Leveling: Is it a core essential or a complete waste of time?

[clevin]

Silly poll. In what game? In what genre?

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Social interactions were killed by players, not blizzard.
Social is not forced interactions, but interactions you want.

Oh give it up with the 'forced' bullshit. Everytime I see this kind of sentence it activates my bozo filter but I'll make an exception here...

Game design can encourage or discourage things, just a real life can. In games, if you don't have a LFG tool people will tend to join guild so they can have people who they run dungeons with. They will tend to friend good players who seem like decent people for the same reason. Give them LFD and they have an easier and quicker way to build a group so you've now encouraged them to do that. There's nothing 'forced' about it and only some whiny-ass gamer would view it that way.

[silvercentric]

Social interactions were killed by players, not blizzard.

This is so laughable. The playerbase is made up a giant mass of people, one that is always in a flux with players coming and going. The community did not change, Blizzard's design did, which changed the needs of the community. The community then adjusted to these needs (ie: you no longer need to be social).

[The Flavour Cat]

While it can seem painful at times, leveling helps you to understand your class and the best way to utilise your spells/abilities, which can eventually be put to better use in dungeons/battlegrounds/arenas/raids. I also agree that you get to experience lore and all the different zones throughout the leveling process, and can also meet other players during questing and running dungeons.

Alt leveling became easier with buffs, heirlooms and items to help you. There wasn't any need to make the instant 90 purchasable on the Blizzard Store. I really don't like the idea of under-geared, unskilled players running around with no idea of how to play their class. Surely anyone who does use a boost should at least make the effort to learn the class before doing anything that requires a full group or raid, and at least do the right thing and research how to play the raid/bg by viewing videos, reading the dungeon journal and going to websites if those aren't as informative.

[Deleted]

In it's current state of facerollable single player content, it is a complete waste of time.
It shouldn't be like that though.

[Nihilan]

I am one of those people for whom the only relevant content an MMO offers is max-level content. I do not care how fun leveling your first character can be, I do not care for the "adventure", or the lore. I just want to get to max level as soon as possible so i can begin playing what i consider to be the actual game. Leveling is an obstacle that stands in the way of that goal.

I am also an altoholic.

Certainly, the first time through it can be a learning experience, but the 5th, or the 10th time through i just want to get this boring shit over with so I my newest alt can actually start gearing and playing meaningful content (What I consider meaningful, i do not care what others see as meaningful.). For years i have been wanting the ability to purchase max level boosts and ironically when Blizzard finally begins offering them all of my characters are already level 90.

While i know Blizzard wont be offering L100 boosts in WoD, if they did - even at the current price, I would boost every single one of my eleven L90s without so much as flinching.

I just wanted to add that leveling in MoP is particularly annoying given Blizzard's experimentation with forced, unskippable storytelling techniques and the gated/phased nature of so many of the questing zones. I did the Jade forest Yulon/Hozen quest lines once and avoided that zone like the plague for every subsequent alt. The last 5-6 of my characters were leveled through MoP using nothing but battlegrounds and the dungeon finder - no questing at all save for those you get in the dungeons themselves. I hated every moment of it, but at least i didn't have to sit through the same crummy in-game cutscene for the 6th time.

/End rant. Going to go take my happy pills now.

[Marek]

There is a mental aspect to the leveling in that it's where your character grows up and develops from nothing into a hero. I think from that perspective, it is important, as it creates a sense of ownership of the character, subconsciously.

I think the alt-overload is what is putting such a strain on the leveling aspect. No one seems to mind that much when they have to spend a few days or a week to level their main once every 2-3 years. When you have 10 alts, that's a different story.

We spend 99% of our time in the game, doing end game activities, leveling does not prepare you for those, it's essentially a mini-game to introduce to new areas included in the xpac. I think that leveling creates utility for the new areas, without the leveling process they would be much harder to justify. However, if we didn't have the new areas, people would complain about how there is never anything new, even if we get raid after raid after raid. Each xpac is a fresh focus for the game, the new areas and levels are to transition you into the new lore focus for the xpac. When I started MoP, Pandas felt pretty out of place, but when I got done with my main to level 90, I'd acclimated to the new environment.

If we did not get new areas, we would all become pretty bored with our surroundings. By the end of WotLK, I was sick of Dalaran, but now I kinda miss it. I am absolutely sick of the Shrine now and I hate Orgrimmar, but I'm Horde at heart.

