Boosting Rule Adjustments

[Unsullied]

I think you need to listen to the community on this one Kestrel. No one asked for this addition to the rules and the vast majority of the community are expecting you to hold the values of turtlewow and keep the rules as similar as possible to that. This is a major change of rules that most people won't agree with, which is why you are being ratio'd. You will definitely lose server population over implementing this. To say that this is something turtlewow would have done if they had the manpower or means to is insane. They had been moderating for over 7 years.

Sure, and perhaps they did not make it a rule for another reason that I gave. As I said in another response (made after you posted this so no way you saw it first) perhaps the best compromise is to instead allow boosting, but enforce group dropping as an exploit. I would imagine the effect would be similar but does stick to the original TWoW rules, given this is a work around of a mechanic they specifically implemented/changed. Would this be more agreeable or feel like the same change with a different coat of pain? (genuine question)

Honestly I think the community is more frustrated about new random rules being implemented without the thought or consulting the general public first vs. whatever board of team members are in the meetings you guys have. When changes like this are made hastily without the thought of how it affects the community as a whole and being able to empathize with your playerbase, it will break dev/player trust.

If you want my opinion on how to best tackle boosting in general, You can implement something similar to how Kronos does it. If in group, level penalty applies to exp gain like it has always been in the past.. If not in group, you gain exp based on the amount of damage your group does to the mob.. so say someone outside of the party does like 90% of the damage, you only get 10% exp of the mob as well as grouping penalty.. That being said you'd have to implement a separate griefing rule that makes it griefing if you keep killing random levelers mobs. I think this is the best way to tackle this in the long term if you don't want to have to deal with moderating this stuff and adding questionable rules that the general public will find as Authoritative..

In any case, thank you for taking time to reply to all our concerns and taking it into consideration. We are genuinely frustrated at how this has been handled, but we all want what's best for the community.. Also please take into consideration that people enjoy this game in different ways. Some just want to get to 60 and raid and others want to level and not raid. Let the people enjoy the game how they want to enjoy it as long as it isn't malicious to the community. I personally want to see this project succeed and have a thriving server population and not end up like Kronos, or all the private server projects after that.

[Darhk]

I am more annoyed that you chance the rules as you see fit. I come from Kronos 5 where they simply did not allow any form of multiboxing at all, well i think you can have a lvl 1 bank alt online in a major city thats about it. Same as on Nostalrius. Just have clear rules from the get go and people wont act like total dicks.

I am strongly against this change, literally planned my whole playing experience to be able to self-level a warrior and priest while my paladin is max level. If I knew this from the start I would just start as a warrior. I do not care for the leveling at all, I just want to raid and pump thats how I enjoy and how I donated 100 euros so my paladin can be a walking main city for my alts. I wont dono a cent more til this change is reverted or some leeway for helping your own alts.

[Holydruid]

First of all sorry about my previous reaction. But this really triggers me for multiple reason.
I've had 2 alts boosted on TWOW, to help other guilds as a raid leader progress through MC and Naxx.
I would never do this if boosting is banned, because i cba leveling over and over and over and over for days.

But let's actually look at the logic here of everything you said, because there isn't much of it.


"We're in beta, communication-wise."
That's not an excuse for the decision itself, it's a deflection.
The issue isn't how you announced it, it's what you announced.
You can communicate a bad decision perfectly and it's still a bad decision.


"Boosting is an attempt to skip content."
Sure, sometimes. But you're treating "a guild leader gearing up a newer player" and "an RMT seller power-leveling accounts for cash" as the same phenomenon because they use the same mechanic.
They're not the same thing. One is a community sustaining itself, the other is a business exploiting your economy. Banning the mechanic because you can't tell the difference is a failure of enforcement, not a principled stance, and you're making the whole population pay for a detection problem that's actually yours to solve.


