King’s honor, friends.
It is my belief that increasing the level cap to 60 for starter accounts would haul in a new era of growth for the World of Warcraft player base. MMO’s like Runescape and FFXIV have demonstrated that a generous F2P trial generates a net growth of subscribing players, as not only does it encourage more people to try out the game, but it provides a stronger incentive for them to subcribe.
As it stands, playing up to level 20 is simply insufficient for someone to actually immerse themselves, and I actually believe it leaves most people with an impression that doesn’t do the actual game justice.
— Why level 60? —
By level 60, a player would have the opportunity to experience most of the zones in Kalmindor and the Eastern Kingdoms. More importantly, this will enable them to experience raid content. Raiding is perhaps one of the most important features of end-game content on World of Warcraft, so it makes sense that people trying out WoW should experience this.
— Won’t this disrupt existing subscriber communities? —
Clearly there’s various ways in which a flood of level 60’s can be undesirable to server communities, not least concerning their economies.
For this reason, starter accounts should be relegated to their own servers and be sharded separately from the rest of the servers. When the time comes that players choose to subscribe, they should be able to transfer their characters to whatever retail server that they would like.
— Further Discussion and Ideas —
There’s plenty of ways that this idea can be refined. And I’m sure that if Blizzard ever picks up this idea, they’d do some considerable refinement of their own. But as players, how do you believe things like LFD should work for F2P players in this instance? Should they be able to make guilds? etc.
Ultimately, my intention with this suggestion is to help grow WoW’s subscriber community. I understand that there’s a myriad of things that people believe Blizzard can do to improve WoW, which they hope would also bring back subsribers. But even if Blizzard does implements those changes, a big thing that’s currently inhibiting growth for this game is how relatively unfriendly it really is towards most new players. So if we’re trying to bring in more people to experience the joys of WoW, I believe addressing beginner content is of the utmost importance.