probably only here because it’s already paid for, and separating the subs would weed those people out.

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Why would you think that would work players are so into meta and min maxing that it doesn’t matter if you play retail the fastest route to 60 is getting boosted.

By separating the subs all you’re also doing is making the people who play both pay more

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Maybe it wouldn’t work, I don’t know. But in my experience, retail players tend to be shallow and not appreciative of the excellent RPG elements of Classic (i.e. questing, leveling, exploration). Most don’t seem to care at all about that part of the game, which makes sense, because most of those elements have been all but removed from retail WoW. They also seem to have no shame about buying, cheating, or exploiting their way to a game’s rewards… on the contrary, they actually seem to take great pride in it.

Classic and retail are two very different games, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they attract two different types of gamers. IMO, retail WoW has more in common with Diablo 3 than Classic WoW.

Putting Classic behind a separate pay wall would at least weed out those who don’t care enough about Classic to pay for it, which would improve the average quality of the players.

It’s just an idea. I know it won’t happen. Blizzard didn’t want Classic and only cares about retail, and I think their strategy with keeping them on the same sub was to hope that some people who came back to play Classic would make their way over to retail and then buy the new expansion. Instead, I think the opposite has happened. Classic has been flooded with bored retail players.

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How is that a bad thing and how is it a symptom of boosting? You assume that if they werent being boosted they’d be out running around when more likely they’d still be in instances…

[quote=“Profits-mankrik, post:1, topic
:717950”]
it raises 60s who have no idea how to play their class
[/quote]

If you can afford to boost a character all the way to 60 odds are you have at least one other character you’re pretty good at, so you’re probably still bette than a fresh 60 unfamiliar with mechanics.
Also, that happens for a lot of players anyway since if you quest your way to 60 you’re probably not doing it as a tank/healing spec.

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Your first assertion is wrong. The people getting boosted would add a insignificant number of people to the pool available for running standard 5 man groups. The reason boosting became a thing is that the 9 dps competing for that 1 tank improvised and as it turns out the improvisation was more efficient. If boosting was eliminated somehow they would be sitting afk in sw/ogri or playing a diferant game.

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Even with boosting all over the place, you can still find groups. You must go “LFM” not “LFG”.

Typing LFG never worked unless you were a highly desired role, anyway.

A vast majority of people playing Classic are not new to the WoW universe. And those truly new to the game have to get gold to pay for boosting.

So they are either buying it which is a problem in itself, or they have a high level friend who gave them the gold to catch up.

Thankfully, there are no cross server grouping for PVE in Classic. If you are struggling with your class or ‘don’t know it’, they’re going to remember. And from the most part I’ve seen people be very helpful with assisting people with class mechanics. If the person is egotistic and refuses help, they will remember that, too.

Edit:
The part of boosting that I dislike is that for some instances, it is rewarding exploiting terrain in order for the mage to safely gather/avoid mobs.

Also, 80% of the boosters are gold farmers, which just supports RMT business.

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Because half the fun of vanilla is having lively zones full of players. Single-player WoW is not very fun.

As one of the devs put it, if the path of least resistance isn’t fun, something is wrong. WoW wasn’t designed to have you /afk your way to 60.

…because boosting takes players out of the zones and puts them inside instances. Looks like someone didn’t read the post.

Being good at one class =/= being good at all classes.

You think I don’t know that already? Even so, you’re still wrong. If you spam “LFM”, then you’re just going to be spamming “LFM heals+tank” or “LFM tank” and you’re in the same exact position as spamming “LFG”.

either you spam “LFG” for 2 hours or you spam “LFM tank” for 2 hours. Nothing changes.

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Yep, boosting and GDKP runs fuel the gold selling industry. If those two pay to win schemes were somehow made to go away, the gold selling/botting industry would be crippled. It wouldn’t completely go away, but it would become a fraction of what it currently is. I don’t know what could be done about GDKP, but boosting would be a very easy fix, just nerf the xp with a high level in the group.

If Blizzard was willing to ban multiboxing software in order to help them police botting. Addressing boosting would be a logical next step in that regard, IMO.

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Explain to me how you think they are “fueling” gold selling/botting