I wanted to share my thoughts on why mage boosting and boosting services are detrimental to the World of Warcraft Classic experience.
Destroys the Social Aspect: Classic WoW thrives on community interaction—forming groups, running dungeons, and tackling challenges together. Boosting bypasses this entirely, turning a social MMO into a solo grind.
Inflates the Economy: Boosting funnels massive amounts of gold into the hands of boosters, creating a wealth gap. This inflation makes it harder for regular players to afford consumables, enchants, or even epic mounts.
Erodes the Sense of Progression: A huge part of Classic is the journey—leveling, learning your class, and feeling your character grow stronger. Boosting skips this process, leaving players with high-level characters they may not fully understand how to play.
Promotes Pay-to-Win Mentality: While not as extreme as retail cash shop boosts, the prevalence of paid mage boosts introduces a similar mindset. Players with real-life money to burn can gain an unfair advantage, which goes against Classic’s core principles.
Hurts Dungeon Participation: With so many players opting for boosts, finding groups for low- to mid-level dungeons becomes a frustrating experience. This harms the leveling experience for those who want to play the game the way it was intended.
Ultimately, boosting undermines the spirit of Classic WoW, which is all about teamwork, adventure, and immersion. By relying on these services, we lose sight of what makes this game special. Let’s keep the world alive by playing together and enjoying the journey!
Not everyone is into “journey”, especially when boosting an alt or alt of an alt. If you want dungeon groups play a class that can tank them or if not wait in LFG for ages.
Players will use every mechanic available to them in the game. Blizzard can nerf some over-profitable spots but I doubt they would change rules post launch… Maybe before TBC if they want to sell their own boost
I get your perspective, but boosting isn’t just about convenience—it’s also fueling massive gold inflation. Boosters farm and hoard gold at insane rates, driving up prices for everything from consumables to gear. For regular players, especially new ones, it’s becoming harder to keep up in the economy. This imbalance affects everyone, not just those avoiding boosts.
I disagree, Most of the social aspect of classic was already dead before the realms even went live in 2019. It was IMO painfully obvious that it was never going to be anything more than people trying to be the fastest one to reach (personal goal X), costs be damned. That´s why many of us never touched it depite our nostalgia and /or avoid group content like the hypertoxic plague it is. Furthermore, it is this exact player behavior, always seeking the silver easymode bullet, that primarily drives the botting to begin with… because if people weren’t obviously going to buy gold in large sums because of sheer laziness, then classic botting would have never been lucrative enough to start with.
Mage boosting of lowbies does not generate gold, it merely redistributes the gold that others have obtained by often illicit means to a player that is obeying the rules. So if anything it´s the boostEEs that need to be inspected and if necessary sanctioned, not the boosters.
Thie feeds back into 1… there was never going to be a sense of progression because the majority of players don´t have the patience to actually invest the time into classic that ywould be necessary to achieve things organically. Hardcore is the best possible proof of this, create level 1 char, get boosted to 60, YAY!! I “won” hc… Its all just a farce, a smokescreen put up by people that don´t want to admit to how bad and /oe lazy they really are.
Please explain how someone that got boosted to their level is by any concievable metric “winning”, esp in tlight of someone that is actually much closed to winning having done all the work for them and gotten poaid to do so… Sounds more like pay through the nose to remain a scrub and cross the finish line last.
This assumes, without any tangible proof, that these players would have even run dungeons… especially in light of the toxic “Y U not Porogamer?” tryhards that classic feels to be even more heavily infested with than retail that do more than their fair share of discouraging people from jopining groups, and heavily gatekeeping the ones that still do.
Bottom line: The mages offering boosts are doing it because they can, and the people buying them are doing it because they can´t, either because of toxitard gatekeeping, or time rtestrictions, or whatever reason that is no business of our becasue neither is doing anything that is objectively wrong (unless ofc the boostee acquired his gold through illicit RMT), other than engaging with the game in a manner that you don´t like, for reasons you seem to not acknowledge as obvious causes.
Boosters farm gold from other players. This does not magically generate gold that did not exist before, by extension ruining the economy. It merely allows them to participate despite the ruined economy by taking gold from the very players that helped to ruin it themselves. If anything it´s poetic justice, pay to ruin the game, then pay again for a boost to participate in the game you helped ruin.
Which is one of the main issues.
People that have time issues in WoW also should have gold issues. If they have gold issues they cannot afford boosting.
It is a reasonable question to ask how the players that are buying boosts, that have not enough time to level up normally, got their gold.
It really is a rhetorical question…everyone knows that people are in fact also buying gold with the direct intention to spend it for boosts.
By taking out Boosting-as-a-service in the sense of making it against the rules on Classic Fresh servers (similar to the GDKP ban) this will result in a game where you can buy less with gold, therefore there is less motivation/need to buy gold in the first place.
There is a big follow chain to this one:
Less need for gold → less people buying gold → less real-money to be made by selling gold → some goldsellers or botters moving on to other games → reduction of the overall “gold generation” by bots or botting activities.
And all this is true even if one accepts that there are also indeed boost-buyers that did not bought gold.
This point basically is:
Less bots/RMT vs. freedom of trading between players. Imho less bots/RMT is the more important one.
Besides we have another point completely separated from the RMT argument: Boosting does erode the social structures that are part of the spirit of the game.
That one is even more important than the RMT one imho.
Vanila in it’s core is very unbalanced and people know it. Back in the day when youtube was still about sharing silly office rage videos, streaming wasn’t even a thing yet and there weren’t a written or video guide just about everything, the players were different. The mentality in general, was different.
Now, everybody rushes around in a great hurry as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
