Scaling Scaling Scaling. Enough already!

[Amerissis]

Both of which are totally irrelevant. What matters is whether it does to Blizzard.

Uhm, yes, and whether it does to Blizzard is determined by what the majority of their customers want. So what he and I think, matters.

[Rafoel]

Yep, really. Individual Player =/= Playerbase. If you personally don't like something, that's your thing. It wouldn't be there if the majority of players (i.e., playerbase) didn't like it.

By this logics any change ever made to the game was bad.

The specific amount of people played WoW at any given time. They played, so they liked it. Then every change is liked by some part of playerbase, but hated by other part, even if small. Then, every change is alienating the part of the playerbase.

Which is of course false. The best example is flying.

[Ere]

I hate every single thing scaling has brought to this game.

100% agree. Scaling is killing this game.

[Battlebeard]

I generally like Scaling.

I love Raiding and a the gameplay of this game. It's nice to cooperate many people and kill bosses, with using this key-bind ability system. That is what makes WoW great.

But I HATE leveling, gearing and all other RPG elements. I would just like a game with no levels, no gear, where you got raid-ready day 1, and the game would focus on raidbosses only, and not all RP bs.

I LOVED Challenge Modes, since it scaled down gear, you were ready for them quite fast and basically only skill was rewarded.

More scaled stuff! Gear should matter less!

[Ere]

I LOVED Challenge Modes, since it scaled down gear, you were ready for them quite fast and basically only skill was rewarded.

Lol. Scaling was so bad in challenges that you got to farm bis gear to get decent times, before blizz soft nerf them with their class buffs in future patches when even potatobrainers can run them 3man in green gear. One of the worst examples ever.

[Deleted]

Why would it cost 200 dollars a month? And why would I need new content every 4 weeks?

No I would not be pissed if a new raid tier came out before I cleared the current one, that is exactly the point. It would mean I had more content to do for many months forward. No catch up mechanics, just raid progression, 1 at a time. No raids would then be obsulete.

It would cost 200 bucks a month because you would need to multiply the development team to develop content for every single target group of the game. Believe it or not: There are others out there besides you that want different things from the game.
- Some want the casual experience, logging in every couple of days and doing LFR
- Others want a raid that they can do with their friends & families, without having to be extremely good at the game, but still have that feeling of accomplishment when they clear it.
- Yet others want to raid progressively, but lack the skills to do it on the highest level
- And then there are the mythic raiders that want the toughest possible content available to match their higher-than-average skill in the game vs. more and more complicated encounters
- Then there is PVPers (can't say much about it, since I'm not one of them)
- Lastly, there is the "inbetweeners". Players that want to play on the highest level as an aspiration but cant, so they start in heroic and then slowly progress into mythic.

Probably since Legion there is an additional group (or subgroup) which is the m+ers that just enjoy running 5-person content. Now they can and can do that even as somewhat of an equivalent to raiding because of scaling.

If you wanted to provide these same options without scaling, you would need a development team that creates ALL of the above aspects separately from each other.

So: Currently, we have 1 raid, 1 dungeon set, 1 pvp BG/Arena set, Open world content.
Without scaling but still keeping all target groups engaged in the game, you probably would have to x10 the development effort. Plus more effort in maintenance/testing, plus more infrastructure resources (servers).

Lastly, a company is also evaluated based on the ratio between Revenue and profit. The higher the costs, the higher revenue needs to be to maintain/improve that ratio. Hence: 200 bucks.

[MiiiMiii]

I generally like Scaling.

I love Raiding and a the gameplay of this game. It's nice to cooperate many people and kill bosses, with using this key-bind ability system. That is what makes WoW great.

But I HATE leveling, gearing and all other RPG elements. I would just like a game with no levels, no gear, where you got raid-ready day 1, and the game would focus on raidbosses only, and not all RP bs.

I LOVED Challenge Modes, since it scaled down gear, you were ready for them quite fast and basically only skill was rewarded.

More scaled stuff! Gear should matter less!

This is the complete opposite of me, and I am facinated people like this exist.

Would you prefer gear was removed from raiding all together?

Imagine a game where you invite people from your guild to a lobby, then you select a raid and have a slider from 1-10 deciding how difficult it will be. Then you are thown into the entrance of the raid, and all you do is see how many bosses you can kill, no loot from killing them. Would you love this?
If yes, is it fun because you beat a challengenging boss with friends? Nothing more needed?

