You’re not listening.
They didn’t bad things about WoW in of itself, they said being forced in BfA created a bad experience.
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to be fair new player experience sucks in any established mmo.
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Im not sure what the alternate is when you are dealing with a game this old. Should chromie be removed and we just go back to creating toons in starting zones at level 1 and going from there? So Horde, for example, you’d start an Orc in the Valley and then head out to quest around there and spend however long killing boars and Im not sure exactly how much of the story or the characters you would pick up that way before the zone greyed out for you and you had to move somewhere else, leaving all the zone’s storyline behind. You’d never get to the point where you actually learned the story through the later extended main questlines.
So we’d be more or less back to the way we were before, where people complained about doing old content and how slow it is and boring and…so on.
Im not saying its great, because it does have issues but the way the game is now with its many expansions which had huge amounts of content, how could any new player learn anything significant before they got to cap? When those of us who’ve played a long time started, we did the old zones and then purchased the next expansion, learned the story, worked through that, then the next expac, and the next. It flowed so we knew what was going on. How do you even reproduce that for new players?
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You don’t actually have to. It’s the expansion they set you to for scaling and dungeons, yes, but you can go back and level in the old world if you want. You just have to deal with the normal zone scaling laws. My sister hated BfA, so I yanked her out and we did Legion instead, and she was brand new.
My personal opinion on this subject is two fold, both of them costing time and money and therefore unlikely to be implements:
For new players create a singular questline (‘Thru the years’) that hits the most important notes of the main theme and/or story of each the expansion.
For experienced players more options:
Experience options for open world content:
a) Explorer- original xp for each expansion (and those that want to experience the content)
b) Defender- xp for lvl 10 to lvl 50 is divided up per expansion (for those that want to experience an expansion in full)
c) Conqueror- present quick system (for those who want to barrel thru to endgame)
Progression options for open world content:
a) Scaled Progression- everything scales with you (post-Legion)
b) In-Zone Progression- each zone starts challenging then with gained xp and gear gets easier (pre-Legion)
Difficulty options for open world content:
a) Easy- low danger (present difficulty)
b) Advanced- medium danger
c) Challenging- high danger (Cata expansion difficulty)
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That’s not the new player experience. New players don’t get the option to do Chromie Time.
Hardly. Leveling from scratch hadn’t felt natural since WLK. Once Cata came out, leveling had you starting in the post cataclysm story, then going back in time a few years to play through BC and WLK, then brought you back to Cata. What they’ve done now is make BFA the starting point for the story for new players. If they level an alt they have the option to experience the stories of the previous expansions via Chromie Time. It’s entirely premised on the idea of it not being chronological.
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Yes, it looks nice but its probably a wee bit too complicated. I remember a content creator (cant remember which one) came up with what I thought was a neat idea - new players started in the new starter zone then went into TBC. They followed an expansion main questline which took them through, giving a good concentrated synopsis of the expansion, and to the last raid of the expansion where they took part in a raid fight featuring them and a group of game-generated npcs so they could experience the finalisation of that expansion. Then onto each of the following expansions until they came up to date. If the experience was calculated to allow them to level up through each evenly they could then know what was happening by the time they got to cap.
Meanwhile those of us who already know the story could start new characters wherever we wished, doing the expansion by choice as we do now.
I think that could have worked a lot better to explain the game’s lore than how it is done now - starter zone - BfA - to cap, because that has to be really confusing. And what will they do next expansion? Does it stay BfA or go up to Shadowlands instead (poor beggars…)?
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I’m confused, when I bought shadowlands I started at level 50 right in the SL content. I didn’t play BFA but I did level 1 through whatever was max content years ago. I just hate leveling though so I wanted it over quickly.
If you want some hilarity they’ve updated like one quest in Quel’thalas other than class quests, the one where they sign the treaty to ally with the horde.
IIRC in BfA you were getting Sylvanas’s letter from Undercity and then returning her letter to her in Org
Just an aside, but Classic exists as a separate game and integrating that as an “old Azeroth” option is much more difficult than just copying over the Classic files of whatever.
If you want a questing leveling expansion, it’s WoD. The chains put you on rails and you get your garrison hearthstone to boot.
The story doesn’t flow from the very start to current as you level anymore, you pick the time you want to level in, and in a zone or three your done, you won’t even finish the story of the expansion you choose.
For the life of me I can’t figure out how BFA is a superior introductory experience than starting in your racial capital.
I understand exile reach teaching people some of the essential mechanics of the game but BFA has these nuanced interactions that expect the player to understand the story as well as some of the more refined decision making and quest dungeon skills.
The push is always been to put people in end game. But that’s just it there’s more to this game than just the final three components of the vault.
Whatever happened to people running twinks alts and just exploring the old world especially if they aren’t the kind that have been here since day one and insist on living in the max tier? But this is their design philosophy and honestly I think I’d struggle to try to get a new person to play the game whether they are returning from many years or completely brand new.
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The big issue would be some zones that were split or merged, no? Like they axed Alterac and split Barrens (also I guess readding zones that were changed heavily in Cata would require matching files that are just not in the game anymore)
I guess a bunch of dungeons did get updates too tht would be hard to phase around
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Yes, people do that, especially those who post complaints for the attention that they crave. When Chromie time was introduced, the developers specifically stated that new players, those who never played the game before, couldn’t do it, until they levelled up through the most recent expansion so that they know why they’re going to Shadowlands.
Also, if players actually brought friends to this game, you think that they would start new characters with them, so they could experience the content together, and it would be a teaching experience for the more experienced player.
The problem is that leveling isn’t designed for new players anymore, it’s designed for the altoholics who complained that leveling their 987th character was boring and taking too long.
New players should level through all the expansions. They could cut out a lot of the crap side quests, sure, but depriving new players of the 17 years worth of content that they paid for is stupid.
But the altoholics kept complaining “everyone should get to max level as fast as possible that’s what new players want”. No, that’s what YOU want, because this is your 987th character and you’ve done it 986 times already. For NEW players, this is their first time seeing everything, and they should be allowed to see it.
The level squish was a bad idea, and the further distortions done to leveling because of it were an equally bad idea.
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Clearly the solution is to force us to do an extremely long MSQ. At least that’s what FF would have you do.
I mean
I see a point to getting an actual overview but the way it got in Legion-BfA was just painful, there’s a reason people just spammed dungeons on alts.
Admittedly even with the old system quest leveing would still get you to out level Northrend in about 2-3 zones, iirc it was also trivial to cap out Warlords before hitting Nagrand
Take out the crap, like I said.
Hellfire Peninsula should be the quests around Thrallmar and Falcon Watch, for example, but not the goblins looking for eggs. Just as an example.
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WoW used to be fun but nowadays it’s just one big grind with a zillion systems and currencies. I think they fired all of the devs and just hired people to make systems that try to get engagement and time played numbers higher.
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wow, removing the deepest lore (fair, though, punting quests like those to the sidequests would likely improve things)