So, in closing, I think leveling is important from an immersion perspective, in that it mentally transitions you from one lore focus to the next, but the act of leveling itself is pretty trivial, it's just another mechanic. I definitely could not do it for a whole bunch of alts.

[Shangalar]

The mentality of the players has changed. In WotLK it was still exciting to level up a new character, even with heirlooms it took time. During Cata a lot of people decided that it would be better for them to have a bunch of alts all doing the same max-level content.

I don't play like that. I leveled up several alts just to have them or to have the different professions. When I level an alt, I typically stay in a zone until I finish all quests in it. With heirlooms and the guild xp perks, this typically means that you can skip the next leveling zone and go to the one after it. But it's always fun for me. There is a bunch of ways to level a character, and some of them are very very fast. The only part that's kind of slow is 50-58 for me. Plus I love revisiting old zones. For example, all of my alts have fully completed Dragonblight because it's my favorite zone.

The waste of time is only in a person's head. If your only goal is to play max level content, then of course you will feel like you're wasting your time. If you enter leveling from a perspective of enjoying your game time, then it will never be a waste of any kind of physical or psychological resource. Personally, I blame this feeling on people who have too much time on their hands and don't have other activities in life on which to spend their time. When I decide that it's time to level an alt and that I have time for it, it will never be a waste. I argue without any evidence of course, but I think that the vast majority of people with rich professional and/or social lives do not feel like they are wasting their time when they log in, create a new character and level it. Divide your time between various activities and you will enjoy the time spent on each of them a lot more.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Leveling, or at least the general idea behind it, namely character progression in an RPG is not pointless. The current implementation in WoW though is, because a character only becomes "real" at max level and then the progression is purely defined by gear. The gating of skills, given the current complexity of most classes, might still be helpfull to some (assuming they find the need to actually use newly learned skills, instead of spamming only 1 button), but not neccesary by any means.

[Shinrael]

I really loved leveling in Vanilla ( and TBC/Wrath respectively )... The Cata revamp was cool and all... it added nice storylines to all zones and they were fun...once or twice... But I used to play all classes and going through each zone 10 times... It didn't work out for me.

[Master Tinker]

Silly poll. In what game? In what genre?

Oh. Sorry about that. This is the World of Warcraft forum. We were talking about World of Warcraft.

[xsilverstonegtix]

Leveling is only essential for the purpose of lore. Which personally I love. But I have to agree once I level my first character through the content of a new expansion it does become a waste of time.

[Itisamuh]

A core essential-- the first time. Alts should not have to do it again in my opinion.

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This is so laughable. The playerbase is made up a giant mass of people, one that is always in a flux with players coming and going. The community did not change, Blizzard's design did, which changed the needs of the community. The community then adjusted to these needs (ie: you no longer need to be social).

But the option's still there. If people stopped socializing when they didn't need to anymore, it means they didn't really want to in the first place.

[Kowloon]

It's essential the first time but after that it's just overkill and by the 5th alt I'm no longer enjoying the leveling experience and would prefer to just have it streamlined like most things should be in WoW. It's like having to re-grind reputations on each of your toons, nobody wants to do that after the first time being exalted.

[DeadmanWalking]

If you don't like games with leveling then go play a moba.

[Deleted]

I think leveling is a needed part of MMOs however I think for warcraft in particular, it's way too long.

If people want to go out into the expansive world and see all the quests etc then that's great, but for me it just feels like the mandatory work that you have to do before you actually get to play the real game.

[Deleted]

It made sense back in the old days, but the way the game is now there's almost no reason for leveling to be there.

In DND and stuff level's are there for a reason and each level actually feels like progression and that. It wouldn't matter if there was 10 or 100 in WoW its just a period of time before you can play endgame.

[Cosmic Janitor]

A core essential-- the first time. Alts should not have to do it again in my opinion.

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But the option's still there. If people stopped socializing when they didn't need to anymore, it means they didn't really want to in the first place.

Gamers are like 5th graders at a ball, no one is going to dance, because they don't know how to and try to avoid making a fool of themself. Incentivising a little bit of social interaction certainly does not hurt.

[viper823]

I love leveling the first time through, but absolutely hate leveling through the same zones for the nth time on alts.

[blackblade]

Harkening to old-school RPG's "Leveling Up" Is a pretty easy way for a developer to give you a feeling of progress.

If they removed leveling, they'd need to put something else in place to feel like your character is continually making progress.