Boosting Rule Adjustments

[Kestrel]

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.

Yeah we clearly underestimated how much of the community would (either actually or just think they will) be effected by this change. If we had that foresight we would have handled it in a different way for sure. Unfortunately we cannot move fast while also taking community input on every change we make.

I hate to harp on this point as I know I have addressed it in other posts/responses, but I do feel it is important that we don't loose sight of where catering to those that just want to get to 60 and raid, leaves servers and their communities. Our ultimate goal is for OctoWoW to have the even more longevity than Turtle WoW had. It is an ambitious goal to be sure, and not one that will be achieved by rushing end game content or straight vertical progression.

[Kestrel]

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.

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.

[Kestrel]

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.

Darktifa is not a member of the OctoWoW team. Pig has made some mistakes in handling this I can't disagree with that. Nobody is perfect and if you expect perfect you will be disappointed. Of course we always strive to do better and hope that most of our community sees that we have been improving by the day.

We are not only remaking TWoW, we are much more ambitious then that.

[Kestrel]

Bad-faith question:

Do you actually have the resources required to enforce this consistently, or is this effectively going to become a player-driven panopticon?

I can open the /who list and immediately find an example:

(I don't know the guy, nor have i ever interacted with him, nor am i singling him out)


The problem is that, under the new rule, how is anyone supposed to tell what's actually happening? Is this player helping an alt get a mount? Doing a quest? Pulling the entire instance? Running a friend through? We can't know from a screenshot or from seeing a high-level character in a dungeon. All i know is "he's gaining an unfair advantage over me right this moment"

I wanted to level a crafting alt myself, but now I have to think twice before doing anything close to my level 60 because I don't know how it will be interpreted.

If the answer is "report it and let the staff sort it out," doesn't that just encourage players to report anything that looks suspicious and be angry at each other?

I actually disagree it feels like a good faith, and very important question. It was something that we thought about, and knew that it could eventually become unmanageable from a moderation standpoint. Our plan was if/when that happened to put a more systemic fix in place (when we had more developer time). Of course given this backlash we are exploring those options now instead pulling resources away from other tasks.

[Kestrel]

”The customer isn’t always right”
”Don’t like it? Leave”

This is not a great way to conduct yourself in front of actual customers, a real bad look.

I understand that people can be annoying and inflammatory at times but if your job requires you to deal with that type of behavior it’s expected of you to keep a cool head once conflicts arise.

The reason small, medium and huge companies employ ”the customer is always right” is because it’s true at the end of the day and by having people in leadership positions regularly dismiss people of any opinion with snide remarks like those outlined above displays tendencies that everyone regardless of opinion of the matter at hand will find off-putting.

I disagree with the rule itself, punishing legitimate players in lieu of catching the bad guys is a worse route to go than spending resources battling them using other tactics and we should count ourselves lucky that more impactful matters and legislations aren’t based on the same reasons.

That said, I find the conduct of the staff to be by far the biggest transgression here, as it shows a general disrespect towards the playerbase that just happen to disagree with the decisions made by the leadership, it sets a bad precedent, today it’s the pro dualboxers that get dismissed, tomorrow it’s someone else, and inevitably the recession of the server in terms of growth.


Do better, OctoWoW.

I agree. It is a bad way to conduct ourselves and not one that I feel represents our team as a whole.

Of course that is not to say that we will be only implementing changes that the entire community agrees with. It is important that we articulate our decisions and how and why they are being made. Especially when those decisions are going to be more contentious like this one. It was an oversight on me and the team not realizing how many would miss interpret this rule change, or would be affected by it.

As previously stated, the goal of this rule change is not to stop RMT, it was just why the decision was made when it was. It was the thing that made us realize this was happening and we had not made clear rules or fixes to the system around it.

[Kestrel]

"Using a high level character to rapidly aquire EXP on any lower level character. General assistance is not considered boosting but a level 60 AOE farming for other lower level characters is and it is forbidden"

So I'm reading this as, so long I dont AOE to "boost" my own character, I'm welcome to mobtag single mobs at a time.

yes?

No you are not, you are purposefully misunderstanding and trying to skirt the rules. The spirit of the rule is clear, you should play the game and not circumvent playing the game.


- Using a high level character to rapidly aquire EXP on any lower level character

I’ll make sure to open a report any time I see two characters grouped together that aren’t the same level as that’s boosting. Getting buffs, using consumes, grouping at all is boosting in my mind.

I am sure nothing bad will come of you reporting anyone you see duo leveling. Have fun playing that game

[Hordeforsaken]

All this comes down to 1 thing:

"Boosting breaks immersion"

---

Simple as that. RMT, fast leveling, and economy concerns are secondary justifications. But let's be honest and say that immersion is what we're talking about.

