Come on now level squish advocates, what are you actually arguing for?
I strongly suspect what you are imagining is half as many levels, but retaining the same XP requirements to gain each.
Really? You think cutting it in HALF after time and time again it’s been reduced is a ‘solution’? Does it not rather look more like you want to ultimately remove levelling entirely - indeed ask for that properly if so - as opposed to actually improving it? Improving it would not be removing or greatly reducing it, improving it means actually adding in new content to make it something you want to spend time doing.
Otherwise what do you think the practical reality of halving the levels but keeping the played time the same as it is now? It would mean you’d only gain 2 levels at most per zone, and it would mean you’d see half as many dings but still be waiting the same amount of time for new spells and such.
Just what is the gain here? Again halving the time played is NOT an argument in favour of a squish, because a squish - as now established - is a visual change to make the game more readable, such as lowering damage numbers from MILLIONS; or making item level progression more readable from expansion to expansion, and to even out incrementations of stats from expansion to expansion.
So tell me what would be gained by a level squish? Or admit this is all thinly veiled push to gut the levelling yet further, foiling people like me who advocate ADDING to it.
I think if Blizzard redo the level system they need to rethink the whole thing. From the ground up.
As per your question id be happy if 1-60 took as long as 1-120, but does it need to?
1-30 should be in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. Should be where you get the core spells of your kit and some extras.
30-50 I would propose you can do in any previous expansion… Northrend, Outland, Pandaria etc. Let most expansions overlap (they do currently to a small degree?) This should be when you unlock your advanced skills.
50-60 should be latest expansion territory.
And then do we need leveling when we release a new expansion? It’s primary use is as a gear reset these days. In theory you could do away with levels and have story requirements or gear requirements as advancements at this point. You’d need to quest/dungeon to raise your gear level with or without character levels. Or you could base new expansion on artifact levels.
My point is, you could avoid falling into the trap of constantly adding more levels all the time.
Of course reducing the levels will reduce the time it takes to get to max level, but that isn’t the end goal. I, for one, don’t believe reducing the leveling time in half would be a good idea. It would be silly to get mounting one day and flying the next day, for example.
What I would really like from this change is meaningful progression, where gaining levels gives something. Maybe not every level, but lets say, not going more than 2 or 3 levels without getting anything.
I would also like them to rethink and restructure the way leveling works, because I believe just continuing to pile up levels until we are at 150, 200, etc., is not sustainable. Better to tie certain rewards, like the ability to use transmog from a certain expansion to having completed said expansion, than to require people to go through content they are never going to finish.
As things are now, people don’t even do half the story before they out level an expansion and move on, and that is the new level ranges. So my stance is this, give people rewards for completing the content but don’t require them to go through the expansions to reach max level.
What Ion said in live stream was that everything would be same except the number what level you are. So it would just mean half as many dings. That is reason i don’t support it, it would not change anything for real but lot of things could go wrong when making it.
Levelling should cover less content / fewer expacs, but do them properly. Ideally do one full zone / quest chain in classic (4 full zones?) and then one FULL expac (choose from any non current expac).
I’m currently levelling an alt (no heirlooms); in BC and I’m 77 having cleared Hellfire Peninsula and done 80% of Nagrand. It’ll probably be time to move on before I’ve even finished 2 zones! Then same again un MoP, WoD and Legion… .
In terms of overall time taken, I could see it taking slightly less time (75%?), but the point would be to make that time matter.
It isn’t necessarily a reduce xp and levels by half.
The world is huge.
Really huge, and the amount of content used from it is really low.
You have huge continents, amazing views, awesome quests, all spread out but at the same time irrelevant.
A level squish could aim to make those places relevant, or leave those places open for reuse.
Who wouldn’t want to travel back to northrend and see how the place progressed.
You could see a new scarlet uprising there, a few cult of the damned managed to regroup and start their own sects, vyrkuls populating new lands and crowning a new king, Trolls finally rid of the plague and trying to recuperate and live without the loas ( since they killed them ).
The same can be said about deepholm, and many other places in the world.
What happened to west and east plaguelands? I think they have been fully purified now or almost fully purified etc etc.
The level squish could also mean, a paragon level, were after you reach a point, you start leveling in a new entirely different exp bar.
I think the feedback blizzard wants, is that they are aware that a simple 50% reduction won’t solve anything and would rather see how the community reacts and discuss solutions.
What has actually changed meaningfully? You’d log in at 33 instead of 77, with all the same spells and everything.
The ONLY difference would be numbers, and the fact you’d see the ding only once instead of twice until you get a new spell.
Seems like a colossal waste of resources to me, and indeed LESS rewarding as only get one level in a zone seems worse.
Even the ‘numbers getting out of hand’ is a complete red herring. We aren’t dealing with millions here are we? People really think 120 is a high number in an RPG where players constantly deal in thousands and hundreds of thousands.
The ‘eventually we’ll be level 300’ is also flawed. We get only 10 levels per expansion, so now work out how long we’ll have to wait to reach the unthinkable and astronomically high number of 200.
I’ve stated many times an very easy start in vastly improving progression, namely reworking the complete pathetic joke in how we gain our Mastery. Yes MASTERY, the very core of our spec which we suddenly learn completely at level 78. Wow, impressive.
Mastery NEEDS to be reworked into an incremental talent system as an old school skill point system. After all, it’s called MASTERY.
I think you are misinterpreting what he said though, when he talks about squishing the levels he says reducing time could be a part of it.
They are collecting feedback exactly to see what people feel this should be like. So even though sitting here talking about the best case scenario we would like might not get us the results we want nothing is set in stone yet.
