Originally Posted by
RamGuy
I for one love the levelling experience in World of Warcraft. The time I enjoy the most with new expansions is when I progress towards max level and do new quest-lines, dungeons and RAIDs for the very first time. I love following the story-line of the world and my character. The end-game grind I don't enjoy all that much, the gameplay of World of Warcraft feels somewhat stagnate and boring for 2018 so doing the endless grind for better gear is not all that motivating for me anymore.
But even as one who love levelling, quest-lines and story progression I have to admit that the game desperately needs some sort of level squish or re-work of the levelling experience... Who really enjoys levelling alts through the endless amount of content you have to go through in order to reach level 110? For new players it might be somewhat more intriguing but it still is a really long grind before reaching the point where everyone else is playing. And they don't even have access to heirlooms, large bags etc..
My wife has always wanted to try out the game with me, but she just not able to enjoy it past level 40-50 due to the older content being and feeling so outdated and boring and purchasing a boost for a game we are not even sure she is going to play and enjoy is rather expensive. The price for the base game, the latest expansion, game time + a boost adds up to a rather stark price of entrance. These days you get a free boost with the latest expansions which of course helps a bunch but she has already got putted off by the previous attempt and its hard to get people coming back after they have already started feeling bored with the game from past experience.
There is no denying the game is somewhat dated. The newest expansions improves on a bunch of things and the levelling experience in both WoD and Legion is so much better compared to the older expansions making it feel awkward to force new characters and players through older content.
The latest level-scaling in the older content did also come with some drawbacks in terms of making your character feel weaker and making everything feel slower which didn't really improve on the overall feeling of levelling up new characters even-though you can finally fully complete and enjoy storylines in various zones without outlevelling everything in the zone halfway through.
What needs to be done is to make the time required to reach the relevant content much faster. Drop at least half the levels or even more, with level-scaling in older content just drop the required amount of experience required to reach current content by at least 50% or even more so it no longer takes forever. Sure you will level at what might feel like stupid speeds but with the level-scaling it should be possible to make it so that players can still decide what zones they feel like doing without out-levelling the content so the only difference would be that instead of having to do like a total of 20 zones before reaching current content you only need to do a total of like 8 zones (these numbers are just made up to make an example).
Or perhaps make it possible upon creating a new character to decide if you want to start from level 1 (with some rewards like heritage armour-sets etc..) or starts from what is considered the latest acceptable expansion that doesn't feel too outdated which would change every time we get a new expansion. So with the release of BFA it could be so that new characters starts at WoD, and upon the release of the next expansion the start at Legion and just keep it rolling with every new expansion. Then new characters would still need to level rough a bunch of content, but at least the content wouldn't be overwhelming and feel that outdated.
The biggest problem with all of this would of course be that it will all result in reduced sales of character boosts which I suppose is a problem for Blizzard/Activision...