Thoughts - Level Squish?

[Sencha]

With the poor WoW dev team code, it would need 3 months to fix all the bugs.

[druenos]

WoW2 might not happen but I find your reasons suspect. Old world gold would exist and continue to exist; there would be old world auction houses and old world places where you could spent it.

However, you could not use it in the new world: you could not sell anything you bought on the old world in the new world: the new world would exclusively have new world items bought with new world gold.

So you would lose nothing and blizzard could give you plenty of notice in advance. And things on the old world--like old world pets--could only be sold/bought on old world auction houses. Old gold would have value just not the same value... I suspect that would solve token problems especially since they would still sell old world tokens--which would be worth titanic amounts of gold as fewer people would play old world content.

This would never happen, this would cause so much trouble with players they would be totally insane to do this. Gold is only a problem to players who have none and your solution only helps salty players who have never bothered to put the work in to make some money. Your whole premise is " lets take away everybodys gold so everyone is equal" ie everybody has none now, nice for lazy players with no gold but why do you want to punish people who actually use their time to make gold?

[Demeia]

This would never happen, this would cause so much trouble with players they would be totally insane to do this. Gold is only a problem to players who have none and your solution only helps salty players who have never bothered to put the work in to make some money. Your whole premise is " lets take away everybodys gold so everyone is equal" ie everybody has none now, nice for lazy players with no gold but why do you want to punish people who actually use their time to make gold?

No, no, you're completely misunderstanding where I'm coming from. A gold and level reset wouldn't be to help the "lazy folks" it would be to help the new folks.

WoW is an extremely intimidating game for new players, with 120 levels and players with massive resources. The point of WoW2 would be to draw in a completely new playerbase and we would all start off equally in the most important resources. It would be just a special expansion to us but to new players--and returning players--it would be a new game.

[Lord Pebbleton]

Yes.
I have been scared before into not playing a MMO because the level cap was unreasonably high even though you could get to it rather quickly. I think the game was flyff, you had to get to level 300 four times or something, what is even the point? Why would I want to start a game with such requisites?

[huth]

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised most favor a Level Revamp ^_^

Then you might want to read the title of the poll. People are in favour of a stat swuish[sic], not a level revamp. Which would be something entirely different than a level squish, as well.

[Deleted]

Gold squish would make more sense.

By the end of BFA wow tokens will be close to 1M per.

[pfbe]

Gold squish would make more sense.

By the end of BFA wow tokens will be close to 1M per.

I don't see why they would, unless there's a lot more people playing by the end of BfA. In any case, Blizzard has ultimate say in the value of the tokens, so if they want to set it to 1M, it'll happen regardless.

[Deleted]

I don't see why they would, unless there's a lot more people playing by the end of BfA. In any case, Blizzard has ultimate say in the value of the tokens, so if they want to set it to 1M, it'll happen regardless.

Price of token at the start of Legion - 36k.
Price before prepatch - 200k+ so 5x that
Price at the end of BfA 5x 200k = 1M

[HyperJay]

Is it time for WoW to have a level squish?

Absolutely 100% no I enjoy a good sense of progression I want to reach higher levels. Imagine a Wrath Player coming back and finding the new high level after multiple xpacs is.... 80? But wait I was already 80 why am I only 60 now this isn't fair. People who say Yes are not human

[Lora]

absolutely not.

[ro9ue]

I would squish it down to level 60.

Every level you should get a new spell or a talent. All of the levels where you get nothing are basically pointless.

[druenos]

No, no, you're completely misunderstanding where I'm coming from. A gold and level reset wouldn't be to help the "lazy folks" it would be to help the new folks.

WoW is an extremely intimidating game for new players, with 120 levels and players with massive resources. The point of WoW2 would be to draw in a completely new playerbase and we would all start off equally in the most important resources. It would be just a special expansion to us but to new players--and returning players--it would be a new game.

Even so it would never happen because Blizzard would be alienating many old time players who have aquired gold over the years in favour of hypothetical new players who most of which will only stick around for a month or two. If Blizzard ever took all my gold away ( or didn't allow me to spend it on the newest content ) I would unsub and never play another Blizzard game... ever, and I think a lot of old players would feel the same. If they want to attract new players they have to update the 14 year old starting zones and make levelling faster.

[FuxieDK]

EDIT: COMPLETE AND UTTER TYPO ON THE POLL! SHOULD READ LEVEL SQUISH NOT STAT SQUISH! Not sure if a mod can edit this.

Hello my fellow MMO-C friends, I had a thought today after sitting back and taking a long long mental stroll through my time in WoW; Is it time for WoW to have a level squish?