I am arguing for a game cleanup through a level squish. Make the world feel bigger and more relevant, and more connected as the level gap won’t be as big. It could also help them make professions more relevant during the leveling process. It would all need a rewamp though.
I don’t think this should be a expansion feature though, I think it should come with a random patch like the scaling world did.
A squish would do nothing if all you do is reducing the levels. You need to actually do something meaningfull to make that new number be of any use. E.g. giving players more choices where to level, having content relevant for longer, make the world feel bigger simply because the gap between the levels aren’t as big. I would certainly not mind going back to level 60 being cap from squish start.
If all you do is reduce the number, then no, it has no purpose or relevance, but then there is no reason to do the squish either. Pretty sure Blizzard had more in mind than just changing the number next to your character portrait, when they discussed a leveling squish.
“make the world feel bigger simply because the gap between the levels aren’t as big”
How? I’m just not seeing this at all.
Again, everything you say has no connection with squishing levels. More choice to level is a matter of scaling. Having content relevant for longer? Where does squishing come in to that?
The ONLY argument I can see is make it so the levelling is condensed so you can more easily fit in rewards. Thing is I don’t like the idea of that, because I don’t want it to take half as much time to reach cap, as that would massively devalue the investment in my characters-- as in not enough growth and progression to make them feel unique for me as opposed to just boosted.
Yes, but from what I can remember from vanilla, to use that as an example, level 30 felt far more relevant simply because there were only 60 levels, and in return, level 30 made the world feel better connected, as it wasn’t filled up with a shallow amount of levels as it does today(to me level 30 is just as being anything between level 20-45)… which makes me question why they matter(conclusion is, they don’t matter to me. That’s 25 worthless dings).
I don’t mind if they don’t go through with it though, but I do support the squish and think it could offer an improvement to the world as a whole, if they go through with it. I am an altoholic, and parts of the reason for that is that I seemingly need to go back to the old zones to remind myself of the glory of this world, which I absolutely love. I do go back on my max levels character(s) too at times, but it feels better when I level. I just wish those levels were more relevant. Craftables actually having an impact, and being worth crafting while leveling up would be something I’d like to see as a result of a level squish too. It can be done as it is now too though. In such case they would possibly have to make say crafted armor to scale over a set amount of levels like heirlooms do, to be worth crafting(e.g. any piece of armor you craft would scale from say level 20-45, and the mats not being ridiciously hard to obtain before you can actually craft it).
It’s not about what you call the levels - I agree that is irrelevant. (although with fewer levels, there is more chance of it feeling meaningful when you level up)
Look at it this way. Atm, I will spend probably 15 hours in each of BC, MoP, WoD and Legion. For a total of 60 hours spent levelling 60-110 (ymmv clearly, but they’re not bad working figures).
I would SO MUCH rather spend 45 hours doing one expac completely. I could properly immerse myself in the expac; professions, rep etc might even be worthwhile.
While I would like all levels to go I’m fully aware that the game couldn’t actually do that therefore I do not ask for it or advocate for it.
I’m perfectly happy with how the game is with levels.
I’d be just as happy if the game suddenly had half of the levels.
The question is " why are Blizzard not happy with the levels required"
If this happened tomorrow the only value that we would see change is the max level of our characters with no other changes.
Therefore the question never has been what do we gain…It’s what do Blizzard gain.
For all we know 60%(arbitrary number don’t focus on it) of all feedback from new players could be that they find 120 levels to daunting and then quit.
It could be that the number of alts lingering below level cap is insanely high due to player feedback that they can’t be bothered going through 120 levels again and again and again.(I know I’ve given that feedback in regards to alts).
Post level 100, we gain nothing, not a single thing no talents no changes to our classes, so you tell me, was that by design to later on go the route of changing the level cap anyway?
IF they did it by design…
would mean they had this planned out for over 4 years, 2 expansions and would also explain why they worked on global scaling for BFA because with that in place and now tweaked to the point it’s working changing the level cap for them is a math exercise.
So instead of asking why Players want it…ask why Blizzard have been going down this route since the inception of Warlords of Draenor when we got our last row in the talent tree.
Balancing hp/dmg for so many levels is what brought us this stupids scaling thing.
You get last spell at lvl 80 last talent at lvl 100.
You can go 1-60 in 2-3 starting zones.
And tons of other things, most of the stuff could be improved/changed if you had, for example, reduced amount of levels. Doing 1-60 in 2 locations while 110-120 gives you 6 …
I don’t think that’s at all what made levelling feel relevant in vanilla. It WAS because of community, and the need to group up for dungeons and even quests. It’s also the simple fact that is took MUCH longer, and as such we spent more time there (which to me is an argument in favour of levelling taking a good amount of time).
It’s true that once you hit 60 you don’t really group up at all with lower levels, but the very fact that it took so long and required groups meant there were more people doing it. In guild chat there were ALWAYS plenty of people levelling mains or alts so it was easy to find groups.
To connect the max level game with the levelling game the must make more use of scaling, and again scaling breaks down the relevance of levels.
See the funny thing here is I agree with everything you say, with the only exception being the use of a squish. I just think it’d be a pointless exercise and won’t add, or maybe even remove, anything tangible.
The fact is the world is hugely larger than it was in vanilla, and the reason it magically feels smaller has nothing to do with levels. It feels smaller entirely because Blizzard continue with this utterly absurd system of obliterating all content than came before the latest expansion.
This isn’t actually The World of Warcraft; it’s the World of Zandalar and Kul Tiras.
A level squish would consume a lot of resources - as in manpower and budget - which could be far better spent on adding in meaningful content itself.
I think that fine tuning the full game is important, instead of leaving broken bits here and there through content that aren’t the latest, so in my opinion those resources aren’t wasted.