You did even if you didn’t want to. It’s a good thing that you have rectified, even if you didn’t want to. See? You didn’t get away with it, even if you believe you did.
Regardless, Blizzard owning the game and making changes at will has nothing to do with those changes being good or bad for the game, does it? Because that is the discussion at hand, not whether Blizzard will or won’t do whatever they want to do with the game, which is something everybody here knows very well.
Implication has to do with intent. If I didn’t intend to imply something, then I didn’t. I have no control over what other people interpret into my posts.
Rest assured, I am in full control of my actions.
Everything I write, I want to write.
How do you quantify “good/bad for the game”?
Your personal preference is not a quantifieable metric, neither is mine.
Nr. of People who play the game is. So, at the end of the day, wheter or not someone likes the boost is irrelevant…if Blizz introduces the Boost, and most people still play the game (which is what I predict will happen), then by any quantifieable metric, the boost wasn’t “bad for the game”.
Yeah, you surely wish it would work that way, but it doesn’t. Words and sentences have meanings as you probably know. When you say:
This implies that we are complaining for no reason whether you meant it or not. Hence, maybe you are “in full control of” your actions and maybe it is true that everything you write, you want to write, but you clearly are not in full control of writing what you actually mean.
Agree on the second sentence. That’s why I set my personal preferences aside when debating about this kind of things. Because I personally find the leveling process boring and tedious most of the times as well, but I also can see that there are other things in the game that can be considered boring and tedious by some players including myself in some cases, such as farming for gold or mats for the professions, or grinding reputations, or doing attunements over and over again for each alter. So what do we do? Do we get all of that stuff in the cash shop as well? If skipping the leveling for cash is fine then everything else should be fine too. It would surely bring lots of players who cba to farm gold or mats for the professions, or grind reputations, or doing attunements over and over again, right, and according to your “metric”, more players is “better”, right?
No, it doesn’t. The statement reads:
The Anti-Boosters come here and want to change how it will be.
This means they come here and want a change. It makes no statement about their motives or whether or not they have a reason. It also doesn’t say they are complaining.
If you interpret something into that sentence that I didn’t write, that’s none of my business
I didn’t say its fine.
I am indifferent towards it.
Said indifference is a matter of scale as well as quality. The one time, 1-58 boost is fine by me. A boost to 70, professions boosted as well, multiple boost wouldn’t be fine by me.
That’s not my metric. My metric whether or not a game is “good” is whether I want to play it or not. No. of active players is a quantifieable metric, not the one I use to decide whether r to play something or not.
When in fact, what we would like is to avoid the change. See? The change came first, the complaints came after, which is substantially different. But keep on repeating yourself that you phrased it perfectly. I make this kind of mistakes too sometimes and time has taught me that it is better to rectify and apologize when it is the case. People take you more serously when you do that, but who cares, it’s your problem anyway xD.
Can you please stay on the topic? We were debating about those things being good or bad for the game, you asked me:
And then said that our personal preferences were not a quantifiable metric, which I fully agree. And now you speak about your personal preferences?
Regardless, if lvl 58 boost is ok, why not the other stuff? Personal preferences as well? I don’t care about them. I put mine aside to try to have an honest discussion. Can you do that too or are you going to jump back and forth between “quantifiable metrics” and “personal preferences” as soon as you see you have no way out?
Wait, it gets even worse:
Then why did you bring that metric in the first place? Is is not valid? If it is not, then why did you try to present it as though it is of some relevance to the point? Or are you going to pretend that you didn’t mean to present is as such, like you did before with the “people asking for a change” thing?
If all you care for is what you want and what you like regardless of it having the possibility to hurt the game then at least be honest and say it clearly, because in that case there is nothing to discuss with you, since you don’t care anyway. Don’t worry, that’s perfectly fine and you are entitled to it.
To be fair, I do think some anti-boosters become strawmen when they take this argument too far. It’s true that accepting and buying 58 boosts is a tacit approval for buying character power as well skipping grinds they deem too boring/time consuming, but I doubt Blizzard will ever make titles, pvp-rating and tier-gear purchasable (it hasn’t happened in Retail). What I do fear, however, is stuff like: unrestricted max level boosts, WoW-token, profession-token, mount skill-token, weapon skill-token, attunement-token (/ keys), reputation-token, talent tree reset-token, bags and extra bag space etc. etc. I could see them do something like this; like buying an epic mount on the store and get epic flying skill with it.
That’s actually the point. If we accept as valid the reasons for the level 58 boost then those very same reasons are equally valid for a lot of stuff. If someone is going to defend the lvl 58 boost but not the rest then it is the special pleading fallacy in all of its glory. There is no way around it.
Edit: Have a nice weekend everybody xD
No, they are not.
Breaking down doors is forbidden, because its breaking&entering. If we accept that as equally valid “for a lot of stuff”, firemen can no longer break down doors when a house is on fire.
Context matters, scale matters, quality matters.
Just because 2 reasons sound somewhat similar, doesn’t mean they are.
These are completely random boundaries. Why would you allow a real money token but not allow to buy raiding gear? No problem, you can buy a token and get boosted from a guild, essentially being exactly the same but hidden by the “bad bad player community that boosts and we can’t stop them doing it”. The end result is the same: You can buy anything: with €€€. Arena rating, raid gear, gladiator, mounts, attunements, you name it.
It looks to me, you are one of those people you call stupid, by supporting that way of business.
I’ve seen your arguments in a lot of posts, that this change is fine for you because you do not think this will lead to more drastic changes.
And you’re right, we have no proof this will lead to anything what OP stated.
