The game has become embarrassingly easy..

[Huehuecoyotl]

The fact is they don't want that. What do they want ? A game to level so hard as standard that any new players will give up at level 8???

Like Vanilla you mean? Like TBC? The two places where levelling was at its hardest. The periods when the largest number of new players joined WoW?

It almost sounds like people actually like a game where they have some form of challenge in the game.

If hard levelling puts so many people off playing, explain how WoW managed to attract so many players during those periods. Remember, people weren't joining just for the endgame. They were paying a subscription and playing a game that they found enjoyable. Because it wasn't so ridiculously easy that it became boring.

But hey, we can still do the ironman challenge if we want a challenge can't we?

Feel free to ignore my point, answer something I didn't say and repeat the same lame arguments you keep using. I know you will anyway.

[Deleted]

And you usually don't resort to this kind of shameful strawman misrepresentation. Nowhere did I say what you impute there.

I was merely making the observation that you make such a broad statement like

Basically, the "leveling is too easy" is just another tired iteration of forum hardcores insisting that the majority of the player population should take a back seat to the hardcore's minority desires. Short answer: no. Long answer: no, and I'm vastly amused by the forum hardcores' frustration.

when nobody has argued that leveling should be hardcore, simply not a snorefest and that most of the posters have not even been hardcore players posting this. Seems you put every player that disagrees with you in the "hardcore" folder, making their opinion irrelevant instantly. It is funny that the easier and easier leveling has gotten in the last years, less players have leveled up max level characters.

[Osmeric]

Like Vanilla you mean? Like TBC? The two places where levelling was at its hardest. The periods when the largest number of new players joined WoW?

Please stop using this absurd argument. Correlation does not equal causation, especially when there was a different reason lots of people joined the game then: there were lots of potential customers who had not tried MMOs yet. That market has been tapped.

- - - Updated - - -

I was merely making the observation that you make such a broad statement like

Basically, the "leveling is too easy" is just another tired iteration of forum hardcores insisting that the majority of the player population should take a back seat to the hardcore's minority desires. Short answer: no. Long answer: no, and I'm vastly amused by the forum hardcores' frustration.

... and embellishing my statement with your own fabrication, and then arguing against the fabrication, not against what I actually wrote.

Please try to be honest next time.

[Deficineiron]

Please stop using this absurd argument. Correlation does not equal causation, especially when there was a different reason lots of people joined the game then: there were lots of potential customers who had not tried MMOs yet. That market has been tapped.

What role do you feel functional difficulty of leveling/5-man content and time-to-max needed played in the success of wow; if you were to have made it as easy/fast as today, would retention have been improved? Can take this a step further and assume all raids were available in LFR/normal/heroic, since this certainly plays a role as well in retention patterns.

Would you say that today's tuning, across the board, would have been a more or less financially successful mmo in 2004/5-8?

I personally find it hard to envision so many subs staying active when they complete max level much, much faster essentially on what then would have been viewed as a very easy mode, fly through instanced content (no aggro and all aoe, remember) in 20 minutes if they don't get lost, and beat teh big baddie on the box in LFR their first night at max level. I simply don't see the retention hooks.

I would speculate (maybe blizzard actually commented at some point in the past on this??) that a near-majority of active subs in jan 2007 did not have a level 60 character, and a similar situation for lvl 70s a year later. Leveling/instnced content WAS the content activity for those players (also bg's),

Early wow, for its very long list of legitimate faults and subjective complaints, kept players busy for many months in content that had some subjective variety (quests structures were usually similar/identical, but environments/settings did change), with enough thematic variation to provide a sense of progress. As I understand it now, the progress comes instead from beating LFR and starting same raid again on normal?

[Deleted]

I dislike the fact low level content is about onehitting questmobs nowadays. And that low level battlegrounds are completely unbalanced.

[Osmeric]

Would you say that today's tuning, across the board, would have been a more or less financially successful mmo in 2004/5-8?

It's impossible to know, but I believe it would have been more successful if it had been more friendly to the typical player. Of course Blizzard cannot be faulted for not jumping into that immediately; they needed to discover what the market was actually like, and that has inevitably involved missteps along the way.

If (silly if) the devs had a time machine and could go back to early 2000s to do it over I think Vanilla would look very different.

[Deficineiron]

It's impossible to know, but I believe it would have been more successful if it had been more friendly to the typical player. Of course Blizzard cannot be faulted for not jumping into that immediately; they needed to discover what the market was actually like, and that has inevitably involved missteps along the way.

If (silly if) the devs had a time machine and could go back to early 2000s to do it over I think Vanilla would look very different.

My udnerstanding is that the mmo precedents they were working from were considerably less 'accessible' than their game was, as well. Would you think today's tuning/speed would do well, or are you thinking of a more middle ground?

