Boosting Culture

I was definitely against it at first. I love leveling, be it through quests or dungeons, but as months have passed since release you just won't find the same amount of players looking for dungeon groups or group quests and I can see why some might opt for boosting.

Having said that, I'm currently leveling my 4th char, because my guild needed it, and have found myself relying on boosts rather than questing because it's so much faster. I guess having multiple options never hurt.

The worst part about it is that it attracts gold sellers for the boosting part, and gold buyers for the boosted.

Hey Telvaine, good talking point.

As for the relentless boosting for alts and efficiency etc, sure it's annoying to see chat clogged up like that. I can see why people get tired of the questing part and just want to go for full efficiency, and if they can pay for this with their own gold then why not you know? If chat is annoying you, you could always install some kind of addon to filter out common phrases (I think that 'Prat' used to allow for this).

As a new player I once got boosted for free through Deadmines, and to be honest it felt pretty amazing leaping so far ahead, being given items for free etc. and the guy just did it out of the kindness of his heart. It was a good opportunity for him to teach me a lot about the game and was such a nice experience that I eventually ended up joining their guild actually.

So yeah, can actually be a really positive experience for struggling noobies - just another perspective for you all.

teebling So someone giving a random player a free boost just to be nice, I have no issue with. In fact, I have a similar story from back when I first started playing. I was trying to find a group for SFK on my first toon. I was invited to a group by a max level rogue I’d never met who ran me through the dungeon by myself for a personal loot run. It was one of the coolest experiences I ever had back in the day, and I occasionally do the same thing with my main for random lowbies I see struggling to form groups.

I also have no issue conceptually with people who have gold choosing to spend that gold on convenience, I do the same thing all the time in real life. However I do also believe that the current culture fuels gold selling and buying, and there’s no denying that an increase in boosting removes players from the pool of potential dungeon group mates, making it harder for those of us who want to play the game traditionally to form groups.

Does anyone have any insight on where the current boosting culture came from? I started in TBC so I didn’t experience vanilla, but I also don’t remember modern boosting ever being a part of the game, and I played all the way through legion. Is this an import from pservers? Are they doing the same thing on retail now too? I’m intrigued to see how the culture within the game has evolved over the years.

I take no issue with boosting. It's a part of the game, a great way to level up quick when your guild is in need of a certain role and a great way for others to make some guild while helping people out.

I'm all for it.

I've paid for my warrior to get boosted all the way from level like 13 or whenever it was able to get into deadmines all the way up to 45 currently. Some guildies got good at doing one pull mara runs so I've spent a big chunk of time sitting AFK at the entrance to the dungeon. Once mara carries get me to level 50 then I'm going to hop into ZG carries and try to take it the rest of the way home there.

My bear tank is just about fully geared at this point, minus a DFT. There's nothing left for me to get it until AQ40 drops. It's been fully geared for like a month and a half at this point, too.

I enjoyed levelling the first time around. Earned a bunch of new friends along the way, and I still play with them today. Those guys are level 60 though and my alt isn't. There's less people levelling in general now and I just want to catch it up so I can start raiding with my alt. I still want to play with my friends, I just want to play a new character with them. So the goal isn't to endure a prolonged grind to 60, it's to skip my way there as soon as possible so I can learn how to tank in real time in BWL and MC with my warrior alt. The fun is going to be gearing up my new warrior by raiding with my friends and the longer it takes to get there the less I get to do that.

I'm glad I was able to slog out my first grind to 60 across the first two months of the game. It was fantastic. But that time is over now. Servers have general lifecycles and the servers are past the magical initial levelling push. I just want to get my alts caught up as fast as possible now so I can play with my buddies.
I also have no issue conceptually with people who have gold choosing to spend that gold on convenience, I do the same thing all the time in real life. However I do also believe that the current culture fuels gold selling and buying, and there’s no denying that an increase in boosting removes players from the pool of potential dungeon group mates, making it harder for those of us who want to play the game traditionally to form groups.

The fact that most people are boosting their alts absolutely does mean there's less people out to level with. I'd be dungeon grinding with other players just running dungeons for exp otherwise. But most people aren't doing this now, so I'm not either. I really do just want to hit 60. This is why it was kind of important to keep up with the pack when the servers were fresh. There was a leisurely 2-3 month window after the launch of the game where people were out and levelling, but that's over now. It's largely been over since the beginning of the year. The sweet spot for levelling speed was to hit 60 within that window, and anybody legitimately trying to level now isn't getting the same experience the rest of us did who stayed with the pack. That sucks, but it's the nature of a massively multiplayer game like this.

I am a bit ambivalent about that topic.

