Blizzard is happy to ruin its long term, long standing reputation amongst its own target audience for a quick cash grab. This is just short-sighted, greedy and money-thirst and yes it might make them yoink a bit of money in the short term, it makes them lose their trust and credibility thus making them actually lose a lot more, in the long term. Are we gonna instantly quit wow because of level boosts? Of course not. But we will become more detached from the game and be more reluctant. I personally for instance, will play TBC, but will invest less time on it and spend less of my money on Blizzard games once again, because I won’t trush the company for a long-term investment once again, as it happened during retail.
Because every target audience has different characteristics. Blizzard’s target audience is the hardcore, dedicated PC gamers. They chose to produce games for this audience in the first years of 90s, consciously. This is an audience that follows gaming websites, spends all day learning about games, reads news about games and can compare/understand company policies. This audience can comprehend when they see a greedy move and they are permanently there, they don’t just quit gaming over night, for this audience, trust and reputation are very important terms.
Like if this was a company that made mobile games for android and advertised it on shabby facebook ads, they could sell stuff in game to make some money and then dump the playerbase because that audience doesn’t care about the long-term commitments. They just play the game once or twice when they take a dump then uninstall it, maybe playing a game for a few hours max. Blizzard’s “main” target audience wants to ruin their lives in a video game and play it for years.
Not saying that other types of people from different gaming habits will never play WoW classic, they definitely can. For instance someone who only plays football simulator games with his boys can try wow and like it. Or someone who mostly plays mobile games occasionally. But this is not the main, target audience for a MMO. You can’t expect long-term success if you design the game to appeal to this crowd, then you lose the MOST IMPORTANT feature that made your company what it is, you lose the TRUST of your OWN audience.
These greedy and scummy money-grabbing tactics made millions of players lose their trust and appreciation for Actilizzard, and the whole classic story started with this narrative. The ONLY reason why classic happened in the first place was that people didn’t want to be treated as short-term cash cows, paying irl money for level boosts or ingame shop mounts etc. And for a short-time, they re-gained this trush, after all the talks, all the panels, interviews, saying that they have earned their lessons with classic and their community and they will never change the fundamental philosophies of classic. Hell, even in their OWN BLIZZCON PANEL they explained why they will stick to these philosophies.
Level boost is to the very core anti-thetic to the existence of classic. It is an oxymoron, it is just shocking and disturbing to see people defending it.