This is why "fast leveling" isn't the issue. If it were, then hunter pets would be nerfed to heal slower between fights. Paladins' solo-aoe/bubble/heal would be nerfed because it's almost as fast as a boost. But nobody is calling pets or paladins as "cringe". Why? Because pets and paladins don't break immersion. But a 60 hunter/paladin auto-following a level 20 character does.

This is also why players are getting the strong "like it or leave" vibe. Because under the universal rules of immersion, you can't have gameplay that breaks the 4th wall. This, I believe, was the core idea around Octo's founding; not a spiritual successor to Twow, but to utilise Twow as a springboard to creating a very specific, immersive experience and gameplay style.

With this understanding, the boosting rule and it's odd implementation make perfect sense. Devs are creating a world for themselves based on lore and immersion, not for Twow refugees. It's no secret that several core dev members are hardcore into lore. And anyone immersed that deeply into lore generally wants to preserve immersion around that lore, and generally annoyed by anything that breaks that immersion. So of course boosting had to go. And there's nothing wrong with that... IF you align with that specific vision of immersion.

It also occurs to me that the "RP" in "RP-PVE" means something very different to Octo than it does to most players. Most of us define RP as actually roleplaying their characters, but Octo seems to define RP as immersion. A subtle but distinct difference. You don't have to literally roleplay your character, but you are expected to maintain a certain world immersion so that when devs or players travel around, they see characters, not players. Boosting reminds them of players, min/maxing, and spreadsheets, and that breaks immersion.

So for honesty and clarification, the Octo website should clearly state something like:

Octo is a lore immersion server where leveling is not an obstacle to be skipped, but the main course. Everything else (community harmony, economy stability, moderation workload) flows from protecting that core premise.

In theory, this means anything that breaks immersion will eventually be removed. Boosting was removed now, and theoretically, cross-faction to be removed soon. Maybe not today or next week, but devs who are this deep into lore aren't going to tolerate cross faction... not for long anyway. Cross-faction maybe community-driven and fun for the majority, but it's also lore heresy. So to protect the lore-community from the majority-community, I would expect cross-faction to eventually be removed. Plus anything else down the line.

---

And to be perfectly clear, there's nothing wrong with creating a world you want, than asking everyone to play how you want. No gameplay style is better than another; it's just personal preference. Those who share that vision will follow, and those who don't... won't.

I originally thought Octo was Twow part 2, but i see now I incorrectly projected Twow onto Octo. That's my own fault. Octo may have started with Twow's code, but that's where the similarities end. Twow was primarily an open sandbox that allowed all players of all styles to come together and play however they wanted. I see now Octo is not that.

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Oh and by the way, " Remove XP gains from mob tagging" is a horrible idea.

Yes, it closes the door on exp boosting, but creates all-new griefing. Imagine this: as a grieferr, I can hit lowbie's tags and deny them exp. All. Day. Long. Now imagine the shitstorm of GM tickets you'll have to deal with, trying to figure out what was griefing and what was accidental. Thousands of players. All. Day. Long.

More innocently, high-level players, as they travel through zones, often kill lowbie's mobs for them in the spirit of goodwill. But now you've turned a goodwill act into griefing or punishment.

This "exp tag denial" (and similar exp reduction based on dmg done) approach was tried on another pserver with disastrous results. The lesson learned was simple: Gameplay incentives only work with carrots, never with a stick. People don't want to play only to be beaten by sticks. No matter how much you want them to conform to a gameplay style. Sticks only work when you want the players to leave, and only when that same stick doesn't hit other innocent players.

If you really want to maintain what you're trying to create, you'll have to close your server and go invite-only; otherwise you're in an endless game of whack-a-mole, upset players, and bad press. That's the problem with trying to maintain lore/immersion gameplay on an open MMO server; you simply can't police everyone's preferences. This is also why Twow was so popular and loved; they didn't try to police it. And what did that get them? Tens of thousands of happy players and hundreds of millions of dollars. What a nightmare.

[Wirt]

First off, I would like to say that the team and I clearly made a mistake with our recent rule change in that we underestimated the portion of the player base that was either actively boosting or planning to boost down the line. Regardless of if we agree or not on whether boosting has a place on our server, I think we all agree that the decision and rule change should have been handled better. I would consider our server in a Beta state not only from a technical perspective, but also from a communication and community management perspective. I appreciate you all understanding this and being patient with us as we get things ironed out.

Onto the meat of this post.

Boosting is contentious. That much we can all agree on. This post is not intended to change anyone's mind, we don't think that is a reasonable or productive goal. This post is intended to share with the community why we made the change that we did, how we feel it will help our community, and how we go about making these types of decisions so you can decide if this server is one that you want to commit your valuable free time to.

The act of boosting at its core, is an attempt to speed past or skip large swaths of content in order to have access to more resources, or more ways to play the end game content. I can personally relate to the person who has 3 level 60's and just would really love to have a 4th that can fill in as their own personal alchemist and herb farmer, but they don't feel they have the time or energy to do a full traditional 1-60 playthrough again.

