Then I think people need to make better arguments instead of always using Classic as a juxtaposition as to how wrong retail gets things.
And the problem with using Classic as an example is that it just doesn’t work in this kind of game anymore. Using levels as a pure form of progression in this game hasn’t worked for some time. From Cataclysm up to Legion, the idea of levels being the basis for raw power didn’t work because the game was already easy. There was no progression to be felt if you were stepping into zones and killing anything before it had a chance to touch you. Most areas had level brackets of five, so if there were any power increase to be felt in your character, it was a moot point because the game was ushering you to the next zone anyways. To add to this, the game’s mechanics and tuning kept wildly changing between expansions, which made it difficult to keep leveling balanced.
I don’t think leveling is perfect either, but it’s certainly in a much better place than what it was, and I think a lot of people seem to forget just how broken it used to be.
I dunno, it seemed obvious to me the OP’s problem was scaling. I didn’t feel like he was calling to make retail into classic.
As for the rest, it doesn’t work anymore because they deliberately designed away from it. Plenty of other MMOs have levels without scaling. It’s not arcane magic or outdated design. Scaling is cheap and requires minimal dev time, so they do it because they don’t care about making levelling a meaningful experience.
Scaling is technically challenging, so I really doubt that it’s in the game because it’s cheap and easy.
It’s the opposite, if anything. Leaving the zones the way they were, and using solutions like hierlooms to speed things up for veteran players, was the cheap/easy solution.
Revamping leveling has no doubt taken quite a bit of dev time and resources, but it has made the experience more coherent.
Yes, your character is at roughly the same relative power level throughout the leveling process, but this is a very minor downside.
Traditional MMO leveling was never a great design, tbh. It’s always been like that mostly for practical reasons. The older design creates this bizarre situation in which vast areas of content serve no purpose at all once characters have leveled beyond them.
It’s fine to prefer that, but it would be a bad and regressive design for the live game. Players who want that can experience it in classic.
I enjoy the new levelling system in place. Mobs do scale with you but with the changes to gear it does feel more impactful, especially on a character you level without heirlooms.
Before you’d feel obligated to use them but now it doesn’t feel so bad.
You do cover a significant amount more of the expansion that you have jumped into and it does feel more immersive in my experience, way more than it was before.
That certainly meets the expectation as they had implied to us. Don’t think anyone was expecting the game to feel like classic.
Plenty of MMOs are also utterly broken because of an inability to maintain balance when leveling.
SWTOR is a joke when it comes to leveling, offering no sense of power increase from 1-50 (you can wipe entire rooms by yourself at the beginning of the game. There is absolutely no reason why you should be able to do that) and while FFXIV doesn’t have scaling, none of it really matters because the game is based on linear progression that never has you fighting enemies below or above your level. Other games like ESO have semi-level scaling so that the game maintains the essence of your average Elder Scrolls game.
This is what OP actually said:
To me, it sounds like OP expected something akin to Classic. If that’s not what was intended, then I think some arguments need to be worded better.
That’s not really true. It’s in retail, but only once you are in the current expansion.
A max level character can revisit old areas and annihilate them at any time. Even early raid tiers can be wrecked by players later in the same expansion.
You just don’t get that right away after you’ve finished a particular leveling zone. Which I think is fine because scaling zones provide so much more variety for leveling paths.
Well, they are going to add BC and Wrath at least.
Also, if a particular player wants is to plow through Pandaria or Legion, then they can do that on a max level character on live.
And once you make the tool to do it again, you spend minimal dev time on it.
It’s much less expensive in the long run than retuning levelling without scaling levels. It may have areas where you need to fix, but it’s much less expensive than the alternatives.
And yes, you can’t just leave levelling alone forever. Some amount of investment is required. This is the cheapest option.
The rest is opinion, and tbh many mmos still have proper level ranges for areas. It’s different, and you may not like it as much, but it’s hardly regressive or bad design. Having every area be relevant all the time isn’t a good goal, nor is it one that we even have under WoW’s system.
I do think that there’s room for improvement on the leveling process. One suggestion I had was implementing a difficulty setting for world content, with minor additional rewards for increased difficulty.
Do note that in Shadowlands expansion, the enemies do NOT scale with your level until you hit 60, whereupon they become 60.
So you face a level 50 enemy. At 55, they’re still 50, but at 60 they shoot to 60 too.
Edit: this is for Shadowlands only, not BFA/earlier content.
What part of that made you think he wanted people to spend 3 times the amount of time levelling, or need to go through 3 zones per 10 level stretch?
The second paragraph you quoted neatly lays out the issue is scaling. It is hilarious how many people stopped reading as soon as they read the words learned from classic and began aggressively defending the game by pointing out flaws of classic OP never asked for.
