For a long time now I have been reading replies to some of my threads and also other posters threads where the topic of leveling comes up. I have noticed that one of the main frustrations by many players is due to the Leveling Grind. Players complain that they have gotten to the point that they just hate the Grinding. Although Blizzard in all fairness has taken steps to alleviate the Leveling Grind. Players still say they hate it.
To be fair here, Wow is not the only game that has a leveling grind. It is present in most single player games, mmos, and mmorpgs. So what could Blizzard do to alleviate the leveling grind further? Or should Blizzard just remove the leveling grind process altogether and replace it? But replace it with what? What could possibly replace the leveling grind system that would actually be an improvement?
At this point in modern WoW they could just entirely remove it, but they’d have to do something to replace how we earn our abilities and talents since just dumping all of them on us at once isn’t a good experience for new players.
and such a system would probably look suspiciously like leveling just without the levels.
Personally I think they could take steps to make leveling better, though. I don’t want to turn this into a classic vs retail or just say “make it like classic” but classic WoW does generally have a much more engaging leveling process.
Not to say that it needs to be grindy and slow(or even slowed down at all), but there’s still things they could learn from it. I think a big problem with leveling right now is its only purpose is a time sink that’s been designed to get you through the time sink as quickly as possible.
Remember what “many players” means. There are millions of WoW players. If hundreds of them each enter 10 notes about how they hate leveling then it would be correct to say that “many players” hate leveling.
I’m sure that’s the way many of the high end game people feel. They want to get straight to top level, top gear, burn through normal and heroic so they can get to the one and only one thing that matters, Mythic.
But that’s a small percentage of players. The main story for each expansion is in the campaign and just doing that is more than enough to level.
Destiny just has gear grind for power, and an experience grind for the season pass. It’s not unheard of, though you wind up having to grind for the aspects and fragments or quest for the newer ones (effectively the talent options to customize your spec).
it aint a grind bruh. if you want true, leveling slop, try classic.
also less than 9% of the entire playerbase actually uses forums (for good reason). im willing to bet most players are more than fine w it. only people i see raising a stink are classic HC sweats doing daily ragebait threads
might as well just get rid of leveling all together. Its honestly pointless and a waste of time at this point. WoW is just a que game. Since somewhere and que into stuff lol
My favorite part of the game is leveling. Whevever I get a max level character, I’m lost. I don’t know what to do anymore. There’s so many options, and I don’t know what the benefits are, so I ujsut end up starting a new toon at that point.
Or Torghast, if they wanna use something that’s less ancient. Just knock the RNG powers out of it and don’t use the wing with terrible pooping ghosts.
I can’t understand why people would play an rpg then complain about it’s defining features. Leveling in this game is not a grind. Renown, reputations, and gearing is still a grind. But leveling is basically instant as the game is right now.
Though that being said it is an interesting thought experiment. How can we make wow a game that doesn’t have any levels but still has meaningful progression?
The only things I can think of just replaces level grind with other forms of grinding. Like earning skills/spells independently of each other. Class quests, mini games in the world like SoD. The main problem with that is once it’s all discovered it just a grind where you doing all the motions.
Remove all the grind and the game is just Plunderstorm. That sounds wack.
Game developers can ask themselves the question, “What is the purpose of leveling in World of Warcraft?”
It creates a sense of character progression, however short that is.
It “slowly” introduces you to your character’s capabilities, which is useful as it gradually becomes increasing complex with more abilities and talents as you level up.
The time spent leveling can help “endear” the player to the character, making the relationship more meaningful due to the time investment (this is also why character boosts don’t go to max level until the very end of an expansion, where “leveling” is replaced by an iLevel grind).
Could Timewalking be better? Yes.
Could older WoW content remain relevant for longer in some form? Yes.
Those two things would do a better job at addressing the issue than just removing leveling altogether. Guild Wars 2 has more of a “horizontal” progression structure after a certain point, but it’s not as popular as WoW. Plus, I wouldn’t want WoW to be flooded with a bunch of bots on free accounts doing max-level content.