Think you missed the part where I said I started in wrath. I literally lvled from 1-55 to be a death knight and from 55-80 during the whole time wrath came out. I didn’t have a flying mount till lvl 80 and I couldn’t even fly with it cause I didn’t have gold. I played solo back then cause I didn’t understand mmos, I just wanted to be death knight.
While yes I already stated my arguement is mostly my opinion of the way things were then TO ME and the way they are now. I understand the fault of my perspective but that doesn’t make it wrong just because your experience was far different than mine.
If the “individual playstyles” allow players to circumvent the entire BfA leveling system, I don’t blame the for changing it.
Blizzard is a company that requires subbed players to make a profit. The player base in large wants to burn through content via power leveling, flying, etc so they can feel like the have beaten each patch causing subs drop between raid releases.
Neither group is ever going to be happy but players doing tasks that take multiple hours/days/months is an essential part of a successful mmo.
I understand your position, and that’s really the crux of the issue when it comes to design decisions.
The same exact expansion, with the same design decision, was viewed in completely different ways. And another million ways between all the other players.
In regards to the power leveling at 110 issue… the change is to combat an exploit in current content, it has no impact on those who wish to take a high level character back to older zones to power level a friend or alt.
Due to how the scaling works in newer zones, a lvl110 character is actually capable of dispatching enemies faster than a character between 111 & 119. This is especially true of characters above level 115 when legendaries stop working. Truthfully, this shows more of a flaw with the scaling system in place more than anything, however flaw in the system of not, there is an immediately present issue of people using this flaw as an exploit.
Hopefully the XP lock change is merely a stop gap measure while they investigate the underlying issue and eventually fix the power curb in level scaling to properly go up at every level instead of the players strength stagnating for multiple levels while the enemies grow exponentially stronger.
I think the telling thing in what you guys are discussing, in particular about Wrath, is that they may not have released a ton of new content, but what they had kept players engaged for an extended period of time throughout the expansion. Something they haven’t been able to accomplish since then. They sell expansions on hype and nostalgia, everyone buying hopes to get back to what they had with some previous expansion, and it doesn’t seem to happen. Subscriptions tank months after release now. Enough so that I believe it’s the reason they stopped releasing numbers. It could be the game is just old with nothing innovative coming out to liven it up, or it could be that the content outside of raids isn’t very engaging.
I thought they have been pretty lenient on letting us do our own thing in recent times. I can remember being shoehorned into content a lot more previously.
The question of course is what about the design decision of Wrath made people want to do it over and over?
Or did it have more to do with player perspective and timing? After all leveling through Northrend now on alts typically gets a lot of complaints despite it being relatively unchanged.
Was it just because the villain was a WC3 major lore character?
Was it that a lot of players had the new experience of getting into a raid? The excitement from killing a raid boss with 9 or 24 other friends hadn’t quite been diminished yet?
Or is it that the sub graph followed a pretty normal product life cycle graph and after 14 years, it’s still Warcraft. A lot of players aren’t going to come back to a game they moved on from just because it had an expansion no matter what.
I played DAoC and it’s first expansion before quitting. There is nothing they could have ever done in a future expansion to make me want to come back because I just had moved on from DAoC.
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.
![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")