"We can't adequately detect RMT boosting."
This is the actual reason, buried two-thirds of the way down.
Everything above it, the nostalgia about wing clip and soul shard bags, the "core part of the game" framing, is a values argument bolted onto what is really an admission: we can't catch the cheaters, so we're banning the behavior for everyone. That's not protecting the leveling experience. That's outsourcing your anti-cheat problem to your player base and calling it philosophy.


"A level 60 should be one someone actually got to 60 on."
Then say that's the goal, and build a policy around that, an achievement flag, a "self-found" tag, whatever. Instead you banned a mechanic that a huge chunk of your population was using for reasons that have nothing to do with faking achievement: alt professions, guild support, helping friends, keeping the economy liquid on a low-pop server. You're not preserving the meaning of level 60, you're just making everyone slower, including the people who never cared about the "achievement" in the first place.


"General assistance is fine, AOE farming for others isn't."
Where's the line? A 60 clearing a dungeon so a 20 can loot it, assistance or boosting? A 60 killing mobs next to a 20 so they get kill credit, assistance or boosting? You just told us you can't reliably detect RMT boosting. What makes you confident you can adjudicate this distinction fairly and consistently across hundreds of reports? You've replaced one unenforceable line with another unenforceable line, and this one will be enforced by whichever GM is on duty and how they feel about it that day.


"We'd rather you know now than 3 months from now."
That's not a policy justification, that's a warning shot. It reads as "the ban will only get stricter, plan accordingly" which is a fine thing to say honestly, but dress it up as such. Don't wrap a threat in a customer-service tone.


"We are all on the same team, most of the community wants this."
Says who? Where's the survey, the poll, the data? You just spent three paragraphs saying you underestimated how many people boost or plan to. That's the opposite of evidence for consensus, that's evidence you don't actually know where your community stands, and you're asserting a majority you haven't demonstrated.


"TurtleWoW's intent was clearly to ban this too, we're just closing loopholes they'd have closed."
This is speculation presented as certainty about someone else's unstated intentions, used to borrow legitimacy for your own decision. If you want to make this call, make it as your call for your server's population and needs, don't launder it through a guess about what another team would've done.


The core problem: you had a real, narrow issue, RMT, and you solved it with the broadest possible tool, at the cost of the legitimate uses that were actually holding smaller guilds and the economy together. If the detection problem is the real issue, that's what should've been on the table for community input, not a blanket ban justified after the fact with nostalgia about leveling being "sacred."

Responding by point;

1.) Your are correct, it is not an excuse for the decision itself. It is an acknowledgement that this was not communicated well. That is important to us, and I assume important to the community whether or not it is important to you personally.

2.) A guild leader gearing up a new player would not be considered boosting and enforceable under this change in rules. A guild leader power leveling a new guildmate from 30-40 AOE farming SM would be considered boosting and certainly feels to me like an attempt to skip content. As said in another response (made after the post I am now responding to so apologies if you already read/are aware of this) this decision was made when/how it was because of its relation to RMT, preventing RMT is not why this is the decision that we ended up on.

For further clarification on that point because it is important. If this RMT investigation never lead us to think/consider that people were already boosting others in the game, we would still have ended up making the same conclusion when we realized and confronted the question down the line. This is a rule we all agree upon and wish we had implemented from the beginning of the server, but the second best time to do that is now, not in another 3 months.

3.) This is not the actual reason, this is what brought to our attention that this was happening and becoming prevalent and that we had to make a decision one way or another. It seamed obvious to some of us that if a method of gameplay was heavily nerfed, and the only way to make it viable was to drop group mid combat, that was not an intended method of gameplay. If you truly think the turtle wow devs were fine with boosting, then why do you think you have to drop group mid pull to even make it work?

Perhaps the solution should have instead been a fix to the mechanics around boosting, that is we should have or should patch up that loop hole instead of outright banning the practice. The result would be the same in my mind (and I'd imagine yours as well but correct me if I am wrong). If this is something the community would prefer that can be arranged and may end up as a bit of a compromise on the issue. It would certainly make our GM's lives easier.

