WoW's New Player Leveling Experience is Bad (How to fix it)
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- čas přidán 20. 08. 2024
- World of Warcraft's new player experience, especially leveling, is bad. I discuss some ideas on how to fix it,
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TimeSkip + old world revamp.
Make a "Story mode" for leveling, new players go through this, can go through different zones
Make a threads of fate style leveling for people that want that as well
I both love and hate this idea. I like the idea of an optional story-mode catch-up system. Something that gets you caught-up level-wise to the latest expansion, while giving you all the major story beats of the previous expansions. An interactive "The History of Azeroth" experience if you will. Each expansion could have its own instance or zone, that way it's easier to add more expansions to the experience as new expansions come out. (Well, until they level squish again and have to re-vamp what levels each experience covers.) It could be like the caverns of times instances where you're playing through major historical events. Honestly, I feel this would actually be a good compromise between FF14's "You MUST do ALL the main story quests!" that ensures you know what the story is going forward, and WoW's "we're going to boost you to the latest expansion so fast you'll be lucky if you know what an 'orc' is."
What I hate about the idea is not actually the idea itself. As Crendor pointed out, WoW lore is a MESS, and Blizzard has a frustrating tendency to ret-con things.
Ultimately, I think any solution would have its hurdles, and they may be better-off just making a WoW2 to wipe the slate clean, using what they've learned from WoW to future-proof against these issues.
It better bloody not get rid of the chance to go back
To add to your "getting worse as you level." Not only do you get "weaker" when you hit Dragonflight, you do get a decent set of gear over the first couple of levels in Dragonflight, and feel somewhat powerful again. But THEN, as you level through DF (and this has been the case for a few expansions now), you get weaker AGAIN. Even if you keep up with gear upgrades, for many specs by the time you get to 70/before you start getting end game gear, you feel weaker than when you were 61/62. Never feels good to me.
When I'm dungeon finder levelling and someone's blowing up the damage meter, they're almost always level 10-20. It's pretty weird.
@@Smapdi_Flaffermannyeah thats because the scaling makes you much stronger the lower your level is. I have a level 10 monk twink with xp turned off bc its fun to just blaze through dungeons and help others have fast runs. I just spam spinning crane kick as mistweaver with lifesteal enchant and everything around me just dies. I soloed WoD dungeons to get the highest ilvl gear if you wanna try it for yourself.
@@saulgoodguy1840 I did that with a warrior and the amount of hate I got was unimaginable, even when I queued as tank. I got vote kicked often, flamed, called names and so on. I geared a lvl 10 twink to help people level in group finder thinking it'd be helpful and fun but yeah I got dunked on by everyone. Never touched the character again and just looking at it makes me sad
@@saulgoodguy1840 Yeah, I understand that. It's just a weird decision to make you feel less and less powerful (if you're leveling primarily through dungeons) as you level up. It's a blast at 10, but quite a bit less fun at 35. But I guess a fast run is a fast run :)
It's weird that people look at it as "Getting weaker" and not "The game getting harder" like in literally every other video game ever made...
It's like fighting the final boss of an RPG and complaining about how "They nerfed you" because he's harder to beat than the lv1 slime that you stomped when you were lv5
I honestly prefer how levelling through legacy content worked before. No level scaling just reaching a different piece of the game when you hit the right level. Let you see the entire game and it let you level in those areas in different ways. Many people didn’t like wod but man did I love levelling through it by just flying around and collecting treasures was super chill
60-80 was still hell, to this day like half of the quests are broken or something
@@toike121 I’ll admit it weren’t perfect specifically 60-80 was diabolical it would take me two days to slog through that shit if I weren’t just dungeon spamming
Honestly think they should just remove leveling all together. Bar maybe the latest expansion.
Leveling 1 to 2 is easier than farting
@@toike121 Yeah but it forced you to check out all the different zones. And it was tuned so that you needed to complete them to get to the next tier area. Now in retail you can blast to 60 by playing maybe 4 zones (or just spamming dungeons in LFG, which also scale. Giant fail) and its over. No reason to explore the other zones at all.
I love your idea of having a Barrens-esque experience for a new zone to help train players as they level. What really sucks is that you go through the trouble of getting familiar with characters like Captain Garrick, her son and the expedition, and then once you’re done, you never really interact with them. I want to follow more stories with those characters.
I've always found it so weird how they usher you into BFA content of all expansions. I get it may have been the "most recent" during the leveling revamp, but from a story perspective at least, it would have made WAY more sense starting in Legion. Assuming Blizz didn't want to add a brand new continent just for new players to level through.
You get home from Exile's Reach and learn that the factions have set sail for the Broken Shore and you must join them, and then the story unfolds there like normal.
After progressing through Legion, you get either get a little catch-up on the events during the Tomb of Sargeras and the Argus Campaign/Silithus aftermath, or you can play through those events directly.
If you choose option 1 after completing Legion, then you get ushered into BFA (and they also bring back the Battle for Lordaeron scenario too), and progress there as normal. After that's said and done, then you go to Dragonflight to level from 60 to 70.
For a first time player, their leveling journey should be longer and feel like a... journey. They shouldn't be rushed through an expansion and then be forced to literally abandon it because they hit level 60 not even halfway through the process. I think that if a new player completes this leveling experiece at least once, then they can have the faster leveling like we have now.
Make leveling rewarding for new players, and not a "oh fuck, I just hit 60 so now I have to abandon this area to progress further".
Legion requires too much backstory. BFA is just Horde vs Alliance. It also has better leveling zones and story.
I think the artifact weapons could cause confusion to a new player for sure. Also even when legion was current, you could hit max level by doing 2 to 3 of the main leveling zones which means you don’t ever get to Argus while leveling. It’s about the same today.
@@lordhughmungus Legion introduces so many characters that appear in Dragonflight. Khadgar, Senegos, Kalecgos, Ebonhorn, the rest of the Aspects, etc. And from a new player perspective they do a decent job of telling you who those players are. I don't disagree that BFA's zones were better, but in my comment, I said that new players would have to play through them eventually. Legion and then BFA is honestly the perfect middle-ground for new players' leveling in the game. You learn all of the major lore characters, get interesting campaigns, and you really don't need much prior backstory because a lot of it is explained as you progress. I agree that it's not perfect for an introduction, but it would be the best thing they could do until they do a full revamp of the old world.
@@lordhughmungus The Horde side relies very heavily on your character already being an established and well-known hero - which simply isn't the case for a character who's been around for only an hour or so. On the Alliance it's a bit tamer, but you're still much more important than you have any right to do. At level 110, yes. Or at whatever the current max level minus 10 is. But not at level 10 or even level 1.
Aside from acquiring the weapons the legion leveling is pretty bad. None of the zones are standouts. Say what you want about WoD but it absolutely mopped the floor with Legion’s four questing zones.
I'd love it if they made an ultra condensed questline that basically summarizes each expansion, then once you finish them all you get boosted to the newest expansion level to continue on with everyone else in the current content.
I'd love a "world tour" you go help the Bronze dragons or something and they send you through to experience the different times on WoW and you get a feel for each story and then bam, you're off to the current xpac
Ooooh love this idea
I think having a questline where you travel with chromie through the various xpacks is a good idea, however I don't think it should be the default 1-60 experience. After exiles reach you should just have a brand new high quality modern with plenty cutscenes and voice acting questline that takes you from 10-60 that will effectively put a new character on a similar level as our current characters that are 'champions of azeroth' and from there you can jump into whatever the newest xpack is.
