The Level Squish will NOT work...here's why

Community General Discussion
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TL;DR: From a Retail Vanilla WoW player’s opinion, the level cap of 120 is not why BFA sucks. BFA sucks because it’s unrewarding and generally designed bad.

I joined World of Warcraft in 2004, playing from Classic through WotLK, then again in late Cataclysm, and sporadically throughout the recent years.

Currently, I am subscribed to WoW. Why? I enjoyed Legion to an extent, BfA has felt unrewarding at best, blah blah, obligatory classic statement, blah blah.

Listen folks; the level cap being 120 is NOT the issue with modern World of Warcraft. What gave any of you that impression? The level cap was 110 in Legion, and Legion was an amazing expansion! Assuming the next WoW expansion was capped at 125 or 130, and was more like Legion or WotLK, overall an amazing expansion like the prior two, would we be thinking we need a level squish?

No. Of course not.

From my standpoint, I feel as if the Developers have looked at the wild success of Classic (WoW passed Fortnite in twitch viewers steadily for the first time since BFA launched! Say what you want about the streamers, but it’s impressive they’ve managed to overthrow a game full of rabid twelve year olds.) and decided, “Oh, it must be the LEVEL CAP was lower, so people wanted to be more committed, right?”

No! The reason Classic was and is still 15 years later SO SUCCESSFUL is because Classic REWARDS YOU FOR YOUR EFFORTS. It presents a challenge, you work hard, and yes, you struggle, you get mad, you pour so much sweat and blood into the game, but at the end of the day, you can look at your character and say, “Damn, I’m proud of the work I’ve done, and the memories I’ve made.”

Since I started playing BFA, I got my level boost, played my Tauren Death Knight to 120, and farmed dungeons until I had enough gear for heroic dungeons, then queued some LFR, killed some bosses, etc etc. The reason I haven’t joined a guild or made any attempt to advance further in BFA is because I feel genuinely unmotivated to do anything in the game. Gear is handed out for free. It’s not special. You get your little goodie bags and a pat on the back for joining up in a group, completing the brain-dead easy dungeons, and then you’re on your merry way.

I’m not saying that I prefer the long road over the short road because of length. Of COURSE not. I’m human, and so are you. You can understand where I’m coming from. But we’re also beasts of burden. We like working and achieving things THROUGH our work.

Do you work your day job because it’s fun? Not necessarily, though some jobs are fun, but what’s REALLY rewarding about spending 8 hours at work is to make money, so you can support yourself and your family, and buy things. These are the fruits of your labor. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but tuck that in the back of your mind.

When you reach level 60 in classic, after a long road (albeit with 15 years of guides, it really isn’t that hard to get to 60, I know some people will disagree with me there, but it’s true.) you start grouping up, meeting people, join a guild, enter hard and challenging, but REWARDING dungeons where you can FEEL that you EARNED those items, you EARNED that spot in Molten Core or Blackwing Lair or AQ40 or even Naxxramas, you can FEEL that you deserve to be where you are and that’s IMPORTANT!

In BFA, you could literally play the game, complete all the raid content (on the lowest difficulty, yes, but you could do it) without ever talking to anyone ONCE.

This is the fruits of your labor concept I was talking about. It’s not rewarding and meaningful to do ANYTHING in BFA because it DOESN’T MATTER. To you, or anyone else around you.

THIS is why Classic is better than BFA. It’s NOT the level cap.

I understand BFA is a different game, and it’s designed for the instant gratification generation, but clearly, this model has FAILED.

How many subscribers did WoW have when you still had to work for your gear, work for your raid spot, etc? 12 million.

How many subscribers does WoW have now? Or rather, before they announced classic, as Classic has brought a lot of people back. They don’t even release the numbers anymore.

The system has failed.

The level cap isn’t the problem. If the level cap was the issue, it would’ve been addressed in WoD or Legion. Not BFA. If BFA was more like Legion, or even more like Cataclysm (and Cata wasn’t that good at that) this problem would’ve never been addressed.

That’s my rant. Maybe I’m totally 100% wrong, feel free to change my mind, but these are my thoughts.

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Why do people keep posting long rants like this. I can’t read all that.

I agree that mechanically BFA is a bad expansion.

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Seriously? I see this kind of complaint all the time and I truly have to wonder if the people saying such things are really as illiterate as they claim to be. The OP has plenty of paragraphs, so it’s not an illegible wall of text. The writing is effective, their position is clear, and they make a good argument. Has social media like twitter really reduced people’s attention spans to that of two-year-olds?

OP, I fully agree that a level squish will solve nothing.

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It doesn’t take an entire essay to get an opinion across that almost everyone has already heard before

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Reading isn’t hard, it shouldn’t take you over a solid two mins to read that.

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I believe most people are that illiterate. Sometimes I also forget that we’re surrounded by many people who can’t carry a conversation on any further than the meme they post.

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So accurate it’s scary.

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Imagine the world in another 10 years.

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I agree.

i am gonna have to disagree with you there. There were a lot of good things about legion, but they were intentionally kneecapped by blizzard. Inability to fly(twice!) paired with atrocious terrain, time gated content(suramar in particular), artifact power grinding, the removal of mage tower appearances, stats and items are still boring and the story made no sense.

