Boosting Rule Adjustments

[Zora]

Not going to lie, this is the post that sold me on the "vision" of the devs here. I played on TWoW for quite a long time, but the idea of actually playing all of your characters to 60 instead of just AOE farming mobs to rush as fast as you can, is great to me. Goated change and I fully support it. I'll be making my first character tonight, good stuff Kestrel.

Tell us you've never played past MC/BWL without telling us. Get to Naxxramas/K40 & enjoy 50-200g depending on the server arcanite bars/mooncloth/cured rugged hides. Even if you have characters yourself -- it's going to take you multiple weeks to get enough of them for a set.

We aren't wiping on shit long enough to slowly progress and slowly gear up.

How you decide to play the game is on you. You want to level all your characters by questing one by one... that's your choice.

We shouldn't have to suffer the repercussions of how you enjoy the game -- all while you enjoy OUR cheap mooncloth/rugged/arcanite because WE put in the work.

Yup. I usually play to 60 and then stop because I dont really enjoy raiding. Im fine with taking multiple weeks to get things too, including getting my own mooncloth and other mats. So im not sure whos work im supposedly taking advantage of, but hey, you do you. I think banning boosting is great.

[Yotca]

Not going to lie, this is the post that sold me on the "vision" of the devs here. I played on TWoW for quite a long time, but the idea of actually playing all of your characters to 60 instead of just AOE farming mobs to rush as fast as you can, is great to me. Goated change and I fully support it. I'll be making my first character tonight, good stuff Kestrel.

Tell us you've never played past MC/BWL without telling us. Get to Naxxramas/K40 & enjoy 50-200g depending on the server arcanite bars/mooncloth/cured rugged hides. Even if you have characters yourself -- it's going to take you multiple weeks to get enough of them for a set.

We aren't wiping on shit long enough to slowly progress and slowly gear up.

How you decide to play the game is on you. You want to level all your characters by questing one by one... that's your choice.

We shouldn't have to suffer the repercussions of how you enjoy the game -- all while you enjoy OUR cheap mooncloth/rugged/arcanite because WE put in the work.

Yup. I usually play to 60 and then stop because I dont really enjoy raiding. Im fine with taking multiple weeks to get things too, including getting my own mooncloth and other mats. So im not sure whos work im supposedly taking advantage of, but hey, you do you. I think banning boosting is great.

So you want your playstyle to get the playstyle of most players banned when you don't even raid?

If you do not raid you do not understand the implications.

Hardcore raids for instance wouldn't be possible without boosting ; there's Rav the avatar who died to a bug from cleave on Bolvar and had MC 2 days later -- he got boosted to 60 by guild mates and made it to the MC.

That kind of stuff isn't possible without it. Also if you're just leveling to 60 -- you claim you get "your mooncloth and other mats" but you need 2/4 maybe 8 at best. You don't need 30 which is what you need for cloth gear for Naxxramas t3 casters be it Priest/Mage/Warlock and the other classes also still need some which isn't possible with what you're saying

Make some sense ; if you're not raiding & just leveling to 60 then why would you want your "choice" to impact all the other players and make their lives more difficult?

[Beckett]

A quick message to say I wholly support the ban. I like seeing people leveling.
An uncontrolled community always end up optimizing the fun out of the game.

People will say it's just a choice, and players can just decide not to boost, I think this is incorrect.
Most people will always take the path of least resistance, even if ends up not being fun. For example: Incursions on SoD. Nobody liked them, yet everyone did them, because it was better than questing.

The path of least resistance extends beyond the server. As soon as someone puts out a western TWOW copy WITHOUT a retarded ruleset, this place is going to be a ghost town. Hell I'm already seeing people bite the ping bullet and jump ship to Capy.

[Yotca]

A quick message to say I wholly support the ban. I like seeing people leveling.
An uncontrolled community always end up optimizing the fun out of the game.

People will say it's just a choice, and players can just decide not to boost, I think this is incorrect.
Most people will always take the path of least resistance, even if ends up not being fun. For example: Incursions on SoD. Nobody liked them, yet everyone did them, because it was better than questing.

The path of least resistance extends beyond the server. As soon as someone puts out a western TWOW copy WITHOUT a retarded ruleset, this place is going to be a ghost town. Hell I'm already seeing people bite the ping bullet and jump ship to Capy.

This...

[Kestrel]

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.

The idea that any of the devs have a single level 60 is hilarious. I think the highest level on the team by claim is in the mid 30's. We don't have the time that we used to for playing the game with the restoration timeline we put out and have been holding to, not to mention all the things like this that end up pulling away days of our (mostly my) time. It is an incredible experience and not complaining at all, but the idea that this is some kind of a ladder pull is hilarious.

As others have said, immersion is important to us, it is not the end all be all. We will not be as tolerable as turtle wow was towards blatant exploits like group dropping to cheese exp distribution.

[Kestrel]

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.

Like I said, I don't want to have an entire discussion here on how we view what constitutes a "good" economy on a world of warcraft server. You and I will not agree and I know that for a fact. The prices will go up, the supply will go down, (who knows how much) that is not necessarily a "bad" thing for the server's economy. You think reducing the crafting CD of mooncloth would "help" the server economy? Or would it change it? This is a long, theoretical discussion about game design and economics and I genuinely would like to have it, but why don't we have it at fireside or in a different thread maybe and you can get a better idea for how I personally (not the whole dev team) views managing the economy.

[Kestrel]

Give us ADHD and on the spectrum people a separate PvE server? Assuming we can transfer characters of course.

Finally someone gets to the important topic in this thread <3

[Kestrel]

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.

The initial intention of the rule was to ban this specific practice (we don't think sub-optimal in group boosting will really be much of a thing should the loophole be closed). We also indented for it to include the mob tag lvl 60 following type boosting that occurs.

After some more internal discussions and reading at least 12 of the pages on this post (will be getting to the rest shortly and going through the cesspool that exploded in the general section another day...), we have pushed a change that we should have just made to begin with. We have pushed an update that patches out the group dropping exploit.

In light of this we don't feel this rule is necessary any longer as the other rules sufficiently cover most of the areas we feel are most damaging to the game. Lvl 60 following/mob tagging may have it's own prevention mechanic implemented at some point in the future. Expect conversations and polls on the forums leading up to that should it happen.

[Kestrel]

Kestrel you want a simple solution for this?

RP SERVER with that set of rules -- people can have all their "immersion" over there for all the rest of us care.

I don't think a 4th server is the answer to this

[Kestrel]

A quick message to say I wholly support the ban. I like seeing people leveling.
An uncontrolled community always end up optimizing the fun out of the game.

People will say it's just a choice, and players can just decide not to boost, I think this is incorrect.
Most people will always take the path of least resistance, even if ends up not being fun. For example: Incursions on SoD. Nobody liked them, yet everyone did them, because it was better than questing.

The path of least resistance extends beyond the server. As soon as someone puts out a western TWOW copy WITHOUT a retarded ruleset, this place is going to be a ghost town. Hell I'm already seeing people bite the ping bullet and jump ship to Capy.

https://github.com/zeizei336/turtle-w