4.) Achievement is not the only reason, I'd also argue immersion and a healthy and diverse economy. Every dev will likely give you a different reason for their individual support of the banning of this practice but those are some of the strong trough lines. And yes we do expect this to make everyone slower, we don't view that as a bad thing, slow and steady.

5.) The line is where the rules and the GM's (with guidance from the developers) say that it is. Enforcement is not a no talk instant ban. GM's will be giving out warnings and clarifications where necessary.

When situations arise where the GMs are not confident in how to handle it, they are escalated to me personally for a judgement call. When that happens internal notes are made on how we handle that specific scenario going forward. That is generally how all issues like this are handled, and how we assure that we do enforce rules and lines consistently.

6.) That is neither a policy justification nor a warning shot. That statement does not justify the policy it justifies why it is happening now, and how we wish it had happened sooner, but now is better than putting it off further. That statement is not a warning shot because there is no threat of further rules.

7.) I did not say that most of the community wants this. I am not sure if most of the community wants this but regardless of if they do I feel it is best specifically for the community that we want to build and the community that turtle wow had. If that is not you I completely respect that.

8.) Trust me, we are making this as our call based on what we want for the server. That does not take away from the fact that the Turtle Team was certainly in agreement. I assume you made similar posts on the turtle forums when they nerfed the grouped EXP in the way that they did?

9.) As previously stated, this is not a decision who's decision was driven by RMT, it was a decision that was brought up because of RMT. I would argue the economy will do better without boosting, but that is a much longer more detailed conversation best had elsewhere IMO (would just end up a conversation about how we define a healthy wow economy).

You said a healthy economy is one of the strong throughlines behind this decision, so let's actually run the numbers instead of just asserting it.

Take a crafted item with a 3-7 day cooldown gating Naxx-tier gear. (Cured rugged hide, Mooncloth, Arcanite Bars). If gearing a single raider needs multiple crafts of that item, you're looking at roughly 2-8 weeks of a crafter working at max cooldown efficiency per person, assuming they craft nothing else and never miss a cycle. Scale that to a 40-man raid and you're at somewhere around 80+ crafter-months of output needed just to gear one guild once. That's not a rounding error, that's the entire supply-side bottleneck of your endgame economy sitting on however many level-60 characters happen to have that profession. (I guess without a crafting profession, i will go buy a big fat dildo and go fuck myself when Naxx is released? Or will Octo do it for me?)

Alts existing as viable crafters isn't a shortcut around content, it's what makes the number of profession slots scale with player investment instead of player count. One dedicated player running 3-4 crafting alts can cover a meaningful chunk of that 80-crafter-month requirement on their own, smoothing supply so prices don't spike every time a new guild starts progressing. Take that away, and the only way to increase supply is to convince more people to level fresh 60s from scratch specifically to fill a crafting cooldown niche, which is a much higher time investment for a much narrower payoff, so fewer people will bother. Supply drops, demand doesn't, prices go up. That's not a values disagreement about immersion, that's just how a cooldown-gated market responds to a shrinking producer pool.

Here's the part that actually cuts against your own stated goal though. The people best positioned to absorb "level a fresh main from scratch just to craft" are exactly the players with the most free time or the most disposable income to buy carries and gold for other needs while they do it. You haven't removed the advantage wealthy or high-investment players have in this economy, you've just moved it from farming efficiently with alts to having the most raw hours to burn re-leveling mains. If anything that's a worse outcome for a healthy and diverse economy than the status quo, because it concentrates crafting supply in fewer hands rather than spreading it across more casual players who could contribute a farming alt or two without committing to a second full playthrough.

So when you say the economy argument needs its own longer conversation elsewhere, that's fair, but it shouldn't get to sit as an unexamined bullet point in the original post while the actual mechanism, cooldown-gated crafting supply and 40 plus month single-crafter timelines, points the opposite direction. If you want to defend healthy economy as a reason for this rule, you need to address why constraining the crafter pool on cooldown-gated professions helps rather than hurts supply, not just assert that immersion and reduced boosting will get you there.

