Since World of Warcraft’s release, “twinks” have been a problem. For those familiar enough with gay culture to be scandalised, I promise that’s the actual MMORPG lingo. A twink in an MMO is a low-level character you pour a bunch of effort (and typically money) into, giving them absurdly powerful gear—proportionately, at least. Etymology lessons will come later.

It’s usually used to dunk on people in PvP. The twinks I know would grab an alt character, level them to 19, kit them out, and run rampant. This happened so often during my time with Vanilla WoW that I still get a fight or flight response when I see anyone with those freaking goggles on. If you know, you know.

Nowadays, though, some gamers are twinking for good. They can do so due to WoW’s expansion structure—the game’s been out for a while, and that’s caused two things to happen. A ‘level squish’ during Shadowlands, which brought the game’s 120 levels back down to a more manageable 70, as well as level scaling in dungeons to keep queues popping quickly.

This allows for some absolute nonsense. With the current system, a level 10 character can be matched with players of a far higher level. To compensate for this, the game scales everybody’s damage and healing so that the level 10 newbie doesn’t feel like dead weight. 

As crappy-throwaway on the game’s subreddit has discovered rather dramatically, this can be exploited. “I get a group for Shrine of the Storm with a level 10 mage named ‘Boostlord’ or something to that effect. They ask in chat if they can Tank.” Suffice to say Mages—a flimsy, cloth-wearing class—can’t really tank under normal circumstances. “I just reply ‘go ahead lmao’ fully expecting a wipe.”

Boostlord then proceeded to tear through the dungeon at blistering speeds, killing monsters like they were “grass under a mower.” Turns out, this is a well-established practice. While finding out just how this kind of thing works, I stumbled onto guide videos (like this overview from Archvaldor on YouTube) dating back almost a year.

This benevolent twink’s obscene power level is thanks to that aforementioned scaling. Since low-level characters have fewer abilities, the game overcompensates by giving them some massive boosts to all their stats, turning simple spells like Arcane Explosion into nuclear-grade weapons. Here’s how you set one of these bad boys up:

• Lock your XP at your desired level by visiting the Experience Eliminator.
• Grind some good gear—commenter jackjsdacksd recommends Warlords of Draenor Dungeons to grind warforged stuff. Archvaldor also recommends them.
• Rock up with the gems and enchants of your choice. There’s actually a whole community dedicated to this stuff, xpoff, with recommended items for each class.
• You are now one of the most powerful level 10 characters in your server.

Blizzard has already stepped in to stop these characters from uplifting their mates—if you party up with someone who has their XP locked, you’ll get an XP penalty yourself. Which means that Boostlord, blessed be their name, was doing this entirely out of charity. All that work just to make some random stranger’s grind that bit easier.

I promised I’d talk about etymology earlier, so here it is: the term ‘twink’ in MMORPGs has a couple of suggested origins. The most obvious one is real-life gay subculture. Twinks are athletic, youthful men—in this metaphor, your alt is a strapping young hottie, while your main is an older bear, showering them with gifts in a sort of sugar daddy situation. Who knew powerleveling could get so saucy.

A more game-adjacent origin is suggested to be from MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). In these text-based proto-MMOs, powerful gear would sometimes have the “Twinkling” prefix. I think we can all agree that’s a lot less fun, if more likely, but hey—language is weird. Both origins could be true. MUDs could have planted the seeds that blossomed into a smutty linguistic flower at the hands of a bunch of giggling gamers.

Either way, I’m just glad there are Boostlords in the world—this is a big improvement over being ganked by some pink-haired gnome with a pair of glowing scimitars, that’s for sure.