I know it’s not relevant, but I had a massive amount of fun making high level toons in D2 and get burned out on endless CS/ Baal runs so I’d rush people through the game.
Sometimes I advertised my service for the price of a hellforge, but i must have done it for free thousands of times.
Not sure how this power leveling has negative effects or is unsupported type behavior in WoW. I’d love to know the reason behind it.
I figured more subs + more time playing = win for Blizzard.
The artifact system was eliminated and that was a core xpac feature for Legion. All 110 content is providing rewards less than BfA questing. Even alts going through can skip the artifact line and Argus completely. The xpac was decimated (and imo it shouldn’t have been, the artifact system should have survived to leave the content more interesting).
If all you are saying is hey, you like to sit in non-progression content, then ok sorry you lost that option. But since that option also let people abuse the “normal” progression game, it got killed and rightly so. Abuses must get addressed and the vast majority of people play MMOs for progression.
I have only set foot in Legion to do some Engineering progression on a new engineer and I wanted Reeves. That’s it, there just isn’t a reason to visit it through the course of my experience with my 7 toons that were 110 when BfA started. New 101s I push to 110 via invasions and that’s it, nothing else in the xpac is useful.
I did not 101 twink in Legion. I had no reason to at that time. But I was very aware of how the system worked, which was “working as intended”. It was the same in WoD since we could start wearing crafted epic gear (even though it was only 3 pieces) at level 91. To this day I still have a level 91 ret pally with what used to be a 6/6 2H axe. He was easily doing 17k damage to everyone else’s 5k. Those are the types of things that Blizzard counted on. However, I don’t believe they planned on having players stay at 110 to take advantage of the weak spot in their scaling system, which is precisely why you don’t see epic gear for level 111 (only crafted gear that has a chance to proc at 233).
The whole reason why I chimed in at all is because Blizzard noticed something happening in one particular medium that was never intended. I am simply suggesting a way to curb that medium so it goes back to how they envisioned it. Players can still keep their overpowered gear and use it for PvP and world events. It may not be to their liking, but it beats taking away the experience cessation altogether.
I wish the artifact system was still here. I liked it much more.
Despite the fact that the artifact system was terrible because it provided skills and talents to your weapon instead of you. Your toon at the start of BfA was the same toon you had at the end of WoD – only ten levels higher.
Any gains you may have earned by leveling were eliminated by level and ilevel scaling, leaving you with no new abilities, talents or power. Brilliant!
I get it, you didn’t like it. I did. I loved the aesthetics, the quests to get them and even though it’s “system” wasn’t perfect, I like it better than HoA.
The aesthetics can’t make up for bad game design. And yes, HoA is a bad joke.
I wasn’t implying that. You stated what you didn’t like about it. I was just stated what I like about it. I think with a few tweaks, it would have been perfect. Then again, I’ve read people who much preferred farming for weapons.
I preferred when my character actually grew by gaining abilities and talents as they leveled. Gifting objects with these attributes just robs the player character of power progression.
I can respect your feelings on it. I was trying to look beyond the silver lining, perhaps.
Love your optimism, wish I shared it.
They are quite clear as to why this is happening. The solution requires them to do work, something they do not want to do anymore. Is it any surprise that when your unwilling to do the work you don’t earn the money.
If you sell an entertainment product based on how much money investors think they are going to make instead of just doing the work it takes to make your product entertaining, then the end result is you get neither.
If I claim I am going to go mine gold but I need to buy tools so I convince folks they will make money helping me by the tools I need, and then I am unwilling to go mine gold I am committing a fraud.
They’ve got it backwards. Doing the work gets you the money.
This lets the devs re-prune us every expansion, because they aren’t taking away OUR abilities, they’re taking away our glued-on “progression”. And people will defend it with “well, every expac you replace your old raid purples with quest greens, that’s NORMAL” like blind sheep.
Combined with the fact that scaling is broken so we get weaker as we level instead of stronger, and, well…you have the mess we’re in.
But look at all the “players” offering “compromises” that if implemented would end up as restrictive as the changes they were planning on implementing anyway.
They’re desperate to get people to play BfA content. The fact that people are abandoning it and subs in a freefall means they aren’t meeting their projections. Eventually it reaches the point where there aren’t enough players to buy store products and in-game services to prop up the operation.
The same sort of “compromises” suggested by “posters” during the wod flight debacle were proposing a pathfinder-like meta achieve within days of the PR debacle. They had Pathfinder ready to go, they just weren’t expecting millions of players to unsub when the announcement came down.
Here’s what will happen with restrictions of any sort: people will stop playing the characters they are currently playing because they find that gameplay fun. If they find none of BfA fun or rewarding in any way, that means they have nothing to play and they will leave the game. And as in the wod debacle, many will never come back. Those who do come back may end up skipping an expansion or two.
Restrictions are not necessary. There is no problem that needs to be “fixed”. Pretending that sub numbers don’t matter is a happy face they put on to keep the investors in the dark.
It’s simply lazy and ineffective game design.
They could have retained the artifacts if that’s their game plan instead of wasting development costs and resources on garbage.
100% agree. I’m unfortunately out of likes for the day.
The whole “cool new marquee feature” that they scrap after each expansion breaks progression and wastes resources, but is apparently the hill they’re willing to die on.
Well, I’m not gonna wait around with a shovel. I’m off to better, greener pastures. I do periodically run my twinks in BGs but there is very little reward other than the fun itself of BGs (unless I get that bloody mine). Apart from that, 99% of my game time is now devoted to ESO.
And my spouse and I play so much that we’ve actually hit that 4a.m. "holy cow it’s 4a.m.!) while playing – like we formerly did in WoW. Makes me sad.
The original intent was to allow players to lock their character’s level for twinking purposes. They added EXP gains to battlegrounds and offered a way for twinks to still exist.
Now it’s being used for boosting each other alts. They find this to be regressive bahavior. They clearly don’t like it. They need to improve on it.
Which is absolutely no skin off Blizzard’s nose. In fact, they are going to lose even more subs if they keep cutting off what the players consider to be “fun”.