Boosting Rule Adjustments

[Beckett]

There are definitely people spawning in and out of the SW moonwell just to do CDs, it seems the lucky few that got a jump start on this server (aka devs and friends/family) will have access to a huge monopoly of CD materials going forward. Again, you guys got the ladder pulled up on ya and the fact that the head dev isn't budging despite enormous backlash to this whole thing stinks of the type of pserver corruption that would've made even Shenna blush.

All this comes down to 1 thing:

"Boosting breaks immersion"

Un problemo: Kestrel in this very thread gave the thumbs up for boosting in DME with lashers. So... it's really not even about boosting a character to 60, they just don't want too many 35s running around.

[Hordeforsaken]

All this comes down to 1 thing:
"Boosting breaks immersion"

Un problemo: Kestrel in this very thread gave the thumbs up for boosting in DME with lashers. So... it's really not even about boosting a character to 60, they just don't want too many 35s running around.

That proves my point that it's not about fast leveling. Immersion players don't want to see immersion-breaking gameplay, even if it doesn't affect them. Which is what my post was about; breaking the 4th wall. Banning open-world boosting while allowing indoor boosting fits my theory this is all about maintaining immersion.

[Yotca]

All this comes down to 1 thing:
"Boosting breaks immersion"

Un problemo: Kestrel in this very thread gave the thumbs up for boosting in DME with lashers. So... it's really not even about boosting a character to 60, they just don't want too many 35s running around.

That proves my point that it's not about fast leveling. Immersion players don't want to see immersion-breaking gameplay, even if it doesn't affect them. Which is what my post was about; breaking the 4th wall. Banning open-world boosting while allowing indoor boosting fits my theory this is all about maintaining immersion.

And you're a minority so small you're a speck of dust. No one cares for "immersion or RP" after 22 years. There's a reason RP servers have less population than HC servers.

[Holydruid]

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.

Then I assume you equally lost faith in the turtle team when they implemented this EXP change originally? Did their server only survive economically because of the drop group work around? That would be a bold claim.

This is not an answer, that's a deflection back onto me instead of the actual claim. Whether I criticized Turtle's EXP change (which i did) or not doesn't change the math on OctoWoW's crafting economy, those are two different servers with two different policies right now. Turtle nerfed shared EXP gain in a party, they didn't ban boosting for using alts to farm or craft materials for other characters. Comparing "did Turtle's server survive" to "does banning boosting hurt cooldown-gated crafting supply" isn't a real comparison, it's just changing the subject.

And even if it were comparable, "the server survived" isn't the same as "the policy was good for the economy." Servers survive bad decisions all the time, players just adapt, prices shift, and the people who quit over it aren't in whatever data you'd point to as proof it worked out fine.

So I'll ask again, directly: on a server where endgame crafting mats are gated behind multi-day cooldowns and raid-scale demand requires dozens of crafter-months of output, does shrinking the viable crafter pool down to fresh mains increase or decrease supply, and what does that do to prices? That's the actual claim. If the math's wrong, show where. If it's right but you think it's worth the tradeoff, just say that. I'd rather have that conversation than another redirect.

Naxx and K40 phase are going to be hell with all the gated crafting materials that are required for 1 tier piece.

[Shaksa]

Un problemo: Kestrel in this very thread gave the thumbs up for boosting in DME with lashers. So... it's really not even about boosting a character to 60, they just don't want too many 35s running around.

That proves my point that it's not about fast leveling. Immersion players don't want to see immersion-breaking gameplay, even if it doesn't affect them. Which is what my post was about; breaking the 4th wall. Banning open-world boosting while allowing indoor boosting fits my theory this is all about maintaining immersion.

And you're a minority so small you're a speck of dust. No one cares for "immersion or RP" after 22 years. There's a reason RP servers have less population than HC servers.

The immersion and vibe of vanilla is by far the biggest reason it's still around in private servers. Not by being able to multibox 20 accounts with "warlock networks and moon cloth slaves". Before this thread I've never even heard of such terms and I've played vanilla servers on and off since the original vanilla. It is and always was a casual MMO with a huge vibe which makes people come back again and again. You are absolutely in the minority of players, treating it as a single player game thinking having 10 or 20 or however many accounts is normal. You are not well.

[Grttadls]

That proves my point that it's not about fast leveling. Immersion players don't want to see immersion-breaking gameplay, even if it doesn't affect them. Which is what my post was about; breaking the 4th wall. Banning open-world boosting while allowing indoor boosting fits my theory this is all about maintaining immersion.

And you're a minority so small you're a speck of dust. No one cares for "immersion or RP" after 22 years. There's a reason RP servers have less population than HC servers.

