Counterpoint: Those casual players would probably play the game more if the rest of the game (I.E. the leveling experience) actually mattered or felt decent in any capacity. They don’t play the game for any longer than a month (and it’s not even a month. Probably a week, at most) precisely because leveling isn’t all that fun or rewarding.
2 Likes
When they made the world part of warcraft irrelevant outside of leveling and gathering profession mats. TBC is where it started becoming world of instancecraft. Just got worse after. I guess they tried in Legion, and BFA to make being out in the world somewhat relevant again, but the pendulum has swung back in the other direction once again, because people again complained about having to do stuff outside of instanced content. Don’t really call a couple of weeklies on the dragon isles, or throwing some monster npc’s in some zones, and calling them rares interesting at all. My opinion anyways.
1 Like
This is what I don’t understand about modern WoW. Why even have a leveling progression anymore if everything is so completely geared toward the end-game? If that is what the majority of the remaining playerbase wants, it makes sense to let them have it. The people that want a proper leveling progression experience aren’t getting that anymore, anyway, and there doesn’t seem to be any closing of that pandora’s box.
I have very mixed feelings about Chromie Time. A new player used to be able (and, in a sense, somewhat required) to play through the progression of the game’s story. Now, you pick a chunk of that storyline, with no context as to how it fits into the narrative, to level through. This is ‘fine’ for experienced players, though I would argue that experienced players are the ones typically trying to speed through or avoid the tedium of leveling through all of that content again anyway. For new players, Chromie Time is a confusing mess that eventually plops them out into the current expansion with no understanding of what is going on, further diminishing any value that could be placed on the lore, which further incentivizes the end-game-only mentality.
If the present and future of WoW is the end-game, leveling is only an impediment to that, and it isn’t a particularly enjoyable one most of the time.
Granted, my perspective comes from enjoying the old way more. I started playing WoW because it was a MMORPG. But…it’s really not anymore. It’s a dungeon-grinder now.
i’d say around the time Starcraft 2 became an E-spot. So 2011-2012 ish.
WoW could really use something akin to the MSQ of FF14. Feel free to skip all the side quests if you don’t want to bother, but at least play through the main storylines of each expansion. Have some sort of notion of what’s going on. But if that were the case, then folks wouldn’t be spending time in the current “now” zones, and they need those popular I assume for financial reasons.
1 Like
Because leveling is the ultimate casual content and the reason many people buy an expansion; they level a character, look around for a couple weeks, then quit for 2 years. Blizzard isn’t going to get rid of leveling.
And for everyone else, it’s 6 hours every 2 years and you’re done. There’s no reason to get rid of it.
TBC when arena was added. I’m sure in the PvE sphere you had DPS competitors, but I don’t remember that really taking off until late TBC/early Wrath, might have just been my server though.
I mostly disagree with everyone. The company found it cheaper to make competitive gaming versus story, atmospheric, and immersion based gaming.
That’s the top, by miles, reason. It’s really obvious, too. The evidence is there. In the tons.
Competitive gaming is literally tweaking some numbers in the backend, and players will derive hundreds of hours fighting over those scraps.
Atmosphere and story relies on hiring competent (aka expensive) writers, game designers, taking risks, etc. all for a few hours.
Remember, Activision’s mission is to earn higher yacht level bonuses for executives.
4 Likes
Barely anyone engages in “competitive gaming”.
2 Likes
You seriously believe this? I guess you are the same guy that says folks that like leveling play for a few weeks every two years and unsub. You have some strange takes.
1 Like
What exactly is “competitive gaming” in your mind, hmm?
2 Likes
Already defined this once, if you aren’t reading, not going to bother.
1 Like
The current WoW formula doesn’t even come close to a modern rpg standard, I’m not sure how people even play this game without a somewhat competitive attitude.
I think the story, questing, exploring, and immersion is just bad in the modern era. It has nothing to do with the players or endgame.
1 Like
Is it bad that I don’t know who got world first raid end boss kill in any expansion 
Same lol.
2 Likes
Oh I’m reading, I just don’t store stuff that doesn’t make sense, so it probably fell in that category.
2 Likes
you are doing it wrong.
It all makes sense if you think $$$, Blizzard certainly does
1 Like
I tend to agree with @Phantomtrone that the leveling experience to the current cap for an expansion is a one-time thing for each major story patch within an expansion, while the three end-game pillars of content (i.e., competitive gaming if you want it to be) will comprise the vast majority of an expansion’s life-cycle that players are engaged with.
It makes sense that focus on the one-time story, atmosphere, and immersion takes a back seat to Raid, M+, and PvP (well I pity the PvP guys, when’s the last new BG or Arena they got?) which is what the players spend the majority of their time on. Maybe there’s a subsegment of the game population that never engages in “end-game content” and just keeps leveling alts for an entire expansion, but I would guess that’s a pretty small minority.
Focusing on end-game content is more likely to keep players subscribed at a profit compared to cranking out new story quests every six weeks (which would be possible but perhaps at break-even or at a loss).
When Blizzard realized they could monetize every part of the game.
1 Like
Everyone’s favorite expansion: Legion. It gave us M+, and continued off of WoD’s addition of accessible-yet-difficult Mythic raids.
Also, older content is hard to dump development resources into, when players who were there spent a year or more doing that content. They will want something new and fresh to play, and this is overwhelmingly reflected by how seasons and expansions wax and wane with players as time goes on. Mists of Pandaria is regarded as one of the best expansions, but there a lot of people who played in the year of Siege of Orgrimmar and hit burnout waiting for WoD to come along.
No one except RPG players are typically fine with “grindy” numerical gameplay, such as levelling things just to see a number go up with some loose idea of how that connects to their player-character’s growth in terms of power and otherwise.
In WoW the presumptive state is that people will reach the endgame and then stay there. In TBC, as it was another expansion and thus a different type of limited regional endgame rather than the two full continents the game launched with, the presumptive state was that folks reach level 70. From 60. To help with this you could start your journey in Outlands at level 58.
That’s how they solved it because WoW is an endgame-focused MMO. Always has been and always will be.
RPG = “Role Playing Games”, that’s a genre.
RP = “Role Playing”, that’s an activity.
These aren’t the same things. POKéMON is an RPG, and folks don’t RP in it. The original name of the MOBA genre was “action RPGs”, because they fulfill the entirety of an RPG’s premise but within a 30-60 minute PvP context.
A genre is not the same thing as an activity.
What you presented here is a false dichotomy based on “hey, they are both have ‘Role Playing’ in their acronyms, therefore they MUST be related!” when that couldn’t be further away from the truth than if one tried. So no, your argument here is literally built entirely on bad fallacious reasoning.