It will still take the same time to level as before.
It will give them an excuse not to add back old/new abilities/undo pruning or generally look at class design, as now they have magically halved the amount of levels, but your abilities haven’t changed.
It’s a dumb solution for a far more complex problem blizzard created with Legion & BFA. Arrifact farming shouldn’t even exist, my character should be complete the moment I hit max level and the only improvement should come from gear. Rewards should be deterministic and meaningful, no titanforging.
If the class design and game design is crap it doesn’t matter what amount of content you add. It will still be bad.
I mean where do I even start. oh right by arguing against all of your points in order.
Yes it will make leveling faster, Ion confirmed they’d reduce leveling time slightly if they ever did a level squish.
You’d get them every other level average(if 60 max) weighted in favour of early levels. That is still better than what we have currently, ergo it’d be an improvement.
see no 5.
Irrelevant, firstly plenty of people get scared off before they even are made aware of the free boost, and the whole argument to make people less scared of the game is a bogus claim people who do not understand the squish make in the first place. Congrats you have proven that one of the most pointless armchair psychology arguments was indeed pointless.
Okay so I looked it up, and yep as I assumed your argument is completely misleading. CP is in no way level, it is far more like AP in the sense it is a post max level way of progression, max level being 50 btw, nice of you to leave that fact out. Also CP is capped and according to what I’ve seen they have no intention of increasing that cap ever. Odd it is like you whole point about CP was predicated on a false equivalency that has no relevance to the discussion of the max level and ever expanding level cap of WoW. Gee it is like ESO realised they do not want their level system to go any higher, whod have thunk it.
It does improve leveling, increased time spent on each level increases the amount of level appropriate loot gained, increasing the actual power progression within levels to noticable levels where one can tell they are getting stronger and makes dungeons as a gear source while leveling more relevant. Saying the fewer but longer levels have no effect on leveling is just a blatant lie.
Returning players would receive a message when they log on for the first time pointing them to the changes made. Come on Blizzard literally sent out dual wield blades to every death knight leveling when Legion reworked Frost and you think this would be something they change and do not inform any about? As for any guides, literally just need to do Find: Level 120 with a replace command in any text editor and repeat that for 120 possible level mentions. This is literally much easier than when even small reworks completely change previous advice that has to be surgically removed from guides and replaced with actually relevant information. This is the worst nitpick in your whole post.
See 7.
Firstly you are literally repeating that it has no effect on leveling and that it would not be shorter, which were previous seperate points. Both of which I have proven to be false(I mean literally half of that only takes actually looking up what Ion said about the squish, but literally no one arguing against has taken the time to confirm the shortening of leveling time).
Honestly I wish people who cannot actually realise the actual implications less and longer levels but same power has on various mechanics like Secondary Stat scaling, power jumps per level, far less microscopic ilvl increases from level to level and so much more, wouldn’t even allowed to have a voice in this discussion.
They increased the leveling time and then reduced the leveling time several times already during their leveling revamp - it’s entirely unrelated to a level squish. ‘But Ion said’ is no excuse to not use your critical thinking skills - even if they intend to shorten the leveling time when they’d implement a level squish, those are two separate discussions.
You wouldn’t get talent points any more frequently. If you spend 2 hours to get to lvl15 and get your 1st, then another 4 hours to get to lvl30 and get your 2nd, you need to grind the exact same number of hours and the exact same number of mobs without talents as if you spent 2 hours to get to lvl 5 to get your 1st then another 4 hours to get to lvl10 and get your 2nd. Talent point distributions are also unrelated to a level squish.
see no 4.
You haven’t made any point of substance here, so skip
I did describe what cp is when i mentioned the cp810 limit in my post, scroll down and read before you complain. Gear scales up to cp160, before that you’ll outlevel it, so the ‘max level’ 50 is entirely misleading - you simply won’t get any new player abilities after 50. BfA’s max level isn’t 100 either even though you don’t get any new abilities; it’s 120 because that’s when you stop outleveling your gear. So thanks, but my statement that ESO requires cp160 is correct.
Here you just judge the squish as good based on a set of criteria that you presupposed to be good. You basically argue that Squished levels --> more time spent within levels --> more loot within levels --> more power progression via gear within levels. But it isn’t an actually established fact at all that a leveling character’s power progression should come from their gear. Indeed, there doesn’t need to be a gear progression at all, as a leveling character’s primary progression is… leveling. In any case, leveling gear will be obsolete by the next level anyhow, and your suggestion would either create such great power-gaps betwen ‘fresh level 10’ characters and ‘spent-5-hours-farming-gear-level-10’ characters that you might as well just call those a different level, or create such negligable power gaps that the whole idea is pointless.
What you describe is still a lot of work. And for literally no benefit as you haven’t demonstrated a single advantage of the squish that would make it worth the trouble. (Also it’s funny that you argue in No. 4. that some players get turned off the game without finding out about the level boost - as if a high level cap ever stopped someone from playing a game that they were really interested in - but assume that redesigning 15 years of linear level progression would be totally easy to comprehend and get used to.)
Nothing there, skip.
You may have missed the point I was making there, that people may look fondly on ‘lower’ level numbers with the squish because seeing 60 or 80 gives them an automatic warm and fuzzy feeling.
‘Honestly I wish people who provide more snark than substance in their arguments wouldn’t even (be) allowed to have a voice in this discussion.’
@Gráinne: One possible minor reason could be people have resubscribed for chance to get into stress tests / beta and since they are paying anyway, dabbling at BfA. Another might be farming gold for the eventual launch of 8.2… but those are just my speculations, not facts…
Your latter question is a really big question mark. If I have understood correctly, the current answer is sadly no. Whether that will change, I am not sure. I am also uncertain whether the current iteration of CP could run in Classic environment. It would contain excess searches, but if it did at least run, I could try cross referencing my own screen shots (as I fully intend to play both BfA and Classic).
