My first thought was just make it 500% xp or just instant 60.
Then I realized why I always burn out on wow and really only had fun the first time in vanilla.
I wasn’t aware of the time and just played.
I agree with your post in the sense that I as well may never reach 60 as I’ll play 3-4 characters and of course won’t have time then to gear up for raiding.
The problem is obvious. It the time limits, not xp rate. Let classic stay 2-3 years and same for burning crusade.
That way we can level half the classes to max, do as many bgs we want, grind rep and have time for dungeons and completing all the quests.
Because to be frank wow is just a job. It’s all about grinding but you never get rewarded so you can enjoy that work. The next expansion comes out before you are finished and the grind continues and years later you wonder where all the time went as you have nothing to show for it.
Another solution is to have classic, tbc and wotlk area and let people finish on one and then move over at their own pace.
It has never been difficult, but it does take a LONG time for any “natural” player (kills and quests, not layer-hopping aoe).
Yeah, MC will still be there, Onyxia will still be there, but you know what won’t be there?
The vast majority of players won’t be there - those who have already completed the stupid Onyxia attunement questchain while you were at work - and good luck finding groups who’ll want to do it with you. Once most of them are attuned, have fun finding a group to do Jailbreak! with (on alliance side).
I’m not advocating for increased XP rates (and if I did, I’d ask for 5x, not 2x anyway), but the man has a valid point.
I have a better solution to that, blizzard should just add a level boost to 58 like they did before so poeple who have a family and work and 3 dogs can afford enjoying this game without taking too much time to level up
With that logic an xp increase wont be solution since everyone would go faster and in this imaginary scenario you are still behind everyone else and wont be finding people to group with (which you will) Any guild thats half decent will have people that do the chain with other people to help them out because guess what; its in their own interests as well 39 other players get attuned.
Yeah I get what you say, and it certainly was for many of us who started to play early, but really, it wasn’t designed for a young audience with only a few hours of /play per week.
You (and I was in the same situation as you were) were just happy with playing only a portion of the game.
But if you wanted to get the full experience (and that is what was intended by the game designers) then yeah it was a second job. It was even the main job for many guilds running raids.
Vanilla was much more sweaty than it is now. Guilds were military-like organized.
The amount of time needed to farm consumes/get all world buffs right before raid nights etc. for 40 people was so much organization. The whole server was organized around WB, guilds made sure they’d share the timing they popped WB so that it wouldn’t overlap with others etc.
Much easier with boons and such now.
The main difference between then and now is that the player-base changed. Casual players are not content with only getting access to a part of the game. I didn’t mind at the time not being able to rank past R6 or to never see MC or any end-game raid content.
The game was designed for sweatlords but it didn’t mean you couldn’t have fun if you didn’t raid. Mainly because a lot of people didn’t. So finding dungeon groups was easy, PvP was fine because very few people ran it with BiS PvE gear or R14 weapon.
It’s a bit different now.
I’m speaking as someone who’s been around since 2005. I was there in the original vanilla incarnation, and although I was never a hardcore raider, I experienced a fair portion of the game before my interest in end game waned.
Back in the day raiding was a niche activity.
According to Blizzard’s own figures, only 5-10% of the population actually did any regular raiding during the height of the vanilla era. Sure there were quite a few more casual players who joined the occasional MC PuG at weekends and plenty of people regularly ran UBRS in ten-man groups, but none of the above is what you’d class as regular raiding, it’s more like opportunistic raiding. They’d grab a slot if one was available, but it didn’t form their core gaming experience.
Serious, dedicated raiding guilds were few in number, and the ones who actually made progress were treated very much like server celebrities. Every server had that one guild who had managed to get BWL on farm and were gritting their teeth trying to get past Twin Emperors in AQ40.
Only 1-2% of WoW’s population even set foot in Naxx during the vanilla era.
So claiming that vanilla was designed explicitly for hardcore sweatlords is, in my opinion, not an accurate representation of vanilla - given that the vast majority of players did not partake of end game content in any kind of regular or structured manner, and mostly spent their time running around zones doing quests, farming, grinding, or doing PvP - and even PvP was largely a casual experience given that less that 1% of the game’s population achieved Rank 14 in PvP.
yep, that was more like what you say in my memory.
back to this part →
2004+ was mostly played by teenagers, and no teenagers accept orders from a guild master/etc, this maybe started more in TBC when those teenagers became adults
Those numbers were what they were precisely BECAUSE the game was designed by and for sweatlords.
People didn’t raid because raiding was expensive and required “arcane” knowledge.
I was still clicking half of my abilities and my guild considered me “imba” because I only clicked half of them and I didn’t keyboard turn - not to mention I could actually decurse (back when decursive worked).
The game’s UI was even worse than it is today, which meant that most people couldn’t even tell when someone was supposed to decurse/dispel. Hell, you didn’t even know who was in a raid before ctraid and 90% of the raid had no idea of what ktm was.
Even today, with all my knowledge about raids/wow in general, I couldn’t possibly raid naxx unless I employed … certain unorthodox strategies to be able to afford it. Because you couldn’t come up with the consumables and the world buffs unless you were a sweatlord among sweatlords.
Rank14, which you brought up, was even sweatier - basically you could forget about getting past rank12 if you had any semblance of a life (job, girlfriend - anything, really).
It WAS a sweatlord’s game and it still is, in its “classic” iteration - even this “fresh” thing that should bring a few minor QoL improvements. Anyone saying otherwise is just lying and acting tough - most likely a credit card warrior. My last classic wow guild was full of them, at least 90% were openly discussing gold buying and recommending various sellers … because raiding in Naxx meant spending 1200-2000g/raiding night during progress. NOBODY was farming that, unless by farming we refer to farming the bank account.
Again, they “did not partake” because they couldn’t afford to, nor did they know how.
MC pugs existed and were operated by the few unlucky ones who were already in AQ/Naxx but still hunting for bindings and I remember them well, as my then-girlfriend went to one of them. The rules said you had to bring greater arcane protection potions for shazzrah (yes) and greater fire protection potions (for geddon and ragnaros). Those were 20g at the minimum (you were supposed to bring more than one) - an amount most people would balk at.
It’s precisely BECAUSE it was such a sweatlord game that most people didn’t raid.
Once they started addressing that (in BC, then polishing it in Wrath) they could see a large amount of people raiding. I don’t have the numbers, but you’d struggle to find someone who hadn’t raided Naxx in WOTLK, for example. Not saying they would necessarily fully clear it or complete glory of the raider or whatever, but I’m saying any max level you could find had been there and killed a few bosses. A few UI improvements and a few addons (DBM / BigWigs) also helped.
What I’m saying is that you’re misreading this, you’re looking at the facts, but you’re confused about cause and effect.
Fortunately, at some point (Vivendi acquisition, I guess) the money-people stepped in and put a stop to sweatlording, as they correctly figured out that they could get way more money if people would actually feel good about being able to do stuff (raids etc) too. Had this been left to the sweatlords, wow would’ve slowly decayed into a dead mmorpg with maybe 20k players total - most of them unemployed incels. You’re welcome to look at the pictures from any guild meetings of the top guilds back then and…see what you can see.