Now I can see an argument for no, because people may feel like they regress which is not what a RPG is supposed to be, but I think I have a few pretty solid reasons as to why it could be useful.

First and foremost I believe would be the current situation of spells/talents. If you think about it right now a lot of classes do not gain another ability/spell past level 80/85 and with the new cap going to 120 that’s nearly 1/3rd of your leveling experience without gaining a single new ability. To me personally it just makes the leveling experience a huge grind and I don’t feel my character get stronger after my final ability. Now yes, you do get talents up to level 100, but even then sometimes they’re just passives and don’t actually grant a new button to hit.

Secondly, you can see with this recent changes to some specs talent trees that Blizzard is running out of creative and new ideas (baking old legendaries and artifact traits into talents). Again, just my personal opinion, but I’d rather see a level squish and a reduction in talent rows that could get rid of some of the less then desirable talents and really make choice matter again.

Last, the levels are generally getting a little out of hand. Think about it, we are now DOUBLE the original level cap and leveling alts does take quite a bit of time now even with the changes recently implemented to help improve it. Having numbers such as “Level 120” is almost as crazy as saying you’re doing 1 million DPS (in my opinion at least).

What I could see is making the 1-40 level of the game as vanilla having 50-60 be WOTLK/BC, 60-70 Cata and Mists, 70-80 WoD and Legion and then increasing from there. Obviously these numbers do bring their own level of issues such as flying in zones that could use it prior to being the current level. So these are definitely up for debate.

I’m curious to see what everyone’s opinions are. Do you think WoW could use a Level Squish or are you okay with how it is?

NO NO NO NO..

The first stat squish was bad.
The second stat squish was bad.
The iLevel squish was bad.

What makes ANYONE think a level squish will be different?

[Gsara]

They could just stop adding 10 levels every xpac and I would happy with that.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Absolutely. Cut down Classic levels by half or 2/3. Every expansion should amount to 5 levels. Retool the talent system to reflect that and add a new row for BfA.

[Oneru]

I'm in favour of a level squish, as it will make levels relevant again.

Levelling a new character now is not much fun to me, as there are large numbers of levels where you don't learn anything new. With the world around you scaling with your level growth, there is no feeling of increasing strength when you go from e.g. level 40 to level 44. If you don't learn any new useful skills in this range, then you might as well not level up at all.
Cutting down the number of levels to e.g. max 60 would help, as it will be easier to make (nearly) every level feel relevant, which should make levelling a lot more fun. This could be combined with updating the world level scaling requirements a bit, e.g. levelling starting zones to level 15 or 20 and then just being allowed to level in any of the old expansions or the rest of the old world.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I have a rather radical idea that might be a hard sell: each expansion has its own levels like professions in BfA.

If you are new to the game you could immediately start playing the latest expansion from 1 to say 20 like everyone else. You also start older expansions from 1-20. If you are max level in the current expansion and max in an older you unlock legacy mode for that older expansion and are able to solo farm older raids etc. On Alts you may then choose to play in legacy mode or not.

How gear from newer expansions work in older would be a problem of course, also a new player might accidentally take the wrong ship in SW and wonder why they're lv1 again.

I had a similar idea when it comes to solving the constant iLvl and stat squishes. Essentially every expansion would only give you a relative progression. You would always do 1-10 of the respective expansion. The way that is displayed to the player would need to be determined yet, you could keep the lvl 120, but internally it would be expansion X*10 + Lvl {1,..,10}. The previousy expansion gear would lose in strenght as you go from 1 to 10 (say 10% per level) and would stop working at 10 entirely. The point would essentially be to create a self balancing system that soft resets itself without akward stat squishes and all the resulting issues every other expansion. You would outgear old content by slapping on a modifier to everything based on how far the expansion is back. Current gear would read in a line which expansion the gear is from (Exp #8, Battle for Azeroth) and the stats would start at the level that is deemed good, so you'd always go from iLvl 200-400 for example.

[vsb]

Level means nothing these days. You're gaining zero abilities or talents or anything from 100 to 120 and you're gaining very few abilities from 1 to 100, certainly not every level. With scaling everything around, difference between 101 and 109 levels is exactly zero. So you could easily squish all game to 30 levels, where each level would give new ability or something. That would be a bit more meaningful squishing.

[Lex Icon]

i think it's been time for it for a long time.. i think they should do something similar to gw2 masteries as progression for new content..
something that's tied to the expansion.

[Accendor]

Multiple alts of all classes on max level for years now.
I don't really care since I am not affected at all.