Good reason to have levels it's a form of progression a progression we don't lose after each xpack unlike gear we lose it's progression and start over again.
I've been thinking about this most of the day. Leveling experience aside, I think the only way this could honestly work as an overall character progression experience, is to maybe go down to 40, then have every expansion be in 5 level intervals. Again leveling aside, what could happen is add an overall ability at the end of each 5 levels that can be further augmented while participating in each expansion's content while also receiving a buff but also a 'sync' when engaging in 'challenging' instanced-based content pertaining to that expansion. This makes old content relevant while also furthering character progression into other expansion content via the augments you take away for that specific ability.
So I guess an example might help. Lets say you get stampede for bm hunter in cata. As you do cata heroic dungeons, maybe you'll get a specific augment which is to lower the cooldown of the ability by x after complete x heroic cata dungeons. Then a particular raid tier will give increased damage based on how many clears, another giving increased duration, and the final tier maybe giving a legendary buff or something that make projectiles shot during stampede duration increase damage for both the hunter and primary pet while also returning focus by a percentage. The idea overall is to give motivation beyond gear which adds to an overall player's progression and also keeping the integrity of the content's difficult as it was at the time somewhat intact due to the 'sync.'
That is pretty much what I find is very lacking since Ion has taken over, no sense of expansion interactivity with the rest of the game. Each expansion pretty much just resets and funnels people without acknowledging a player's effort up to that point. Sure the person might have the achievements, mounts, pets, mog whatever from that time, but how you played continues to flip flop every expansion to the point that a veteran honestly might not even be able to tell you what level they learned what skills.
Didn't read through all the comments but what would get me to play live WoW again would be if one expansion's progress carried over to the next and if that means capping the level then so be it. The level capped at 60 was what they originally planned to do before TBC but decided to raise it cause leveling up at that time was a selling factor, now I believe it is a deterrent. When you pay for an expansion + years of subscription then have your progress mean nothing after spending hundreds of dollars then repeat over and over that shit sticks in your subconscious as something negative IMO.
Agreed. And yet I have seen negative reactions directed specifically at the fact that ESO does not add new content the WOW way... "just more of the same" they say.
I've always found the whole WOW expansion system reserved for max level players a pain in the butt. Nothing is worse than having your top tier pre-expansion gear become irrelevant and replaced by green drops 15 minutes into the new expansion content.
ESO has also done the gear bit well by keeping its max level pegged at the same CP160 for years with no plans in sight to ever raise it.
When I add up how much money I've spent on WoW since 2004 for expansions + subs it's well in the thousands yet I can't log in to play the stuff I bought unless I pony up another $15...
When I add up the money I've spent on ESO it's significantly less but I can log in and play whenever I want...
Make everyone level 8 in BfA. That number is superfluous anyways.
All people want to know is when they will crit for 9,349,225,120,456,300 damage. Of course they will get a heal for 10,456,782,458,900,125 health, which sort of makes the crit meh anyways.
Making the numbers smaller at this point is like making them absurdly big... they aren't relevant to begin with.
So he talks about "the most current content" and how "older content isn't meaningful" but asks if it's enough if they shorten that "kind of an empty experience" for players?
Well, i happen to have a better solution to the problem: get rid of the empty experience altogether. Begin to treat the whole game as "the most current content" and keep it relevant no matter how many expansions are released.
After a decade of deep slumber they are finally waking up and acknowledging there's something wrong in the game. I'll be back in Classic and maybe someday i could enjoy the full game once again.
You had me about to agree until you dropped classic. Classic is still the same broken game design, its the core of the current game. Just with just as much bad game design, just in different spots. All these arguments I hear about classic are nonsense. Talking about how you get to take in the game when you have to walk everywhere. But do you know what's faster than riding a mount? Teleporting! And I know all you bastards are using that hearthstone! :P
The problem is that they've nerfed nearly all of the game into oblivion so that it consists of going through the motions of doing something stupid, so that you can get to the next, higher level region of doing the same thing. And they apparently think that the solution is to ask you to still do a ton of that, but just somewhat less than before? Have they considered actually making the lower level content good?
It wasn't endgame raiding that made WoW popular in the first place. Hardly anyone ever gets to that part of the game. It was the lower level content that made it popular. But if the lower level content has been nerfed to the point that it's awful, why should anyone not already at endgame pick up the game in the first place?