You don't need to make new zones, infact i think it'd be better if they just reused old zones for this and update them to modern standards in the process.
I kinda hate it.
@@dlld77Better yet, renove Exiles Reach.
100% agree. All the portals spoil us, we need to get back to boat and zeppelin travel. This is an RPG. We already have hearthstones, mages and warlocks for this. Make Azeroth feel big again.
Also I think that wow leveling needs to have a Story Mode or just free roam leveling mode, Story Mode puts you through the main story of all the expansions at a rapid pace that you can later explore fully on your own.
Finally I think leveling needs to be more challenging. There is nothing prestigious to easily constantly grind big groups of mobs for quests or rush through dungeons without stopping. My greatest leveling memories was where I had to group up for a quest or struggled with a dungeon
As someone that's played since the beginning, I still find myself making a new character and immediately run to the call board and just leveling through the old world
On top of everything else with Chromie Time being very jarring for new players, old zone quests are VERY prone to bugs. The typical go here kill x are fine of course but countless number of quests that use some form of scripting for the events are likely to fail because of all the small tweaks added to the game slowly unraveling the spaghetti code of the old worlds. Just yesterday I decided to level an Undead for the new heritage armor in 10.1.7. Lilian Voss quests towards the end had her despawning fairly often, Agatha in Silverpine forest is suppose to grant you water walking when you go to kill the Gilneans in the central castle but now only appears after you engage in combat with one AFTER swimming there. These are just two ive seen recently but as an avid leveler and someones whos been playing since I was a legitimate child, its apparent that this applies to nearly every pre-WoD zone. Even Legion era quests are prone to these sorts of things. These were just two examples but general glitches like mobs that wander a shoreline are fairly likely to glitch to the bottom of the map, or Rares invading where they use to be able to reach you. I really do believe doing a World revamp would be perfect and even giving the option to Chromie Time to previous era zones would be great for those that want to revisit those stories.
Yeah I was leveling in outland and was trying to kill the Gan'arg servents and I would instant die when they died. I was kind of confused because there was no debuffs or mechanics of the quest that would explain that. I could just be an idiot but I submitted a bug report and it seems fixed.
@@Tyradriknows they explode when at low health in ~melee range, there is an emote that should precede it, and the classic dynamite sound effect, for big damage
*emote not elite!
@@samwise1790 It was me being an idiot then thanks for letting me know!
@@Tyradriknows If it makes you feel better, I ran into that earlier myself; pulled a second group without thinking and had about two seconds of "how am I dying?" before, well, dying to the explosion from the last one. XD
The plants vs zombies quest is also messed up with scaling, the final enemy MASSIVELY scales with your level, luckily so do your "Cherry bombs", but the boss has like, 4x the hp he's meant to have
Wel at least Crendor is using green screen technology from 2005
2:18 "I don't even think blizzard knows what story they're telling"
I don't follow the game lore that closely but this is how I feel lol. it kinda seems like they're trying to make it super complex and interesting in the hopes that it would make it good, but... that doesn't automatically make it good haha
I preferred it when they just ripped every piece of fiction in history off.
You have Arthurian legend, germanic paganism, Native American legend, feudal Japan, and Egyptians all put into a blender and then whisked vigorously with a dash of alien conspiracies, handful of lovecraftian horrors, and of course a hefty helping of judaeo-christian symbolism.
If you look at it all at once it’s kind of like when you mix every colour together and get shit brown every-time. Wow is big enough for you to narrow the scope of what you’re paying attention to, though.. Gotta keep ‘em separated.
Yea, I really loved the true classic WoW experience.... before they did the accelerated lvl experience and make every elites to normal and making enemies half HP.
I just don't understand the rush to max lvl, all you do are dailys, dungeons, raid or PvP. Without lore and world attachment, people won't stay.
First time around, sure. But for alts - I just want them levelled. Especially if its going to be my new main for whatever reason.
It’s not even a rush, it still takes fucking forever. It’s more that it’s just this pointless treadmill where you kill stuff over and over just to make a number get bigger. Leveling up and getting gear doesn’t feel meaningful because everything scales and everything feels the same. If anything you feel weaker as you level up… You really aren’t meaningfully interacting with any game systems or gear that you acquire.
A better new player experience would also serve as a great re-introduction for players who have been away for a while or for people picking up old toons.
I mean it feels like they took your advice and added "DRAGONS! ZOMBIE DRAGONS!"
Something for new players: Chromie Time doesn't even offer vanilla zones (unless you pick Cata, but if you're new you don't know this) to get people into the story. You leave Exile's Reach and hit the gates of SW, they tell you to find Chromie, and she wants to send your noob ass to Kul Tiras without any idea who the heck they are much less the factions that inhabit SW or Org. Maybe combine that with your idea of a Barrens-esque zone to help ease new people into the world.
(Unpopular opinion) but I honestly miss the days before the lvl crunch. I actually liked lvling to lvl 120 because with that, even with older expansions like lvling from 85 to 90 in pandaria, you basically had to do most all the expansion to get enough exp to get to a lvl to move on to the next zone / expansion. Sure, sometimes you didnt finish all of the zones but it did give you enough to know the story. I started in the middle of Wrath times and I was able to get the story behind Classic zones and BC. I didnt lvl through all of it but I understood it and was attached to the characters and story and in turn my character who has been through it all. I also miss the fact that you had to walk for those zones until a certain lvl and then you could fly, like even if you had done it you HAD TO be lvl 90 again on any alt to fly in pandaria. It felt more like a journey then just zipping around to the next spot and blasting through the zones.
Yep exactly. You had to explore everywhere to become the top tier player. And that just makes sense to me. You want to be the top G? Earn it. Retail feels like its this incredible rush to get to the level cap, and they get you there fast. You can be a casual and get to the cap in under a week. That is beyond stupid. They built this massive world to explore and thousands of quest lines and little bits of lore and then you have absolutely zero reason to explore it. They violated game design mechanics 101. I don't give a shit about the end game and gear maxing. I want to have fun. The game is devoid of it now.
I'm giving Classic a run before I totally sign this off as a dead game. It's depressing though, I used to absolutely love the game in my teens and 20s. Now in my 30s coming back for the nostalgia hit and just saying to myself "look at how the massacred my boy". Not surprised given how shit Blizzard has become as a company.
What i love about classic wow is the sense of progression and the leveling journey. You spend such long periods of time in each zone and that makes you love them. And every level/green piece of gear feels like a milestone
I think the best option would be something like Tali's "Path of the Curator" idea. It would include all the things you talked about, hopefully in a way that gives new players a bit of freedom, while still keeping them on a path where they get all of the major lore and mechanics that they'll need, and then at the end, before sending them off into the newest expac, making sure they know about going back to old content so they can do that for the future, maybe giving little breadcrumbs of various old storylines that they could go and experience later.
As someone who just leveled 2 alts to 70 just this week in different timelines/expansions I actually like the leveling system. I'm not a new or returning player, tho, so I absolutely see your point: Magni calling a new player Champion of Azeroth and they going " ... but I just got here" is kinda crazy.
The lore part of the new player experience can be fixed really easily tbh. Just make a short questline or even a cutscene that goes through what happened in the past and what's the current threat. The bronze dragons aside, we literally have Lorewalker Cho that would be *perfect* for explaining this stuff!
