Leveling is an extremely outdated concept

[Big Thanks]

Honestly, leveling shouldn't feel like an obligation, it should be following an entertaining story, and when you are finished you are ready to start endgame. In WoW its a set of arbitrary tasks set to keep you playing as long as possible, rather than actually enjoying yourself. That concept of leveling IS outdated.

I might be wrong that leveling is perceived by the majority as "work" and not a engaging and a genuine "fun" experience all the way.
Some people already posted here saying they enjoy leveling immensely, so i dont know.

I fail to see how though, specially for a new player.

Diablo 2 had an interesting way to make leveling important.

There was 1 quest that each toon got to do ONE time for top rewards called the Hellforge quest. When you completed it on Hell difficulty, you got a chance to get some pretty high level runes to drop. You couldn't guarantee a rune drop any other way. these runes were physical items that were socketed into gear. If you socketed rare runes in a certain order, it could create rare and powerful items.

One of the best ways to get some good runes is to keep making new toons and leveling them up to do the quest. It was like reward for playing the leveling game.

I have said for 15 years that Blizz should copy their own model. Add a super elite quest that can only be done on a fresh max level toon that offers major rewards. They kinda did this with heritage armor but I think they missed the mark because the heritage armor really isn't interesting enough. I was thinking their could be maybe 100 different quest rewards, and you randomly get offered 5 of them when you complete the quest. Some of them can be pretty significant too in order to make it very attractive.

Thats an awesome way to make people "want to make a new character"
Something like this i think would be amazing for WoW.

The idea of making leveling just as fun as endgame...would benefit WoW immensely imo.

- - - Updated - - -

What, all of a sudden tab-target combat isn't to blame anymore? I guess we know what your cause is this month, at least; could've come out with it sooner than halfway in.

Also, leveling provides two important things: leveling from character creation allows for Blizzard to get players used to how their class handles through a progressive rollout of abilities and to introduce them to the world. Leveling in expansions allows for a clean gear reset, reopening the pool of players available for endgame progression and making it easier to 'reroll' for players burned out on a given class or faction without ending up hopelessly left behind as an ever-growing endgame piles gear on gear on gear.

Asking a "new player" to "stick with our game" and "work for up to 1 month without having fun" for a "mystery box endgame" you may or may not enjoy...
I think this is too much to ask for a new player.
Ofcourse they are gonna quit.

[Justpassing]

THIS JUST IN: Breathing is an extremely outdated concept

Shit, I'm just tryna live

[Itori]

Leveling was fine and fun when gear and levels meant something, now with scaling it feels like levels and gear have no meaning. This is only present in WoW though, other games leveling feels fine.

[Claymore]

Honestly, I've been saying this for years, but "leveling" really just needs to die off when it comes to MMORPG's.

People want to be able to play with their friends. For many people, that is literally THE ONLY REASON they play. It's awesome to have additional narrative/story content to do, but that's something that should be tackled at your own leisure, not a mandatory hostage situation before you can play with your friends again.

When a new Expansion comes out, give us some cool new ability, even if it's a long cooldown, and then just be done with it. Let progress be dictated by gear, not a bunch of artificial time-sinks.

[Big Thanks]

Honestly, I've been saying this for years, but "leveling" really just needs to die off when it comes to MMORPG's.

People want to be able to play with their friends. For many people, that is literally THE ONLY REASON they play. It's awesome to have additional narrative/story content to do, but that's something that should be tackled at your own leisure, not a mandatory hostage situation before you can play with your friends again.

When a new Expansion comes out, give us some cool new ability, even if it's a long cooldown, and then just be done with it. Let progress be dictated by gear, not a bunch of artificial time-sinks.

What if...

Your friends would be happy to quest with you because they would receive awesome rewards?
Extra points if it was also a fun experience...and not just for the rewards

A possible future...in an alternative galaxy

[NineSpine]

Honestly, I've been saying this for years, but "leveling" really just needs to die off when it comes to MMORPG's.

People want to be able to play with their friends. For many people, that is literally THE ONLY REASON they play. It's awesome to have additional narrative/story content to do, but that's something that should be tackled at your own leisure, not a mandatory hostage situation before you can play with your friends again.

When a new Expansion comes out, give us some cool new ability, even if it's a long cooldown, and then just be done with it. Let progress be dictated by gear, not a bunch of artificial time-sinks.

You guys all have the problem completely backward. The problem is that the endgame is built to be a constant, endless treadmill. This encourages players to NOT play with their friends and NEVER do anything that doesn’t benefit them directly.

You are never done questing, never done with dungeons, and never done with the raids. The only exception is an extreme fringe minority. By creating a situation where you are never done with anything, it makes players feel like any minute spent doing something non-progressional hurts them.

They need to do away with this endless scaling shit, and bring the content in line with the average player. The average player should be able to reach a point where dungeons don’t benefit them anymore. They should be able to reach a point where they don’t need to do quests anymore. Players need to be able to grow their characters beyond content.

That is what frees people from this cycle and gives them time to play with friends, help level, do alts, etc.. The multiple difficulty tiers have to go. All scaling content has to go. That is what made everything into a breakneck race to finish chores, rather than an online world.

