Thoughts on In Game Guides

Guides New Player Help and Guides
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Optional Context:

I have been using a paid addon called Zygor for more than 2 years. Before that I used Dugi guides. The original promise or marketing behind these guides is to get the “fastest leveling route.”

Today, the “faster leveling route” is probably just do the intro zone (the first choice when creating a new character), that gets you to level 10, and just start hitting dungeons as soon as you can. All the heirlooms will carry you if you don’t have them. Which makes low level dungeons very boring. They make me want to not have alts, but that’s another story.

A lot of free alternatives to these have popped up like Azeroth Autopilot (now Azeroth Pilot Reloaded), TomCat’s Tours, and WoW-Pro Addon.

I’m not here to advertise anything, I have issues with the paid addons, but just to throw this in here, none of these come close in quanity and quality compared to Zygor. It’s not just that the quest guides are better (I refuse to call them “leveling guides”) or the cleaner UI. It’s the auction tools that I like better than auctionator, the more complete higher quality/quanity guides for achievements, dailies, events, professions, pets, mounts, etc. The gear finder that gives you the dungeon or raid with the top chance for an upgrade. I even use the gold guide from time to time when I’m strapped.

As someone who always bought the guide books with games as a kid, I find it very satisfying and relaxing to just work through everything. I’m not into the amount of effort it takes to get an achievement like “Well Read” by picking up on game clues to randomly visiting places. Gimme an arrow, I’ll go there. This is me personally, I’m a software engineer, I find “grind challenges” to be a pedantic waste of time. I get my challenge kicks from that. Games are for relaxing, that’s it.

To the point:

Addons like TomCat’s Tours or Azeroth Pilot are a great idea. I love that they have open GitHub repositories that anyone can contribute to. But they more often than not fall short. And I’m not sure why they all aim for this “leveling guide” idea that I feel like is outdated. Call them what they are, “quest guide” or “story guide”. Zygor even gives you an option for new zones, play through the story only and get the zone achievements, or do the story and all optional quests.

All of them have struggled to keep up. Zygor has the most, and has done the best over time. But Zygor hasn’t actually innovated in years. Things like the gear finder and auction tools have been there for a very long time. In fact they’ve only slowed down. By getting rid of other guides they used to have like Elder Scrolls Online, and updates really only include adding the basics. (Dragon Glyphs, WayGates, /love achievements, etc.) To me it looks like a slow loss of funding and demand over time.

The free options barely keep up with quests. But the open source nature gives them the most potential.

For the free options, I think a bit of concentrated effort would go a long way. Instead of 3 quest guide addons and whatever ATT is supposed to be (which I think is very overrated), I wish we had one addon with an active community. Maybe backed by something like WowHead as a Premium feature.

For Zygor, I wish they could do more than meet minimum expectations. I prefer it over any free option, auctionator, ATT, etc. I like having everything integrated into one thing rather than a hodge podge of independent addons. If they had a rare scanner packed in with “Adventurer of…” guides for example, I’d be ecstatic. But I don’t see them doing much in the future except for adding to the list of preexisting things.

Do you think these sorts of addons are valuable? Do you ever feel like they could do more? Do you think they’re slowing down and we’re in a post “FASTEST LEVEL ROUTE GUARANTEED” era, and the marketing on these are outdated even if they have functionally evolved?

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No value from these guides since Chromie time came out.

For speed leveling, once you hit 10, head for a zone with a high quest density - lots of quests with relatively low travel time. That usually works out to be Silverpines for Horde and Redridge for Alliance.

At 35, head for WoD and do Frostfire Ridge/Shadowmoon Valley until level 60 because of the bonus objectives in those zones. If you run out of quests before level 60, hit Gorgrond or Spires of Arak.

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This is is the outdated and slow method of leveling I was talking about? This is crazy slow.