IMHO, Activision/Blizzard has destroyed Blizzard Entertainment. While Blizzard Entertainment is the largest company under the Activision/Blizzard banner, it is the only company under the umbrella without a C.E.O. The end result, zero control at the Blizzard Entertainment level. The suits at Activision/Blizzard pull all the strings now.
As @Quizzical says above "It was the lower level content that made it popular."
Increasing the level cap of course was a simple approach to putting existing subscribers back on the treadmill. Rinse and repeat.
The solution to a high level cap: level boosts! Extra money sure but but once boosted little reason to do old, non-challenging, content. Unsub!
I assume the drive behind these questions is: how can we get new players to do the old content, thereby staying subbed longer. We still want to sell the boosts though!
As someone who has leveled 2 charecters from 1-120, they should absolutely fucking do this. This shit is a slog and a half to say the least.
The only good way to level is to wear heirloom gear sit in org or stormwind and que as a tank all the way there. You que times are 1min or less and you just aoe pull half the dungeon and have a slim chance of dying.
You don't get item upgrades because heirlooms so gear is useless, there is no resources to manage its so bad.
You can turn your brain off and run into shit and just smack the keyboard and win. also the talents are stretched to thin, 1 every 15 levels is dumb af.
Level squish back down to let's say 70 would mean starting at level 15-70, you would get a talent every 7 levels or so (my math could be off.) Making those choices closer together and now people have more choice of where to level.
Example 1-30 could be classic all the way 30-40 could be tbc wrath 40-50 could be cata and mop then 50-60 could be WOD and legion then you could do 60-65 BFA and then have the next expansions content be 65-70 then each going expansion would only go 5 levels so we don't get back to a similar situation in 6 years (assuming wow last that long)
Yes abolish the archaic crap.
Change it to a milestone system. Blizzard loves to "time-gate" people's experiences. Creating a milestone system would allow for just as much as a grindy experience Blizzard wants to sell without the dungeon/mob grind bypassing it.
Want access to more zones? Gotta finish all the assigned content in the previous tier.
Want to move onto that next dungeon set? Got to clear the previous dungeon's story line quest chain.
No more levels just MERIT. Bring the pride of accomplishment back.
In a way it could work, since further that level number goes up, less I care about it. Especially since it goes up so fast and without challenge. I guess squeesh could help with allowing levels to last longer, maybe bring back some gearing progression she leveling, though I doubt it. It would definitely make make leveling seem like less tedious task for newcomer, since 120 levels do feels lot, if you don't know how fast it can be done. Though mob scaling did address a lot of issues levelining squeesh would, like zone out leveling problems, making easy mobs even easier,... Though I got to admit, beside latest expansion, leveling does feel like pointless thing, since it does very little to teach you about game mechanics and stuff, due to how easy it is and how you can breze through and get carried in dungeons. So in a way, it might be better if UT went through even faster, you do bit of vanilla zones, then one old expansion and then last two, if you bought the newest. Or one if you didn't.
Honestly with all the constant character and skill changes....hello!!! Please quit messing with that one!!! Gave me headache after headache as well as pain in the rear end. Loved way it was set up until you " made it easier for new players". Introduce new skills earning them with accomplishments. Keep it interesting and yes challenging! And quit making it feel like we fell into dimensional warps. Storyline shouldn't be all over the board. We became avid fans of playing because we enjoyed it!
Just kill WoW and make WoW 2. Stop putting resources into a dying/outdated game and instead give us the next blockbuster MMORPG.
RIght from the start, the biggest mistake I felt WoW made was only having two factions....A thrid neutral faction (Ogres, Goblins, etc) that hated both sides would have been great....The battlegrounds would have been a blast with a third faction.
Would a Level Squish Make World of Warcraft Better? Blizzard Wants to Know! - MMORPG.com
It seems that Blizzard is taking more seriously the notion of a World of Warcraft level squish than had been previously thought. A new survey is making the rounds asking players how they would feel if the company decided to "squish", or reduce, WoW levels from where it currently stands at 120. Each expansion has added more levels to the cap and developers feel that this is not healthy for the game. Ion Hazzikostas recently alluded to a forthcoming squish with the next expansion.
I wonder if they'll ignore the results of this survey like they do everything else.
Well, will the results be published? Even if they get the answer no and "accept" it, they could always just make it easier to level or wait a year and ask the same question again.