[Deleted]

Of course people are using it. Why would they not? It lets you get way easier and better gear than most other content. You think people would refuse to get easy gear out of principal?

LFR for better gear? Are you serious?

You are badmouthing people, while you are in the same audience.

If you want to blame something, blame casuals(don't hate yourself too much thou). Blizz is just giving thier playerbase opportunity to play, as only MINORITY is playing HC and above.

[Marston]

I love scaling. Being able to do stuff at any level is great. As soon as you outlevel things it becomes to easy, the rewards are no longer relevant and if you want to see the story of a whole zone you definitly will outlevel said zone, even without heirlooms.

I can definitly understand why people don't like it, especially the "no feel of progression argument". The one thing scaling helps with so is provide content for more players and maybe even for a longer perioud of time. Being able to do raids with any number of people from 10-30, having raids on several difficulties, having basically endless Mythic+ dungeons, this all means that people of any skill have something to do (as long as they are interested in this form of gameplay). Also, especially with Mythic+, if you are playing them normally (as in, maybe do ~5+ per week), you actually have more content than you can consume, a problem that every MMO faces at some point: The speed at which players consume the content.

Now of course, I also would love if we would get a new dungeon every month, a new zone that lasts a few hours and has daily/weekly/world quests/world bosses every other month, a new BG every few months and a new raid every few months. But that's just not possible. As a creator, it's impossible to create content faster than people consume it. So being able to extend the content without it becoming boring or feeling artifical (and I know a few will disagree with me here) is basically the best thing a developer can hope for.

[potis]

Business? You mean how their sub numbers has dropped more and more until they were too embarresed to show them anymore?

You say the game has "grown". Based on what? Sub numbers? Not every change done to a game is positive.

4 raid difficulties does not make people more happy in the long run. People do LFR, bored to death, then they feel like they have defeated all the content in the game. You think they suddenly get motivated to do Mythic raiding because their LFR experience was so epic? You think they want to do the same bosses all over again with slightly higher scaled hp, dmg and ilvl drops?

Well you are dense.

Sub numbers dropped cause the MMO genre dropped overall, its not the new cool thing anymore, Legion hit 10m subs again, maybe 11m , we wont know, of course its gonna drop.

And it still has an insane amount of active accounts compared to any other MMO.

WoW has what? 80mil unique accounts by now? Remove a few million of bots and still a ton of people randomly coming by every expansion to check changes and unsub.

Game has grown with the rest of the world, get with the times.

Its a fast paced action game right now, its not a RPG, when you realize that you will figure out why WoW has turned out this way.

The random difficulties allow for the clueless mouthbreathing everyone to see what the game has to offer, some will unsub right after, they saw what they wanted to see, why does it matter?

LFR provides extra gear for alts for everyone else.

And if you consider LFR "Gear" as you mentioned in a post above, then you are part of the group as to why the game its how it is.

Everything changed to appeal to the person that cant/doesnt want to dedicate time/is not as good yet wants to feel special.

[Deleted]

I love all the scaleing. First of all haveing multiple zones meant much smoother leveling, and it does not go as stale. Also it fucking SUCKED leveling old proffesions. most of all herbalismen" now i need kingblood for that is the only decend spawing herb from 65-112, and then go to X zone where 2/3 of the herbs there are green but easy to get to, because there are some decend rare flowers to get skill from" IT was the worse.

[Sencha]

Fully agree with OP. Scaling sucks and is a lazy way to make content last longer in a repetitive way. Raids had 1 difficulty in vanilla and it was perfect.

[Redroniksre]

Well in the LFR retrospect, i do LFR when i feel like doing some story content and not dealing with a mostly toxic pug environment. If i really want to put in time, then ill do a pug but it is a game, so i don't always want to deal with stupid shit. Scaling is one of the best things to be added, otherwise we would be restricted to one patch zone at a time, as opposed to several zones.

[Battlebeard]

This is the complete opposite of me, and I am facinated people like this exist.

Would you prefer gear was removed from raiding all together?

Imagine a game where you invite people from your guild to a lobby, then you select a raid and have a slider from 1-10 deciding how difficult it will be. Then you are thown into the entrance of the raid, and all you do is see how many bosses you can kill, no loot from killing them. Would you love this?
If yes, is it fun because you beat a challengenging boss with friends? Nothing more needed?

This is literally exactly what I want. The fun of WoW is to kill challenging bosses together with friends. To cooperate. I don't know any better game than WoW where you can be around 20 people and kill bosses together like this with good gameplay.