As far as a time-machine, I find it fun to think of giving it to the current functional owner of wow, mr. kotick. What would HE do different? (lets assume its a single-use machine).

[Osmeric]

My udnerstanding is that the mmo precedents they were working from were considerably less 'accessible' than their game was, as well. Would you think today's tuning/speed would do well, or are you thinking of a more middle ground?

I think today's tuning would do well, and might even still be harder than optimum. I think the devs have a bias to make a game that they want to play, and this has hindered their adaptation to what the market actually was.

WoW has lost large numbers of customers over the years; many more ex-players exist than currently play it. I think it would have been possible to keep many of those that slipped through their fingers.

[May90]

I like it how people explain the leveling difficulty by "Newbies don't know how to play". We are talking not about very easy leveling. We are talking about fucking godmode leveling, with 1-shottable quest mobs. 1-shottable. Literally. Name at least one single game in which you can 1-shot mobs in the majority of the leveling and in which they deal to you negligible damage at the same time. I cannot think of a single one. This is pretty much the easiest leveling I've ever seen. If this was really the top difficulty beyond which people quit in annoyance, then people wouldn't be able to play anything but WoW. It is not so, people play Dark Souls with no problem, even though it is considered one of the hardest single player RPGs - I don't see thousands of post with whining about how hard it is.

So, I want to make this point clear once again. We are not complaining that the leveling is easy. We are complaining that it is essentially made in a god mode. There is no talk about difficulty at all when some classes have abilities to 1-shot mobs up to Cata, 2-shot Cata mobs and 3-5 shot Panda mobs, while getting negligible damage - and it is not with heirlooms or epic raiding gear, it is with usual green-blue questing gear.

So, come on now. Leveling is a joke at the moment. It is a disgrace. (The link is for those liar trolls who claim that people never complain about leveling difficulty on official forums.) It needs to be fixed, not because it is just easy, but because it is for brain dead people who can't read and use computer.

[Deficineiron]

So, come on now. Leveling is a joke at the moment. It is a disgrace. (The link is for those liar trolls who claim that people never complain about leveling difficulty on official forums.) It needs to be fixed, not because it is just easy, but because it is for brain dead people who can't read and use computer.

found it interesting the first reply said he was so tired of brain-afk leveling that he would pay for instant90 funtoons.

is blizzard sophisticated enough to make leveling so easy it tries to hook folks who never played a game before while making intentionally making some existing players so bored with process they are more and more disposed to just pay for their private-server-style funtoon and be done?

If they have, its brilliant, you have the folks who love the tuning paying you instead of quitting, and the folks that hate it paying you 4x more to not do it.

[Osmeric]

found it interesting the first reply said he was so tired of brain-afk leveling that he would pay for instant90 funtoons.

is blizzard sophisticated enough to make leveling so easy it tries to hook folks who never played a game before while making existing players so bored with process they are more and more disposed to just pay for their private-server-style funtoon and be done?

Perhaps existing players already have a boatload of characters at level cap. They've said Cataclysm saw more alts levelled to cap than all previous expansions combined. How much more entertaining can leveling yet another alt be?

The lesson I'd take home from all this is that maybe levelling itself is an obsolete concept. Put all that expensive geography to use at "cap" somehow.

[Deficineiron]

Perhaps existing players already have a boatload of characters at level cap. They've said Cataclysm saw more alts levelled to cap than all previous expansions combined. How much more entertaining can leveling yet another alt be?

The lesson I'd take home from all this is that maybe levelling itself is an obsolete concept. Put that all that expensive geography to use at "cap" somehow.

if there was a compelling business plan for it, they could certainly just phase all leveling zones and make a max-level area too.

[May90]

The lesson I'd take home from all this is that maybe levelling itself is an obsolete concept. Put that all that expensive geography to use at "cap" somehow.

The fact that leveling is made poorly doesn't mean that leveling itself is an obsolete concept. It just means that leveling the way it is currently in WoW is obsolete. That is, 1-shotting mobs is not appealing to anyone.

You're right that existing players no longer want to level alts. So, let us make leveling interesting for those who actually want to play it, no? Instead, Blizzard tries to make it "less painful" for those who are no longer interested in it anyway, while new players who have never leveled a toon suffer from this poor design.

If they have, its brilliant, you have the folks who love the tuning paying you instead of quitting, and the folks that hate it paying you 4x more to not do it.

I hope that was not their plan...

[Huehuecoyotl]

Please stop using this absurd argument. Correlation does not equal causation, especially when there was a different reason lots of people joined the game then: there were lots of potential customers who had not tried MMOs yet. That market has been tapped.

I started playing WoW, and stayed with the game, because of the outside world. Not because of the raiding. One of the reasons I left with Cata was what they had done to levelling. It killed any thought of starting another alt to enjoy part of the game that pulled me in originally.

