Would never happen. Blizzard stated that they wanted to give people level 90s so that they could catch up to their friends. This completely negates that...
Well having a consistant storyline to follow through wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, even though I'm not convinced Blizzard could create such storyline, just look at the complete shitpile they've made out of current lore - and they didn't even have very many constraints.
But you can't tie it to something only a small fraction of the players manage to kill - you'd also have to provide some sensible catch-up mehcanism so people could play together without having to wait 6 months for their friends to catch up.
Generally speaking, having "public quests" requiring grouping hasn't worked out too well because once everyone is past the area, there's no one there to do your quest with you. The same would apply to any kind of objective that requires a group to kill. Eventually no one would get past it.
So I'll have to file this under: Not so great ideas.
But its like they're admitting the game has become a fucking mess and any kind of immersion is broken the moment you hit level 58 and suddenly step several years back in time. Old raids, dungeons, factions, PvP areas and most other endgame content from previous xPacs feel like you've stumbled across an abandoned theme park. New players who are going through Northrend or Outland for the first time must just be thinking 'what happened here?'.
You're catching a glimpse of all this cool looking stuff, but for reasons that are beyond you the game is quietly shooing you past them as quickly as possible, and if you're an older player any attempt to revist that stuff is going to feel empty and hollow. Not much point going back to Dalaran to try and relive the days of WOLK if its empty, or running Karahazan if you've got three level 90s with you who are there for transmog gear and who make any kind of challenge trivial.
Being melodramatic you're forgetting few thousand quests that are still for those new players stepping into Northrend or Outland for the first time. The same quests people who started in vanilla experienced (with the exception of few that broke in Cataclysm). Also you're exaggerating with the endgame content of previous stuff, because do you know anybody who started in TBC or WLK who actually did vanilla endgame content while leveling? Exactly, the answer is nobody. Nothing has changed in that regard.
But you're right about something breaking immersion when you hit 58, and it's the shitty old-fashioned quests of TBC that didn't get redone. 60-70 feels like stepping into the stone ages of MMORPG design.
I don't see why you felt the need to suddenly go on a tangent about how bad you think TBC was, but I'll ignore that.
My point about levelling through the expansions admittedly has been a problem since TBC, but its only really started to become noticable with Wrath since Vanilla's end game content wasn't advertised to you so much in the levels leading up to level 60. TBC on the other hand is the point where you started being introduced to endgame stuff before hitting the level cap, such as the Aldor/Scryers quests. Which is a very nice piece of design, but come Wrath it suddenly meant you were painfully aware as you levelled that there was this cool looking content that you were being pushed past. It got worse in Wrath where the Lich King was present from level 68 onwards in the quests, with it being built up that you were going to kill him.
It doesn't help that Blizzard started introducing 'catch-up' mechanics, which meant this problem now exists within expansions themselves. See that cool looking intro raid over there? It came out a few months ago, so you can't really do it, instead you'll have to spend a couple more dozen hours doing dungeons you've already done in order to do a raid thats far ahead of you. Oh you can do it if you really want, good luck finding a group for it.
Last edited by mmoc4e765b20d3; 2014-08-25 at 10:00 PM.
Give me stone age questing any day over collect / kill on rails.
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You'd really need to have a drastic overhaul of things for older content to stay relevant. There are many ways to do this of course, but for example, leveling could be far more about the ability to wear gear (or simply get into places, as it already is), and less about actual power. Or introduce rather severe level scaling in instanced segments of the game, along with older boss loot variance that would urge higher level players to actually go back and do these things. Professions could require mats from older areas as well (not sure why this already isn't done)
Yeah, sure... Ignore what you brought up... You hinted that somehow magically in olden times people that leveled past TBC (in WLK) would somehow see the endgame content of vanilla/TBC which is just a blatant lie.
There's just as much Aldor/Scryers quests in TBC leveling as there were faction specific quests in vanilla for Argent Dawn in Plaguelands. Probably even less in TBC. And you don't see Icecrown at all today before hitting 78-79 to start Cata so you don't need to worry about those "we're attacking the scorge" quest chains anyway :P
OpenRaid and LFR work just fine for experiencing current expansion content.
And honestly, if some new player joins in because 5.2 patch advertisement was cool (it is one of the best raid patch videos) then do you honestly think that guy is interested in doing patch 5.0 dungeons first instead? Nope. It's the 5.2 content that was interesting.
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And that's exactly what TBC was... "Bring me 20 bear arses" quest repeated 500 times.
as much as i would usually disagree with this, if blizz are doing this timeless thing where it scales you to lower level + ilvl for older content so we could re-run old classic raids n such, then this could work,but if they didnt go ahead with it,i cant see it happening ever