This rule, and the way this is literally being forced into our throats, no matter what we say. Made me and many others of my guild lose faith in your team. TurtleWoW wasn't already the best in making decisions, but atleast they reverted their decision on community feedback like this. OctoWoW is turning into Blizzard-level-like behavior, the exact reason why most people don't like Blizzard. Keep the honor to yourselves and actually listen to the community with an outrage like this, and try and mend the faith people had in you. As a lot of is gone already.

[Unsullied]

I am more annoyed that you chance the rules as you see fit. I come from Kronos 5 where they simply did not allow any form of multiboxing at all, well i think you can have a lvl 1 bank alt online in a major city thats about it. Same as on Nostalrius. Just have clear rules from the get go and people wont act like total dicks.

I am strongly against this change, literally planned my whole playing experience to be able to self-level a warrior and priest while my paladin is max level. If I knew this from the start I would just start as a warrior. I do not care for the leveling at all, I just want to raid and pump thats how I enjoy and how I donated 100 euros so my paladin can be a walking main city for my alts. I wont dono a cent more til this change is reverted or some leeway for helping your own alts.

I played Kronos since Kronos I and I can tell you Kronos also changed the rules a lot and broke player trust. Even now they flip flop between allowing multibox and not.

[Beckett]

This sort of damage control isn't enough Kestrel.

You not only need to roll back the rule change, but seriously consider removing Darktifa and Pig (Or should I say, Darkpedo and Pdid) from your staff. They've proven they cannot be trusted to wield any sort of power, and their big mouths have damaged your server's reputation.

Supporters and potential investors into this project are pissed. You have an easy thing to do: Just remake TWOW server. Don't fuck it up trying to cater to wants that simply don't exist anymore.

[Grttadls]

First of all sorry about my previous reaction. But this really triggers me for multiple reason.
I've had 2 alts boosted on TWOW, to help other guilds as a raid leader progress through MC and Naxx.
I would never do this if boosting is banned, because i cba leveling over and over and over and over for days.

But let's actually look at the logic here of everything you said, because there isn't much of it.


"We're in beta, communication-wise."
That's not an excuse for the decision itself, it's a deflection.
The issue isn't how you announced it, it's what you announced.
You can communicate a bad decision perfectly and it's still a bad decision.


"Boosting is an attempt to skip content."
Sure, sometimes. But you're treating "a guild leader gearing up a newer player" and "an RMT seller power-leveling accounts for cash" as the same phenomenon because they use the same mechanic.
They're not the same thing. One is a community sustaining itself, the other is a business exploiting your economy. Banning the mechanic because you can't tell the difference is a failure of enforcement, not a principled stance, and you're making the whole population pay for a detection problem that's actually yours to solve.


"We can't adequately detect RMT boosting."
This is the actual reason, buried two-thirds of the way down.
Everything above it, the nostalgia about wing clip and soul shard bags, the "core part of the game" framing, is a values argument bolted onto what is really an admission: we can't catch the cheaters, so we're banning the behavior for everyone. That's not protecting the leveling experience. That's outsourcing your anti-cheat problem to your player base and calling it philosophy.


"A level 60 should be one someone actually got to 60 on."
Then say that's the goal, and build a policy around that, an achievement flag, a "self-found" tag, whatever. Instead you banned a mechanic that a huge chunk of your population was using for reasons that have nothing to do with faking achievement: alt professions, guild support, helping friends, keeping the economy liquid on a low-pop server. You're not preserving the meaning of level 60, you're just making everyone slower, including the people who never cared about the "achievement" in the first place.


"General assistance is fine, AOE farming for others isn't."
Where's the line? A 60 clearing a dungeon so a 20 can loot it, assistance or boosting? A 60 killing mobs next to a 20 so they get kill credit, assistance or boosting? You just told us you can't reliably detect RMT boosting. What makes you confident you can adjudicate this distinction fairly and consistently across hundreds of reports? You've replaced one unenforceable line with another unenforceable line, and this one will be enforced by whichever GM is on duty and how they feel about it that day.