There is nothing wrong with leveling in RPGs but RPGs are not about leveling, they are about developing your character. There is no need for 120 levels.
honestly after having spent so much time reading the forums etc. it is definitely the very smart community that wow has that pushes changes like that into the game Ion even said himself in the Q&A that he understands the level number could mean a lot to many people (such as myself) so he isn’t sure if he wants to touch it and then after that come the s**t ton of posts “Ion take my levels” etc. that vouch for such a disgusting change so they say “oh hell yeah the community is really digging this idea!” and they do it
I still hate this *** but think the community is the biggest problem
Here’s what I posted on MMO-champion, and I stand by it. The squish is not nice, but the current levelling process cannot be allowed to stay. It’s incredibly, incredibly bad. Here we go:
It will disrupt the levelling flow. Perfect. Because the levelling flow is so bad it’s achieved meme status.
Levelling up needs to be completely re-thought from the ground up.
We need for there to be rewards with every level - this requires there be less levels or we get dumb stuff like 111 point talent trees.
We need for there to be choices of where to go to without removing the sense of progression - that is we need an end to mob scaling without making the range of a zone so big you can’t stop on the main quest and go off on your own path without outlevelling everything
We need vast swathes of content to be skippable entirely because it’s so old and so dated it doesn’t fit into the game anymore.
We need an end to official character boosting services
We need to reintroduce the notion of getting “stuck into a zone” - that is spending a lot of time in a zone and feeling like the whole thing is cohesive.
We need numbers to not go to extremes on both ends. On the low end, we need an end to things like 1 armour pieces and things like that, and on the high end we need to stop getting millions of DPS and tens of millions of health points.
The best way to do literally all of those things is a level squish.
And before anyone says “omg 60 levels with 10 levels per zone means I get less choices because of no scaling anymore”-people come out of the woodworks: The game already has 7 brackets: 1-20, 20-60, 60-80, 80-90, 90-100, 100-110, and 110-120. What differenc
‘We need for there to be rewards with every level - this requires there be less levels or we get dumb stuff like 111 point talent trees.’ We don’t actually require a tangible reward for leveling up - other than the current system where we get stats and higher content opens up to us, with the occasional spell or talent. An Arcane Mage has like what, 20 spells in total, and 7 talents. Should the level cap be 30 so that they can have meaningful rewards for every ding, or should we bloat up the talent trees again just so they stretch until the arbitrary squished 60 level cap, or can we just please accept that not every level has to bring class improvement with it other than the base stat increase we get from the ding. And even if we wanted rewards for dinging, it can be anything from gear, to useful consumables, to gold (other games have introduced level-up rewards later without having to go back to squish levels).
‘We need vast swathes of content to be skippable entirely because it’s so old and so dated it doesn’t fit into the game anymore.’ You can already skip vast swathes of content. You can run 10 dungeons to go from 70 to 80 and you can skip the entirety of Northrend. Or you can quest through the entirety of Northrend from level 60-80 and skip TBC entirely. Scaling and skipping content has nothing to do with the level squish.
‘We need an end to official character boosting services’ Would be nice, but it isn’t going to happen. Squishing the levels wouldn’t make character boosts obsolete.
‘We need to reintroduce the notion of getting “stuck into a zone” - that is spending a lot of time in a zone and feeling like the whole thing is cohesive.’ We can do that right now, it has to do with scaling, not level squishes. You can quest through Hellfire Peninsula from start to finish from level 60 to 65, with the squish you’d quest through it from level 20 to 22, but you can still get ‘stuck in a zone’ in the same way right now.
‘We need numbers to not go to extremes on both ends. On the low end, we need an end to things like 1 armour pieces and things like that, and on the high end we need to stop getting millions of DPS and tens of millions of health points.’ That’s a stat squish issue, not a level squish issue, Blizz already changed up stat and damage numbers without having to touch levels, they can do it again if needed. Besides, there really is only 1 letter difference between seeing 100 or 100k written on your hp bar. And when talking about the levels, 120 is really not that high a number.
So I agree that we can discuss a rework to the leveling progress (the scaling they introduced was a good start for example), but I disagree that a level squish is a solution.
Yes, we do. Levelling up needs to feel gratifying and good. Levelling up and getting literally nothing means you might as well not have levelled up.
Levels exist to be a representation of relative power. This is how ALL RPG’s are designed.
I care. The open world should be full of people at various different levels, and you shouldn’t be able to buy power for real money. This is so fundamentally against Blizzard’s company philosophy of fair play that it frankly is an admission of failure on behalf of the entire company that this has even been allowed to take place.
It is indeed the easy way out. Let’s not overcomplicate things.
This is such a tired and stupid argument. Do you know the difference between “we” and “we all”? I referring to myself and hundreds of thousands more (there’s a reason Classic is getting so huge), but maybe not for you. That doesn’t mean using the word “we” is incorrect. Get over your ego trip.
I want a reward for every single XP point that I get perhaps everytime I get an XP point I could get real life money so that I feel rewarded for doing it
This is already where we’re going - and although you clearly make an exaggeration, you do hit the core of the issue.
A level needs to be tangible reward, or it’s just as meaningless as getting a point of XP, and in that case we might as well have billions of levels because heck it! A level should not be as meaningless as getting a point of XP.
![:slightly_smiling_face:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slightly_smiling_face.png?v=6" ":slightly_smiling_face:")
![:wink:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
Whether that will change, I am not sure. I am also uncertain whether the current iteration of CP could run in Classic environment. It would contain excess searches, but if it did at least run, I could try cross referencing my own screen shots (as I fully intend to play both BfA and Classic).