Majority of the income I make in Classic comes from doing short (~5 minute) runs within instances. I log on a character in a dungeon, invite my alt on the second account to group so I can reset for myself, do five quick runs within 20-30 minutes, and then log out and do other stuff.
One of these 5 resets runs nets me ~35-55 gold. This is far from the most time efficient or lucrative ways of making money in the game, but I personally like it. There’s basically zero chance of failure, you don’t depend on other people so you can do it whenever you want, say you wake up at three in the morning and can’t go back to sleep, you can just go do a quick session right there and then, and it’s pretty consistent, it’s not an RNG thing where you’re hoping for an expensive item with a very low drop chance to drop, you always get more or less the same results.
I rarely do six or more of these runs a day. Why would I? If I were to do just one a day, over the course of a week, that would net me enough money to cover all my raiding expenses, and get a flask of supreme power to stash in the bank for future speedruns/AQ40/Naxx.
But there are times when, for example, it’s Saturday, I have no real life plans for the day, so I just do a bunch of these runs over the course of the day while reading an interesting book or binging a TV series or something. Thirty runs over the course of a day means roughly two and a half hours of playing the game, which is really nothing special. I’m sure there’s been times when I’ve done twice as many. So while this change is not the end of the world for me and it’s not going to make me quit or anything, I do have to admit I find it somewhat frustrating, since it means I can’t really do something like this anymore.
Besides disliking this change because it personally negatively affects me, I also dislike it on a “philosophical” level. I don’t like having arbitrary time constraints placed on the players. I don’t like Blizzard saying “From now on you can do X amount of instances a day and no more” - if some nolife NEET wants to spend twenty hours a day grinding, that’s up to him and he should be allowed to do so. But then again, WoW has had weekly raid limits and 5 resets an hour limits since vanilla, so eh.
Another thing I dislike about this thing is its implementation. From what I understand, it works the same way the current 5 instances an hour lockout works, except it’s 30 instances per 24 hours. This means we have to keep track of it and pay more attention to it, if one were to do a lot of instances in the evening, in the next morning they would still be locked out, since it’s within the same 24 hour period. I wish Blizzard made it so it’s more like the daily heroic reset they added in TBC - you do, say, heroic Shattered Halls at 20:00, then there’s a global reset at 03:00, and you can do another heroic Shattered Halls run the next day at 09:00, you don’t need to wait until 20:01 the next day to do it again.
Alternatively, if they were to change it to a weekly cap instead of a daily one, so it was 210 instances a week instead of 30 a day, I would no longer consider it a problem whatsoever. I might do thirty or more instance resets in a single day, and I might even do it twice or thrice a week, but no chance I’m doing it every day, so I doubt there would ever be a time where I would reach the weekly cap.
