World of Warcraft fails to please (me) yet again

Games
1

I was following online the last Blizzcon because there were rumors about stuff I was very interested about. It was all a flop, sadly.

I left World of Warcraft shortly after Cataclysm, and after being very excited about it because my idea of an ideal virtual world is one that doesn’t fall into obsolescence but keeps getting updated and improved. Cataclysm was supposed to be just that: an overhaul of old content to make the whole package more seamless and up to date.

The result, though? Exactly the opposite. They made all content obsolete systemically. As I’ve written in the past, they completely broke the progression. They sped up the leveling in order to make players reach max level faster and enjoy the bleeding edge content, but in the process they utterly destroyed any sense of quest and zone flow. You cannot even follow the shortest quest chain in a zone without outleveling it by the middle point. You run a dungeon once, and you’ve already outleveled whole zones outside.

For someone who’s chasing the treadmill power creep and wants to just collect better loot, it’s all ideal. But for someone like me who’s in no rush to reach the top and just wants to enjoy and explore ALL the content at my own pace, reading all the little stories that the zones have been written around, then this new skin of the game is completely unplayable.

The recent rumor was about a feature that I think was already implemented for the content of the latest expansion, and it’s basically the only way to salvage the experience I want without redoing the whole game: content that dynamically rescales to your level.

It’s a feature now common to most MMORPGs and even single player games use it. I’m actually contrary to it, conceptually (it’s much better to remove levels completely and design a game around a flatter skill system), but it’s the only practical way to save WoW, at least for me.

Just scale the content (quests, monsters, dungeons, possibly rewards) to a challenging default (or scale the character to the content), and I’d jump right in. Exploring all the stuff in

A great thing that Blizzard is doing with WoW is that you get every expansion for free by just waiting a couple of years after its release. So I could play all the content I missed in the meantime. A boatload of content. I’d love to just do that and pay Blizzard the monthly subscription. But I can’t because the progress is broken and all that content has been pushed to the side and forgotten.

And what we get? Vanilla WoW? Did players really ask for this? I really don’t understand what’s interesting about it. The content was objectively lower quality, and fond memories are probably based on a more complex overall situation that doesn’t simply depend on rolling back the game.

WoW phase one was great and praised everywhere because it removed the grind of old school shitty MMORPGs, like Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot, where you’d sit in the same spot for hours, grinding a spawn point. WoW replaced that awful boring grind with actual questing, so that you were always on the move, visiting and exploring and enjoying the game world fully. Making it an interesting place. Reading, if you wanted, the stories in there.

Then WoW phase two came and put the grind right back: just a race to level cap and farming the same dungeon or raid over and over and over and over. Waiting for the next exp pack for years only to burn right through the content in the matter of a weekend, and go back at farming dungeons yet again.

If you like doing that it’s all good. WoW is big enough to accommodate for different kinds of players. But it’s 2017, and I’m still waiting for something that most other games with far less resources have gotten right…

P.S.
Don’t suggest me to play FF14, I already know :)

2

They just announced scaling for the full leveling experience, so your rant seems ill-timed.

3

Duh, where? I thought I saw the whole presentation.

Did they say if it’s in a patch or if I need to wait next year?

4

I think it’s part of the new expansion so you’ll need to wait. I wasn’t watching it very closely as I don’t actively play WoW.

Edit: Just checked, it will be coming in patch 7.3.5 so probably a couple of weeks.

5

Some did. There were pirate servers running it that were popular.

6

I’m reading something on a website but it doesn’t convince me it’s going to work.

Level up is still way, way too fast to enjoy old content, and they don’t seem to do full level scaling, they’ll do zone ranges.

That’s still means that you can ideally enjoy ONE zone, but you’d still at the same time outlevel nine of them.

I’ve also read they’ll retool the expansions so they will overlap, Outland is 60-80, Northrend is 60-80. And you probably still get enough of that experience by doing half of a single zone.

So in the end this doesn’t really work in a way that fixes the problem I have. You’d still outlevel content at a crazy speed.

I hated the fact that during Cataclysm I couldn’t go in a dungeon because I knew I’d gain 2-3 levels in 10 minutes and that would broke completely all the quest flow.

7

Yes, but it’s all about dissecting what is that players enjoy there.

For me it was that the flow of gaining experience and level up was carefully balanced around the content in the zone. Blizzard completely fucked up that balance. But I certainly wouldn’t go back to play again the same stuff in the same way.

8

You won’t outlevel a zone while doing it. They might adjust XP so you have to do 4 zones in an expansion to get 10 levels, they haven’t given details yet. It’ll definitely be an improvement, the only question is how much of an improvement.

I personally like the GW2 model where no content ever becomes truly obsolete.

9

It’s a tiny bandaid to the actual bigger problem.

Before: you start a quest chain with six steps, and by the 2-3 step it’s already green or grey.
After: you do the same quest chain, it stays viable all the way to the sixth step, but at the same time you’ve outleveled whole zones outside your tiny bubble.

Leveling up in current WoW is super fast. If the level scaling is only a level range, then you still rush through the content at the exact same speed, and outlevel that content at the same speed. Nothing is fixed beside the little bubble that follows you, but you’re still unable to go through the content as I’ve explained above.

