So why is it 85 and not 90?

[Phibi]

So they can stretch out the money making. It's a simple business plan. When people start leveling over 100, it starts getting silly. This way, they can pump out 3 more xpacks if they keep up this 5 levels per, instead of 1 more (if they did 2x 10 level xpacks)

yeah not like we already crossed that "silly"-line with cataclysm.
tanks with 130k+ hp is so un-silly.
i mean who cares that it's like 3x as much hp as with wotlk or so.
just pump it up to ridiculous!

[Jademist]

At first I was iffy about it being to 85 but now I like it. Allows for more expansions...I like expansions...

[Uhaneole]

They are trying to stretch the WoW franchise out untill level 100?. by doing it in 5 level incriment's they therefore have more room to release expansion packs...because i guarentee the will stop WoW at lvl 100

^this, but i wanna say 99 instead of 100... if you believe that Blizz PP slide they have 2 more xpacs after this so id wager to say the next one 85-90 and the last one 90-99... just my 2 cents tho :P

[Mudkiper]

yeah not like we already crossed that "silly"-line with cataclysm.
tanks with 130k+ hp is so un-silly.
i mean who cares that it's like 3x as much hp as with wotlk or so.
just pump it up to ridiculous!

Whats wrong with 130k+ hp tank's? Makes a lot more sense if you think about it.

[Spwn]

i remember reading a post from someone, talking about a leveling system, where when you reach max level you "prestige". sort of like COD. For example lets say WoW goes to lvl 100. after that you would go back down to level 1 but with a symbol. Like level 1A. and so on. So, technically with this system WoW could go on forever.

[Dairystyle]

Maybe because the game progress too fast or something like that?

Remember finding a future expansion plan released by blizzard about 5 years ago and that there were alot of expansions planned, up to lvl 120-130 if i remember correct. Its very old info and may be incorrect but i think thats why they are taking it in smaller leaps so you dont have to gain 998 lvls in the final expansion to reach max lvl x]

(Sorry for the spelling, im really tired)

It was fake. The guy later admitted to making it all up a while later in the thread sometime around Cata's announcement.

Their claim about capping at 85 makes sense but I do think they could've done it to 90 which means they'll be able to squeeze out more x-pacs. Nothing at all says they must or will stop the level cap at 100. For all we know they'll take it to 200 though I very much doubt that.

[Thebigblue]

i remember reading a post from someone, talking about a leveling system, where when you reach max level you "prestige". sort of like COD. For example lets say WoW goes to lvl 100. after that you would go back down to level 1 but with a symbol. Like level 1A. and so on. So, technically with this system WoW could go on forever.

Yeah i read that post too i thought it was really cool, it as arch levels. But to be honest if it goes at 1.5 years per that i think they would make a new MMO, like a WoW 2 basically, with improved graphics and mechanics and stuff. Thats what i just think though.

Im being realistic here. Honestly a game with 5 expansion is slightly ridiculous. But its all speculation. IF they do go with the 85-90 and 90-100. we still have 4 and a half years until then. And with delays and such, that will be morel like 6 years. 11 years for a game is a long time, and i think they would move on to something else, or at least re improve the game. Maybe have it be set in the first part of the warcraft series or something.

[Zantumall]

I thought it was about ratings scaling. Because you need more rating points (ie crit rating, haste rating, etc.) each level, they wanted to keep the numbers as low as they could by decreasing the number of levels while still having the same amount of content in those levels.

[NeoCerberus]

i think the problem is there's not enough land....

[Altmania]

So they can put more levels into further expansions, so we don't end up in a few years at level 120.

this is the reason

[stuck4cash]

it's so they can push 5 levels every 1.5 years, if they did that with prev. ones wed just be hittint 75 which i think would be ideal for them. it's gonna get far fetched when we're lvl 120 with 900 million HP

Remember in BC when tanks had 10k hp and we thought 20k was ridiculous? The numbers itself mean nothing and people adjust *very* quickly (People have already forgotten the 30-40k tanks of early wrath.

[Phibi]

Whats wrong with 130k+ hp tank's? Makes a lot more sense if you think about it.

really? means in 2 expansions all the tanks might have 1million + hp.
yeah, that's not silly at all. especially when you think about the damage people will do by then.

