Level squish survey

Community General Discussion
163

No the survey is the PROOF that they wanna do a Level squish.

@Ivydoom: sine Legion and scaling level is not linear anymore like it was before.

164

Well done proving how utterly you are uinable to make actual points, but okay lets do this again.

  1. So let me explain you the IF THEN clause, I am sure you have heard of this very famous sentence structure, but it seems you have still failed to grasp how it is used, so let me make an easy example: “IF it rains today, THEN I will stay at home”. Now in that sentence we know the following, should the IF statement come to pass, the THEN statement will come to pass as well. So when Ion said IF the squish happen, THEN they will also reduce leveling time, guess what that means will happen to the length of leveling when they do the squish? Yes the level squish itself will not mechanically affect leveling speed(well it will, due to fluctuations in kill speed, but that is not the argument being made here), but along side it we have a confirmed level speed increase coming. So yes under any circumstances lying to people’s faces that there will be no reduction in leveling time when it clearly was stated to be bundled with one is just scummy.
  2. Level squish comes with level speed increase, I think we proved this fact clearly, so yes you’d get them more often. That being said your reply is missrepresenting my point, as what I wrote my reply to was a statement that even if they cut levels in half they’d not have you get upgrades on every level, where my counter point was yeah it’d be every other level on average weighted in favour of early levels, which is still much better than how current level up rewards are spread out. I never argued you’d get more rewards per time spent(until this post to debunk that fact via point 1) I was merely debunk the asinine point about how because it wouldn’t give rewards at each level it’d be pointless to squish levels. Own your asinine man instead of trying to pretend my reply was to a completely different point. :stuck_out_tongue:
  3. haha
  4. No I made an easy point here, that you are attacking the stupidest point for level squish, that people are too stupid and run away at the sight of big numbers. The fact you later in 7 and 8 then try to reason that level squish bad because people are actually so stupid they cannot come to terms with the level squish or that oh no guides have to be rewritten shows your arguments are on the same level as BIG NUMBERS BAD. In the first place this is an argument that I saw no point in defending because it was a bad point, and only replied to it too because I knew you’d bring it up in a reply how I ignored a very good point if I just skipped it over.
  5. You are still lying through your teeth on cp I see. CP is and will remain to be no different than AP, a post max level progression system. The fact you do not see why keeping their max level permanently at 50 is not an indication of specifically keeping level bloat in check I don’t know what is. But hey lets talk why CP is just like AP, how about they have catch up systems for it, or how about it does not offer the same benefits as a full on level did? Yes their effects might be different, but in both cases they are based on the paragon leveling system, ie progression beyond max level. Lets ignore that your point for this whole thing was that it is another way to disprove BIG NUMBERS ARE SCARY when even ESO hides this big number behind a small level 50. Link me any promotional material by them that advertises champion points as a big number leveling system(couldn’t find much really, not even back of the box images from after they introduced the system) rather than “Level up to 50!” or other generic max level indicators. I cannot believe you dedicated 3 whole points to the point that BIG NUMBERS ARE SCARY.
  6. Nice attempt at arguing around my point without addressing it. Firstly, you will not see big differences between different players at the same level, Heirlooms p much mean that cannot happen(and in the ways it can happen, ie Enchanting, it does already happen). As for it being unnoticable, sure maybe, but it is still more noticable than what we have right now. Also the argument has nothing to do with twinks, but rather to increase the feeling of getting stronger even within a level rather than feeling stale until the next level is hit(which would have given you nothing since friendly reminder squish will remove useless levels). I can’t believe two people have tried convincing me that GEAR is not relevant to leveling, it is like everyone arguing against this has NEVER played an RPG in their lives. So here is my simple question to you, prove to me that to the average player having more appropriate level gear gained on longer but fewer levels is somehow not an improvement over how the current system handles throwaway gear that loses it’s effectiveness within half the time than the suggested alternative. Obviously you will not, just like the last guy, because you do not actually care about the state of leveling.
  7. Bla bla bla I cannot run a Find and replace order in a text editor, it is so much more hard work than having to rewrite entire guides after balance changes. And yes you are actually making the argument that people are so stupid that they can’t understand that “There is half as many levels, but each level is worth twice as much”. Because yes people do not know that 2 times 1=1 times 2. Get out here with this.
  8. What you said.
  9. I missed the point here because it was stupid, at least with your big numbers are scary argument people actually make it, but that people are nostalgic for less levels? Please quote someone who said that within this thread, otherwise this is your worst strawman of all your points. No to mention nostalgia was your opening statement after which you literally went back to, it won’t be shorter and it wouldn’t affect anything, but hey you repeated yourself plenty of times in them so all is forgiven.

Oh and I really wish instead of trying to be snide at the and you maybe actually went and proved without a shadow of a doubt that a level squish wouldn’t have any effect on the stuff I listed as things people ignoring shouldn’t have a voice in the discussion. So yeah if you have a single honest bone in your body, please do prove to me that there’d be no mechanical difference within the basic game systems(ilvl, Primary Stats, Secondary Stats, ability “rank ups” and other such mechanics) and then try to argue it won’t have any effect on leveling. God you are a joke.