Leveling up, gearing up etc is just a mean to an end. To me it's a waste of time. For me the game START when you are 110 with gear enough to raid HC mode.

Overwatch is a prime example, there are what, 23-24 heroes, which are basically like classes, since they are very different. You don't need to gear or level your Lucio or your Reaper, you are ready to play from day one, with no gear, level or special equipment. All Reapers are equal and always ready for action.

I want the same for WoW, where you chose a class, and you have all abilities from start for you to bind to a key. No gear, No level, you can maybe change your appearance but that's it. Then you queue for Raids, Dungeons or PvP areas, solo or with friends in lobbys. Big lobbies that is, 20man for Mythic etc. Then you do the bosses in the raid.

Personally I don't care at all about story, lore, leveling, gearing, quests or any of the traditional RPG elements. I just want to raid/pvp etc as early as possible and not be depending on gear to do so. Skill should be the ONLY thing that matter.

[pfbe]

The only bit of Legion scaling that felt weird to me was the leveling zones while you are leveling. You don't get to feel like you're growing in power, you're just stagnant for 10 consecutive levels. If anything, it made leveling feel even more of a contrived waste of time for me. Just pop me to 110 and save me the burnout.

[Super Kami Dende]

Scaling is one of the best additions to WoW in a long time. I only hope they extend it to all previous and future leveling Zones/Dungeons/Raids.

[Deleted]

Personally I don't care at all about story, lore, leveling, gearing, quests or any of the traditional RPG elements. I just want to raid/pvp etc as early as possible and not be depending on gear to do so. Skill should be the ONLY thing that matter.

So, you basically want a MOBA with raiding?
I don't particulary like the idea.

@MiiiMiii:
So basically you want the game only tailored to what you view as the correct difficulty?
Guess what: So does "Spongebob Casualpants", and so does "H.P. Hardcorecraft" (Names are fictual).
This is exactly why scaling exists in the 1st place.

[Super Kami Dende]

Fully agree with OP. Scaling sucks and is a lazy way to make content last longer in a repetitive way. Raids had 1 difficulty in vanilla and it was perfect.

It's always fun to play "spot the person who never actually played or Raided in Vanilla but pretends they did"

[Vagabond]

No scale = no WoW

[Deleted]

Scaling is LAZY. It is trying to feed us the same content multiple times, with slight changes to HP and DMG, then call it new content. Throw the concept of RPG out the door, we need more scaling! Scaling is, in my opinion the worst mistake this game has done ever. It sucks the life out of this game. It just gets worse and worse, without any indication that it will stop.

I hate every single thing scaling has brought to this game.

I agree on some points but disagree on a lot of other points.

First, scaling is not lazy. I love the scaling of the zones in Legion, and I would love it if Blizzard applied it to the old world as well. It assures that you can fully quest through a zone without out-leveling it. It allows you to do dungeons with all kinds of people. Have a buddy who is 101 and you are 107? No problem, you can still run together. Thats great. It means more people can play together. It has constantly bugged me that if you wanted to play with people, you had to stop when they stop. If you made it some levels further, you were so much behind it did not make sense to play together anymore.

Next, raid scaling and dungeons scaling. I like it. It means people who do not want to challenge themselves or just can not play that well have difficulties suited for them, and I can have a crack at Hc and Mythic. I would like to see some HC / mythic only bosses as Blizzard have done in the past, but thats about it.

Spell ranks didn't offer any depth for the game. You could game some of them, but it was clunky and broken. Having half a dozen health stones (different ranks, with glyph and without) in your bars as tank (because they did not share a CD) was stuoid as hell 8but hey, it worked, so you did it). Its good the removed that outdated and antique mechanic.

Its good you can mine. Have you ever tried to make a new WoW account, where you have nothing,a nd then tried to get anywhere? if you can#t even di high-level mining or picking herbs your sources of income are quite limited. And having to do it on an alt was still stupid. requiring players to farm old content for hours just to get points in a profession did not add any depth to the game, nor was it fun.

Btw, HC and Mythic gets new abilities and phases, its not just "more DMG and HP", and the "more HP and DMG" part still makes the fight quite different, because you have to handle mechanics very well. the fights differ a lot on the different difficulties.

I only agree with WF/TF, but thats an RNG problem, its not really about scaling. WF/TF should go. Its frustrating, infuriating and just plain broken.