Hey man, no one said twinking in low level bgs is cheap. Just look at 19s in vanilla. Gold was hard to get but yet you had to keep combobulators, bandages, sharpening stones, pots, bombs, and no one shamed anyone for using them. Fony basically made using stun bomb —> bandage a thing. That’s 2 consumables right there. And again, no ones harmed him for it.
Now all of a sudden we are in 2019 and outlook on twinking has totally changed?
Na, twinking has remained for more than a decade for me, spending the most gold and time on your gear AND consumables, to have the best edge in the form of pvp you enjoy.
if you think gold was hard to get in vanilla its evident you never played it
its true there was less shaming but with games with no flag stacks or time limits, consumables had less impact than in todays 'environment'
also the dynamic of twinking has clearly changed over the years
in tbc we got introduced to arena and it quickly became more popular than queueing bgs, from my experience anyway. consumables couldnt be used in there with the exception of sharpening stones weapon swap pre 2.1 (i think, might have gone on longer) and bandages (not typically seen as a consumable) which led to the people who queued arena 95% of time to stop carrying consumables for the 5% of bg play, mainly only using them inside premades when it was still acceptable
around this time blizz did reworks to bgs to set time limits and other stipulations to stop bgs going on for hours and hours because being in at the start of one often led to you not finishing it due to lack of playtime available during your day, meaning in the premade scene consumables were making the meta unfun to play in
this led to stricter rules imposed by guild leaders on what consumables are ok to use in premades, usually passives like rum and elixirs.
nobody wanted to play in an environment whereby if you didnt have 2 stacks of swiftness pots or bombs or those fking felwood seeds that gave you 2500hp for 10secs meant your team was at a severe disadvantage
leading into xp lock days consumables were looked down upon more and more, twinking was being looked at as less of a passtime to kill tom the 13 yr old mage sitting at 300hp and more of a sub-section of wow where a different competitive scene was being formed, ditching the traditional endgame grind and high-skill ceiling cap in favor of less effort for a lower-skill ceiling but with the same competitive mindset
with the removal of levellers post 3.1 (or was it 3.2) the community lost a lot of its own playerbase because a majority of them didnt want to put effort into migrating on the off-chance that queues were consistent, so the community became tighter and etiquette within it became more important, leading to consumables being more and more looked down on
again, arena became more important due to longer bg queues, leading to less and less consumable reliance.
cata came along and from my own personal experience in the very early cata days xp-off queues were straight up bugged (at least for EU) which forced us to organise wargames in the 20-29 bracket (before f2p and 24s existed) and as you know consumables are unusable in wargames
with the insurgence of f2p and 24s becoming hugely popular since its inception in mid/late cata the use of consumables led to huge flames and all sorts of toxicity due to f2ps having very restricted access to them and gear in general
the nature of all guild v guild premades using wargame feature meant consumable use was seen as anti-competitive, a crutch only seen in pugs
the only consumables i remember being used during cata that wasnt 'shamed' was rum and the usual bandages
twinking became more and more niche all the way up to wod, with most of these bfa twinks coming back thinking nobody twinked since wotlk, the people who look down on consumables are the ones who experienced the 'meta' changes and the general attitude of the community switch over the years
final note - its 2019 not 2007 anymore, if you find enjoyment in killing levellers and spending 15k per bg you're just an awful player and nobody wants to hear your opinions on any topic to do with twinks because you're sub ~50 iq and you have nothing to say anyway.