165
  • Thanks for trying to be educational, but your logic is still deficient. Level time changes are not a consequence of a level squish, nor is a level squish a prerequisite for leveling time changes so your if/then smartassery doesn’t work. They can reduce/increase leveling time without squishing levels, and have done so already. Stop trying to co-opt the benefits of a leveling time reduction as some argument for the merits of a level squish when you can have one without the other.
  • Arcane mages have like what, 20 spells and 7 talents. Should the level cap be 30 just to ensure that every level brings some meaninful reward? No. The current spells and talents can’t be stretched to even 60 without bloating them up with fluff. So ‘I spent 5 hours doing 3 quest zones and gained 10 levels and a talent point’ is just as arbitrary as ‘I spent 5 hours doing 3 quest zones and gained 5 levels and a talent point’.
    a) Leveling rewards don’t have to class skills (they can be gear, rep bonuses, consumables, cosmetics, etc.; other games do them without level squishing),
    b) and even with a squish we wouldn’t have meaningful class rewards every level, so if an arbitrary 5 level gap without talent points is fine, an arbitrary 15 level gap without talent points is equally fine when they take the same time
    c) and nobody has demonstrated that constant shinies dangling in front your levels wouldn’t trivialize those rewards equally, instead of having the excitement of looking forward to milestone rewards
    d) nor proved that the sluggish feeling of spending an entire day at the same level wouldn’t be less encouraging than the level progression we have now.
  • Obviously new levels could be learned, but it is still an effort, without any proven benefit so far (benefits that couldn’t be done without a level squish that is, such as talent revamps or level time reductions, scaling changes, etc.). We could also rename every class - Mage to Sorcerer, Priests to Cleric - and people could get used to it, but why? Slapping a different name on a class doesn’t fix it any more than slapping a different number on the leveling process fixes that.
  • If we will ‘not see big differences between different players at the same level’ that also means that we will not see big differences between the same player at the same level so what’s the point really? So your suggestion of ‘gear progression while spending more time in the same level’ is either going to be negligible or undermine the level system (is this dungeon tuned so that fresh-10-with-no-gear can do them or so that spent-5-hours-getting-gear-10 can do them, essentially introducing the endgame power creep while leveling) and introduce automatic twinking (since people at the end of a 5-hour-level will be far more geared than others at the start of that level), only to take that power away as soon as you ding, leading to a cyclical power spike and drop instead of a steady increase.
  • You don’t actually play ESO so perhaps don’t try to educate people on how the system works. Players continue to earn experience after 50, they just don’t get skill points (just like in BfA we level after 100), but they outlevel lvl 50 gear (fyi there is no lvl 50 gear anyway, only cp10-cp160). Endgame starts at cp160 when you don’t outlevel your gear anymore, until then you’re just leveling and smelling the flowers, and many PvE group activities are tuned well beyond that (cp300+). And as for why these numbers don’t feature prominently on ESO promotional material, it’s because they market themselves as a story-driven MMO with a fully scaling open world; BfA didn’t market themselves with the ‘120’ number plastered everywhere either, they hyped up the allied races, story zones, warfronts, increased level cap, free max level boost, islands, Azerite sytem, etc. We can probably end the ESO tangent here, I merely used it to point out that there doesn’t need to be a meaningful leveling upgrade all the way for every single level and games with higher treshholds work fine as well.
  • Obviously nobody is going to come out and say that ‘I want a level squish because of nostalgia’. I merely brought up that possibility because the level squish discussion is mixed in with a lot of different topics, such as a talent system overhaul, or more old-school talents, or ‘make leveling great again’ back-in-my-day sentiments - and for the record I did level through the vanilla world and the goal of RPGs has always been to progress, not to spend as much time within a single level as possible to gear yourself when you know you’re still leveling (the twink gearing experience of is an opt-out from this level system, not an example for how leveling should work). There are level-agnostic progression systems (like The Secret World), but WoW has never been that.

If I was snide, I took my cues from you, so if you take any issue with that, take it up with your own tone in your responses. And you’re the one advocating for a change, so the onus is on you to prove that these changes would be beneficial. All I’m doing is pointing out concerns and how ‘level squish’ is not some magic solution without tons of problems of its own.

166

Anyone know the instant sure fire way to lose an argument? Ignore the question presented at the end of someone’s reply and not at all address how to anyone with a single brain cell it should be obvious that a level squish would have effects both small and large simply because of how levels work in WoW.

Hey mate, I gift you a box containing chocolates and cheese. Would you say me giving you chocolates increased the amount of cheese you own? The fact you keep denying the confirmed information that the Level Squish will be bundled with a Level Speedup at this point is hilarious.

