The same information was relayed by Tom Chilton, who I’ll remind you, was the Game Director for World of Warcraft for over over 6 years. He more than anyone would know what the executives at Activision-Blizzard do because he reported to them during their twice-a-year (sometimes not even that) meetings. And he made it clear that Activision-Blizzard gives no orders or even suggestions to Blizzard Entertainment.
How is this not true?
The game caps your stats and your level based on the level you are downscaled to. Sure, if you are downscaled by 45 levels all your stats will be capped and you will mow down the creatures there, but you are still hard capped in zones you outlevel, which makes progression feel meaningless.
This is only made worse by the fact that the game messes with your effective level silently. You can make a step and whoops! you lost a level.
A lot of people complain that leveling feels meaningless in WoW, but in GW2 it’s even worse because the game toys with your level and your stats however it pleases. The only right way to do this is to make it opt-in in exchange for rewards.
Again, it does not do this.
In World of Warcraft the enemies scale with you up to a certain point, and that means you can’t, as a level 40, go back to Westfall and rip through the Deadmines, because it scales up to level 60 now. Your progression does feel meaningless because no matter what type of gear you have, no matter what your level is, no matter what talents you pick, the enemy is just as powerful as you are unless you return to one of the older scaling regions when you’re 10+ levels beyond the cap (returning to any classic zones at level 70 for example).
This does not happen in Guild Wars 2, because even if you go back to an old zone like say, Queensdale, which generally scales from level 1 to 16, you will always be a level above the maximum and even the Guild Wars 2 team states that in general, a player with a higher “real” level will still be considerably more effective than a player with a lower “real” level, even if they are scaled to the same effective level, primarily due to the increased Traits and Skills available and the gear that they are wearing.
So your progression matters and affects how you perform. If you take your level 80 character and rock up to a level 10 event with full ascended gear your effective level may be level 11, but you will absolutely rip through that event faster and survive for longer than someone who has only just hit level 10 and is participating in that event with you.
Simple as that honestly.
Scaling blows and makes character progression while leveling feel pointless. Even at max level you need significant ILvl increase in the open world to feel like your toon has actually gotten stronger.
Just another reason the game feels bleh.
1 Like
not going to happen when people have no problem wasting 10 of milions of $ on loot boxes and skins , tbh i question if blizzard can even make a true story based game anymore, HS, OW and HOTS has really blown there egos , been riding the loot box and skin train for to long.