I similarly relate to those that are sick of walking all the way to the wailing caverns from Darkshore because they don't yet have the Astranaar FP and there is no level 20 warlock in the group. I understand and relate to those that are sick of finding an awesome new hunter melee weapon, only to realize they have no weapon skill with polarms and their wing clip misses 8 times in a row and they loose their HC character (don't ask). In this game that we love so dearly, there are things that we love a bit less.

Some of those (like having soul shard take up 2 full bags) our team, the turtle team, and we'd like to think the community, agree are unnecessary and can be improved upon through QOL adjustments. Other things, like having to level your characters to 60, we feel are such a core part of this game, and that they need to be actively protected and fostered.

We do not fault those that desire a more streamlined gaming experience than our server provides, but we will not be compromising what we want for the sake of those that wish it was something else.

We firmly believe that this change to no longer allow boosting will serve to improve our community and server in the long run. We don't expect everyone to agree with this, but do expect everyone to abide by these rules and behave themselves in discussions around the issues. Please keep in mind no matter what your opinions are, we (the majority of the community, not just the OctoWoW team) all want what is best for this server and game. We are all on the same team.



To those that would argue that this not how Turtle WoW was, I would ask what you think their intention was with their changes around boosting EXP. From our perspective their intention was clear, and if given more time I am certain they would have patched the loop holes that they missed that allowed boosting to continue. We of course are open to trying to patch those holes ourselves from a systemic standpoint, but don't think allowing boosting to continue in the meantime is good for us or the community. If this is a deal breaker for you, we'd rather you know now than 3 months from now when we push changes that get rid of your preferred boosting method.

The situation that led to this change being made when it was, revolved around our ongoing fight against RMT. While investigating some RMT allegations, it became apparent to us that RMT boosting is something that we will never be able to adequately detect and act on. The entire Dev team was on the same page when the discussion happened and that is why the change happened in the way that it did with little fanfare.

As one final point of clarification, we specifically are banning "Using a high level character to rapidly aquire EXP on any lower level character. General assistance is not considered boosting but a level 60 AOE farming for other lower level characters is and it is forbidden.". This is rule change meant to ensure a level 60 character is one that someone actually made it to level 60 on. You are still welcome to (on non-challenge characters) use a higher level toon or friends to help with difficult quests (like the whirlwind axe).

I look forward to reading your differing opinions on this in the responses, and of course fielding all questions in game at our fireside chat this Tuesday.

Frankly if you cant agree with this, maybe classic is more your speed, you can also get away with RMT on blizz servers too.

[Igzee]

(tldr) You think you do, but you don't

[Yotca]

Kestrel to be clear ; no factory alts is HARMFUL to the economy.
Another user rightfully pointed out that you'd need a full guild of people with profession crafts to gear very few characters and the prices outside of that would be exhorbitant ; damn highway robbery, which means more farming, more grinding still for ALL players.

The players do not have the time for that! Having cured rugged/mooncloth/arcanite buys at 20g is healthy and people actually can afford to buy them without having to play that long.

Why do you think Twow introduced the survival trinkets that increase your chances of getting arcane crystals or black lotus? Because ain't nobody got time for that and the only people profiting were the people who just herbed or mined all day which in all good faith are probably the people you should be hunting down for RMT and who are either unemployed or have made this their source of revenue. They addressed that issue with the survival trinkets to tank the prices of lotus/arcane.

Even on Blizz WoW high level guilds have always had multiple accounts with what is called factory alts for exactly this reason. Even on Blizz WoW you could boost your own characters because that meant owning two accounts.
My wife and I had a mage each exactly for that purpose.

A good amount of us were raiding Naxx and k40 we want to be back to that point. This is the X time many of us will be returning to clear MC/Ony and only much later get to Naxxramas which we're fine with but the parts that can be made faster should be made faster. No one wants to go through the exact same grind over and over again... it's enough once on your main! This will also hurt returning players that might join the servers when BWL or even Naxxramas are out -- they don't want to hear about the loot we got or how fast we cleared -- they want to be a part of it as fast as possible and that comes through help from higher level characters.
A huge amount of the player base will not be returning if they can't be helped to reach 60 fast.

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?

We have time to play. We don't have to waste and this kind of rule change is wasted time.

I leveled a 60 rogue ALT on the PvE server because we were told we could transfer after a couple months. That isn't happening -- I'm going to have to level another rogue on the PvP server after my main because of that ; not being able to boost him never was part of the deal. You guys already messed up on transfers don't mess up on this.

Also let's be real... people who aren't paying for donation points should have a very limited voice to the chapter on any of the topics because they're basically enjoying this due to the rest of us paying ; that's the truth no matter how you try to spin it