"We'd rather you know now than 3 months from now."
That's not a policy justification, that's a warning shot. It reads as "the ban will only get stricter, plan accordingly" which is a fine thing to say honestly, but dress it up as such. Don't wrap a threat in a customer-service tone.


"We are all on the same team, most of the community wants this."
Says who? Where's the survey, the poll, the data? You just spent three paragraphs saying you underestimated how many people boost or plan to. That's the opposite of evidence for consensus, that's evidence you don't actually know where your community stands, and you're asserting a majority you haven't demonstrated.


"TurtleWoW's intent was clearly to ban this too, we're just closing loopholes they'd have closed."
This is speculation presented as certainty about someone else's unstated intentions, used to borrow legitimacy for your own decision. If you want to make this call, make it as your call for your server's population and needs, don't launder it through a guess about what another team would've done.


The core problem: you had a real, narrow issue, RMT, and you solved it with the broadest possible tool, at the cost of the legitimate uses that were actually holding smaller guilds and the economy together. If the detection problem is the real issue, that's what should've been on the table for community input, not a blanket ban justified after the fact with nostalgia about leveling being "sacred."

Responding by point;

1.) Your are correct, it is not an excuse for the decision itself. It is an acknowledgement that this was not communicated well. That is important to us, and I assume important to the community whether or not it is important to you personally.

2.) A guild leader gearing up a new player would not be considered boosting and enforceable under this change in rules. A guild leader power leveling a new guildmate from 30-40 AOE farming SM would be considered boosting and certainly feels to me like an attempt to skip content. As said in another response (made after the post I am now responding to so apologies if you already read/are aware of this) this decision was made when/how it was because of its relation to RMT, preventing RMT is not why this is the decision that we ended up on.

For further clarification on that point because it is important. If this RMT investigation never lead us to think/consider that people were already boosting others in the game, we would still have ended up making the same conclusion when we realized and confronted the question down the line. This is a rule we all agree upon and wish we had implemented from the beginning of the server, but the second best time to do that is now, not in another 3 months.

3.) This is not the actual reason, this is what brought to our attention that this was happening and becoming prevalent and that we had to make a decision one way or another. It seamed obvious to some of us that if a method of gameplay was heavily nerfed, and the only way to make it viable was to drop group mid combat, that was not an intended method of gameplay. If you truly think the turtle wow devs were fine with boosting, then why do you think you have to drop group mid pull to even make it work?

Perhaps the solution should have instead been a fix to the mechanics around boosting, that is we should have or should patch up that loop hole instead of outright banning the practice. The result would be the same in my mind (and I'd imagine yours as well but correct me if I am wrong). If this is something the community would prefer that can be arranged and may end up as a bit of a compromise on the issue. It would certainly make our GM's lives easier.

4.) Achievement is not the only reason, I'd also argue immersion and a healthy and diverse economy. Every dev will likely give you a different reason for their individual support of the banning of this practice but those are some of the strong trough lines. And yes we do expect this to make everyone slower, we don't view that as a bad thing, slow and steady.

5.) The line is where the rules and the GM's (with guidance from the developers) say that it is. Enforcement is not a no talk instant ban. GM's will be giving out warnings and clarifications where necessary.

When situations arise where the GMs are not confident in how to handle it, they are escalated to me personally for a judgement call. When that happens internal notes are made on how we handle that specific scenario going forward. That is generally how all issues like this are handled, and how we assure that we do enforce rules and lines consistently.

6.) That is neither a policy justification nor a warning shot. That statement does not justify the policy it justifies why it is happening now, and how we wish it had happened sooner, but now is better than putting it off further. That statement is not a warning shot because there is no threat of further rules.

7.) I did not say that most of the community wants this. I am not sure if most of the community wants this but regardless of if they do I feel it is best specifically for the community that we want to build and the community that turtle wow had. If that is not you I completely respect that.

