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.
Hehe I skipped the entire thing. Didn’t buy BfA (after playing the beta, why bother?) Saved money, saved time. Having fun elsewhere.
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.
No. The idea that characters get progressively more powerful is the staple hallmark of MMO play.
I can understand your confusion though since WoW is now being turned into some time-gated Diablo-hybrid on rails instead of a real MMO.
No, not really. Character progression has been a bandaid slap on in MMOs because developers were trying to get the attention of tabletop RPG players.
It just does not work.
I couldn’t disagree more.
Then you should play Tabletop RPGs more often.
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.
I’m actually surprised you don’t like Diablo because there’s a game that’s entirely about character progression, where your success is very much determined by your characters stats. As such it requires very little actual mechanical skill from the player to play successfully.
Oh, I never said I don’t like Diablo. Played D2 till my eyes bled.
But Diablo mechanics have no place in WoW and vice-versa.
Well there we can definitely agree. It’s too bad that WoW is becoming more and more like Diablo than being what makes WoW great as it’s own game.
What 4 button play style do I want to play today?
The system was not INTENDED to be used in that fashion. They were actually pretty clear about why it was being changed. This tends to happen when a game mechanic is used in a way the developers never intended.
The feature was not being “abused.” The feature allows players to turn off XP and that is exactly what players have done.
Players have no obligation to guess how a feature incorporated by Blizzard into the game should be used – it is assumed that it is there to be used – and exactly as designed, which in this case, is to turn off XP.
If you read that thread further, you will see that due to the ![:poop:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/poop.png?v=6" ":poop:")
![:cloud_with_lightning_and_rain:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/cloud_with_lightning_and_rain.png?v=6" ":cloud_with_lightning_and_rain:")
caused by this stupid plan, Blizzard has decided to re-examine how to deal with this 100% self-induced “problem.”
It was never intended that players who were level 110 play with their friends who may be level 111 or higher?
Don’t be silly.
What you mean to say is that there’s a bug thats a result of how level scaling is working that allowed level 110 characters wearing high end gear to be “more powerful” than higher level characters wearing low end gear.
Again, I think that the entire notion that characters have power progression is silly in it’s own right and that the fix that Blizzard should be making to the game is to remove the paradigm that character level has anything to do with that characters ability to engage monsters that for the most part aren’t any more powerful that those you’ve encountered previously in the game.
Seriously, are seagulls in Kul Tiras really more powerful of a creature to defeat than those demons you were slaying by the hundreds on Argus?