I agree about this, but my perspective is different.
I don’t have a “main”. I don’t do end-game content: max-level dungeons, Mythic, raiding, and pvp. I don’t do any of that. Those are my differences. I am a gold-maker and an alt-leveler.
I have played WoW for hours a day since 2004. My differences were never a problem until Legion. In Legion and BFA, everything changed:
(1) I have to do raids and max-level dungeons to get profession recipes
(2) I have to reach exalted rep to get profession recipes
(3) I have to do many questlines (many, many hours) to unlock flying
(4) ditto to unlock allied races for my altoholic to play
All of this is gating “the things I play” behind a specific kind of player: the MAIN player who does all the quests, does max-level dungeons and raids, and naturally gets all the reputations by doing max-level play.
Then maybe the utterly BROKEN scaling is the issue they should be working to fix, rather than trying to implement “fixes” that leave the underlying problem while interfering with how players want to play the game.
People have talked about how stupid it is for our characters to grow weaker as we level since the beta, and Blizzard didn’t fix it. I don’t think there’s any chance they’re ever going to fix it, if they can just railroad players down the “intended gameplay” path instead. Breaking things for players is much easier than fixing the actual issues with the game.
All good points. I’m not sure what the answer is, and I think Blizzard isn’t sure either. For me though, the last few expansions have been swings and misses, and movement in the wrong direction.
Gonna try Vanilla when it drops. Maybe if I can find the right guild I can recapture that initial WoW enthusiasm I used to have. Probably not, but worth a shot.
The devs taking some issue with power leveling isn’t anything new and goes back at least to Legion pre-patch when they seemed to have mixed feeling on people using the Legion invasions to power level low-level alts.
I also remember ole’ Ion having a few words to say about people doing that during Legion Assaults… and how they were going to keep an eye more on that sort of thing in BFA.
I’m not exactly sure your idea on a linear path is quite as rigid as you make it out since there are several ways to level a toon, especially an alt. I completely skipped questing for two of my alts thus far and leveled them through island expos and battlegrounds.
This is the point I cannot understand. How can you have a character progression system where lower-level characters are more powerful than higher-level ones? How is this system, the underlying foundation of the game, just sitting there with this fundamental problem, months after an expansion launches? Fix that and you fix a good deal of the rest of the problems with the current game play.
I’ve done this 4 times. You eventually hit a roadblock where you find that activities are hidden behind reputation and questing requirements. The devs absolutely what every character to complete a significant about of unrelated content.
The idea that characters get progressively “more powerful” is just plain silly.
Player skill should be the only determinant for if the player is able to defeat any monster in game. Monsters that are “more powerful” should simply require more players to defeat them.
Think about it this way, when you were level 10 you were wondering around the world fighting Wolves, Bears, Goblins, Kobolds, Orcs, Wizards, Undead Monstrosities, Dragons, Demons, etc. Every expansion since then you have basically been fighting mostly the same big bad guys, up to and including ancient all powerful god like beings. We are suppose to believe that with each expansion there’s somehow come along some wolf or kobold, living in the new land, that somehow “more powerful” than that demigod you just defeated on your way over to Boralus or Zandalar?
No, that’s just silly. Your character isn’t getting “more powerful”. Every mob in the game should be tuned exactly the same and depending on whether or not your character need to enlist some aid from your friends characters, it should have more health and powerful spells.
The original MMORPGs that we played 20 years ago weren’t planning on 14 years worth of expansions and “character progression”. These systems weren’t intended to progress in this endless fashion.
It’s time that we all just admit that WoW isn’t that kind of game. It’s more of a fantasy amusement park with some fun story lines to follow, then it will ever be some computer version of a table top RPG, where level progression make sense. WoW game play is a completely different context than sitting around your dining room table making up stories and rolling dice for a character that’s suppose to have a beginning, middle, and (most importantly) end to their story.
Thank you but I choose what games to play. I love MMOs with character progression and I pretty much play all of them, except WoW these days, which is in a terribad state and doesn’t show any signs of improvement under this dev team.
Then you must hate WoW because character progression is a broken game mechanic for MMORPGs like WoW which are very much driven by player skill and actions to overcome game play challenges rather than deterministic statistics.
I formerly loved WoW and played it incessantly for over 13 years. In fact, I may be one of the few players who loved leveling in WoD, despite the “great pruning”.
The game is now a time-gated Diablo hybrid on rails and I don’t find it fun or rewarding anymore. However the other MMOs I play are super fun and super populated – largely by disgruntled WoW refugees.