A game that attracts and keeps new players will stay around forever. A game that only keeps current players slowly dies of attrition. Chess has been played for thousands of years. Why? Because new people constantly keep learning and playing the game. If that weren’t true, the last people to play chess would have died thousands of years ago.
The point of the level squish and level-scaling and grouping BC/Wrath and Cata/MoP and ALL these changes to the levelling system is to make a good levelling experience FOR NEW PLAYERS.
If this change drives away half the current players because a number 120 on their screen became 60, but makes the game more attractive to new players, WoW will last longer and make more money in the long term.
Oh yes, level squish! Instead of, you know, making the content that isn’t scripted, instanced PvE dynamic, engaging and meaningful!
Newsflash Blizzard… your obsession with raiding has killed the WORLD of Warcraft, and professions, gameplay, your subscriber base, fun and diverse classes has died along with the open world.
Right - because going back to earlier content after hours of questing and gear, just to find that you’re still no more powerful than those boars because they’ve mysteriously also gotten just as powerful as you by standing still in a paddock and making rutting motions, and which take precisely the same amount of tedious time to kill as they did three weeks ago because of Ion’s “time in combat” metric… yeah, that’s so much better!
I don’t really get the point of this level squish is it literally just because they think a new player would think 120 is such a YUGE number that they won’t play? I mean it would still take the same exact time to hit the max level right? So why does it matter? And it’s not like they’ll remodel the talent trees from the ground up so you’ll basically end up with the same numbers same abilities just… a smaller level cap
Is this some kind of joke?
Actually who am I kidding it’s probably gonna be used as a ninja nerf to exp gain for more time played my bad
Honestly the level scaling is the only thing keeping me playing this dumpster fire. I’m really just here for classic. But at the same time I am enjoying the breezy nature of the content thus far. If I had to level through ALLLLLL of the expansions vanilla style to get to 120, I would have dropped out days ago. Someone did the right thing making leveling a more breezy experience. Hoping to gets more interesting later on though.
I dunno about you, or how long you have been playing, but I had this account since late MoP. I have been playing since the beginning of TBC. You introduce a level squish, and you might of well take away all my hard work to get to where I am today.
As I said, a level squish will solve nothing in this game.
And level scaling has taken away Character Progression. Should’ve never been intorduced in the first place.
Then you will piss of a lot of people who enjoy the freedom of choice level scaling brings, and ilvl scaling is only noticeable when your under-geared, once you have gear under your belt (390+) it basically doesn’t exist.
Our classes would be bloated as hell, with most of those spells never being used and/or cluttering up our bars. As a Shaman not having to micromanage my Totems or macro 3 different DPS cooldowns together is great.
Then we would have billions, if not trillions of health, and the game would crash. The stat squishes were done because the numbers were getting so big the game couldn’t handle it. Its the reason why Garrosh in SoO back in MoP had so many phases, because his actual health pool was bigger than the games code can handle. The stat squish is necessary if Blizz wants to keep stepping up player power every major patch.
Then we go back to cookie-cutter builds where you have to run a specific spread of points or you weren’t doing anything meaningful. While its still prevalent today its leagues more flexible and way less punishing for picking the “wrong” talent than it was before.
Reverting the changes would be horrible at this point.
Well… those kids in elwynn do that demon ritual, wouldn’t suprise me if blizz writers say they were the old gods all along shamalamadingdong twist style.
It depends if killing those boars was worth your time or not.
Other games make scaling work by making their entire game relevant for both leveling and max level characters. If those boars were for a WQ that netted you a worthwhile reward I think people wouldn’t care.
I do agree that scaling shouldn’t exist for max level players as the game is right now, but if they decide to go back and make the open world relevant again then I have no problem having Defias Pillagers in Westfall match my level, as long as it was part of something relevant to my character.
And who says there wasn’t freedom of choice before level scaling?
If you rather a boring class design, that’s fine then. But I would rather have my class back to the way there were, when they were fun.
The devs had so many oppitunities to fix the stat squish of WoD to the point where you couldn’t one shot everything while naked. But no, all they did was abandoned WoD and worked on Legion instead.
So spend 15 years playing a game leveling up to just regress?, because numbers got too hard for people?
Stat squish was one thing (wasn’t happy with that squish either) but a level squish i just can’t understand why people would want that.
People who want a slower paced game are getting Classic in a few months. go be happy with that filth and kill a few thousand boars…
Honestly the worst idea Blizz has come up with in the past few years - and thats saying something.
Previously, if I wanted to level thru the EK as Alliance for instance, their were set routes you had to take in order to have a meaningful leveling path, such as Westfall > Redridge > Duskwood > Stranglethorn > Western Plaguelands > Eastern Plaguelands > Blasted Lands. Sure I could move to another zone of a similar level range, but I had 1-2 options at most depending on my current level.
Currently, the early game is similar, but once you past the 20’s you have way more options in where to go, with more potential zones to choose from as I climb within a bracket. Maybe a want to do Redridge thru my 30’s, or Stranglethorn during my 50’s, I get the choice to do that or not while still gaining relevant XP and gear rewards.
Class design is more of a subjective topic tbh, some people prefer MoP Elemental, others WoD, and so on and so forth. So on that its a agree to disagree.
How do you get around the limitations of the games engine? You can’t without replacing the engine entirely with a new one that can handle said large numbers. Which they didn’t want to do because it was simply way to much effort for what could be gained.
Yeah. Primarily due to the fact most talents are ether based on utility (You use different talents in different situations) or are ones based on ones personal play style, and picking a “non-meta” talent isnt gonna cost you hundreds of gold to fix, or prevent you from doing most content in the game.
Who who says they couldn’t do the same thing before the level scaling was introduced.
Problem with a lot of people is they keep saying, the quest kept turning into grey, so they were forced to quest somewhere else, but yet, I never seen Blizzard hold a gun at them forcing them to move onto another zone.
And what did Blizzard do when they introduced the level scaling to all the zones?
Increased the health pools. You can’t say they have to rewrite everything to do one thing so simple.
Well, from a developer standpoint, how do you fill 120+ levels with meaningful rewards?
From a new player standpoint, looking at that large number can be psychologically off putting, since people would think the leveling would be really long (most other MMO’s have much lower caps compared to WoW, usually around 80 or so). Though this is more speculative.
But TL:DR is easier to make 70 levels more interesting to earn than 120.
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")