8.) Trust me, we are making this as our call based on what we want for the server. That does not take away from the fact that the Turtle Team was certainly in agreement. I assume you made similar posts on the turtle forums when they nerfed the grouped EXP in the way that they did?

9.) As previously stated, this is not a decision who's decision was driven by RMT, it was a decision that was brought up because of RMT. I would argue the economy will do better without boosting, but that is a much longer more detailed conversation best had elsewhere IMO (would just end up a conversation about how we define a healthy wow economy).

You said a healthy economy is one of the strong throughlines behind this decision, so let's actually run the numbers instead of just asserting it.

Take a crafted item with a 3-7 day cooldown gating Naxx-tier gear. (Cured rugged hide, Mooncloth, Arcanite Bars). If gearing a single raider needs multiple crafts of that item, you're looking at roughly 2-8 weeks of a crafter working at max cooldown efficiency per person, assuming they craft nothing else and never miss a cycle. Scale that to a 40-man raid and you're at somewhere around 80+ crafter-months of output needed just to gear one guild once. That's not a rounding error, that's the entire supply-side bottleneck of your endgame economy sitting on however many level-60 characters happen to have that profession. (I guess without a crafting profession, i will go buy a big fat dildo and go fuck myself when Naxx is released? Or will Octo do it for me?)

Alts existing as viable crafters isn't a shortcut around content, it's what makes the number of profession slots scale with player investment instead of player count. One dedicated player running 3-4 crafting alts can cover a meaningful chunk of that 80-crafter-month requirement on their own, smoothing supply so prices don't spike every time a new guild starts progressing. Take that away, and the only way to increase supply is to convince more people to level fresh 60s from scratch specifically to fill a crafting cooldown niche, which is a much higher time investment for a much narrower payoff, so fewer people will bother. Supply drops, demand doesn't, prices go up. That's not a values disagreement about immersion, that's just how a cooldown-gated market responds to a shrinking producer pool.

Here's the part that actually cuts against your own stated goal though. The people best positioned to absorb "level a fresh main from scratch just to craft" are exactly the players with the most free time or the most disposable income to buy carries and gold for other needs while they do it. You haven't removed the advantage wealthy or high-investment players have in this economy, you've just moved it from farming efficiently with alts to having the most raw hours to burn re-leveling mains. If anything that's a worse outcome for a healthy and diverse economy than the status quo, because it concentrates crafting supply in fewer hands rather than spreading it across more casual players who could contribute a farming alt or two without committing to a second full playthrough.

So when you say the economy argument needs its own longer conversation elsewhere, that's fair, but it shouldn't get to sit as an unexamined bullet point in the original post while the actual mechanism, cooldown-gated crafting supply and 40 plus month single-crafter timelines, points the opposite direction. If you want to defend healthy economy as a reason for this rule, you need to address why constraining the crafter pool on cooldown-gated professions helps rather than hurts supply, not just assert that immersion and reduced boosting will get you there.

This rule, and the way this is literally being forced into our throats, no matter what we say. Made me and many others of my guild lose faith in your team. TurtleWoW wasn't already the best in making decisions, but atleast they reverted their decision on community feedback like this. OctoWoW is turning into Blizzard-level-like behavior, the exact reason why most people don't like Blizzard. Keep the honor to yourselves and actually listen to the community with an outrage like this, and try and mend the faith people had in you. As a lot of is gone already.

100% this. The server economy is going to look really bad once naxx comes out and arcanite bars are selling for 100g on top of all the other consumes needed to raid. But kestrel likes hard core so we’re going to nerf farms too so you have to compete open world for herb nodes

[Grttadls]

Also in case it isn’t clear. I don’t think anyone here supports RMT based boosts. Paying money to someone to mob tag you is lame. I believe most people here are upset about the limitations to self boosting an alt.

If open world annoyance to levelers is the problem. Allow the instance based boosting “loop hole” and let people play how they want please

[Igzee]

Kestrel I understand where the concern is coming from and I partially agree on some points, though personally I don't think it's a good change. But it's your server who am I to argue. What I would like to ask is if there would be room for a little compromise.