From there expand a bit on Chromie time and have it available from the start instead of tossing them in BFA, saying "alright nerd, you're still new and a weakling, so before we get you to the new stuff, choose a place from what the past that you want to level in and experience the story of the time" of course still having the option to switch if you want to. I'd say also change the Chromie time ending part a bit; give the option for people to continue their journey until they finish all the quests that they want from said timeline, and just tell them they won't get experience if they continue to play through it(or get reeeally small amounts of it) - I've seen so many complaints that people just want to finish up their storyline quest and get tossed out of it at like halfway through or the end.
Hell, they can even make leveling slower, BUT have the *option* for alts to gain more xp and have it go up to like 3-5x or something for each alt you have. Players that have only 1 character get to still enjoy it, and those with alts will still go on their altoholic journey. The most important thing would be to have it as a toggle tbh.
11:30 the problem is you just described exactly what you just said was bad a few minutes ago. At the start of expansions all your borrowed power stuff from before gets removed and you basically start over .
The biggest problem I can see for a new player is having no idea who any other faction leaders are. Exile's Reach falls into the same problem alot of WoW content does and that is the location is forever stuck in the time of what ever that current content was. A lvl 10 - 50 experience is really needed that actually properly introduces the player to the major factor characters and not just "Oh hello Champion" as if a freshly made Exile's Reach character has been best buddies with Jaina and that player knows exactly who she is and what she does.
World of Warcraft feels like if you told your little brother how to play Final Fantasy 7 and then just immediatly booted them right before Aerith's death.
Love u long time.
just like this, started recently with my gf and i played back in classic times. Welevel up within the first area of bfa and a few dungeons with quests to 60 and for her it was just overwhelming. In the earlier times leveling was an adventure and part of the game and professions for example were cool while leveling too and you learned you class step by step so you can get familiar
In retail, at all points of leveling, there should be threat of dying to mobs. To make you have to play your class, not overpull and pay attention. Having to use defensives can be fun and learning combos to overcome things or level faster. When you can 1v1 a mob safe, or pop
Some cooldowns and play your class to kill a bunch all at once makes leveling more fun and interesting
That actually exists while leveling to a certain extent; the character I'm working on now got to 50 and had their XP gains locked; until I hit roughly 150 ilevel, there was actually a frequent risk of death if I pulled more than one or two enemies at once. After that point, I can fight something like 6 enemies at once (depending on the enemies) and still be around half-health.
exactly, i came to level 67 didn’t have to use my defensives once
I think WoW needs to either massively lengthen the leveling process (but with increased experience gains for alts like how heirlooms used to work) or to remove leveling entirely. The system needs to change and that is going to require serious innovation on the part of Blizzard, because I don’t think its current trajectory is able to sustain much, if any, growth. WoW needs to be about the journey (grouping, meeting players, leveling up, learning your class through trial and error), or about the endgame (totally irrelevant level-up experience, new content only for max level characters in max level zones, etc.). It can’t be both, which it feels like it’s trying to be right now.
While I agree that classic WoW is not strictly “better” than the current game, I think the overall experience of playing the game, especially as a newbie, was. This has many factors, from poor competition at the time, lack of information about the game so everything felt new, etc., but I think the biggest reason is that everyone was experiencing the same game at the same time, regardless of time spent in game. Also sharding didn’t exist so the world felt more alive, which made grouping up and learning the game alongside other new players realistic and a very common experience.
I honestly don’t know how Blizzard can fix this issue without some sort of massive overhaul, game reset, or sequel at this point; but I do have some hope. Exile’s Reach seems to be a very solid step in the right direction at least.
I’ve recently introduced my friend to WoW, and decided for us play through Classic WOTLK rather than retail for her first time.
The simplicity and immersion of Classic makes it so much better for new players.
In Retail, being able to take a boat across the ocean and be whipped back 15 years into the past is so jarring especially for new players.
“i was just talking to King Anduin in SW, and now he’s… 12?”
The fact that the new game spans over such a long time period ruins the “World” of Warcraft. Rather than having a grand, complex world to explore and experience, the game becomes a mash of different time periods, dead mechanics, and story lines that end in abandoned raids.
It’s so hard to immerse myself into the world when everything feels so artificial. nothing makes sense and everything scales to your benefit. Leveling a new character on Retail feels like some sort of simulation of a story, rather than the immersive journey of past WoW. (this comes from someone with no nostalgia for classic, because i was a toddler in those times)
I think that's a huge reason for why the modern game feels so weird and different imo: It feels like we see too far behind the curtain now and that there's no sense of "being" in the world of Azeroth anymore, it feels like I'm just playing a regular videogame and dopamine simulator instead. The immersion or sense of adventure over time has slipped and especially when so many anachronisms or incongruities happen, especially simultaneously, it chipped away at the immersion and became something very different and more artificial.
FFXIV's been a game for 10 years but I believe the entirety of the main story only actually covers around 1-2 years of in-game time (though it's not explicitly stated, it's what people have gathered from a lot of different contexts and sources). There's a time skip of 5 in game years from 1.0, but that allowed a certain "reset" in a way that was similar to Cataclysm but felt far more coherent and sets the stage better for a clean slate for a new player to start in (Especially as they go back consistently enough to tweak the 2.0 leveling and main story experience)
So here was my thing- I got into WoW at the end of Cataclysm because one of my friends was at max level and he played the game a lot.
In retail (comparing this to my very short lived time WoW classic) it definitely felt like a solo experience. My friend would come by and show me a mount, but this one could fly. Holy crap did Ryan look cool as hell. I wanted to impress him to a degree for sure. I started as a warlock, I enjoyed the game because of how much stuff there was and frankly, I appreciated the leveling zones because of the structure of where to go next and while I didn’t understand basically any of the story until I got to Northrend, I still enjoyed the game. And even the smallest things that would be taken for granted, I remember Ryan showing me the portal to Lorderon (not gonna look up names, this is already such a long comment) and I was gobsmacked. There was more to this game?? And then holy shit there’s a secret elevator in this crypt thing which goes down to this oozing green undercity? And this zeppelin took me to this huge city with a ton of players just like Ryan and I wanted to be there. But did I meet anyone near my level or did anyone in Orgrimmar talk to me? Nope. But I just thought I just needed to get to max level and then I’d be able to contribute and then I’d be important.
I think I got to 85 or somewhere near it, switched to a rogue, had a randomly generated name which I still use today for other characters and that rogue was my baby. Played through the rest of the expansions with my guy. But despite rising through the levels, Ryan didn’t want to play with me past coming and visiting to show off a new mount every once and a while. And why would he, he had more important things to be doing. I wanted to be useful. And be appreciated.
I was still finding pretty zones and enjoying finding everything so fresh- stepping into the outlands at 60 was still a magical experience for me. Ganking that one guy over and over in outlands then turning invisible and doing it again- was like the most social thing I had done with another player outside of a dungeon finder. At one point I was more interested in using the old mount glitch where you can clip into geometry if you’re under a steep enough ledge to get out of bounds more than anything else because I could go do some more leveling. Ok. I could go and do a dungeon finder and maybe get some better loot which… sure. I could do PVP which while fun when you’re at low to mid levels becomes painfully bogged down by the best PvP players in the game soon enough. But my friend Ryan actually was like interested for a second. I had something new to show. The last time was when I found out about glyphs in inscription and he liked that.
