First off. Weird way to announce a level squish with a random survey. If it wasn’t meant to be an announcement maybe have your survey guys work on their phrasing? Because “are you aware” sounds like it’s already set in stone.
Anyways. While I am not 100% against it. I am… sceptical.
So if your main purpose for the squish is to make the levels seem less daunting for new or returning players but much of everything will be the same I can get behind that. Like I don’t care that the levels are high I think it’s kinda cool. But ultimately will be neutral on the subjects. However it is very important to me that none of this negatively effects the ability to solo old content.
You may also reduce the EXP needed to get to max level. Not that it takes a long time anyways but that’d make sense because if all you did was reduce the amount of levels to say 60. Then each level would take twice as long. However each level would presumably be twice as rewarding? A complete rework of how the talent system is laid out could be introduced at a time like this as well.
If you do intent to do this. What I’d like to see is the level scaling getting an overhaul. First off: Make it optional not forced. Second. Make it scale to everything but the current expansion. So for example. You’d reach level 55 and all outdoor content with scaling enabled would also be level 55. However it won’t go any higher. And if you want to get decent exp you’ll need to do the current expansion to get to 60. Perhaps make it level 10 or so (current level 20) and you can choose to go to any zone (but the newest) in the game. So you hit level 10, and you wanna go quest in northrend. You can do that. That sounds like a pretty cool idea.
For narrative purposes having current content being locked behind higher levels and required to get those higher levels makes sense. But if you really wanna go all out you could do something more like ESO where you can do the newest content straight away. Problem with that is there is little sense of power growth besides gaining new abilities and blizzard always wants to focus on their newest expansion. And if they went all out people could choose to avoid the new content. Hard to say for sure if that’d work or not in WoW.
On one hand being able to jump right in at level 10 after starting zone intro into the new content would be cool. But on another note that’s why boosts exists and why a free boost is given with new expansions now. However a lot of new/returning players I’ve talked to don’t like the level boosts. Because they never levelled the character they don’t really enjoy playing them and almost always abandon them. They seem to be mostly enjoyed by “vets” who wanna quickly get an alt up. Boosting a brand new character without having another character at high level seems cheap for newbies. However the small pool I’ve talked too isn’t enough to get a concrete consensus.
The 7.3.5 patch that added scaling was greatly appreciated. And I would like it expanded upon. My biggest issue is that it’s always forced on and cannot be disabled. So while before as a level 40 I could’ve gone back and solo’d WC for that sick leather set, I no longer can. In addition it makes being a hunter suck because you have to outlevel an entire expansion to be able to tame any elite beasts because they’re always 1 or 2 levels higher then you. If the scaling system is reworked in a level squish then hopefully these problems are dealt with. Ideally with the ability to toggle it on an off. Probably similar to war mode in that you have to be in org/sw to do it.
While being able to queue for all levels of dungeons would be nice and I think things like that would help a lot with people who burn through all the new content so quickly. It can also take away from the current narrative. Which is probably why the current system has timewalking dungeons which are weekly events. What would happen to those in a level squish scenario? Would they stay the same? Or if the whole scaling system was reworked would they be removed? Honestly an irritation I’ve had is despite the game having scaling tech I cannot unlike in almost every other game I’ve played with scaling tech queue with a lowbie friend for their dungeons to help them out. I have to hope I have an alt in their level bracket in order to be able to queue with them.
Scaling can help keep old content fresh and alive, but if not done right that it can ruin other experiences. The only reason that scaling didn’t make soloing old content difficult at max level is power creep. Hopefully a squish would also deal with that and smooth out power levels. I’m not sure what the perfect solution is.
I will say despite all it’s flaws one thing Rift did PERFECTLY was it’s mentor system which allowed you to scale down your level at will and get certain benefits from it. Allowing you to quest in lowbie zones as if they were your level. And queue with lowbie friends for dungeons. It was an amazing system. I honestly prefer it to ESO’s complete scaling tech. However as I never knew ESO without it. Being able to solo old/low level content was never something I experienced in it. So it’s fine in that game. But doing that in WoW would put a bitter taste in a lot of players mouths being suddenly unable to solo old content… I mean just making it harder to solo old content hasn’t gone over well. Complete scaling would ruin it. Which is why I suggest a toggle.
However I know almost nothing about this feature mostly because blizzard isn’t talking about it. So for all I know. Absolutely no serious rework of any system is intended. The only thing this will do is mostly visually be less daunting to new players but will functionally be the same experience. But I just feel like such a huge endever also comes with huge opportunity to fix and improve upon many other systems. Scaling, Talents, Ability allocation, Over-all levelling experience, etc.
Thoughts?