But we also have a very sour taste in our mouths, if we think about the last 15 years and how the game and the philosophy of the industry changed.
That’s why a lot of people prefer to have no changes at all, because they don’t want to get dry f’ed by a hailstorm again.
And additionally to that, boosts will essentially have more negative longterm effects on the game, so why would we add it, if it’s not necessary?
You can’t do anything about the latter, because it’s not the industry that changed, it’s the people consuming their products. When I started gaming, it was a nerd-activity, at a time when “nerd” was still used as a derogative term. Games were made by nerds for nerds. And the thing about nerds: they care. Alot. That’s basically what defines a nerd. So the people designing these games didn’t just build a product to sell, but a product they could be proud of, and others could admire…and they knew that their audience would do that, because they cared.
Good old days 
Today however, gaming has become just another victim of the lifestyle-industry, catering to the consumer-needs of the masses. It’s all about fast pace, gimmegimme, what’snext. It’s no longer a nerd activity, its a mass-consumer-product. And mass-consumption dosn’t care. It consume, and while it’s chewing the last few bites, it’s already on the lookout for the next ones.
Naturally, the quality of games began to reflect that. Because why put love and care into something that is essentially designed to be this months fad to keep the treadmill rolling?
/rant and back to the topic:
I think Blizzard began to understand, in cold business logic terms, that there is a market to be served here however, a market of people who want the old style of gaming back. There is also growing pushback from the gaming community against what gaming became.
This matters, because we are talking about a lot of people here, most of which have disposable income. So, serving them makes sense, and taking the games they loved and putting the exact things they don’t like into them, doesn’t.
That’s why I don’t think we will see more cash-shop options in classic any time soon.
And if I’m wrong, well…the thing about my disposable income is: I get to decide what to buy with it, and Blizzard is not the only company on the market
This is why everything in my life seems to be timelocked and nothing new interests me. I hate current music, I hate current movies, and it seems as though I also hate current video games. All three appear to cater exclusively for the lowest common denominator, or people with the attention span of goldfish.
The only ‘new’ games I’ve bought in the last four years are remasters such as Command & Conquer and Starcraft. Literally nothing else interests me. The most up-to-date movie I’ve watched is 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016 (and even that had to have a stupid franchise name forcibly glued to it before major studios would allow it to be released) - and don’t even get me started on music.
This world no longer caters for people like me - and it’s another reason why I’m so against this damned boost. I’m rapidly running out of options, and places to go! There’s very little left! And even those few things that are left are being corrupted in order to please the aforementioned people with the attention span of goldfish!
I’m honestly amazed that C&C Remastered wasn’t released with a massive cash shop tacked to it, selling loot boxes, Mega Mammoth Tanks super soldiers and wonder dogs. I’m flabbergasted that it was allowed to slip through the net relatively unscathed.
KEK
DO YOU HAVE ANY HISTORY WITH BLIZZARD lmao
You are free to believe what you want. But I dont think they will add everything in retail store in TBC.
I agree with a lot of what you’re writing in this post. It truly was the good old days when the developer could be a bunch of nerdy friends that simply wanted to create a game they would love and play themselves; it would just happen that other people would share in their interests and thus they could make money from it.
I agree, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. Imo, there’s a mutual influence between the industry and the consumers. Consumers’ demand and behavior makes the industry change to accomodate them. But the marketing people also study all kinds of psychological tricks and manipulation tactics in order to increase the likelihood of consumers buying the product. They study human nature and try to find ways to exploit it. In some countries this has led to laws which are supposed to protect the consumers from themselves, but in gaming I think it’s more new and recent, such as the lootbox-debacle in the EU (?) a few years ago.
The companies also know that the new generations growing up will get used to new forms of monetization, thus the standards for what is accepted will get moved more and more, unless conscious consumers speak up against it. Businesses could start with ‘innocent’ MTX that doesn’t annoy a lot of people, and once that has been gotten used to, they take it a step further. Especially in old and grindy games like this one, a lot of people dislike the long and boring grinds, and the game’s gatekeepings, and thus the company could exploit that by offering tempting paid skips which some people would defend (‘designed problems’->offer solutions).
Yes! To some extent I think this is what this is about; it’s about showing them that there is a market for people that want games that stays true and loyal to this old design philosophy they set out to follow originally; that refute to bend to the will of the players but instead forces the players to adapt to the game.
Problem is; in my eyes there’s no MMORPG on the market that is as good as Vanilla-Wotlk. So if Blizzard ‘destroys’ these games, as a consumer I don’t know where to go. I have a slight hope for Ashes of Creation, and perhaps for New World, but I seriously doubt them because every single MMO that has come out since 2010 has been a disappointment to me and follows a ‘modern’ ‘hand holding’ design philosophy that I don’t like.
Yet.
And in the meantime, there are games other than MMOs.
I spend a lot of time playing VR games currently on the Oculus Q2 for example. And frankly, even the most immersive flatscreen-MMO cannot even begin to compete with the level of immersiveness of a game where that giant alien spider is literally coming at me and I have to actually aim to shoot it instead of moving my mouse 
That means your getting old.
I have the same problem 
bump 
bump bump
What players need to understand is hard truth, that even if it may look like we’re helping publishers while participating in microtransactions, we atually don’t, and the saddest part about it, is that in fact we spoil them to give us lower quality content by making microtransactions their main source of income instead of an actual game, its that simple.
And ofcourse its far worse in MMORPG genre seasoned with factors such as non-competitiveness of the environment.
We can only hope that one day good competition is there, and game publishers are no longer sacrificing actual players time investments for a fast buck.
The Witcher 3 (and it’s massive addons/expansions) was a pleasant exception to this rule