I played Classic for a bit, and holy crap- someone decided to help me do something. Which I don’t know if you know, had basically never happened in my previous experience. Sadly I didn’t play a ton of Classic because it would definitely suck the rest of my time up like it did before, but it was still crazy to find someone else who was like, a real player, who wanted to help me cross a canyon and kill a harpy or two.
I don’t think the new leveling experience should have anything to do with the story. Or dragon flight. Or anything else. But it should have people to play with. I’m not sure if Ryan is still playing the game today, but last time we talked he was doing Mythic BFA stuff and when I was finally at max level and finally leveling near him- Ryan still didn’t want to play with me, because his guild had an optimized leveling strategy and I would be slowing them down. So legitimately, just give players a reason to talk to each other. Because the world of Warcraft feels a lot smaller when you realize everyone is an NPC.
As a wow newbie in the last 2 years, the first time I made it to max level within BFA I felt empty. I was confused, Wow has 20 years of content and I was already max level after such a short time and never even touched the old continents? Retail wow is in such a rush to level everyone to max to try the new content, so much old content is skipped. I end up playing classic/wrath to get the old wow experience.
Edit: Honestly I really wish we had a way to port our max level characters from wrath to retail, so I could start from the beginning.
On the story I really like how they tell "the story so far" of an expansion in the quest log and they sort quests by their importance to the core story or key unlocks. I remember that "story so far" thing being really visible in BFA but haven't noticed it in dragonflight though.
People will hate it but WoW needs a soft reset like Warhammer Fantasy moving to Age of Sigmar. Keep the art style, keep the mechanics and play style but stick it into a new game. Say Azeroth wakes up, the planet blows up and start the lore from scratch.
Or parallel reality. Or just no lore explanation.
Yeah I did like the idea of choosing which ever expac you wanted to level in BUT im not a new player so did forget to factor that in! Plus it does take away from simply exploring Azeroth as I did when I first started playing ten odd years ago... i really enjoyed that, hope they bring back the whole wandering around and finding these interesting places to level!
Unironically I think vanilla wow from era/vanilla, bc, and wotlk are far more noob-friendly and much more *rewarding* and better structured as new player/leveling experiences. If I had to recommend someone "getting into WoW" now for the first time, I'd unironically think of asking them to play on a classic server to experience the "magic" so many of us did that got us hooked in the first place.
The stories were simple, but it really felt like YOUR journey through all this, through all these places and experiences.
These days, they want it to be YOU being the main character, a la WoL in FF14, but you're always put on the backseat for the sameish roster of popular and powerful characters.
Not having a Main Story Quest throughline for any real leveling experience in WoW aside from the past expansion or two is kind of a huge miss when they do want to expedite the process and just usher you into endgame. FFXIV ironically does the same, but it's questing/leveling experience is a curated, crafted experience the developers want you to go through so that when you do hit endgame, everyone has the same context and skills for what happens next. And there's little rush to catch up and rush through all the main story quests, because it's an RPG, and half the fun of it (imo and lots of people playing) was to actually have a story and experience unfold over time.
Even then, a GOOD CHUNK of WoW's own stories and experiences no longer exist in the game, or never existed in the game in the first place. Almost every single expansion transition, especially back in the day, was only ever really explained in detail in novels outside of the game's purview. Wanna know why we're going to WoD? Read this book instead. I think that's a huge shame and disservice to a lot of really great lore, world building, and characters, and we should have had those events in the game itself in the first place.
I think that's why FFXIV's leveling experience is still preferable to me, because like 95% of the lore and reasons things happen on and off screen are all in the game and explained in the game's own content. I never had to go outside of the game to either see where to go next or why something happened or what I was missing in terms of story/lore/characters.
I love your idea of a secondary quest zone, similar to durotar (although i will always choose tirsfal glad>silverpine over any other early game leveling experience)
Blizzard needs to make a way for new players to choose their leveling experience. Idk i haven't played in YEARS and i have no idea what its like rn.
While this would take a lot of work, I think this would be cool:
A new leveling experience, where you can choose one of three options: 1. You go to exiles reach and from there BFA. 2. You start at your race’s level king zone and then when you reach level 10 do Chromie time. 3. A new leveling experience with new zones and a story that gets you from 1-60 with the updated lore, and gives players hints of the next expansion. But have it also be dealing with the dragons in some way, so that way at level 60 you can transition into the dragon isles. Then just have whatever the next expansion is after DF release and the new players are caught up on the lore and the characters that will be relevant in that expansion! ^.^
As a new player, you should choose - Start at level 1 and progress, slowly trough all the expansions in order or start at level 60 and go straight to the new expansion. That's it.
While he was talking, I wrote 5 different ways to potential fix it as well, but deleted them all because of too many unsolvable problems. The only reoccurring theme for me was some sort of great reset. I will say this though, while leveling I do dislike the scaling of mobs to your lvl the way it's in the game currently. It always feels like its the same exact threat of failure or death every time (virtually none), which makes it quite boring, IMO. One of my favorite, and most memorable parts of vanilla, is stepping into a new zone or a new area of a zone, and wondering if maybe I should not be there.
The biggest issue is that the wow team is too afraid to expect a new player to spend more than 2 hours of /played leveling without quitting the game. which ironically is what creates a bad experience and why they quit
Blizzard needs to sit down and think about every step of the way in the matter of lvling experience, they need to revamp the entire old world, and come to a conclusion already on where players go as they lvl, and remake the quests entirely, instead of all these plasters on bullet wounds they have been doing with lvling, like Chromie time, Exiles reach, and speeding up lvling astronomically so we don't notice how shit the content is. All of the stated things should be scrapped entirely and they should conclude what to do, slow lvling down again and make it worth it by actually making the questing good. Oh and also just throw all the portals everywhere away, they kill the importance and uniqueness of mages, and with dragon flying coming everywhere eventually, even revamping the old world to be bigger would not even be a problem as we get to fly many times faster than the original 310% we have had for so long.
as much as it would suck to have a very long cinematic at the start of the game for a new player it would be nice if they had one telling the story of wow with what happened in the world before the time in which exiles reach takes place and then another after and then after the cinematic after they give you the choice of "Relive the time in which something in the cinematic happed" or "Proceed into the current time"
Got in just before burning crusade dropped and loved questing from Duratar to the Barrens, into Mulgor to connect with my brother’s Tauren Shaman, and catching the Zeppelin to Taren Mill and OMG THESE FORSAKEN ARE HELLA SKETCHY. Tried the new player experience for Legion and there was zero challenge.
I remember at the start of Cataclysm you became INSANELY overpowered very quick. Like you could do the first few quests of the expansion and you would literally TOWER over people with Wrath gear. Those first few days of PVP were absolutely insane, getting one shot in full raid gear by some dweeb that had like 5 greenies from cata
your right about getting weaker. when u hit dragonflight on your toons that played shadowlands you are geared enough to blow thru the beginning of a new expansion, but if u go and level a new toon you hit the new expansion so undergeared that it can be a struggle early on
the feelin when you get in the deeprun tram WAS AMZING!
