What would you replace SQUISH with?

Community General Discussion
1

Gotta admit, a level squish sounds like sweeping dirt under a carpet instead of dealing with the problem properly.

Let’s throw the idea completely out the window. Be creative. Like:

  • Replace “Levels” with “Days Played” must complete at least one quest and kill at least 10 things for that day to count. Or make it “Hours Played” instead.

  • Replace “Levels” with “Average Ilevel” bracket. Can’t equip gear in the next bracket until all your gear is upgraded to the current bracket.

  • Replace “Levels” with experience points. Just flatten the whole thing out into one long progress bar. You get talents and abilities when you get them, whenever/wherever that may be. No Dings ever.

  • Replace “Levels” with ducks. The more ducks you have the better you are. Ducks are soulbound, and, yeah well, they’re just like levels but called something else.

I dunno… go crazy… obviously this is an IMPORTANT PROBLEM to solve, nothing’s off the table.

But it can’t fix real problems. Only the totally fake problem that numbers bigger than 120 are too scary for some players to endure. :wink:

2 Likes
2

This isn’t about big numbers being scary (at least not entirely), so much as how so many of those numbers do… well, next to nothing.
What did you get besides slightly better items from 110-119?
Nothing, really.
What about 100-109?
Well, your artifact leveled, but again, that’s item improvement (though a cooler one)
I’d like leveling to actually earn things at a better pace again, and a level squish may well be a good thing for exactly that.

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3

What did I get? Sweet class mounts, gorgeous spec-specific weapon xmogs, an order hall, a mailbox toy, an extra hearthstone, weeks of enjoyable /played time, a a couple of swimming mounts, a very useful underlight angler fishing pole…

I got lots of stuff.

What have I gotten from BFA? An Auction House mount basically, and agita over Blizzard removing portals, striders, levels, fun, friends and more.

But it do that though? Scaling has more to do with pace than level numbers… and they already have control over that.

5 Likes
4

OK, these are all good things that we picked up in BfA (and a few less good things like the portal changes), but those aren’t things linked to your leveling directly. Sure, you may have gotten some while leveling, and if you did, then awesome. But these aren’t directly related to how many THINGS you get as a result of leveling by the nature of the level system (AKA, spells learned, talent points earned, and whatnot).
Say we had a cap of 40 or 60, but as a result, actually got a new spell or talent every 1-2 levels as a result. Sounds slightly chaotic, but really, it’d still be the same amount of stuff, with smaller gaps where you go “OK, so doing the same thing for another X levels until I get this and can do some new fun stuff.”
This is hardly a fix-all, but it is an interesting idea, and yes, scaling effects pace mostly. But this allows for possibly fixing some of the pacing issues that are already there.

5

Actually, that ilvl idea is not half bad.

Every single MMO has tried leveling since it was introduced with D&D by the blessed on Gary Gygaz…

I do like the thought that your ilvl determines the level of content you can (or can’t) do. They could weight mobs (and their respective colors) as gray, green, yellow, orange, red. They could do the same with dungeons.

It could take the weighted score of your gear and talents. Talents would open up as ilvl increased. There would be NO progress bar and quests would simply reward gold.

For those that like the feeling of “achieving” a goal there could be gear goals that were essentially the DING effect of hitting a new level.

In doing this we would want to keep ilvls hidden. This could help avoid alot of the issues we have with shaming, etc based on low scores. Instead if a character joined your party/raid they would be weighed against the queued dungeon you entered. Prior to that it would be some default gold color or something.

This would have the benefit of allowing you to determine how easy a run will be as well. If everyone is Red and you are Green you will know that they will struggle so you may have to pick up the slack a bit.

This same concept could work for Mythic runs as well. It would simply use the color concept against the key and give you a determined time to “Agree” to the run. This would also avoid deserters and key-quitters since it gives folks time to decide once the key is entered before they start.

This could also solve the level issue as there would be no levels. Instead you simply couldn’t equip certain gear until your overall color matched or exceeded the gears target color.

