So I truly think that a change like this doesn’t go against the spirit of the original classic in any way.
IMO this is a good way of giving players a bit more XP while still having them do something and engaging with the world. It will incentivize players to go after those mining/herbs nodes, get more gold circulation going around in the early game. They won’t feel as much like they’re wasting time going off the beaten path a bit to get that node, etc.
This is somewhere where to me it actually seems natural and seems like it fits in the game and may have just been an oversight, or something people weren’t putting a lot of thought into for the original launch because there were just more pressing concerns that had to be dealt with at the time. But it really fits the vanilla philosophy of leveling how you want and I think that’s one of Vanilla’s strongest aspects.
I’m not saying this would ever be a ‘primary’ way of leveling in the sense that it should be the optimal way to level to run around picking herbs, but I think if they gave a similar relative amount of XP compared to how herbs/mining nodes were during Shadowlands leveling that would be a great thing. Again, it’s just making the ‘grind’ to 60 a bit more blended in and seamless with things people want to be doing.
I know there’s a lot of talk and controversy over XP rates and leveling in general, and often times someone you hear is people just want no sense of a progression and a ‘free ride’ to endgame. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I just think that unfortunately since Classic was heavily rushed when it was originally launched the devs missed a lot of opportunities to diversify the gameplay in terms of forging that path to endgame. It’s not that ‘it wasn’t meant to be this way’ it’s more that they literally just couldn’t afford to spend time working out the details and needed to ship the game, but now revisiting things, we can take a look at things with a more critical eye and fill in some of the gaps. People just wanna be having fun and doing things they wanna be doing while making the endgame progress.
I’ve been playing a bit of New World lately while I wait for SoM and while to be completely honest a lot of the game is a disappointing, buggy mess with some really bad, counterintuitive systems, one of the things they did do well was make the players feel like they were progressing no matter what they were doing. Whether it be crafting, gathering, questing, PvP, etc. It’s fun when these things also help you get to endgame, instead of you having to make an active choice of whether I wanna slow my grind down to do them or not. Something in New World even as small as getting a decent chunk of XP for PvP kills was surprising and exciting. There was never even a sense of the dreaded ‘should I really be doing this’ feeling.
Anyways, I’d love to hear what people on here think. Hope you guys are having a good day. I’m so looking forward to SoM!