10

Yes, but it’s important to remember that Blizzard doesn’t give a shit. They want you to hit max level so you can play with your friends and get addicted to the elder game. That’s why they give out level boosts with every expansion.

11

The nostalgia hit of doing full-vanilla Scarlet Monastery PUGs and the like might actually tempt me to resub for a bit on a classic server. But no, you can’t go back in terms of the sense of freshness, the mystery, the community you might find on the server, etc.

Still, I love playing old games. Do it all the time, and I love that they are exactly what they were when I played them 10, 20, 30 years ago. I do it with Unreal. I do it with Ultima III. I do it with Telengard. I do it with Thief. It generally saddens me that you can’t do it with MMOs. So I’m all for official vanilla servers as long as Blizz can recoup the cost of running them.

Most importantly: Bring back the original Tirisfal tavern music!!!111!!!

12

If it was me I’d create optionally a special custom type of character where the level curve is super slow and tuned specifically around the content, flag them in some special way so players feel somewhat rewarded to create and play these “masochistic” types, and that’s it.

It could be implemented in a day. It’s just a redesigned xp curve. Or you could just apply to every level range the original value that it had for every time a new piece of content dropped. That would be already okay.

level 1-60: apply the vanilla xp curve
level 60-70: apply The Burning Crusade xp curve
level 70-80: apply Wrath of the Lich King xp curve
level 80-85: apply Cataclysm xp curve
level 85-90: apply Pandaria xp curve
level 90-100: apply Draenor xp curve

Me happy, here’s my monthly subscription.

13

I like the way Blizzard does it now, for the most part. I’ve already played the old content. Give me the new expansion and I’ll enjoy that content.

If it was up to me I’d hit the cap with one character and then have the ability to insta-level all my other characters to the level cap. I don’t want to replay the same content.

What I really want is a better MMO experience. There really isn’t one out there that I’ve seen.

15

So, basically Hrose just spent several paragraphs complaining about something that is coming in the next patch. Not the next expansion, it is coming in 7.3.5.

16

If your goal is really to do the quests just to see the story line and explore, what difference does it make what color the quests are? It seems like a completely arbitrary complaint. Wow isn’t and has never been challenging when it comes to questing, being on the “right” level doesn’t make the content hard, or even something you have to pay any attention to.

It’s also possible to shut off your exp so…you could entirely regulate this for yourself if it’s actually a thing…unless they removed the ability to do that.

You say that WoW removed the tedium of other MMOs, they also removed any challenge in the process. WoW has always been a sleepwalk when it comes to questing and progression. I personally can think of nothing more tedious or game killing, than having to spend large amounts of time redoing quest chains when leveling alt characters.

You praise WoW for removing tedium, and then complain that there isn’t enough tedium.

17

Uhm… What?

The amount of experience you need for going from level x to level y is simply just a single number. And the variation you get as the levels increase is the curve.

Then yes, it’s possible they also have tweaked the quests rewards and monsters xp, so you cannot simply fish that number from an old database, but doing even a vague approximation certainly doesn’t require any substantial work.

18

I don’t know how it is right now, but the risk of dying for just doing a bad pull was always there. Unless you were overleveled. And there were always high level monsters that patrol the area that mixed it up. It’s not a complex game, but it’s not that simple either.

And then of course the dungeons, that right now are a complete joke just because you always have someone in the party that overlevels everything. If the party was properly rescaled those dungeons would become very challenging once again.

That’s why I asked to make this optional?

I’m sure you haven’t done all the quests in the game. And I’ve explained my main reason would be to play the old expansions. That I NEVER played. There’s a boatload of content I’ve never seen, but the leveling pace is so broken that I wouldn’t enjoy going through that content.

19

I just resubbed and leveled a warrior from 42 to 100. At a certain point, if you stay to finish a zone’s quests, you are one-shotting the mobs and it feels even less challenging than it was in the first place (which wasn’t that much at level). There should at least be a way to get in over your head and have some sort of risk. But then, my dude was wearing full heirlooms so I guess part of it was my own doing.

Also, ANYTHING that can change the leveling process after level 58 would be very welcome. So very tired of Hellfire Peninsula, whatever landing that is in Borean Tundra, Hyjal/Vashjir, and the mandatory WoD questline. Would be nice to have some way to follow my muse rather than be funneled every 5-10 levels.

20

The last character I leveled in WoW was a hunter, and I was one shotting mobs that were at my level, which is exactly my point. Wow isn’t, nor has it ever been, challenging in terms of quest or dungeon content, unless you were underleveled. If that’s the kind of challenge you seek, turn off your exp?

Like I said, unless they changed it, you have the ability to turn off your exp at any point, you have complete control of how hard you want to make the content. Don’t wear any heirlooms, turn off your exp, go do stuff that’s 5 levels harder, etc. This entire thread is a complaint about something you have total control of.

The risk of dying from a bad pull? lol…When I leveled my Palie, I would literally pull every mob I could at once that wouldn’t leash, I leveled to max level doing that…but once again, this is completely in your control, turn your experience off.

21

If they would let me take those quests, that would have been cool. The more flexibility the better.