Hello guys, this is a post from the EU forums that I’m posting here as well so that more people can see and reply with their thoughts (whether in agreement, disagreement, observation or impartiality).
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/why-the-level-58-boost-is-bad-for-the-game/252942
Hello, I’ve seen the community is quite torn on this topic, which troubles me as I thought something as ‘‘retail-ish’’ as the level boost would have people enraged and set the forums ablaze, so I thought I would make a post listing the reasons why the boost IS in fact bad for the health of the game and for the individual experience of both long-time classic players as well as new / returning players who don’t have a 60 yet.
It further aids bots
If anyone doesn’t know how the bot economy basically works, once an account is made with the purpose of being a botting account to make gold, it’s basically a race for the botter to make as much money as possible before they are eventually banned, if they are in fact ever banned. Every time a botter’s account is banned, they have to go through the whole set up cost and time investment of creating a new account and levelling new chars to begin their botting activities again. If they are unable to make more money than the set up cost of a new account and are unable to level up to the level they need to farm gold in a short enough amount of time before they are banned, then they start going negative which over a while will bankrupt a botter (put them out of business). So, the sooner they can get back to the point (on a new account) of being able to make money again, the more profit a botter can make and the more in-game resources they can (potentially) take away from legitimate players and the less likely they are to go under. Now, being able to boost to 58 OBVIOUSLY makes it quicker for a new bot account to start making money again, and therefore is a bad aspect of boosts because botting is bad for legitimate players for well-documented reasons.
Due to it’s cost, it actually makes the game less accessible to many new players
One of the biggest defences of the boost is that it allows new, returning and players who don’t like content added in vanilla wow to catch right up and skip past all of that content thus making TBC more accessible to more players, which both to blizzard and to players seems like a net positive. However, if the cost of boosts on retail are anything to go by, then these boosts actually act as a massive pay wall. Because now, if I’m a new player in TBC, I feel somewhat obliged to buy the boost so that you’re not behind from every1 else who has bought it. Now, some players won’t be able to afford the boost and thus are discriminated against and others may be able to afford it but are put off by the perceived required cost to play the game on an even playing field. To summarise this point, I think the cost of the boost will actually make TBC less accessible to more players than the amount of players who will now ‘be able’ to play because of the boost. And even if it isn’t more, it’s still a win / loss situation, thus there isn’t a distinctive and clear benefit to the boost.
It creates a new meta for how to be the most time efficient and competitive player
If I, or my guild decide that I need/want another character for a profession cooldown, let’s say a primal might cooldown to make more money or to craft at a higher rate for the guild, without a boost, I would have to level a character and that would be the most time-efficient and competitive way to get that additional transmute. Now yes, the most time-efficient and competitive way to do this would be through paying for dungeon boosts but at least I can do this all on the same account. But now, with the boost, the new most competitive way to get this transmute alt is to create a new account (assuming I’ve used my boost on another transmute alt already), pay a new sub and buy another boost. Essentially, the best way for me to be competitive in the market in tbc is to pay real life money for a level boost. It’s more time-efficient than dungeon boosting. And if anyone thinks that the best way in a video game to be efficient should be to pay irl money to the game company, then I don’t think they understand what makes good games, probably because they’ve been raised in this generation that have only ever known games to be loot-box cash grabs and nothing more.
In this sense, having it limited to 1 per account actually makes this new meta more toxic for players because to indulge in it, they have to make a new account and pay a new sub for every alt they want whereas if it was unlimited, they could at least do it on the same account.
It de-legitimises what others have earned and sets a terrible precedent
When you see some1 in retail with a store mount, you don’t gasp and think, oh wow, that player is awesome for having that mount because you know that the way they got that item was just through spending irl cash, and thus, holds not value. It wasn’t an in-game challenge to earn. It didn’t require any admirable traits such as skill, dedication, teamwork, co-operation or intellect. It required a credit card. The same applies to the boost. Now, seeing a level 60 doesn’t make you gasp in amazement of another player but it does show one thing. That dedication in the game directly correlates to increased results. The level boost devastates this fundamental correlation.
Now for the terrible precedent. What is this precedent you may ask? Well if you shouldn’t have to earn levels through doing something in-game then why should you have to earn gold, and by extension things such as riding skill, ur mounts, ur consumes, boes and so on. If you apply the logic being used to defend the boost to its’ full extension, you arrive at this conclusion, unless you are selective in your application of your pro-boost philosophy. But with no clear rules to define what conveniences are ok and what are not, then it all eventually results in subjective judgements of loud individuals to decide what is ok and what isn’t. This is why so many people were #nochanges because it provided a clear and consistent guideline that determined what could and couldn’t be in the game and applied that ideology to everything, not just somethings at the player base’s and the dev team’s discretion. Of course now, this has been abandoned, and the classic ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ has taken effect. Well if spell batching can go, then why can’t we change seals? And if seals can be changed, why can’t we nerf horde racials? And if we can nerf things, why can’t we buff things? If we can have the boost, why can’t we have the token? etc etc…
It’s cliche but, it isn’t the ‘classic experience’
This is the most subjective point of them all but… to me, the boost screams ‘retail!’ just as much as LFR, LFD and the wow token do. To me, it is no worse or better than them. Imo, if you have a problem with those things being in classic, then you should have a problem with the boost too. LFR was introduced in Cataclysm, LFD in WotLK, the boost in MoP and the token in Legion thus making the boost one of the newest features of all of the features that I mentioned previously as being ‘not part of the classic experience’. If the goal of classic is to bring back a version of the game that was long gone, then how is adding a feature from MoP cohesive with that?
Player-driven dungeon boosts are more acceptable than blizzard provided level boosts
To put it simple, although you CAN buy gold with irl money from third party sites to pay for dungeon carries from other players, there is also the ability to pay for those carries legitimately through earning the gold legitimately whereas if you have the blizzard-provided level boost, you can ONLY earn this (in classic) through irl cash. Of course if you play retail, which you shouldn’t feel at all obliged to do to gain an advantage in classic, then you can earn the boost in game through wow tokens.
In conclusion, dungeon carries are more acceptable because, although they aren’t at all conducive to a healthy and fun classic experience, they can be paid for through legitimate in-game means and do contribute somewhat positively to the server community in the sense that it is a player created economy where players can work to make money (assuming the boosts aren’t being run by a bot and/or hacker) whereas blizzard level boosts can only be obtained one way and one way only (through playing classic) and this is by buying them with irl cash.
It pollutes the 58-70 player population (especially at launch) with clueless players
It isn’t going to be fun when you’re trying to do dungeons whilst levelling with players who are on their nice and shiny new boosted class that they have no idea how to play because they’ve just been thrown their random assortment of gear, with a crap load of talents and spells that they don’t understand. These players will be dead weight and a drag to play with not to mention the fact that they will contribute to server lag and over-population in HFP.
What’s the middle ground? What’s the solution?
Imo, if blizzard make fresh tbc servers that cannot be transferred from or to then they could allow players to level boost on those realms and then remove the boost from the existing, non-fresh realms that are progressing from classic to TBC. The whole purpose of fresh realms would be to cater to new and returning players anyway so they don’t have to compete with players who have boat loads of materials and gold stashed up from classic and the main defence of the boost is that it allows those who don’t like classic content and didn’t play classic to skip and/or catch up to other players so why not put both things that cater to the same audience on one type of server and then get rid of that stuff on the servers that cater to another audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFfdUJk_CIE&t=32s
This is a very good video with mostly similar points to the OP. If you don’t like reading, watch this instead 