When I look on my realm the chat is full of peeps who pay gold to skip content (DM boost, Stockades boost, Mara boost, ZG boost, AQ40/Naxx gbid aka boost) and as we all know you can also buy gold via cash on third party pages. And after the boosters made their money they use it to skip content as well on their alts or for gear. I acknowledge there are better realms, where this is not so present but it is not a side issue.
Just wonder why anyone is now upset and surprised… it is sad ofc but ingame shop, paid boost etc. are just a logical consequence of an aberration which has begun way more back. When I read now people planning to ignore, blacklist whatever other dudes who have shop items… did they do this as well, when fresh 60s in blue gear joined their Naxx40 and paid 20k gold for Gressil or whatever? Always interesting to see how abusing the issue is fine as long as oneself benefits from it but when others follow the same road there is a huge uproar…
cant say if Blizz would have followed no changes in TBC classic but the community unmistakeably stated they want to skip content for money… and thats what we will get sadly…
Here is the thing about #nochanges:
It never was a majority movement to begin with.
Most people would have been fine with changes even in Classic. Better BL spawns or BL as proc like FL is in TBC … it’s a nobrainer considering servers wth 3-4 times the population compared to Vanilla.
Same with WBs. No one has fun collecting this BS, and Chronoboomshakalaka would have been a nobrainer from day 1.
Many people would have loved to see the pvp system reworked instead of rehashing the same grindy, broken, unfun garbage that people hated 17 years ago and still hate today.
There is also no good reason why there shouldn’t be an option to use the updated character models, in ones own client.
All good changes, and most people would have loved classic with these changes and more, even loved it all the better for it.
But, alas, these people didn’t make their opinion heard, whereas a small, but loud, minority did. And Blizzard listened, unfortunately, which is why we endured 2 years of classic wow, warts attached.
Blizzard as game designers should’ve put an end to bad behavior that is antithetical to the game (boosting, gold buying), not endorse it by offering it themselves (paid boosts, store mounts and whatever else will come). The players are simply doing what is the most efficient in their eyes, thus the game designer should step in and stop them from optimizing the fun out of the game. On another note, I do wonder how many are engaging in this behavior compared to those that don’t. I’m sure there are plenty of players that play the game more ‘traditionally’. It’s sad then that Blizzard is cashing in on the other half of the player base.
You make it sound like the nochanges crowd was so influential but then you remember that they imported the worst AV version of Classic, which they were very against.
So much for them living rent free in your head.
People wanted classic wow as it was in 2004. Instead we got classic wow 2.0 which was some weird hybrid of the original with modern changes.
8000 people on a sever was a change. Not combatting bots was a change. Releasing a trash AV that was only in the original for a month or so before TBC came which no one remembered or even associated with the original… Blizzard were given the opportunity and they blew it.
It’s not the fault of nochanges that caused the problems, it’s the changes that did occur that amplified the imperfections of a 15 year old game.
You expected the same experience without changes?? You needed changes for that experience.
They could have fixed the mage boosting = better leveling experience like back in the day, for instance.
I mean… People will gravitate towards a path of least resistance. Not everyone enjoys the time wasting aspect of the game, probably quite the opposite, most people don’t like to sit and do the same repetitive thing over and over, especially for the second, third and so on times that they are levelling, so of course they look for quicker and easier ways.
I’m unsure how any of this would be a surprise, honestly.
I know, that doesn’t automatically make it a good idea though.
The year was 2019. The world and gamers have changed, and the clever choice would have been to reflect that, not ignoring it for the sake of a “prevervation” that was doomed from the beginning.