They should just stop increasing levels every expansion and instead add some sort of feature that makes their level perpetual and massively increase the difficulty of the game (ala Diablo III).
What WoW definitely does not need is more level-gated content and level cap increases. They need to rethink their game world. I would recommend their next expansion be similar to Cataclysm in that its an entire World revamp, where instead of design/appearance they tweak the content and make it playable in a new way similar to Diablo's difficulty levels.
You should have made it harder to level right from the get go. But if you take the current 120 and reduce it to what... 100 in future expansions, people will feel cheated of their progress.
Maybe a good idea is to have a max cap at 100 and then add specializations or something similar. Other paths a player can take that are skill based, not level based. Like in vanilla where you sucked at using a wand but got better depending on how much you used it? Think SWG here. The had professions which you could level up any way you wanted. So a crazy idea would be that you are a master warrior who has some kind of self heal, and when you are tired of playing warrior, you "respec" to stealth druid and start the journey to master again... all skill based. The respec gives you something (whatever it is) because you reached master warrior/healer but decided to start over.
If they can make it work then that's fine. I don't have a problem with levels. My problem with WoW is the focus on end game raiding that turned the leveling experience into very easy mode. I play WoW for the story/lore but I want the open world leveling to be challenging, not a visual novel.
Nope. Instead they should lower exp gains, get rid of dungeon finder, and remove quest trackers (not your quest log, the marks on map of where to go, the question marks, etc).
Just kill WoW and make WoW 2. Stop putting resources into a dying/outdated game and instead give us the next blockbuster MMORPG.
After Blizzcon and the Diablo Immortal fiasco I don't think they have the people there to deliver anything close to the next blockbuster MMORPG.
They are doing the best thing they could do by releasing WoW Classic.
WoW Classic....the WoW killer
Grouping in Old school mmo's: meeting someone at the bar and chatting, getting to know them before jumping into bed. Current mmo's grouping: tinder. swipe, hookup, hope you don't get herpes, never see them again.
Comments
When I add up the money I've spent on ESO it's significantly less but I can log in and play whenever I want...
All people want to know is when they will crit for 9,349,225,120,456,300 damage. Of course they will get a heal for 10,456,782,458,900,125 health, which sort of makes the crit meh anyways.
Making the numbers smaller at this point is like making them absurdly big... they aren't relevant to begin with.
You'd trust guys who can't figure out how to fix their game after 15 years to make a new one from scratch? XD
Good luck with that.
It wasn't endgame raiding that made WoW popular in the first place. Hardly anyone ever gets to that part of the game. It was the lower level content that made it popular. But if the lower level content has been nerfed to the point that it's awful, why should anyone not already at endgame pick up the game in the first place?
Increasing the level cap of course was a simple approach to putting existing subscribers back on the treadmill. Rinse and repeat.
The solution to a high level cap: level boosts! Extra money sure but but once boosted little reason to do old, non-challenging, content. Unsub!
I assume the drive behind these questions is: how can we get new players to do the old content, thereby staying subbed longer. We still want to sell the boosts though!
The only good way to level is to wear heirloom gear sit in org or stormwind and que as a tank all the way there. You que times are 1min or less and you just aoe pull half the dungeon and have a slim chance of dying.
You don't get item upgrades because heirlooms so gear is useless, there is no resources to manage its so bad.
You can turn your brain off and run into shit and just smack the keyboard and win. also the talents are stretched to thin, 1 every 15 levels is dumb af.
Level squish back down to let's say 70 would mean starting at level 15-70, you would get a talent every 7 levels or so (my math could be off.) Making those choices closer together and now people have more choice of where to level.
Example 1-30 could be classic all the way 30-40 could be tbc wrath 40-50 could be cata and mop then 50-60 could be WOD and legion then you could do 60-65 BFA and then have the next expansions content be 65-70 then each going expansion would only go 5 levels so we don't get back to a similar situation in 6 years (assuming wow last that long)
Change it to a milestone system. Blizzard loves to "time-gate" people's experiences. Creating a milestone system would allow for just as much as a grindy experience Blizzard wants to sell without the dungeon/mob grind bypassing it.
Want access to more zones? Gotta finish all the assigned content in the previous tier.
Want to move onto that next dungeon set? Got to clear the previous dungeon's story line quest chain.
No more levels just MERIT. Bring the pride of accomplishment back.
mmorpg junkie since 1999
That's just, like, my opinion, man.
WoW Classic....the WoW killer
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