I like boosting, but more from the booster POV. I boost guildies alot but never did it for money. And with two accounts I boost till the early 50 anyway, so I ususally invite guildies to fasten the process and having a conversation while repeating the same dungeons for hours.

It's alot of fun with a geared Warrior, almost like raiding with full WBs and as my Warrior can only progress in raids, I get to play him more which is also a plus

On the other hand boosting toned down normal dungeoneering while levelling alot, and with no need for tanks or healers you see more and more bad and itemhungry lvl60 DPS every day. Also there is the case of that boosting promotes RMT and botting, which is definitely true.

Telvaine I did have some pserver experience and while boosting through dungeons for quests or loot was already a thing back in vanilla, exclusively boosting for faster levelling is a pretty new thing, might be even a invention in wow classic.

A possible solution was brought up a few months ago involving low lvls not being able to gather from a lvl 60 loots. What do you guys think?

I levelled during the initial rush, groups everywhere, obviously not gonna be the same when everyone is 60 but to come back, starting a fresh char, seeing all this boost shit instead of LFG does leave a bad taste in the mouth.

I don't begrudge people doing it, if it works people are gonna do it.

I don't mind it. It's just another part of the economy. If people want to spend their hard earned gold to buy that service, I don't see why not. Reminds me of the Diablo 2 days where getting power leveled was the norm. After leveling my main I don't really want to go through the grind a second time, so if I make an alt I'll most likely get him power leveled. I think it's a good thing. Most people don't want to just grind to grind, they wanted to come back and live the glory days, and go through the motions the first time, not every time.

I am sprinkling in less boosting than I was expecting. I used a chunk of it through levels 20-45, but since 45 I've been mostly solo questing. I tried buying mara boosts but the guys I bought runs from weren't on, so I just started questing again. Then I tried buying some ZG boosts after level 50, and realized it was going to be really expensive. Without rested exp bonus, it would take about 10 ZG runs per level for the amount of packs I saw pulled, and at 15g per run that's about 150g per level. I don't know if it would get better or worse, but to buy my way from 50 to 60 would have cost ~1500g, maybe +/- 500g either direction. I don't have a mage to farm with and don't want to blow that kind of gold just to skip leveling, so I went back out and have done most of my alt's leveling from 45-53 just running quests.

One of the cool things has been since not many people are out in the world questing now, I've been able to go and quest and be out in Azeroth on this PVP server. This wasn't possible when I was leveling my main during phase 1. It wasn't safe outside, and the only place to level was in dungeon grinding groups. So this is nice to be out and questing for my first time here in Classic. I'll sprinkle in some free ZG boosts along the way to 60 when buddies offer, but for the most part I'm going to quest my way to the finish line.

@teebling So someone giving a random player a free boost just to be nice, I have no issue with. In fact, I have a similar story from back when I first started playing. I was trying to find a group for SFK on my first toon. I was invited to a group by a max level rogue I’d never met who ran me through the dungeon by myself for a personal loot run. It was one of the coolest experiences I ever had back in the day, and I occasionally do the same thing with my main for random lowbies I see struggling to form groups.

I also have no issue conceptually with people who have gold choosing to spend that gold on convenience, I do the same thing all the time in real life. However I do also believe that the current culture fuels gold selling and buying, and there’s no denying that an increase in boosting removes players from the pool of potential dungeon group mates, making it harder for those of us who want to play the game traditionally to form groups.

Does anyone have any insight on where the current boosting culture came from? I started in TBC so I didn’t experience vanilla, but I also don’t remember modern boosting ever being a part of the game, and I played all the way through legion. Is this an import from pservers? Are they doing the same thing on retail now too? I’m intrigued to see how the culture within the game has evolved over the years.

The boosting culture comes from modern WoW where the focus is strictly on the end game content. Leveling is treated as a second rate play style in my opinion. I have some hopes that Shadowlands will change that, at least a bit, by letting folks choose where to level. Even then there will probably be 2 schools of thought. There will be those that pick expansions to level through for the story, and those who choose the meta, whichever is found to be fastest.

There are those who just want the destination, and others who enjoy the journey.

I'm pretty set against it. I think it hurts the integrity of the game and reduces the player pool for people who want to group and finish dungeons legitimately. It makes trade chat unusable due to the spam from "boost communities" who abuse right click report automation to silence any competition or anyone who speaks negatively of boosting, and creates a very bad idea of the game for any new players who join and see it.

I hope Blizzard find some way to prevent it, as I've seen recent posts of the situation being left alone to run riot on other countries' servers, and the effect is terrible and it makes the game pretty much unplayable for many people.

I think the best solution I’ve seen pitched for the chat spam is just a separate “LookingForBoost” channel. Would at least get rid of most of the annoying spam. That would do nothing to solve the problem of no one to actually play with at low levels though.