Next expansion should be something wild go revitalize world of warcraft for another decade. I might be high on hopium but something about a new continent beyond the waves from Kalindor, with a new faction led by Nightsquall the Night Elf pirate that welcomes any race onto the faction, even maybe a bi faction system at some point, but making the alliance and horde still separated like it is today. Then with the complete rework of the old world, going in phases over the next few years, creating a new 0-100 levelling system, going over the levelling experience of the different races and zones, bringing them to today in the new lore standard, like northrend and pandaria and outlands and everything, reworked and re-released, over the next decade, bringing stuff to the new age slowly. Dunno
People have been saying this for a while but I honestly think at this point, almost 20 years in, there needs to be a new game. Revamp everything, write a new singular cohesive story so we can start at the beginning again and not wonder what the hell is going on. The game itself could use another makeover and new mechanics, people don't even read the quests. The whole experience just feels dated, even the new stuff they put out. They're stuck in 2004. Just basically trash it and do something new.
Ever since they've done the first Ilvl squish nothing has been the same. It hasn't gotten better ever since.
I definitely don't think the game needs to be made any easier, to have any more hand-holding, or any more convenient and streamlined. I think we've gone far enough in that direction, by a long way.
Wow would benefit from horizontal progression, same as GW2.
Probem is that Cata exists and it replaced original.
It's got to be a revamp of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Group zones into threes or fours e.g. Tirisfal/ Silverpine /Hillsbrad or Elwynn/ Westfall/ Duskwood.
Add rewards at the end of the grouped zone quests, such as a zone mount or transmog, but keep the level squish.
Build up a baddie amd keep the same NPCs throughout these stories so you get to know them. Introduce big lore characters in the stories, they could appear once or twice but would give some context for more recent expansions.
Think this would be engaging and retain new players and there would be more replayabilty for new characters/ players, with incentive for existing players to level alts through the zones.
Biggest roadblock for new players is monthly subscription in 2023 when most games are free to play with microtransactions. Also WoW has those. And also new expansions cost as much as an AAA game.
They need to just remove Exile's Reach. It's a terrible tutorial.
When I started as a very late joiner in 2017, the main problem I encountered was not being able to do all the content in order and understand the story properly:
-I finished classic. I killed C'thun. Ok. What now? What was the story of classic? All the revamped classic zones talk about the cataclysm and Deathwing, yet the raids have nothing to do with that.
-In Burning Crusade and in Wrath is very easy to misunderstand the "right order" of the dungeons and raids. If you don't carefully study the patch order, you might kill Kael'thas in Magister's Terrace before Tempest Keep, for example. Wrath felt pretty linear and well told at least.
-In pandaria I encountered a big problem. Most of the story came from cinematics that you have to find on CZcams. When I first entered the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I have no idea what was going on. The place was destroyed? Why?
-Similar case with Battle for Azeroth. I didn't do the whole Darkshore battle intro, suddenly Teldrassil is burned, Undercity is gone too, and all I find are random NPC's referencing events I didn't witness.
You end up having to rely on many wiki and lore sites. I had a lot of trouble understanding Illidan's whole journey. Or why Khadgar was so important. And now, with new players randomly being thrown in Battle for Azeroth and then Dragonflight, they must be lost as hell.
The problem is how to solve the issue of old content being, well... Old, thus having little support from Blizzard, since they want the new zones to be the focus. Some mentioned FF14's method of having a main storyline. It would be ideal to find a way to make the whole game relevant and not just the latest random island from the new expansion. I see they're cooking something with all these return to old dungeons stuff though.
Someone who just started does Exiles Reach -> BFA -> DF. Once we get to next expansion it will be ER -> DF -> New Expac. Once we have that 90% of the levelling concerns are resolved. As for the old content, that does tend to be for veteran players with enough interest to go back, but DF does a good job of teaching history thru its story. I do like your idea for ER2 though, just another sorta timeless exploration zone with a self contained plot about to level 20 that keeps teaching them about the game. Funny thing is, Exile's Reach actually has as second island landmass that goes totally unused - that night elf / forsaken area. Funny enough, that's the heritage armor races coming up, right?
WoW could benefit from a personal story system like guildwars 2 has, something that is all about your character that transcends whatever expansions are available at any time
Yes. After a three year absence from GW2, I'm back, and reading the personal journal really helped. Also back in WoW after six months, and would like a journal to read here, too.
I was one of the people that got lost with the portals. I was in progressing through Kul Tiras when I got the portals unlocked, I clicked in one to maybe see a description to wher it led me, I instantly got teleported to Ironforge, somehow I ended up in the Darkmoon faire, luckily I remembered that i had a Hearthstone😂
In only three more expansions the level cap will be 100 again at the current rate. Things are only downhill from there if they do the same sort of sh*t again, compressing the leveling experience even harder. They need to undo the level squish instead and just let the levels go into the thousands before squishing them again. If they really want to push everyone into the newest expansion, just reduce prices on level boosts to no more than $5 or even bundle them with newest expansions for new or returning users. Also they should copy FFXIV's roulette system to help ensure LFD and LFR for older content gets filled out.
i’m getting my boyfriend to play wow with me, and i know for a fact he’s gonna love the endgame content, but i’m really scared he won’t enjoy the leveling. i think im gonna level a character with him and we will go through legion together. wish me luck guys, whenever we get to play i will update this with how he liked it!
There are so many things that need to be fixed-- even stuff as new as the Shadowlands content is broken in multiple ways like cut-scenes freezing the game to which Blizzard Support claims addons are the culprit (they aren't, I disabled them and the screen froze. The fix was to sit there in silence for about 3 straight minutes in order to continue playing) or in xpacs as old as Wrath certain quests to get achievements like in Zul'Drak are fully unplayable without a massive amount of effort to get it to run without crashing to desktop (there are many videos on a specific quest where you enter a vehicle and it just... ends the game processes.)
More then that, the way you would play the game from a starting area is basically pointless as you'll be shoved into BFA content at level 10, be called the Champion of Azeroth, and be expect to know even the most basic story beats as if you've been playing. There are SO many references to things that make literally no sense when you have no idea what they are talking about because the content is something you were pushed to skip.
And even after all of that-- as said you only feel weaker and weaker as you level with 61-70 being a horrid slog only to then need to figure out what content to play to get gear quick enough to feel useful again. It's actual painful to play a new 70 when you're trying to farm the Insignia's for the Fyrakk stuff as it guarantees a good chunk of gear only to see someone at the same level pull 10 of the elites that nearly four shot you with a stacking dot.
I honestly wish that they would reset the story and completely change how leveling feels. You should feel progressively stronger in a world that has an actual line to walk. So many expansion could be revamped as new ones with either tweaking their existing assets or combining ideas. WoD fell flat-- so remove the worst parts of WoD and use "Alternate Draenor" to instead show past events on the continent of Outland. Bring the WoD architecture for Draenei into Azuremyst Isle and have the buildings slowly appear as the zone transitions into "modern day" after new people playing the race return. Phasing zones like Eversong, Tirisfal, Elwynn, Durotar, etc to make the world change slowly instead of hitting new players with 20+ years of lore in a short cinematic that STILL claims that Garrosh and Varian are still leading their people.
You shouldn't rush players into current day stuff when it feels the worse while also ignoring the whole of the rest of the game just bc it isn't current. It's literally saying "old stuff sucks, new stuff sucks while leveling but you at least understand most of what is going on."