Everyone that started playing WoW, EVERYONE, started playing the levelling. Like it or not, that was what pulled them into the game. If it was rubbish, do you honestly think they would have stayed with it in the hope that the endgame got better? Especially bearing in mind how much of an investment getting to 60 was in terms of time.

So don't give me the "correlation not equal causation". That is a standard cop out argument for someone that knows that they can't argue the facts in front of their face.

I fully expect you to use the "your experience does not represent everyone" argument next. But that still won't stack up. Because everyone that starts to play WoW plays, or played, the levelling part of the game first. Everyone.

[Deleted]

Er, not really. Leveling was always just a means to an end, I really can't remember many times where I said, "Yay, leveling is so fun."



This sounds a lot like nostalgia, actually. You could smash outdoor mobs like nothing in vanilla too, especially on the bursty DPS classes. Or pull entire swarms of them and AE them down without much trouble, depending on class. Yeah, some classes were also painfully slow in their killing speed, but that was really an issue with individual classes, not indicative of the systems back then.

You have got to be kidding. Are you actually suggesting you played a game through all those levels thinking the game wasn't fun - And you stuck around?

[Deleted]

Don't try to make it so dramatic. Just about anyone who has played, heard of, or knows anything about your typical EQ/WoW/etc MMO knows how it works...you go through the leveling grind because the game makes you. Not because it's zomg so exciting to do 3000 quests to fill up an XP bar.

I didnt know that when I started WoW.

[Osmeric]

So don't give me the "correlation not equal causation". That is a standard cop out argument for someone that knows that they can't argue the facts in front of their face.

No, that is the standard argument given when a person like you tries to pull a fast one by arguing a correlation implies causation.

You don't like that rebuttal? Don't commit the logical error it rebuts.

[May90]

This sounds a lot like nostalgia, actually. You could smash outdoor mobs like nothing in vanilla too, especially on the bursty DPS classes. Or pull entire swarms of them and AE them down without much trouble, depending on class. Yeah, some classes were also painfully slow in their killing speed, but that was really an issue with individual classes, not indicative of the systems back then.

Only thing is, I'd never played WoW before MoP, so it's hardly nostalgia. I've played a lot of other RPGs, MMOs and single player, though, and WoW's leveling is probably the dumbest I've ever seen. Before that I actually thought that KotoR was the easiest RPG ever, but WoW's leveling tears it to shreds. You get 20+ OP abilities, but you don't even need most of them to succeed. As a Marksman Hunter, for example, I just hit Aimed Shot and, in rare cases when mob survived this, put 1-2 additional Arcane Shots.

Don't try to make it so dramatic. Just about anyone who has played, heard of, or knows anything about your typical EQ/WoW/etc MMO knows how it works...you go through the leveling grind because the game makes you. Not because it's zomg so exciting to do 3000 quests to fill up an XP bar.

I've never played EQ, but in Ultima Online "leveling" WAS the game. It was not a means to an end, it was not played just "because the game makes you". People played the game with starting heroes because it was a lot of fun. Really, if you told any UO player back then that they have to grind a lot for the endgame, I don't think they would even understand you - they didn't feel that they "had" to do something, they just did it because it was fun.

But, from this and other threads, I get the impression that WoW spoiled MMO community quite a lot. Nowadays many people cannot even imagine that leveling can be fun... Which is very sad.

I suppose everyone likes different things, and I don't particularly enjoy the leveling aspect of the game.

Oh, I like this attitude. "I don't really care about leveling and I don't like it, but you guys criticizing it are wrong".

[May90]

WoW's leveling is not significantly different from any other game in the genre.

What? Play SWTOR using only auto-attack and the first 2 abilities - and let's see how far you get. And SWTOR is among the easiest. Or play GW2 and pull 5 mobs in starting zone...

[Huehuecoyotl]

No, that is the standard argument given when a person like you tries to pull a fast one by arguing a correlation implies causation.

You don't like that rebuttal? Don't commit the logical error it rebuts.

Talk me through how some of the people that joined WoW didn't have levelling as their first experience of the game. That was the basis of my argument, that you decided to ignore in order to throw this "standard" argument into the mix.

Everyone that started to play WoW played levelling first. Those that enjoyed it, carried on. Those that didn't, walked away. There may be a small number of masochists in there that didn't enjoy it but carried on playing. Lord knows why. But lets assume they are statistically irrelevent.

So, the people that stayed enjoyed the levelling at the difficulty it was. Ergo, there wasn't a massive issue with the difficulty of the levelling in Vanilla and TBC, when the number of subscribers was going up (which means, mathematically, that there must have been more people joining the game as new, than were leaving).

If I had taken that further, and opined that because subs levelled off in LK, and declined in Cata, that this was because the levelling was easier, then you would have been absolutely correct to jump in and use the "correlation/causation" argument. But I didn't.

So talk me through where your argument is actually relevent for the first part of my point, related purely to vanilla and TBC?