Adjustments to Dungeon Creature Behavior and Group XP

One of the most common pieces of feedback we’ve received (and observed ourselves in our own adventures) is the concern about pervasive sales of dungeon boosting services in-game. It often overpowers chat with advertisements and makes certain channels hard to use for their intended purpose.

It’s also no secret that the gold from many boosting groups is used for illicit activities such as Real-Money Trading (RMT), as much of the gold that players pay to boosters is then sold for real money back to other players.

Now that we’ve seen the final major content release of Burning Crusade Classic, we will soon adjust the behavior of creatures in most dungeons (including the new dungeons coming in Wrath of the Lich King Classic) to make it significantly more difficult to endlessly snare and kite enemies. Additionally, we will implement a reduction to group XP earned when there is large disparity between player levels in the same group.

We’ve experimented with similar changes to most dungeons on our Season of Mastery servers, and we’ve found these changes to be very effective at reducing the efficiency of boosting groups. We plan to roll out these adjustments to Burning Crusade Classic realms at the same time as the Joyous Journeys XP buff, which should happen sometime in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information about that and when you can expect to see these changes hit live servers.

This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone that spamming chat channels with advertisements for boosting services outside of dedicated Trade channels is against the Terms of Service, and you should take every opportunity to report players that you see advertising for boosting services in channels such as General and Looking For Group.

We’re really looking forward to players joining us very soon in the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta, and hope to be able to share more about that very very soon as well!