[ZazuuPriest]

Leveling was fine and fun when gear and levels meant something, now with scaling it feels like levels and gear have no meaning. This is only present in WoW though, other games leveling feels fine.

I agree never truly feeling any stronger the entire time you're leveling because everything scales is one of the worst things they ever did to this game. The only time you feel a power increase is every 15-30 levels when you hopefully get a rotational ability.

[Nihilist74]

Depends on the expansion. I thought legion had some great questing and leveling zones. The music and atmosphere for the leveling zones were great. I felt like MOP had some great questing zones. BFA had pretty boring for quest zones. I also did not like the quest zones in cataclysm. I would hate for wow to have a bunch of cutscenes and dialogue choice menus like games like dragon age. That stuff is boring, tedious and a waste of time. I also don't want group play incentivized either. I don't care about seeing other players.

[Blackmist]

Realistically, modern WoW starts at the level cap. I've said this for years.

I'm of the opinion that each zone should have a set of story quests, and when you've done them on any character you can do WQs and dungeons in that zone on every character. The quests could also slowly unlock a zone specific transmog.

Honestly not sure on gear. You could have a baseline of say 100 ilvl, and have items in each expansion drop back to that when it ends. Then you can slowly gear up again.

[WowIsDead64]

I think is the main reason why WoW doesnt have millions of new players everyday.

Problems:
-The story telling is not good enough to carry the weight of leveling to max level
-Grouping is not incentivized
-Even if by miracle you see another person on the outside world...there is no reason to group
-New expansion launches feel amazing because you see a lot of other people around you...but they might aswell be NPC's because you never interact with them

Closing thoughts:
MMORPG companies are stupid. Yes, stupid, to believe a new player is willing to put in 2 weeks or even 1 month of "work" put into leveling for the small chance the player might or might not enjoy the endgame.

Is a mystery box that takes up to 1 month to open and might end up being a fluke

This would be completely fine if you actually enjoyed every single moment of leveling.
But you dont.
Its not "Story Rich" in any way or form
Is just......"Hey here is the quest text! Gogo kill some boars and come back"

Problem is - leveling is core part of RPG. Do you want Wow to be session-based game, where you have instant access to "endgame" content?

[Big Thanks]

Problem is - leveling is core part of RPG. Do you want Wow to be session-based game, where you have instant access to "endgame" content?

I didnt ask for removal of leveling

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

It is not an extremely outdated concept - people don't flock to WoW because WoW is the extremely outdated concept.

About your "problems"

-Story being shit has no relation with leveling. It is shitty regardless;
-Grouping should not be incentived if you want your mmorpg to be popular - WoW and it's similars owe their popularity because for the first time you could get to fucking maxlvl without socializing and grouping. Meanwhile I couldn't even properly explore Rune-Midgard in Ragnarok Online without a group.
-Stop being antisocial and go talk with the other players, ffs. It's a mmorpg - if you wanna co-op, just do it. If you don't wanna co-op, fine, but it isn't the game's job to hold your hand.
-New expansion launches feel amazing because it's fucking new content (finally). Other people are irrelevant unless I want to play with them.

If you don't enjoy leveling, you don't enjoy WoW.
Stop playing WoW.

Got to watch out for the opposite though friends can keep people playing during bad times but making friends mandatory can discourage players as well.

[NineSpine]

Problem is - leveling is core part of RPG. Do you want Wow to be session-based game, where you have instant access to "endgame" content?

Unfortunately, Blizzard has moved the design so far toward the people who DO want that, that now that’s a lot of who is left playing the game. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Blizzard has pushed the game further and further from being an MMORPG and now what we are left with is a lot of people who don’t want to play an MMORPG.

[Dejavuproned]

Bruh. Don't tell me what I do or don't like. I happen to enjoy levelling because of its simplicity and Care-free nature. And there are millions of people who like levelling.

Also "if you happen to see another player?" what are you on about? Are you on a low pop server or something? I can't get away from other players in the world sometimes while levelling. Shadowlands revamp will breathe new life into the levelling experience and I think you will be surprised how many people partake in it just because they can and not for some other reward.

Sent from my CLT-L04 using Tapatalk

[Nnyco]

Grouping should never be incentivized, if you wanna group with someone it should be out of the reason that you want to group, not because you have to.

[Syegfryed]

Its just pointless in wow, since everything that matters is high lv.

[Darknessvamp]

I think is the main reason why WoW doesnt have millions of new players everyday.

Problems:
-The story telling is not good enough to carry the weight of leveling to max level
-Grouping is not incentivized
-Even if by miracle you see another person on the outside world...there is no reason to group
-New expansion launches feel amazing because you see a lot of other people around you...but they might aswell be NPC's because you never interact with them

Closing thoughts:
MMORPG companies are stupid. Yes, stupid, to believe a new player is willing to put in 2 weeks or even 1 month of "work" put into leveling for the small chance the player might or might not enjoy the endgame.

