WoW: Lich King without annoying boosters – Blizzard makes boosting groups unattractive

In WoW Classic, too, boosting will soon no longer be worthwhile. Blizzard builds in strong hurdles designed to make boosting unattractive.

If you ask the players of WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic what is most annoying in the game, the answer comes pretty quickly: Boosting. On most servers, the trade channel is simply no longer usable and low-level dungeon groups are becoming increasingly rare because buying a boosting player is so cheap. Blizzard now wants to put a stop to that.

What is boosting? In online games, boosting is when superior players – either through skill, a higher level or better equipment – ​​accompany inferior players through content in order to give them rewards. This can be strong equipment, or simply a lot of experience points in a short time.

In WoW Classic, boosting means, above all, accompanying them through dungeons so that the “little” characters quickly get a lot of experience points. Such services are usually paid for with gold, but sometimes also with real money, which is illegal.

What is Blizzard planning to do? In the official forum, the community manager Kaivax revealed some details about the plans that will apply to Burning Crusade and thus also to Wrath of the Lich King Classic in the future. Boosting is said to be less attractive, so there will be some adjustments:

• The behavior of creatures in dungeons will be adjusted in such a way that it should be almost impossible to slow them down indefinitely or prevent them from ever reaching the player. Endless kiting should no longer be possible.
• There will be significantly less experience points for the party if there is a big difference between the different levels of the party members.

The adjustments are similar to those that Blizzard experimented with and had good experience with during the Season of the Championship.

There is no exact date for the changes yet, but it will likely be before the Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch.

Is boosting actually allowed? Basically yes. Both the boosting itself and the advertising of such services are permitted – at least in the trading channel. However, Blizzard is aware that the gold from these deals often flows into real money transactions and players feel disturbed by the constant boosting spam. Therefore, Blizzard simply wants to make boosting less attractive without banning it entirely. Because “pulling smaller players through dungeons” has always been part of World of Warcraft, but it wasn’t used as much in the past as it is today.

What do you think of Blizzard’s efforts to limit boosting?