1.) Leveling has not been a valued part of the “experience” since Wrath or even earlier. The player base as a whole does not want a lengthy, difficult, tedious, or involved leveling process.
2.) A huge portion of the player base enjoys rolling alts. A lengthy and painful leveling process discourages this practice and shortens the life of excitement and interest in an expansion. Once the main has hit whatever cap the player has set for him/herself, being able to roll a new character and catch up with his guild/group mates to play a new role in the content is vital.
3.) Leveling serves only two purposes: First, it allows the player to become familiar with a class/spec. Second, it tells the story through quest lines and zone discovery. That’s it. Belaboring it into a straight grind (a la Classic) is no longer what the WoW player base wants. We had the grinding method for 10 years, and nobody (well, not nobody; but a very tiny portion) wants it anymore. We want the story, and we want a process of learning where all the buttons are and what the abilities do. That’s it.
Wrong? No. You simply look at it the way you look at it and want what you want in the game. That is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is what it is.
There is nothing that keeps you from spending more time or moving more slowly. Exploring every corner of this game would keep you busy for literally 15 years, and you’d still have “stuff” to do and things to discover. Leveling is set up by some players as the defining exploration of the game. In Vanilla, leveling took a very long time, and in the first two expansions, level grinding remained a very big and time-consuming part of the story revelation. That has slowly ceased to be the focus. Hitting 60 is not the end. It is the beginning.
The game doesn’t end at 60 anymore. It starts there.
I didn’t say I wanted that. That’s just how long it took. I wasn’t exactly power grinding though. I took a lot of time leveling leatherworking and just exploring and things like that.
Ask me how long it took me to hit level 60 in EverQuest? Answer: Undefined, I never did. IIRC the level cap was 50 when it was released but I didn’t hit that until after the first expansion raised it. After two expansions, I had 64 days and 6 hours played at level 52. Some time after that I gave up on EQ and started playing Dark Age of Camelot, after a brief fling with EverQuest II.
Sure, I played Eq as well, Still do actually on their TLP servers (Yes ive been playing EQ for 21 years)…but What I have learned from Playing Eq TLP servers is the VAST majority of people do not want that slow leveling. We were kids and teenagers when EQ came out and now were adults with families and jobs, we cant take 500 hours to hit max level.
The faster the better, IMO, this isnt 1999, its 2020…
Right now on an EQ TLP server to go from 1-60 During Kunark Era on a Normal TLP EXP server (They have servers with adjusted EXP rates) it takes around 100-200 hours depending on if you have a premade group or where you level etc (Yes I know thats a huge variance, but that is how EQ is, your leveling experience is dependent on a ton of things most notably your access to good pre-made groups)
This is too long. Going from 50-60 takes about 40-120 hours depending on what I said above. Its too long…its the number 1 reason people quit playing EQ and Darkpaw Games is too stupid to figure that out.
And unfortunately Pantheon seems to be going down that same road and the truth is, once people start playing it, they won’t stick around. Only a small portion of the population wants to slog through huge leveling grinds.
That being said, I am ALL for Blizzard putting in ways for people to slow their experience by a %. Give people an option is fine with me.
On all your points except maybe #3, all I can think of its “chicken or egg”? Is that what people want? Or is that all they know so that’s how they base their decisions? I don’t disagree with most of what you have, but almost all the points you bring up are littered with subjective conditions.
Well of course they are. Players are people, and every person is different. There are likely a hundred different reasons we could come up with for people wanting an involved leveling process and a hundred for why others don’t.
The fact of the matter, however, is that leveling is being reduced in consequence, and that is directly in response to the player base’s rather loud and lengthy complaints about how tedious, confusing, non-linear, and senseless it has become.
World content has been trivialized for a very long time, now, and with trivialized world content, leveling is neither useful nor entertaining.
The game begins at level cap. It always has, really, but the amount work and time that got sunk into Vanilla leveling lent it a feeling of weight. Players who prefer Classic missed that and wanted it back. In the retail game, however, with so many expansions and so many stories and so many disjointed time jumps and skips…it doesn’t make sense, and very few people enjoy it at all.
Of course it’s subjective. People aren’t all the same. Still, there are marked trends and consensus.
I’ve played the game since '05, and I have no desire to return to Vanilla-like leveling in the retail game. I leveled a toon to 60 in Classic, and I leveled many toons to 60 during Vanilla. I don’t “hate” it. I loved it. But the game is different now.
I hit 60 on my first toon in Vanilla, about a month before BC was released. It took me forever & I loved it. I also never want to experience that kind of leveling again.
No way. People wanted longer leveling in BFA and looked how that turned out. Retail wow isn’t about the leveling experience, if you want that go to classic wow.
There’s no right or wrong in this situation, just subjective opinions.
I myself think the less time we have to spend on leveling, the better. And I say this as a person with an account packed with 50 toons, a big chunk of them is at 120, another big chunk is at 110 and the rest is at various lowbie levels.
I’ve leveled enough that I kinda don’t want to do it anymore, and the way I see it, most people consider that the real game starts at max level, so what’s the point of extending the part of the game that isn’t considered “the real game”?
And if some people want a long grindy leveling experience, WoW Classic is always there for them
The fast leveling is great when you’ve got several alts and don’t want to spend eternity leveling thru content you’ve seen dozens of times over the years. I think the majority of people who play are veterans anyway.
I think if the content that exists within previous expansions was still relevant you’d have a good argument. WoW though is built on the concept that after an expansion nothing in that expansion matters anymore. So effectively its useless to do any of the content aside from current.
So I’d rather get my characters up to current so they can be more useful.
Yeah I feel like 7 hours or whatever it turns out to be will be about right. I actually boosted a character once I got past 60, I have 12 120’s but I’m starting to view 61-90 or so as a slog. This will also encourage me to roll alts on some of my friends’ servers that I might not have done otherwise. Still 36 in classic, been stalled out for most of a month, and I’m still so demotivated, truly if it took less time to level I’d be happily raiding there by now and my guild would likely appreciate more 60’s. I don’t expect them to change that but making it faster to cap in retail makes perfect sense to me, as someone who’s leveled a lot I’ve been able to tell that I start to lose interest somewhere halfway through the process currently.
I understand where you are coming from but the reality is that this game is 15 years old. Anyone who is making alts has run the campaigns soooooo many times. I mean wandering around smelling the roses and listening to those crazy pandas or appreciating the lore in Northrend is great the first 2-5 times, then it starts to wear.
If you are a genuine new player that 7 hours will be closer to 20-40, maybe a lot more if you have no support and have to discover the game on your own.
Maybe I should have used my words better. It is rather a simple question though. Did they speed level through looking to complete it as fast as possible? Or did they casually level through?
People simply arent spending that kind of time on games as an average anymore. I have played since Vanilla, and I did the hours of leveling, dungeoning, raiding, gearing and so on. Back then, I could, I was younger and had significantly less demands as far as life went. Now, I am married, have pets, a job and other things to take care of. If it is gonna take me 6 months of time to level up over the span of a few hours a day, I probably wouldnt play that game as it would no longer be worth the money spent or time invested.
I joined at the end of MoP. I hung around in leveling for a long time. It was interesting, and there were lots of things to do that no longer are part of the game, like farming mats for gold and using that gold to buy flying, or buying cheap BoE’s on the AH when your equipment is bad and quests don’t give you what you need.
Now, if your hunter doesn’t get a bow from a quest reward and doesn’t find one, the one that has a vendor value of 20s now costs 2000g on the AH. I remember paying 50s on my low level hunter.
