TO FIX WOW:1. smaller server sizes & server-only LFG awarding satchels, so elite players help others. 2. "helper builds" with loom powers - talent trees so elite players cast buffs on low level players XP gain, HP/mana, regen, damage, etc. 3. "helper ilvl" scoring how much you help others. 4. observer games like in SC to watch/chat (like twitch but with MORE DETAILS & inside the wow UI) 5. guild leagues to compete with rival guilds for progression (with observer mode).6. jackpot world mobs.
The way WoW does it? Oh hell yes.
If you want to know how leveling in an mmo should work, go play SWTOR (basically it's a single player rpg story with choices you can make etc).
Bad news: Classic realms are also seasonal, since vanilla is now a ghost town and the same thing will happen with tbc in about two years. And people still come and go in whatever classic realm is live, too.
The problem is not the game, the problem is that people wish it wasn't 2021. We have infinite things competing for our attention now.
I think the worst thing about WoW's levelling, is it forces you to do the same thing on each toon as you go through the content.
Really, doing it once and then being able to level anywhere would be enough.
Threads of Fate isn't really doing it for me if I'm honest. I'd happily level to give each class time to sink in, but the thought of pushing my remaining classes through the same fucking abysmal Shadowlands content yet again has me reaching for other games.
Leveling is part of the RPG half of MMORPG.
Usually leveling gives you a sense of growth. It's a little less now with how old zones scale, but the scale is capped depending on the expansion it belonged to. (While writing that I forgot about the level squish, but I'm sure at worse they scale to 50.)
You could remove leveling from wow. Then it would be like any other seasonal game. Every few seasons has a gear reset. But then that would destroy their world building and story (i know it's bad already).
What do levels have to do with world building or story? Neither have anything inherently tied to an arbitrary number next to a characters name. Hell, Secret World has IMO the best world-building of any MMO by miles, and a much better story than most/all to boot. And it did all that without character levels (or even formal classes!) back when it originally released. There was still player power progression/growth and whatnot, just more tied to gear/abilities than character levels.
I am playing devils advocate to things I keep hearing and the way people approach levelling MMO's.
By the way I love levelling, but my argument is making a case for why others do not. I am more interested in the direction of levelling and how it was approached back in the day to how its approached now. And what can be changed to make levelling more appealing, even if that means getting rid of it. Not saying we SHOULD get rid of levelling, more looking for solutions
no. I mean most of the only good or at least tolerable story telling happens when you level. not just in WoW but most RPG's. even as I despise the over arching plot line going on in WoW the lore and stories in each zone are by far the best parts of the game in that regard.
Was equating the leveling experience with the questing experience. Even without the arbitrary level system, you would still have the chore of doing those quests to experience the content. Perhaps there is something fundamental that I'm missing, but without those it really wouldn't be an RPG.
Quests and whatnot aren't inherently tied to levels. And if the quests are "chores", they're bad quests. Secret World did a good job in making some of them more interesting with investigation missions that did everything from forcing you to look up morse code to translate a message to going to fake company sites to look for information (like, an IRL site but it's presented in-universe). Has plenty of the standard "kill X" quests too, but those investigation missions help balance things out.
Leveling is cool if it's exciting, engaging, fun, and doesn't feel like it keeps you from the actual meat of the game.
Right now, no mmo on the market offers this.
People will bring up FF14 as an example of a good leveling experience, but i couldn't disagree more. That game's leveling is unbearably slow and tedious, and it has the worst implementation of "locking content behind quests" that i've ever seen.
It's an issue of mindless consumer purchasing something that's not meant for them vs self aware consumer purchasing something that's meant for them.
Or daily routletts.. or fates.. or leve quests..
Sounds perfectly fine to me. Grinding out quests again is hardly more engaging. In fact leveling second jobs (up to soul of magic/war) has got to be the easiest thing I've ever done in any MMORPG. Not to mention that leveling in deep dungeons is cool, as you get to actually use your whole toolkit way earlier than if you were going through the usual leveling motions. It's WoW's ToF on roids.
Last edited by Cosmic Janitor; 2021-06-09 at 12:16 AM.
You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.
The people that want the endgame "Now now now" with levelling removed should probably stick to single-player games. Levelling has been and always will be apart of the MMO genre, it's just the min-max crowd that keep trying to push for the genre to be what they want it to be. It's the whole reason why WoD failed, all it had was end-game after levelling and nothing else going for it. "Raid or die" was the term used during that time period.
There has to be more than just endgame for MMO's otherwise it gets stale quickly and you end up with a "raid and logout" community. Hell it's already a thing for the top-end guilds, all you see those guys do is basically log on for raid/M+ and then logout. What kind of shit is that?
Last edited by NatePsy; 2021-06-09 at 12:24 AM.
I suppose it depends on how mundane the quests are for me. If it's something like fetch 10 asses that refuse to drop, pick or collect ingredients or deliver this to such and such. Then yeah, they should probably go. Could never get into FF14 levelling, don't think i got too far before i got super bored, long ass cutscenes didn't help imo, although i know people appreciate them for heavy story telling, but should be skippable for people who don't want to sit through them.
However i really liked SWTOR's Class missions for levelling, and the standard quests were made interesting with the voice acted dialogue and choices. Same can be said for ESO, to a lesser extent but still enjoyable.