A Barrens-like zone, where new players can hear the legends of Chuck Norris, and where to find Mankirk's wife.
blizzard really did replace the leveling bloat that pushed new players away with a hyper speed go go go leveling that also pushes away new players
ITs very simple, You introduce them to few location relevant tasks, and then send them under ground to a cave or a mine or a tomb to kill something and bring something back. Then you send them outside of the immediate area to continue doing that and exploring.
You dont put them on an island and make them plow through a thousand of zombies like theyre nothing and kill some very big ogres without any effort to then kill a dragon and fly directly to stormwind.
It all ties into Blizzard's mindset of the purpose of expansions. In most other MMOs, while there's that "keep playing the game" aspect obviously, there's an effort to add to the game meaningfully and permanently with that expansion. Blizzard got so increasingly comfortable with ignoring that latter part that they straight up changed the game to skip past expansions. You don't miss out on long-term activities your character engages in because only the recent expansion and its activities matters.
Portal room rant resonates sooo hard
They should revamp the old Azeroth, update it and go wild. Make all the zones (atleast the ones in planet like Northrend, Dragon Isles etc) trasitions seamless meaning you can fly anywhere. Build and add things upon it (secrets, more islands, underwater zones). In general I prefer the traditional classic gameplay but I feel there is some potential to make modern wow more open and interesting but ofc it would require work and thought put into it
i've come back to wow to play on a trial account and i honestly think trial account experience for leveling is far superior
sure you cap out at 20, but since there are no zones that you would grow out of you get to experience EVERY expansion and almost EVERY zone at an apporpriate level of difficulty
i'm literally just doing all the quests in the game for fun, and if i bought game time that would actually be harder to do in a satisfying way, i'd get overlevelled and feel pressure to move on to some higher level/end game content
i like having the freedom to do whatever, and anything that helps me feel in control of my own adventure contributes to that feeling
No, you don't need a reset, you just have to make non instanced content (world) a content and gearing of its self, and this give it gear to each expansion to it. So you can get progression in each expa., and see all the game when you want, also you can still endgame as it doesn't affect the two game modes each other.
getting lost in the portals is like having a complicated settings menu that just gets deeper and deeper and eventually you realize the exit window button is on the hearthstone cooldown
an Azeroth Revamp might actually be what is needed to revitalise the new player experience. They already got a solid Tutorial. build on that, after getting to your Capitol city. have them be directed to the quest board. there they can choose 3 different paths. each will lead you to a different set of zones that would get you up to lvl 40. then you make your way to the other continent. with 2 or 3 different paths to take, focusing on Either your own faction's part of the continent or that of the contested parts of the continent. this also allows for replayability. you can run 3 characters through the "old world" and get different stories. if you want. of course there is still chromie time. that allows you to pick up an expansion to level through. if they do with those expansions what they did with BFA, add a "msq" to the zones, the new player could easily see all of the levelling story of the expansions. maybe have them get a call to arms quest at lvl 40. where they then have to go through all of the patch content of the expansion to finish up the story.
All of this is a major time investment for the Devs but it would definitely make the new player experience WAY WAY better.
0:56 Honestly thought the first one would be the outdated monthly fee
Legion killing off tons of characters was a big mistake too, so many characters you won't ever see again. And chromie forces you to go back and make sure they die even!
Update the Old World and old dungeons to the present day with updated leveling, gotta be on the list.
Then you can do Time Campaigns, to see the old story zones of the other expansions with solo raids to show the story fully through.
I recently came back to check out wow after playing some tbc and wotlk back in the day and I found the leveling just weird. It feels like a fever dream. You can get the same reward from fighting alongside legends of alliance and horde in dreanor and from killing tigers and collecting pages in stranglehorn. It's really disconnected and because you can just do whatever and it doesn't really feel like it matter what you choose, it kinda makes you detached from the whole thing. I just do quests wherever is closest to me and spam dungeon finder to level up without really caring for any of the story. It's not like it matter anyway
I kind of feel the past couple xpacs have been lobby game focus - sit in town queue sit in town queue - boring imho. Blizz created this huge world, and it's mostly wasted expect for those that farm old content. I can't imagine how a new player would even enjoy the game being thrown in the deep end of the pool. The portal rooms are convenient, but it really ruined the sense of distance and size of the world.
How to fix it? IDK. LoTRO supposedly has a new level feature and I've heard good things about it but haven't tried it yet.
I think they should make an entire quest revamp of every expansion up to MoP.
Make the quests more about the land and the people with no connection to the major villian of the expansion.
I think this would make every questline more timeless without awkward lore contradictions, like 'who is the current warchief in this quest?'.
I know the omnipresent big bad of the expansion worked very well in Wotlk, but with so many stoylinies going around it's just confusing.
But this asks for a major efford for old content, which makes it unlikely.
I’m a new(ish) player. I got Shadowlands on sale, and I think the tutorial island could be much better. What I think would be good is a condensed campaign that goes over all the important story points, before going to the latest expansion.
I've suggested "different gearsets for each expansion" before. I'd even go so far as to suggest different levels for each one! "My BfA level is 5, My Cata level is 40". Start at L1 to 40 in a new expansion. Then each content patch raises their own level cap by 10 or 5 or whatever is appropriate (5 for Korthia, 10 for Zaralek Cavern). And your gearset in MoP isn't available in WoD (transmog is shared).
That sounds awful to be honest, who wants to keepbtrack of 10 sets of gear?
@JJJBunney001 I suppose you'd really only focus on a couple.
I am a new player to WoW and I can totally agree about portals. Generally "teleportation" in game feels outdated. And I don't mean that "old is bad" - in WoW case it feels like the system would be cool for Classic WoW - where you had like 2 big "maps" on Azeroth and small places like cities to teleport to. So you wouldn't be focused on using teleports thaaaat much as a new player. However since Classic was released 20 years passed and WoW got HUUUGE with many places and quests to explore and current ( = old ) teleportation system limits you as a new player, because you don't know where are these teleport and where are they gonna take you. And to continue on this "exploration" topic I'd love if Blizzard would "re-do" their map. Especially larger map that show several zones (not the current zone map, that one is pretty good). I'd love to see names of zones not just their outlines. I'd love to see quest markers on larger map - and I don't need exact pin on location, it can be enough with simple yellow dot telling the number of quests on each zone. That's just simple UX. And it can work well because WoW older has this "experience" but with quests tab - you can see every single quest grouped into zones, so I am asking to do the same, but visually on map so I can plan where I want to go and what to explore. This would also work MUCH MUCH better for those who use Chromie to experience the world and past stories ( I do )
I just cancelled my wow sub (new player level 21) I started noticing the enemies scaling with my level making me lose any sense of progression and fun. Diablo 4 has this issue aswell when I noticed it in WoW I was like "Uhh not this again". Personally that is my biggest issue with the game.
Also like I said I was only level 21 and already started feeling weaker than when i was level 1 because of the scaling. Like the boars in the starter area take longer for me to kill now than when I was level 1... WHY?
A prime example of how broken this system is: You go to pandaria, level there and of course, for the immersion you learn your occupation, cooking et&. As you progress you find out that the lovely things you make cannot be used, because they are all locked out until level 32, 35 and so on. So what is the point to craft your own set of armour when you cannot use it anyway until it is too late (by level 32 you get better gear as drops than you can make).
Teldrassil had around 30-35K population and Darnassus around 20-25K. Stormwind have around 200K.
I want a total reset of the world, with a bigger, more realistic scale.