Outside of the scum RMTing, this really negativly effects the majority of dedicated end game minded players, both currently existing and still leveling. One of the main motivations for genuine players to boost were to create alts that could craft particular items needed throughout our journey, whether for a quest or more generally paying for items such as consumables. There's also reasoning for summoning alts or filling in raid slots for needed roles but that's not the issue I want to discuss at the moment.

Now to the compromise. What are your thoughts on removing or at least lowering the cap on reaching max professions? To say it's currently level 35 but what if we could lower it to at least level 20. Even that much of a difference doesn't seem like a lot but would save so much time for people who have lives or even just don't want to go through the motions of grinding that far again and again and again.

Also to note, so many people prioritized doing this already before this announcement while some like myself pushed it off in lieu of other priorities not knowing this change would ever be a thing. It almost feels like a ladder pull at this point putting half if not more at a massive disadvantage.

Can we get an answer about this concept of lowering the level to enjoy Artisan profession ?
It will even balance the fact that it was level 20 early in beta and many people abused it

Now, regarding 'boosting', most of us are only tag leveling, which do not have that negative connotation.
Please note that we do not fully level our alts this way, only few phases mostly while queuing for a dungeon. We also enjoy the custom content and try to avoid the one that has been cleared at least 30+ times for the last 20 years.

If RMT wants to level characters they will find an other way. In fact forcing the leveling in a unique specific way is the best way to normalize the leveling and make it impossible to detect and ban the sold accounts.

Let them do that, spot the abusers (log IP while leveling, notice short time between each level, players in the zone, char name changes, IP/country changes, guild at 60, cross data references), hit the ban hammer after a month. Then the server will get a reputation to not forgive and people will think twice before buying a 60 online.

Even better, let mains register their alts so that you have a trace on who levels with whom and why. Could be an open whitelist, so that people can check before reporting

[Arlian]

I don't like this change.

I'm the type of player who doesn't like to bother others for crafted things like enchanted leather or disenchanting greens, using multiple day cooldowns to help our guild progress a tiiiny bit faster etc. I like having access to a level 35 with a few different professions as I don't have to wait for a guildie to come online and I tend to not ask in trade/general chats because there's usually a fee involved and as a non-profit druid, I don't have a lot of gold
I was also really hoping to create an uber account for our guild which means quite a few level 20 warlocks.

While I don't really ever aim to have a second level 60 (I feel 1 takes up enough time as it is xD) I do, however, have many friends just coming back from the burn from TWoW and they just want to get back to how it was on that server. Progressing in BWL and excitedly waiting for future content! It's my many'th time leveling a character in azeroth, but I have never done the end game content and what TWoW has made happen is amazing. Am looking forward to progressing so much (and leveling on Octo so close to Ambershire leveling was VERY difficult for me).

I also remember a promise of providing the Turtle experience on Octo. For me, I guess I joined kinda late in TWoW (only started with Ambershire) but having alts was common and it was refreshing to be able to boost my own to level 20 and 35 as I would never normally have multiple accounts/alts. And we can all agree doing the same quests over and over again for the 20 years I've played the game on/off is tedious.

I was so happy with how the server was doing, (and yes, I know this was my own decision to donate) but I literally donated a substantial amount (at least for me) day or two before this announcement, and now I know I'll probably won't be getting enough diversity from the game as I can't level my alts the way I'd like (irl does get in the way of having too much game time). Essentially I donated for one thing, and am getting something else :'D

I genuinely hope the community will be heard and this will get reverted like the pvp rule was recently (which imo was a really good one to stop griefing low levels, I personally never enable pvp, was just happy others wouldn't be griefed).

<3

[Beckett]

You guys got rugged. Look at one of their GMs in the other thread calling people idiots, or saying in blue chat "The customer isn't always right, leave if you don't like it". The PvP server thing was the warning sign, but you guys absolutely pulled up the ladder on people joining when sign ups became public.