"Your Mortal Strike Crits xxx for 95383 Damage"

[Shyzhi]

They did it so they can focus more on content then leveling they said. But ofc its so they can also get more Xpacks out aswell :P more money!

[Deleted]

They wanted to have more time before getting to 100. They thought 100 was like a big final.

[Deleted]

Whats up with the magical 100 border?? Why should the game end at 100. The game will end when blizz don´t earn any more money.

I don´t matter what lvl you are, I care about good content, but they do need to find a way to solve the problem with we getting more and more stats. in lvl 100, we might have 1M stam or something.

---------- Post added 2010-12-10 at 01:01 PM ----------

Erm guys, it's allready settled as i understood, there are two more xpack for WOW before next MMO, next one from 85-90 and last one from 90-100, but we dont have too many informations yet, beside some speculations..

so it´s impossible for two blizzard MMOs to co-excist (spelling?)??

[v2prwsmb45yhuq3wj23vpjk]

Maybe because the game progress too fast or something like that?

Remember finding a future expansion plan released by blizzard about 5 years ago and that there were alot of expansions planned, up to lvl 120-130 if i remember correct. Its very old info and may be incorrect but i think thats why they are taking it in smaller leaps so you dont have to gain 998 lvls in the final expansion to reach max lvl x]

(Sorry for the spelling, im really tired)

Stat increases has nothing to do with how many levels we get to gain per expansions, it has to do with them actually releasing an expansion. This is the largest stat gain yet, yet it's only 5 levels. The reason behind stat gains is so that we completely overpower previous content and lower level players so it doesn't feel like a small upgrade. It helps players feel like they're truly gaining something from the expansion instead of it being yet another raid instance and yet another zone, etc.

[Malefic]

I laugh at people saying the game will end at level 100. Do you not understand how a business works? Blizzard will continue providing this game aslong as it is a profitable franchise, and at the current rate even if they lost 10% of their player base every year, it'd be 5-6 years before they'd be worrying. Blizzard will create more lore aslong as they need to also; heck they even do things now that make you think " oooh, this could happen " for example the 5million posts saying " inb4 we have to return to kill Bolvar as Lich King ". Even if it gets to the extent of them having to make up imaginary giant pink unicorns that attack the world; if the game is profitable for them; they'll do it. The game will end when it stops becoming profitable.

[Heliorad]

I think people are underestimating the vast amount of work that went into revamping all the old zones for the Shattering.

While there's probably some truth that with 5-level incremented expansions you can fit in more than if they were doing 10 levels, at the same time, for THIS expansion at least they had a huge amount of work on the old world to do in ADDITION to the new zones for levels 80-85, and new races. I suspect that had a big impact on deciding to do 5 levels instead of 10 this time around.

[Vladinator]

Simple math suggests that without having to up the level limit from 255 chars (2 bytes) to 4095 (3 bytes) i.e. 80->255 is 175 levels and if each expansion has 10 new levels then it's 17.5 expansions. Meanwhile using the new 5 levels per expansion you boost that number up to 35 expansions, almost double! This means more money saved to avoid having to add that 1 extra byte to the database.

Fun fact; there are roughly 50 million characters on an average "old school" realm, we got let's say 500 realms in the world. This means we multiply 50 million characters with 500 realms and we get 25000 million times 1 byte (since we only need to add 1 byte to increase the level cap from 255) so a total of ~23.3GB must be added world wide to do just that. :3
Just to compare a name in game has an average of 10 characters and that equals roughly 1.5 bytes per char (.5 because US/EU a lot of us use UTF-8 while Asia, Russia and such use UTF-16 so we just use an estimate by halving it) so 15 bytes times 50 million characters times 500 realms we now have 375000 million bytes, and that equals ~349.3GB just to store all the character names in the world, as of today.

I dunno I'm just having some fun here. :P /lol

[Fortuitous]

what was maximum level of AO ? 214 ? hehe

200 baseline, 20 shadow levels, 30 alien levels, no idea what new eden added...

More levels doesn't really mean much, it's just an arbitrary number. Blizzard could release 3 levels in an expansion pack and still manage to fit in just the same amount of content that any expansion they've released has had. Content is what matters, not what # the max level sits at.