5341

That’s a very manly staff you have there Athyrn.

5342

You’re not the first person in this thread to say this, so I’m guessing it’s a fairly common experience. But speaking for myself, I see lots of people my level in my zones while leveling… at least 10, often many more. This is true for both a very old server (Proudmoore, Alliance) as well as a newer & less populated server. (Arathor, Alliance)

I wonder if y’all just got really unlucky in your choice of server, or if you’re engaging in hyperbole.

5343

And I think they’ve done a great job on the 1-60 stuff. For the new guys we occasionally manage to co-erce into the game, the initial levelling is pretty lonely and in TBC and Wrath not many of them actually stuck it out so I’m happy all round that they’ve simplified the process and made it more enjoyable at the same time.

I still don’t really see what the problem would be in making all the zones outside of cata effectively level 80 and letting people start at level 85. You still need cash, you still need rep, you still need to level professions but you’re not necessarily totally excluded from playing with everyone else and enlisting an existing player’s help doesn’t mean them absolutely steamrolling over content for you because they’re exponentially more powerful than you before they even put any gear on.

If they want to raid they’re still going to have to “level” their rep to get the enchants etc necessary, but they don’t have to wait a couple of months to be able to run normal dungeons or find a zone that’s got more than NPCs or the odd level 85 farming low level herbs/ores etc.

I know that seems to be a minority view, but I still ultimately think the entire level system is pretty pointless, full stop.

5344

We’re a mid population server as far as I’m aware. It’s not dead generally and in the starter areas there’s normally people around I’ve just no idea where they go once you finish the initial class quests. As I’ve hit 55+ on this one I’ve started to see a couple more people in the Blasted Lands, but it is literally a couple, swamp of sorrows I completed without seeing another player of any level.

5345

In your vision of a 5-level game, how long would it take to hit 85?

5346

About an hour would suit me.

I’ve never been able to fathom out what levelling is supposed to achieve except to ring fence off the end game content. What difference does it make if everyone starts out at level 1 or level 85 that barrier still exists if you want to raid or run heroics.

5347

That sounds like you’re trying to queue up for heroics (which would be odd for a level 81, which is why this is a bit puzzling). I’m not sure if there’s a gear level minimum for normal dungeons.

5348

I always thought of him as a quest giver. Also, when the Alliance began gathering, someone would announce it on /hordedefense and we would flock there for the fun. Sometimes I miss the pre-“honor” system days.

5349

There is. My weird ass leveling approach yielded the same result, because I was essentially still getting level 81 gear by the time I rolled into Uldum, so everywhere that wasn’t a level 80 dungeon was showing as locked out, and it’s only opened now that I’ve gathered some gear within Uldum. I won’t be surprised if I’m locked out of the 85 dungeons until I run enough late zone quests to grab mid-range quest blues (or hit Twilight Highlands) or if I get some drops from the lower level dungeons when I start running them on normal.

5350

This presupposes that end-game content is the only content actually worth playing. When I first played WoW I viewed 1-60 not as a prelude to anything, but as a game in itself, and I had a blast. Maybe now that we are all tired of the Diku model or on our forty-seventh alt, things have changed.

5351

Nobody equipping and showing the engineering goggles has any right to complain about looking goofy. :) But seriously, none of the current t11 gear (or the lookalikes) really works well with the heroic blues. It’s going to get really bizarre for my elemental shaman once I start filling out my enhancement set with the unwanted hunter t11 lookalike agility mail.

5352

But you don’t get any choice of how hard you want to make it. There are essentially no group quests left. Even naked I would expect all of the quests I have seen to be easily soloable by a newer player. They have repeatedly buffed all classes and turned all the ‘elite’ mobs into normals. I don’t care about all of the normal stuff, but why did they have to remove the small selection of potentially challenging quests? They were entirely skipable if you were unable to finish them.

5353

I would take this a step further and say it was a superior game to the end game, at least to me. I have broken two nasty end game addictions now: vanilla honor farmer and vanilla raid farmer and I don’t even want to entertain the thought of taking that stuff seriously again. It is not for me. Leveling is. Or was.