This would also all be dynamic so it occurred based on mobs you were fighting in open world, dungeons, raids, rewards, and purchased gear.

2 Likes
6

I would replace leveling with two systems: One which would streamline questing to remove pointless fetch quests and add back story that was removed or was never put in the game, but is critical to understanding that zone;

And one to teach people how to play the game from bottom to top.

People could choose which they wanted to do. But it would be optional. People who are elite or people who don’t care whether they get better could move on and always come back if they felt the need.

1 Like
7

Ion seemed adamantly against the idea of “Adding another talent choice every expansion”. And has successfully prevented us from getting one for nearly 5 years now. Almost two and a half expansions have gone by since then.

They don’t WANT to add more meaningful permanent progress milestones to our experience because it adds complexity that’s difficult for Blizzard and their least-common-denominator player base to manage.

They can try to spread out the meaningful milestones they have, pacing them more evenly over the leveling experience, but that’s like watering down some pretty thin broth already. They don’t want to shorten the experience too much and risk losing revenue from Level Boosts either.

It’s a delicate balance to thread. Some people enjoy the journey, others are only interested in the destination so they can catch up with guildies and friends. How do you serve both without short-changing one or the other?

8

The problem is the less-experienced devs they get with all the turnover in that department.

1 Like
9

I wonder how much of that is a result of clashes with Mr. “Players think they want a better game, but they don’t” at the top.

10

The problem at the top is that their vision of perfection in game design is not shared with the playerbase. The planning department needs a reboot too.

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11

“Problem” (level, stat, or whatever else) equalization.

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12

I’d replace “level squish” with “new talent system.”

3 Likes
13

As long as the levels feel like they’re moving along at a nice pace, levelers will be satisfied.

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. If each level takes twice as long it will feel like leveling has slowed to a crawl, even if it hasn’t.

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14

And that’s exactly it. If there’s fewer levels, the same amount of STUFF is spread out over it better.
Presuming no change in the amount of XP from 1-Max (say, a lv60 cap instead of lv120 means that each level takes 2x the XP), then the time from 1-Max stays roughly the same. I doubt that we’ll see this turn into some form of truly fast leveling, but it’s unlikely to make the leveling process slower on it’s own either.

15

I would replace squish with shrinkage. :eggplant:

2 Likes
16

Honestly, I’m not sure I want to see the milestones spread out more evenly.

I would rather blow through the content that’s the most stale and spend more of my time in more recent content than an equal amount in each. So if all 7 talent unlocks happen after serious focused levelling gametime of 0hrs, 1hr, 2hr, 4hrs, 8hrs, 16hrs, 32hrs … I’m kinda sorta fine with that.

17

Remove more abilities and profession items, of course. That would make whatever survives the purge more MEAAAAAANINGFUUUUUUUL

3 Likes
18

Quoting myself here, but this is what I’ve been proposing for a while, even before a squish was in question. The question has been asked quite a bit, so it’s easier to literally quote myself. Of course, bump those numbers up to 120 for the foreseeable future expansion we’re sure to get. Scaling 1-120 (120-130 new content.)

We all saw leveling as a problem and a lot of it comes with the pace of how we’re rewarded in the sense that outside of a level once you reach a certain point you haven’t anything to look forward to.

What I suggests fixes that (At least from my point of view) and provides a bit more class fantasy on top of it.

1 Like
19

From level 20-83 It doesn’t feel like I’m getting powerful at all. I mean I just went up 63 levels and it took me all day I feel like I should be getting stronger but it doesn’t feel that way. I would not mind a level squish at all. Numbers are numbers. Its all about the experience of leveling.

1 Like
20

I don’t know “level” is a pretty simple word. I wouldn’t change that.

Option #1
I would add a feature like pathfinder that you need to complete for each expansion. When you’re done with that you can create characters at that base expansion level.

Option #2
Just make new characters start in WoD at level 1 and shrink levels. Make it so if you want to level in expansions older than wod they just scale to your level, but that only doing from WoD and newer expansions is enough to cap without going out of your way.

1 Like