Is a mystery box that takes up to 1 month to open and might end up being a fluke

This would be completely fine if you actually enjoyed every single moment of leveling.
But you dont.
Its not "Story Rich" in any way or form
Is just......"Hey here is the quest text! Gogo kill some boars and come back"

WoW doesn't get millions of new players every day as it's getting older. All the problems you listed are not as result of having a leveling system.
First point, story telling being poor whilst leveling isn't a fault of leveling itself, it's the fault of the writing and if you're having a problem with the leveling quest story line being bad then how are you going to enjoy the max level quests written by the same people?
Second and Third Point cause they're the same thing, this is a fault of quest design and/or the grouping system not leveling. Additionally we've known for years now that Blizzard isn't looking to incentivise group world content unless it's in very specific cases, e.g. Elite quest or world boss, otherwise they only really want you grouped up for instanced content as also seen by how hard they come down on raid groups operating outside of instances e.g. no quest progress for most things and worsened reward returns.
Fourth point, this is a you issue. If you don't interact with people then they're not going to interact with you.
"Yes, stupid, to believe a new player is willing to put in 2 weeks or even 1 month of "work" put into leveling" probably as stupid as Battle Royale games that successfully trick players into paying for rewards through Battle Passes and giving them stuff to do so they can unlock the ability to use those rewards and have a reason to keep playing their terrible games. Plus who's to say a new player isn't buying for exactly that experience? Plenty of people just enjoy the grind.

If anything leveling isn't outdated in WoW, the real problem is that it's reward system is lackluster. The whole crux of a leveling system is that gaining exp and advancing another level is meant to feel rewarding and that you're either obviously increasing in power or expanding your options available to you both in terms of class and content. Now WoW's leveling system does this, you gain access to new zones, new dungeons unlock in the Dungeon Finder, an ability unlocks every couple of levels until a point and talents get unlocked every 15 levels until 100 and you get a small stat boost. Unfortunately it's all extremely boring. The dungeons and zones you've unlocked whilst leveling are ones you've unlocked and played through already a bunch of times, even though you unlock new abilities or talents it doesn't really change how you approach fights as your class and spec plays the same ableit with an additional or sometimes situational button press if even that if it's a new passive you've gained and since all stats are gear dependent the stat boost you get each level is rather negligible and since you have no control over actual stat allocation it's pretty much nothing to pay attention to. Then of course there's the leveling rewards drawbacks they keep introducing like making content hard scale in power to you so you can never actually get visibly stronger as you level anymore and exp returns are normalised which keeps reducing the number of profitable quests as they're balanced with the busywork quests. Of course this is all stuff that wouldn't effect a new player who's playing WoW for the first time, they'd be experiencing it afresh.

I mean if they get rid of leveling and make it so everyone is at the same set base stats and skills all the time with gear as the only progression they'll just come up with another system to timegate power advancement like a longer AP grind that affects when you can wear certain gear at certain power levels or heck worst case scenario they lock zone advancement behind a currency system and you have to do repeatable quests in a zone to open access to another zone and weekly and daily timers are somehow incorporated.

Just imagine if leveling was considered as fun as max level content.
It would be insane, imo.
No idea how to do it ofcourse.
I always fall back to the "Skyrim" example.

I always think a "leveling like in Skyrim" might work in wow.

But everything you can do in Skyrim for leveling you can do in WoW for exp as well. You can:
-Kill Wildlife
-Hunt Dragons
-Kill Bandits
-Do Quests
-Gather stuff

Unless what you're talking about is the skill trees meaning you want a more advanced leveling experience (as in more control) not to get rid of it.

[zezel81]

I believe leveling is not issue.

I my opinion how story is laid out like a single player lead to the final conflict.

It’s great if playing through it once or single player.

Mmorpg should have multiple conflict and multiple storylines.

Some takes group effort and some do not.

Example
Vanilla wow had multiple conflicts.
ESO and current WoW everything pretty much leads up to final boss.
Which then is broken per expansion.

To improve is to add multiple different things going on. Every week or how many time complete. Dungeons/hide outs move to new location with different story. Cycle through between 3 or more repeat. So, the quest changes per how many ppl and revert back.


Example Deadmines quest leads adventures to it. After 100 or more ppl clear it the dungeon moves location and has new boss.
The quest in that area change to fit the change.

Cycles through 3 times returns to previous location.

[Big Thanks]

But everything you can do in Skyrim for leveling you can do in WoW for exp as well. You can:
-Kill Wildlife
-Hunt Dragons
-Kill Bandits
-Do Quests
-Gather stuff

Unless what you're talking about is the skill trees meaning you want a more advanced leveling experience (as in more control) not to get rid of it.

In SKyrim, leveling IS the game.
Exploring IS the game.

Even if we "fix" what you say in your post, which is "make leveling feel rewarding" you will never get rid of the feeling..."the game starts at max level"

Its VERY IMPORTANT (IMO) to get rid of this feeling.
Leveling should be extremely fun for a new player. How? I dont know.
I dont know what tickles "most people's" fancy

[keldarepewpew]

I love leveling in mmos. Blanket statements are a bitch that way.