5354

I’m pretty sure that it was patch 2.3 that turned the elite monsters into normal mobs in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, so that particular ship sailed a long, long time ago.

5355

Cenarius - US West Coast represents!
(Horde was out-classed 8:1 on that server so we gave them a fair warning to not interfer in the killing on the forums a day before…)

5356

true, most of them were gone long ago. Wrath introduced very few difficult group quests. Most of the supposed 5 man quests were soloable in quest gear and the most of the rest fell with a bit more gear. Haven’t ventured into the 80+ zones yet but from what I have read so far, it is mostly the same. So this isn’t just a one time change, it is a trend, and I would hate to see their next MMO follow it.

Based on reactions to my posts here and the general satisfaction with today’s leveling experience, I guess am just a tiny minority. But one last question: if this style leveling had been present from day one, would WoW be what it is today?

5357

I get that view as well. I joined WoW wanting to play a multiplayer game but found I had to spend 2 months playing on my own to get to a point where I could play with the guys who were level 60 and to be honest I hated it, it was a barrier to getting to play with everyone else. I couldn’t join them and they didn’t want to boost me through 1-60 because they’re so ridiculously overpowered compared to any level below 59.

That still remains the case and it also applies to the end game content, I fully accept.

But you don’t get any choice of how hard you want to make it. There are essentially no group quests left. Even naked I would expect all of the quests I have seen to be easily soloable by a newer player. They have repeatedly buffed all classes and turned all the ‘elite’ mobs into normals. I don’t care about all of the normal stuff, but why did they have to remove the small selection of potentially challenging quests? They were entirely skipable if you were unable to finish them.

There’s no group quests because there are no groups in the lower level content. However they do it blizzard “lose”, if people outlevel the zone they complain, if they take too long to level they complain, if you can’t solo the quests in the zone because there’s no-one to group with they complain, if you can solo all the stuff in the zone they complain so I’m still reasonably happy that they struck a reasonable balance in the 1-60 content at least.

Group quests are fine if you can get a group and while I accept your point to some degree it’s also equally frustrating if you can’t finish x amount of the questlines because there’s an elite mob in the way that requires 2-5 players or even more in some cases to knock it over which is something I remember from the old vanilla quests.

5358

That is a really good question.
I’d say no because the hardcore people would have left soon and WoW only got that successful by word of mouth. Personally I pulled in several people at work that wanted to know with what game I spend so much time with.
Once enough people were in it it was starting to become bigger and bigger as even more people wondered where their friends hung out.
Girlfriends / wives that were complaining tried it themselves and got hooked. Then the social aspect kicked in which makes leaving the game now so hard for so many people (including me).

I think Everquest 2 would have been the game lots of the hardcore people would have gone to and one can only wonder how it would be today.

5359

I think it would be. You have to remember that WoW was so popular because it was the first MMO that people could play without utterly retarded mechanics, the first MMO that wasn’t completely abusive towards its players. But WoW 1.0 and Cataclysm are hugely different and it doesn’t make WoW 1.0 look good. Completely broken characters, massive amounts of bugs, a lack of content, no clue on itemisation, entire classes you couldn’t take into raids…

5360

When killing the elite mob was the end quest of a long quest chain, getting a group together was always a nightmare. Grouping to kill an elite baddie as a one-off thing was always a lot of fun, but I imagine it would be hard to implement the one-off kill with all the phasing in the new zones.

I don’t know. I suspect that MMO players used to be conditioned to expect (and want) a certain amount of pain & challenge by Everquest, but that players nowadays just don’t have the patience for that kind of thing. They seem to just want an amusement park of cool things to see & do. And I have to admit… I myself usually want something like an amusement park rather than a challenge. Generally, if I want a challenge, I choose to group for a 5 man dungeon. Granted, the dungeon itself is rarely that difficult, but people’s stupidity & noobishness often provide me with all the challenge I could ask for.