Make a huge zone of Elwynn Forest, with actual villages and not 2 houses and an empty one. I hope for a "Stormwind/Elwynn, Ironforge/DunMorogh, Orgrimmar/Durotar and Thunderbluff/Mulgore" starting expansion (But at this point, there's no more "expansion" as we know them). And adding a zone per big patches with more evergreen content for each one of them, renown, random events, dailies, weeklies and at least one dungeon. Each zone is so unique and revisiting them slowly in a bigger and better way will surely satisfy my hunger for a rich interractive world that most people care about. And sure, down the line, we go back to Northrend, Pandaria, Kul'Tiras and so on. I want capital cities be hubs for adventures in specific regions. Go to Stormwind for a series of quest about trading with Booty Bay and open the tram to travel between Shadowforge and Gnomeregan when they're created later on. I want real player progression, when you gain renown with the farmers of Elwynn, you can buy a rare seed to grow in an old field in Westfall to have a carrot mount in a week or something.
I want scaling. Everywhere. Levels doesn't matter anymore but ilvl do. Let me level up anywhere and experience the game as I wish. Let me choose where I want to go, which zone I want to help, tell me a brief resume and I'm going on my own adventure.
But more importantly, I want community. No more LFG. No more LFR. No more PvP toggle, but actual zone battlefields like Tol Barad Peninsula. War effort where you queue for it to change a zone and gain a mighty temporary title, to later come back and do quests and renown in it. Yeah yeah, I'm looking at you Barrens. Sure, Alliance/Horde balance isn't always right... But I think it's time to talk about factions anyway. Mercenary is perfect for this, you live in low pop Horde but you're Horde? Go for it, help the Alliance, who cares really. It's the PvP health of servers that matters. If there's no one PvP-ing against, then what's the point of it? Shouldn't we just stick to arenas? And to that I say YES. Kind of. You can't have WoW without the Horde and the Alliance and for PvP, they must have meaning. When you choose a side to fight, you're stuck with it for a week. After that? Well, no one will stop two big server guilds to fight in a PvP Battlefield even if they're both "Alliance", but one will reprensent the Horde. And who know, maybe they'll win. And maybe, just maybe, more people will be like, yeah, the Horde is not that bad, I'll enroll Horde next week and try PvP for myself!
I really think PvP is the best place to learn a class and a must if you think of raiding. It teaches you everything you need to know because you fight something far more wiser than a punching bag (Well... most of the time anyway). You need to surpass yourself to win, learn not only what your class can do, but others. Do not stay in the fire. Protect the healers. It's way more flexible and on the spot than pressing "W" to avoid an attack from your DBM addon. It trains you to observe, process and react, something that is crucial in raiding but yet not even necessary in LFR.
I don't want power. In fact, I don't want to be able to go in any dungeon solo and one shot everything. Even if there's a juicy mount at the end. Why? Because that's why I stopped playing. I realized there's no point learning a Mythic raid with my guild to get mogs (Well, at the time, actual "power" via ilvl) or mount when I could just buy it in the BMAH a few years later or just grind the drops on 50 characters every week in 1 or 2 xpacs.
That's what evergreen is. Not a talent tree that will follow next xpac. I want the whole xpac to follow. A reason to go back to the Dragon Isle with my guildies to fight Raszageth and grind that raid until we get all the loot, and go back with new members that wants the mount or a mog and teach them how it all works in the process.
No one wants to play a game where no one interact with you. Housing could be an amazing show-off place and a perfect way to add even more loot and trophies. And heck, if you like staying and decorating your house, more power to you. But if you want stuff, you need to get out. No AH in your house. No Crafting Tables or Research desk. No free plants or rocks. Just leave a table to send NPCs you get from Renown questing so there's something to do there that doesn't require a lot of time. And when you release a few new zones, sure, add a garden and a mine where you can select what grows or what forms inside so you can collect some old resources to level up quicker without spending thousands in the AH. Craft old xmogs or some useless crap. While the AH is a wonderful place to trade with players at high level, try starting a new character and level up Engineering or Forge in Outlands. With or without the AH, you'll be done in either 1 or 2 years of daily commitment or you need to trade your soul for a few mats, and no one wants that... Except the seller, I suppose.
All in all, I really think WoW need a bigger overall than Dragonflight did. It is sure welcomed and appreciated, but the gaming industry is rapidly evolving and the WoW formula is stuck in 2004, because everything they created since is left behind each expansion, and I think it is way too late to try to fix this and go back fixing everything that was created to make it evergreen today. It is possible of course, like adding renown to the Argent Tournament why not. But at this point, better go back from the start and put all those years of knowledge into love for the basics, the starting experience, the World of Warcraft.
And as a Gnome that got so much love in all those years from the lore team, I think it's time to balance the stories too. Ya shot yourself in the foot with Allied Races imo, but hey, prove me wrong. Pandaren had a little hickup in Legion and some old god stuff in BFA, meanwhile the Night Elves are everywhere everytime and looks like they'll get a new capital before the Gnomes and Trolls that never had one in game. I mean... Come on Blizz. Show some love to the less loved. Pandaria was amazing, but now who cares. Well, the Pandaren players do. Evergreen. Do it. Give me a reason to chill in the Jade Forest with people leveling up or just doing their daily renown with Paw'don Village to unlock a rad apple tree for their home.
The newest/latest new player experience island is many years old now, and it itself feels outdated already
You should be able to level 10-max in the CURRENT expansion. Get attached to the current story so when you hit max level you aren't completely lost.
WOW is just straight up too big. The game has been going on for twenty years. You have to restart the whole world to truly clean it up.
A game starts you off strong, the gameplay is easy, you are blazing through and then slowly you get weaker in relation to the enemies and have to use your new skills and everything you learned to beat them and eventually you have to defeat a very hard boss at the end.
What are you talking about " in videogames you start weak and become strong" Its the other way around!
I'm essentially a new player [dabbled about 6 years ago for a few months]. With my unofficial main toon I shut off experience gaining at Lvl59 so I can [at least try] to enjoy some content from 2017 through present. Currently it feels like hitting top level is really the beginning of the middle game, with iLvl415-20 the beginning of the endgame. I've been cheating by using Chromie time to get scaling to lvl60 in older content, but why not just let players set scaling to max level for all zones?
Ff14 making ARR free was a great decision. You can play everything, feel no pressure to sub, or time pressure to finish it, feel the leveling experience, then decide if you want to play more. If wow did something similar and just made progress up to some expansion free I’m sure more people would try it.
As a player who started playing in 2024, I was having a lot of fun leveling through the old content but then when I hit 60, it forced me to go to Dragonflight and I stopped having fun instantly.
Your example of a new player in Pandaria is exactly what happened to me. I had made a monk and wanted to play Mists of Pandaria because it felt like my own epic martial arts story. Suddenly I could not continue the Pandaria quests even if I wanted to because I had hit max level. Everything was suddenly way too low level there and all the quests were basically hidden from me. I quit then. The game wanted me to move on to BFA but I had no interest in that.
Yeah honestly they need to do what GW2 does and just make All content relevant. No more level increases, just a set max level, and you can go through Any bit of content you want. Everything is relevant, and maybe the best possible gear is just Always from whatever Raid and Dungeons are brought in with the new xpac. But, it doesn’t mean you’re overpowered to hell in other stuff.
