Kestrel wrote: Mon Jul 06, 2026 6:50 am
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).