One integral part of World of Warcraft back in the day was powerlevelling: I remember a starry-eyed Harvey watching Protection Paladins on YouTube sweeping through hordes of the Scarlet Crusade for a group of lucky levellers. I was completely unaware of the economic underbelly supporting it, but it sure looked cool to see someone soloing a dungeon.
It was doubly helpful because levelling back then was a bit of a pain. Even without any fancy tricks in retail, levelling up an alt account today doesn’t take much time—but back in the Burning Crusade? It was a journey. It also helped you rake in gold as a nice bonus, something that was also in more meaningfully short supply.
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“We’ve observed a significant number of Burning Crusade players entering dungeons and then participating in no meaningful gameplay,” Kaivax writes, “Often while only one party member plays through the instance. When this is prominent, it can lead to detrimental economic effects, among other concerns, so we’re implementing a series of hotfixes to address it.”
The hotfixes in question? Firstly, no freebies—players need to participate to earn any experience in dungeons now. Secondly, non-boss enemies now drop loot based on how many players participated in the kill. This takes an axe to both power levelling and gold farming.
And while it’s an uppercut to my nostalgia, I do kinda get why it’s happening—even if the old days were more innocent (at least, with my rose-tinted glasses on), it’s a different landscape out there. Real money trading is more rife, powerlevelling services are rampant, and the information required to perform it is more readily available.
You’re no longer special if you have a kitted-out Paladin that can carve through one of these dungeons without trouble—and that’s going to have a major impact on the economy, something that’s notoriously hard to control in MMOs.
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