This was not the only decision that could be taken for people who skipped Classic, we have historical precedent for opening of brand new fresh servers along with a TBC launch. These could be great places for people to start, with fellow players in this situation.
If they need classic to make more money why not add faction changes, race changes to add to their server transfer option. Or sell Digital special editions for each version of classic that comes with the original pets that came with it only for classic versions of the game, not retail itself.
My point being there are a variety of ways to monetize without directly impacting game play, and other ways to benefit new/returning players to TBC.
So I understand your point but they didnât add boosts for no reason which I explained in my prior message.
They added it to help get new players who are interested in playing TBC to jump in and play and its 1 per account so in the long run it wonât affect the game anywhere near as badly as what retailâs does which you can in theory fill every character slot with a boosted character.
My point really is that it wonât be as damaging as what youâve seen it be on Retail due to the harsh limitations they are putting on it.
Now when they get banned, they make a new account with a fake name - buy a boost and start botting right away in high level zones(after a few hours of levelling up skinning that is also botted)
So as soon as this goes alive expect thousands if not hundreds of thousands of level 58 rogues skinning mobs in winterspring and flooding the market with millions of leather every day, making rugged leather(and TBC leather as well possibly) go for 1 silver each.
Blizzard will make millions of dollars every month from botters alone by letting them destroy the ingame economy.
So in other words nothing will really change.
Blizzard were never going to ban enough bots to make a meaningful difference and the massive amounts of gold everyone has including money accumulated by bots has already pre-emptively doomed the TBC economy.
Even without paid boosts people will still pay their way to 70.
Getting to high levels to make botting efficient took around 2 weeks, now it will take 2 minutes.
Thatâs quite a substantial change.
And yes, Blizzard bans bots every now and then, even if its just a small percentage of them. So they lose some time levelling a new character and that means a loss of profits for them.
Now, people will be incentivized a lot more into botting.
The only logical way to prevent botting is just to add WoW tokens for gold like Retail did because yes it killed the economy but they took the money from the botters and basically killed the 3rd party market which when WoW classic was announced they all came flooding back because they knew how much people were against buying gold.
Its easy to say they made bad choices but inreality they were effective and people got used to the systems like being able to buy max level characters and people being able to buy gold or subs for their gold so clearly it worked.