There is a perfectly good mechanism for achieving this. It’s called Timewalking.
This has two benefits.
It leave old dungeons and raid as they were to allow players to solo farm them for Mogs, Mounts, Pets and Achievements.
It concentrates the playerbase on a certain set of dungeons and / or raids. This makes forming groups possible. Can’t imagine that forming a raid to go do Sunwell Plateau after 15 years would be easy if it was just one of 30 raids available at that time.
I do think more could and should be done with Timewalking to make use of existing content. But this is how to keep old content relevant without ruining gameplay for many players who enjoy farming old raids.
This is why you play Classic Era, because it is untouched and is the best version of WoW because as proven along all those years, they only go from bad to worse.
In my opinion this is the main problem, everything feels like a Speedrun.
Even Blizzard (maybe especially Blizzard) encourages this behavior with “most optimal ways” to do this and that, and with mop remix… which is literally design to be an overpowered Speedrun, this mentality got consolidated and most definitely brought to retail with renewed force.
with retail many dungeons are being revamped atm for seasons and are used in timewalking, it makes me wonder if you invested anytime in retail at all or just here as another classic lover trying to stir things up.
PVP was an after thought tbh and if you want it there is an option called WM.
game is nearly 20 years old with 9 expacs of content which you can chose to level in due to chromie time.
its called retail not actual no idea how you came up with this name.
if would serve you well to read up on seasons before making comments as there is a thing called a roadmap
Timewalking is the best way to keep older dungeons and raids relevant. It always players to run the original content solo for mogs, mounts and achievements et al. And it focuses the playerbase into specific dungeons and raid. 10 Expansions worth of dungeons and raids would be too many for players to form groups as the playerbase would be diluted too much.
I have spent a lot of time in game over the last 10 years or so farming old content for mounts, mogs and achievements. I liked doing the Glory achievements. Not done much recently, finding it hard to solo Legion raids and BFA Glory achievements have quite a few non-soloable one.
I would have given up WoW a long time ago, or maybe become one of those players who does the first patch of an expansion to see it and then waits til pre-patch of the following expansion.
I’m far from alone in this playstyle, even time this topic is discussed on the forums lots of players comment on how they engage in the playstyle also.
TBH what puts me off playing alot of the time is the elitism and toxicity of the community. They take it way too seriously and you can’t join for content unless you cleared it on day one. Nobody runs normal mode raids and whenever I mention normal mode raids all I get is “LUL RUN Mythic, it’s EZ Mode”. These same people Rage when they wipe in LFR or M+
Everyone has life (well those of us lucky enough to still be alive).
Life is pretty valuable. I wouldn’t sell mine for all the gold ever made in the 20 years of wow…
Yeah honestly if you want a leveling experience go for classic.
I don’t mean to be mean while typing this but Retails leveling is just extremely bad for all the issues you mentioned and nothing less of a overhaul on how leveling works and a change in mindset in how challanging leveling content should be (at the moment not hard enough to prepare new players for the endgame)
Personally I think that making leveling take longer and making it harder and more challanging, as well as dungeons while leveling is simply something not meant for the retail crowd, nothing wrong with it. Main reason is due to blizzards own treament of their IP over the years most people on retail consider leveling a chore you have to get through, a formality to access the endgame at max level.
And the game for a long time was designed like that with every exp squish and every attempt not improve leveling per se, but just make it faster.
As opposed to the UNMATCHED HARDCORE vanilla experience of spamming shadow bolt from 1-60 and then from start to finish of every boss fight …
Seriously, if you want to re-live the vanilla world PvP experience, you can play Albion Online. To sum it up:
it’s always just some guy in fully maxxed out gear going around the map one-shotting levelers. Or
a group of players going around bullying lonely players
There is absolutely nothing enjoyable about it.
Harder leveling, I can understand. There are people who enjoy a difficult journey to max lvl. And if you’re one of them, there is classic and classic hardcore for you.
In retail, there isn’t hard leveling because there is hard endgame. There is mythic raiding, high lvl M+ dungeons or rated PvP if you want a challenge - All of which is more difficult than anything vanilla could ever offer.