This whole thing is funny to me. Perspective is a cheeky thing. I came from Everquest to WoW and found it to be so much easier. 1- 60 was a great experience for me but not because it was hard but because I had a whole plethora of choices to make. Talents and gearing actually mattered then. A lot of people are going to come to the conclusion when classic goes live that 60 raids weren’t hard, you were just bad at the game and managing 60 people in WoW is like herding cats. Heck without dungeon finder(and often with) you cant even get a group of 5 people to do an instance without someone flaking.

Anyway I am not trying to say EQ>WoW (though in some ways…) I am here after all. Just that the argument that people want to work hard is silly to me, especially if you are talking about in WoW. WoW is the most casual MMO that has ever existed. It always has been.

The reason the level squish won’t solve anything is not because people want to work hard, but because those levels will be filled with tedious boring crap. Stats are linear. Gear is identical aside from how much +good it has. Heck you can check wowhead now and see the difference between items today VS in classic. The classic items have much more interesting stats/effects. Was it all great for everything? No but that’s ok. That mace you think is worthless because the DPS is lower, someone else wants it for a stun rogue or warrior.

Blizzard has spent a long time streamlining every inch of azeroth and I would say that BfA is their greatest achievement in that regard. Only gear you can use drops for you, and its stats change to be the one you prefer. Zones scale to your level, mobs scale to your Ilvl. most classes have had any abilities that were hard to balance neutered or removed. Most DPS specs are within 5% of each other and everyone does the same thing, generates a resource then spends it on something while waiting for procs. Sure everything is fair and balanced but nothing is fun so who cares?

I want my RPG back. It’s not about work, it’s about fun. The clue was that this is a game.

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Current expansion content doesn’t have anything to do with why I’d be ok with a level squish. 120 is a lot, especially when gaining a level isn’t rewarding. I had 5+ level blocks where nothing remotely interesting happened. No big talents, no new abilities, no feeling of growing more powerful. Just a flash and some new dungeons. Too many of those levels makes the entire leveling experience feel less enjoyable.

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Well you seem to be arguing about the wrong question.
This is about the next expansion.

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I agree. So much of BFA feels unrewarding. Even the story campaign itself is gated behind rep and a time gate. It makes it feel like your playing a facebook game which I guess given Blizzard’s statement of “Do you guys not have phones?” makes sense. It seems like they no longer understand that people don’t like feeling like their progress is put on hold by an arbitrary mechanic.

Then you have the azerite system which was broken from day one. They removed artifact weapons which while they made little sense from a lore perspective? They felt like you were progressing. Now with azerite gear the abilities you get are often tossed away should you get a gear upgrade making everything feel like it lacks permanence.

Add on top of that the warfronts which are boring as hell. They are pve masquerading as PVP but lack the kind of tension real pvp provides. It’s impossible to lose a warfront and they play out the same exact way every damned time.

Honestly, with the level and world scaling with the player, heirlooms and warmode? It’s honestly not that hard to lvl to 120. I still feel that should they implement a level squish it will feel a bit like a slap in the face. A character level is a bit different from a stat squish. A character’s level is the most immediate indication of a player’s progress in the game. Some people have leveled multiple characters to max level and then to have those characters suddenly neutered would feel like a real kick in the balls.

Should the introduce a level squish, what then? Is your progress then slowed even further as a way for them to increase metrics i.e. much like removing portals seemed to be to have it take more time for people to get where they want to go. Activision is all about that “engagement” regardless of whether your actually having fun or not.

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Play maplestory (level max 250 and uping the cap last I heard) then come back to that statement. 120 is child’s play. lol it’s a joke. The number of levels isn’t the issue it’s the rewarding of it,etc that is the problem not the number.

People whining over 120 being too high knows nothing of levels being high.

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Umm I think too many people are focusing on the ‘‘Level Squish’’ and less on the everything else they are discussing - and - brainstorming to make things feel meaningful, rewarding, ?? fun ??..

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I have to admit going from 120 to 60 or whatever they are going to set it at will feel bad and like I am being taken from. I know it will be the exact same and I am probably being stupid but just seeing numbers get smaller feels bad.

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Its not about BfA. It is about the meaningless leveling that is 90-120. It will work well of implemented with leveling system changes. While its semi-illusionary to people who have already been playing, earning something every level is what many have been asking for. And no, adding useless talents and abilities every level for 120+ levels is not a good option. I dont need 50 ranks of flash heal, heal, PoM etc. Nor do i need 120+ talent points that have no meaningful impact on gameplay. A level squish has the potential to fix a lot of what we all want to see fixed. The potential is huge. We have no idea what the plans are for it (if any) so we cant say if its good or bad until they officially announce it and how they plan to implement it.

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It isn’t that they’re illiterate at all. It’s simply that some ppl are just lazy.

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People are operating under an assumption that reducing the number of levels would be Blizzard’s one and only action to fix everything that we don’t like about the game.

Counting on a level squish to fix all the things is a ridiculous notion, and so the people who seriously think that is what’s going on get triggered and start long rants.

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Well, the point of the level squish is over here.

You point is way over there.

Unless there was something I missed. I honestly stopped reading after it appeared you were so far off the point of a squish you would not make it back.

BTW I am not optimistic it will work either. It will not fix anything. And psychologically players will lose levels overnight. That is a hard thing to overcome.

The squish, though, I believe is because people see a number of 120. That can be very intimidating for a new player. 60 or 70 looks much better.