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the vast majority of the playerbase wouldn’t bother with a leveling addon… let alone one which expects people to pay (which is actually against the rules, but i can’t remember the loophole which Zygor exploits to get around this)

personally, i find dungeon leveling slow and boring, i’d prefer to be questing instead of waiting in queues and doing the same dungeons over and over, when i can go to a zone with a high density of quests, rares, and chests, and slam through the levels.

I’ve got 5 70s (maybe 6?) heh dunno… but i’ve got more level capped characters than i usually do this early into an expansion.

leveling is insanely fast now.
i’ve never touched a leveling guide.
i just don’t see the need.

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I used the Zygor guide in vanilla and bc for my hunters.
Back then, you had to tame specific beasts with a specific skill level in order to learn it so you could teach it to your hunter pet.

The Zygor guide had that info in one place.

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(OP btw) Interesting that all the comments here are on the old “FAST LEVELING!” marketing campaigns.

I’m using a WeakAura right now that tracks weeklys, rares timers, what events are active (Community Feast, Dragonsbane Keep, etc.)

All of these guides aim to provide something for this. Zygor being a big one. If any of this were just leveling, I wouldn’t use these tools either. I’ve been happy to have the guides to get all dragon glyphs in a few minutes, all the exploration guides, the profession guides to get a quick and cheap level up, and of course the previously mentioned gear finder and auction tools. Plus whatever else. Toys, mounts, pets, all the goodies. Dungeon and raid guides, but I don’t use those often.

At this point the psychology is interesting to me that when everyone thinks of these guides, they’re only thinking of fast leveling. Which is my least used thing because I don’t really do alts. But these are daily tools for me.

The original question posed was about how scattered all of this is, how helpful in game guides are and how people felt about how they all fall short of great.

Leveling… wtf. “I level alts fast without, me good!” who… cares?

The reason the free ones all struggle is due to the lack of funding. Thousands of hours of work put into this stuff and people get mad when it isn’t free or won’t contribute to open source. I’d pay double if WoW did official in game guides just for the added benefit having a bigger team behind it with all the inside knowledge needed to have things 100% on day one. Rather than depending on a couple of people to spend a bunch of time in PTR only to have it all changed on release day.

If you’re into manually hunting down every critter to /love, or taking less than 10 minutes to do Honor our Ancestors, that’s a personal choice.

I’m just a little disappointed there’s an obvious demand for this stuff, but not a lot of support. Or that support is scattered and unfocused.

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I think many players are in my position where we’ve been playing for years, some of us since Vanilla, and have leveled through all zones multiple times.

We either pick a particular zone because of crafting mats and recipes, mount or pet farming, because there are rares or mats alongside the road that give enough xp to gain an odd level with rested xp, or, more often than not, to just get high enough to do additional content.

Ultimately however, once you’ve done a zone many, many times, you just want to pass through as quickly as possible.

When someone else pays your sub, perhaps they can tell you hou you “should” play. Until then, playing the game in ways that make you happy is all that really matters.

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What is this leveling obsession? I’ve done loremaster three times. I get it. If you don’t have anything to add to the conversation just go. You’re derailing the whole point.

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LoL. I too have Loremaster on three accounts.
My only obsession in game is getting all mu characters to 30 for flying.

Well over half my toons are parked in various expansions to either make gold, mount farm, or because I like to periodically do specific questlines within the expansion.

Your leap to assumptions is amusing.

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it seemed to be the main point of the op.
don’t get snippy when people respond to it.

so… what is the point?
because right now, it’s looking like all you’re doing is advertising, which doesn’t belong here.

It seems like your post would be better suited to General Discussion.

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It’s been a long time since I used a leveling guide. I used Zygor back in Vanilla/BC/Wrath because back then leveling from 1-60 was not at all a straight path. I never expanded much beyond the leveling guides; I think I did try a couple of the profession & achievement guides but didn’t find much value in those. After the Cata redesign I found leveling guides to be unnecessary and just stopped using any guides at all. Plus, the game incorporated some of the more appealing features from the guides such as quest pointers & map overlays.

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Dosent the game already tell you where to go and where to get the objectives done on the map? The quests most the them are chains and follow each other