I really think the world revamp is the way to go. Start by updating chunks of the world. Example. Lordaeron, new endgame area for both ally and horde, covers tirisfal, eastern/western PL and like silverpine n alterac. Then also update Elwynn Westfall and Duskwood for alliance to be the sort of "barrens" area you describe, and for horde update barrens, durotar and maybe stonetalon. Then go about updating the rest of the world as you go.
Also I think they should remove portals as much as they can, replace it with boats/ zepplins and add dragonriding to the old world, which is already super fast and fun!
In Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, they had an area called Eureka where you had all your endgame skills and stuff, but you were "reset" to level 1, and had to grind a new form of XP called "Elemental XP". However, this was an optional side-content area, rather than the core content. Making something like that a full-blown expansion sounds like an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how well it would go over.
the barrens zone would be a good idea too in my opinion. accelerated acquisition of skills but also detailed quest and tutorialization of all that is expected to be done by a character in a group. this could be its own closed off story. shamans get special quests about totems, rogues about poisons and CCs etc etc so you learn what your spec is about. after this you should be able to do the normal level dungeons in a group setting in the latest expansion with the expectation you can perform your duty (tank/heal/dps but also utility like bloodlust or interrupting or dodging aoe's)
the barrens zone would have its own story which gets resolved at the end of the map, and it doesnt need to be world breaking end of times tier either, as you are just starting out the stakes should be WAY down
afterwards you should get a cutscene where the plots of the latest expansion are explained so you can come out swinging with that expansion right away. the benefit being that if the next expansion eventually comes out, you just need to make a new cutscene explaining wtf is going on, and just swap them out
I agree with there needing to be another set leveling track between exile's reach and whatever the latest expansion is. I guess you can still have the option to do the previous expansions if you want to, but it should heavily recommend this new tailored leveling. It needs to be its own tailored thing because the leveling pace just doesn't fit previous expansions, and plus the stories from previous expansions would just be confusing to new players. The tailored experience can maybe be like a caverns of time-esque set piece of like 1 or 2 zones that is calculated to give you a story that wraps up in the amount of time it takes you to get to the latest expansion starting level. To help introduce relevant characters you can have them do cameos of main characters here and there, but the story should be pretty satisfying standing and wrapping up on its own.
We are talking about the game's future, since it's a niche game with an aging playerbase. The solutions to reviving WoW and securing it's future are:
-No corporate overlords dictating to Blizzard how much/what type of/when content is to be released
-WoW 2 / reset the game (have a teleport to a "garrison" where you can bring party/raid members to look at your accomplishments in WoW 1 and a huge storage with unlimited pages to put legacy items in)
-Get rid of monthly subscriptions by tying subscriptions to Seasons
-Get rid of the WoW token while reinstating GM's into the game while improving the anti-cheat system as bots/hackers continue to find new ways to break the game
These steps are controversial, radical what have you but need to happen to make WoW hype again.
pretty simple. stop locking f2p to lvl 20, just let people get to max lvl and do any story, only lock the newest expansions/ behind a sub fee
wow classic leveling experience is actually pretty dope so maybe retail should just copy classic :D
They need to just remove leveling (Note that I said leveling, not power progression or questing, I will get back to this after the next point), Pandora's box is opened there is no way to fix it without taking steps back which would cause a collective meltdown as well as problems. What they need to do is what they did with flying, flying was added to the game, this had a negative impact because WoW as a whole was not created with flying in mind, this is why flying needed to be disabled in all instanced content, BGs, new expansions, etc. however by the time they realized what a colossal screw up a TBC gimmick caused Pandora's box had already been opened. WoD _tried_ closing the box but it was a disaster, and because flying, which was shortsightedly made a core game feature years back, the fact it _had_ to be disabled every expansion and a pathfinder put in, it left a sour taste in everyone's mouth except a small subset of classic boomers such as myself who could just deal with it and didn't mind. How did Blizzard fix this? Instead of trying to close Pandora's box, they just completely embraced their feature and began to integrate and design around it in the process removing the bad feature and leaving a good one. Except again that small sub-set, not unlike the classic boomers who were fine with no flying when they tried that.
So why remove leveling? Well, leveling as already effectively removed. A no-lifer can get a max character in a day or two, and even a casual won't be more than a week unless they are only playing like 30 mins a day or something. "Fixing" leveling would require nerfing dungeon EXP and slowing down the actual leveling process, both things that can't be done without causing tons of issues. What they _can_ do however, is remove leveling and tie power progression behind questing. Maybe you get a talent point for each zone major questline you do, or some minor stat boosts for other stuff, or however they want to do it. Transmog, mounts, etc. can all be tied to this too. Then, questing actually becomes a new branch of the game and not some obstacle to the "real game" that people pass and leave an empty world everyone ignores after hitting the "real game". If say the Ring of Blood rewarded a stat increase, you can bet your ass people would be going to Nagrand to do that content. Or maybe finishing a quest chain in a zone rewarded you with a talent point, you can bet people would be out in the world doing the quests in the zones.
"But players would ask to join end game raids at level one!" - Not an issue, how often do they invite people in questing greens that hit max level yesterday to mythic raids? People _will_ gatekeep the same way they do with gear at max level.
"But leveling is part of the classic RPG experience!" - Blizzard and WoW (as well as other games and companies) have broken a lot of these "rules" in the past and been fine. I would argue the system I propose better itches that old school power progression than _current_ leveling where mobs scale with you and you actively feel weaker as you level does.
"But the story!" -And how would this system mess up the story any more than it is? Presumably a massive change like this would come with a world revamp, where they can make evergreen stories for the earlier zones, and then have you talk to Chromie or whoever to travel to Outland/Draenor/etc. and do that.
"People will do them all and run out of stuff to unlock!" -How is that different to now? At least there is more incentive to go out in the world, even if long time players and sweats compete everything. Presumably there would be a cap on the power progression and the continued questing would be for transmog and mounts and other such stuff. Since I (and many others) believe asking a player to do the quests in every zone from vanilla-DF (and beyond) is unreasonable.
Just some thoughts.
I liked the new starting zone ... once. Doing it multiple times is just a slog and I hate it. It's a very pretty zone, but the way it holds your hand the whole time even if you don't need it is just not enjoyable. Like, I don't need the NPC to make me spam my ONE ability 5 times slowly, several minutes after I've already been using it in other quests, to get how the ability works.
Im a cata kid. I was so annoyed how fast i outleveled zones and quest chains....like my quest log would have 20 quests for hillsbrad foot hills but i was ready for arathi basin, and i felt so disconnected from that zone because there was no "lead in" to it. I just wasnt getting XP so i looked for zones where if get XP. Then suddenly i was ready for BC stuff, get halfway through hellfire and im basically ready for wrath content, so a couple zones in wrath and suddenly cata content
New players want THE STORY OF THE GAME. At least i did, way back when. Thankfully i got to experience catas story. Playeded through mop, got mops story...and i quit playing. Came back for BFA some time later, and the issue was WORSE..
Give players a way to experience the story of wow, to get invested in the world. Idk how best to go about it if.
Exile's reach "runs" you through a dungeon. Ostensibly to teach you. But personally i always hated being run through a dungeon by a higher level guildie. It robbed me' of any sense of achievement. A reset, yes back to level 1 but let them keep their gear as cosmetic gear. Add a system to allow people to gradually enchant/up grade their now cosmetic gear, new world new quests new upgradable gear.