After a long time away my sister and I decided to ty World of Warcraft again.
In a week of rather casual effort she has levelled a character to level 33, which is more than halfway up the current character level limit of 60. I only played for an hour, and got to level 12. That’s… ummm, way too easy. Neither of us reports any moment, at any time, when we were in even the remotest danger of dying.
Now, World of Warcraft was never hard the way EverQuest was hard (EQ was REALLY hard, and it would have been fantastic were it not for the fact that, despite the name, it had almost no quests) but levelling up still took some work. Getting a level was an accomplishment. Now it’s ludicrously easy, in much the same way they made Star Wars: The Old Republic so easy I’m not sure what the point of it was.
Why are they doing this? Why make a game so amazingly easy?
It’s easy to level. But Mythic raiding is the hardest gameplay I’ve done.
Why make it so easy? That’s a hard question to answer. My guess is they want folks to hit level cap and then do content that fits the difficulty they seek.
Because the players who are into the leveling and questing aspect of the game are like you - they play through that content, then stop playing. The players who were grinding end-game content when you left are, in large part, the same players who were grinding end-game content when you came back. They’re the consistent income source for the game, so now the whole game is tailored to their experience. And they generally want to get through the low and mid game content as quickly as possible.
There is the option for World of Warcraft - Classic which allegedly recreates the experiences of Vanilla, like corpse-dragging your character through one zone far to high for it in order to get the next zone you need to level to a powerful enough state to actually survive the level you’re corpse-dragging through (the Barrens were notorious for that for low-level Tauren).
You’re not the target demographic. Nobody still playing WoW cares about grinding through the same leveling process that they’ve done 500 times in the last fifteen years. “Leveling” is just something you do when a new expansion raises the cap and so that you can get to the new end-game raiding and gear collecting.
MMOs are about steady, long-term revenue streams. That means catering to end-game players.
You say easy but I think of it as being less of a grind to level up. While leveling, you’re typically alone and likely won’t have any meaningful group time until you hit the current content. Seriously, if you go to content from Burning Crusade, Mist of Pandaria, or Wrath of the Lich King you’re playing in a ghost town which is no fun for a MMORPG.
Isn’t that a function of it being too easy, though? If it took longer, there would be more people playing the mid-level content. And if they really want to cater to the end-game players, just add a button that instantly raises them to the max level of any character on the account.
People don’t want to take frikkin’ forever to level a character.
The initial grind was 60 levels. Just before they “squished” the levels it was 120. Twice an already marathon grind for most people.
It’s not just catering to end-game players, it’s also a matter of not discouraging new players from joining, because believe or not there are still people finding WoW for the first time. Also, there are people who want to level a character in one of the many new race/class options but don’t want to take six months to do it.
An xp multiplier slider would accommodate the varied playstyles. It’s just a bit of a shame that so much of the content that they created can’t be played as intended because of power creep at the lower levels and how fast leveling occurs. Some of the outdoor elite zones in early WoW and the original dungeons such as the original Scholomance were quite fun.
The game’s been out for going on seventeen years. The people they’re focusing on are the people who kept it going the twelve years you weren’t a player.
I just started a thread about an MMORPG called Conqueror’s Blade, RickJay. It is very group-oriented. It is also FTP via Steam. Perhaps you and your sister might enjoy it too eh.
octo is right … it’s to the point that they want you to see the new content that when there’s an expansion they give you a lvl whatever character you need to play the expansion the last one my relatives played you could advance one character to I think it was 80 or 90 free of charge …
and my.com isn’t too bad we’ve tried a few games here and there on it … there’s just such a glut of free games now no one sticks with a game for long … the only reason for a sub is all the free boosts and end game content and the like …
If you want end-game raiding and high-end end-game content… yes.
However, even in Vanilla there were people as interested in the mid-content as the end content, solo players, and so forth. At this point the game is expensive enough to also keep those folks interested, too. In fact, they’ve changed how to level so you aren’t so rigidly held to storylines and doing things in order. If you want to bypass a particular expansion while leveling you can now do that. Or spend a lot more time in useful leveling in just one expansion than you used to be able to do.
It does bug me that they’ve made soloing old 5-man instances more difficult, as soloing past content is one of my interests for reasons I don’t want to spend a half an hour detailing here. But things change - if they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t still be playing 16 years later.
Because it’s easier to make end game content than Novice/Moderate/Advanced/End Game content. So just fast track everyone to the end game and “the game begins at 60”.
For what it’s worth, last time I looked at Everquest (which was admittedly a long while ago), they were doing the same thing. Throw tons of leveling aids at low level characters to get them into the end game levels ASAP.
I don’t agree with your hypothesis. Even when leveling was more difficult, older content was often a ghost town and you could go to major hubs like Shattrath, Dalaran, or even a basic hub like Ironforge and hardly see another player running around. Blizzard made a deliberate decision to make leveling easier than ever before because most people don’t like the tedious grind. A long tedious grind to go from original content to the current expansion is a barrier for new players.