The immersion and vibe of vanilla is by far the biggest reason it's still around in private servers. Not by being able to multibox 20 accounts with "warlock networks and moon cloth slaves". Before this thread I've never even heard of such terms and I've played vanilla servers on and off since the original vanilla. It is and always was a casual MMO with a huge vibe which makes people come back again and again. You are absolutely in the minority of players, treating it as a single player game thinking having 10 or 20 or however many accounts is normal. You are not well.

I don’t know if you played turtle wow but there were 40 naxx clears a week on the main server. Even if you’re clearing naxx “casually” the reason you could afford t3 crafting materials were because there was someone with 5 accounts and 10 alts doing all the crafting CDs. Have fun clearing naxx casually when mooncloth is over 200g each. If raiding isn’t your thing that’s cool. I’m not here to tell you how to play and you shouldn’t tell us how to play either. Thanks

[Holydruid]

Also who are these people going: "Its for immersion in the wow classic universe"
While ya'll play PvE server WITH CROSSFACTION SHIT ENABLED, paladins and shamans touching tips in raids.
Which literally goes against EVERY PART of immersion of the WoW Lore

[Mrsneed]

A lot has been stated in this thread since I was here yesterday so instead of playing reply catchup, I want to focus on what you're saying in this snippet and relevant content that has been posted by others already.

They made adjustments to the EXP calculations to make in dungeon lvl 60 boosting no longer viable. Players found a work around through dropping group right before the mobs die. This is very clearly a loophole/work around that players have been exploiting. We can agree to disagree about why the turtle team did what they did, but this work around was not something they intended. We have implemented this rule to patch this work around, in retrospect I wish we had found a more mechanical solution to the work around but we have limited development capacity and now here we are.

We as players need a clear cut definition for what boosting is in the context of this rule.

Is the underlined component of what you stated in my quoted reply your definition of what boosting is in the context of this rule? As written, it sounds like a blanket prohibition on all boosting as described in the quote above + all boosting and potentially-maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn't-boosting scenarios outside of dungeons (AOE or single mob tagging in the open world).

If the definition of the rule is what I underlined in your quote above and solely restricted to that, then I don't have a problem with it and I feel like a lot of people will not have a problem with it either. If it is in fact a blanket prohibition on all boosting and tangentially-related activities then that remains an issue that I simply cannot agree with you on.

Please provide us a clear cut definition. The 11 pages of forum posting and >100 replies that I've read do not provide this definition and I, among others, are confused still.

Not by being able to multibox 20 accounts with "warlock networks and moon cloth slaves". Before this thread I've never even heard of such terms and I've played vanilla servers on and off since the original vanilla.

These terminology and concepts are so commonplace that you would have to be actively avoiding any and all WoW content since its inception. For this reason, I do not believe you.

[Shaksa]

The whole "the journey is the treasure" trope is bullshit. No one enjoys their time on a plane, no one enjoys their time on a train or the subway etc this is the same thing.

Does the dev team genuinely believe most of the players want to go through leveling alts over & over again?
The time it takes isn't something that belongs to the dev team. It belongs to the players and most of us are old and have families and being able to do this has always been a part of the game from 2004 to Turtle.
As someone who has leveled 30 -- yes 30 -- lvl 35 warlocks for 10 teleports for my guild and farmed 100+ shards on each so we could get more raids in without the travel time from MC/BWL to AQ/ES ; I can tell you this takes an excruciating amount of time. What this did offer however is raids that end earlier and less raiding days per week which allowed many of us to spend more quality time with our friends and families in the real world.
Does the dev team genuinely believe that wasting 20-30m in flight paths once you're fully leveled and geared on any given raiding day is the way to go? Do you genuinely believe that even PvP events get enough people if they can't be teleported?

This is complete lunacy. I'm speechless.

[Grttadls]

The whole "the journey is the treasure" trope is bullshit. No one enjoys their time on a plane, no one enjoys their time on a train or the subway etc this is the same thing.

Does the dev team genuinely believe most of the players want to go through leveling alts over & over again?
The time it takes isn't something that belongs to the dev team. It belongs to the players and most of us are old and have families and being able to do this has always been a part of the game from 2004 to Turtle.
As someone who has leveled 30 -- yes 30 -- lvl 35 warlocks for 10 teleports for my guild and farmed 100+ shards on each so we could get more raids in without the travel time from MC/BWL to AQ/ES ; I can tell you this takes an excruciating amount of time. What this did offer however is raids that end earlier and less raiding days per week which allowed many of us to spend more quality time with our friends and families in the real world.
Does the dev team genuinely believe that wasting 20-30m in flight paths once you're fully leveled and geared on any given raiding day is the way to go? Do you genuinely believe that even PvP events get enough people if they can't be teleported?

This is complete lunacy. I'm speechless.

“People who boost don’t play the game!! Ban boosting”

Meanwhile in the same breath

“You played the game too much, chill bro”

You can’t have it both ways. I personally wouldn’t level 30 toons but this guy did and who are we to stop him.