And you know what I am gonna address the ESO point, because I literally looked up multiple guides for it to formulate the very simple opinion that everyone should realise within seconds. OY IT IS LIKE THEY ON PURPOSE KEPT THEIR MAX LEVEL SMALL THEN PUT A POST MAX LEVEL PROGRESSION BEHIND IT. It is literally just like Artifact Power, except you know instead of directly using Exp to level it(because Exp in WoW becomes money from quests at max level, THE MORE YOU KNOW!) AP introduces a different resources that you get from the same sources you’d get Exp from, who’d have thunk it.

So yeah at this point it is painfully clear you have no interest in having an actual discussion and are just spouting your own points over and over(you literally repeated your points against longer but fewer levels improving power gain through gearing in some cases word for word). I won’t be replying to you anymore outside of any time you or anyone else attempts to make the point the Level Squish will not reduce the time needed to level(because being technically correct is the least important thing when we know they will come as a pair).

167

And there is certainly room for discussion for what sort of changes the leveling system would need (if it needs to be changed at all). :slight_smile: I’d just caution against people using some elaborate vision of revamped talents and stat scaling as an argument for a level squish. As you said, a level squish in itself is pointless, therefore we shouldn’t advocate for a level squish - we should look at the actual changes that people think would accompany the level squish, because those are the actual changes we should be discussing.

For example people bring up meaningful rewards for every level, that’s not a discussion about the level squish. We had talent points for every level (above 10) and it wasn’t meaningful either. We basically looked forward to the juicy milestone rewards that were buried midway down the talent tree under a ton of boring passives. Increases my parry chance by 1/2/3/4/5%… was hardly an interesting or impactful reward for 5 levels :wink:

Let’s discuss meaningful rewards. Should every level feel like a meaningful reward? (I wouldn’t consider upgrading Conjure Food Rank 2 to Conjure Food Rank 3 a meaningful class reward for example). We don’t have enough impactful class skills or talents to last even 60 levels. And fundamentally, should every level even be meaningful? Wouldn’t that dull the levels into a string of repetitive reward-influx, instead of the significant milestones we now work towards? Is there another way to make levels rewarding? Other games have level rewards that aren’t just a skill point or ability. Perhaps we could also reward zone completion achievements with gear, cosmetics, rep, or some such, as many other games do. I’m sure people have a lot of ideas of their own how they’d like to improve leveling!

Let’s discuss scaling. Let’s discuss leveling times. Let’s discuss talents, or a revamped utility perk system or some major class ability overhaul. Just let’s discuss a level squish for what it is, not for what other good things we can think up that could accompany it, but could also exist without it.

1 Like
168

I didn’t get any survey and it’s irrelevant to the question at hand anyway, the survey implies prior knowledge of the level squish.

169

There are several ways to ‘lose’ an argument. But pretending that your assertion is correct and the game should be changed according to your preference becuase it’s other people’s job to disprove it is not an argument at all. Neither is throwing out salty references to the cerebral deficiency of your debate partners :slight_smile:

Your analogy is cute, but no. A pile of (:poop: and :cheese:) equals more (:poop: and :cheese:). But more :poop: doesn’t equal more :cheese: . And even if more :cheese: is good, more :poop: won’t automatically be good just because they can accompany each other. Read the survey by the way, they ask about a level squish that reduces the number of levels required to reach endgame, not the time it takes to reach endgame. So that is the definition of the level squish. If they start asking us whether we want to reduce leveling times, we can discuss that. But this question is about a squish.

As for your who’d have thunk it ESO nonsense, gear and endgame is entirely inaccessable to level 50 (cp10) characters. So stop insisting that it’s the ‘max level’. :laughing: We could rename WoW’s lvl 100 the ‘max level’ and rename 111-120 ‘champion points’ that wouldn’t change the fact that the max level is 120, because that’s when you stop outleveling your gear and when you can start doing engame content.

The reason I may have repeated points - I thought of it as reiterating really to explain better in case you perhaps failed to comprehend the implications - is because you contraditct yourself and don’t account for the counterarguments to your points. You say for instance that you want an impactful power progression within the same longer level but insist that power difference would be negligible - what’s the point then. You made vague references to some major stat impact the squish would have, but never once brought up any evidence for it nor demonstarted that Blizz couldn’t just tweak stat scaling without level scaling (as they did before). So I suppose we should be glad that we’ll be spared your replies if all of them revolve around snarky complaints about what others say instead of presenting any evidence for your argument yourself.

1 Like
170

I didn’t really follow the argument much, but i can back up the statement on eso cp points, the max level is NOT 50, it’s cp 160, that’s where the gear stops scaling, and you get no more stat points.

Cp is a mix of a progression system and leveling, up to 160, after than it’s purely a progression system.

Also i agree that a level squish is not meaningful in any way, personally i actually would dislike it, because we would probably lose even more power, which ruins progression a bit, when you are doing 1 mil dps, and then next exp you are back at 40k.

I do understand the need, but i don’t think doing it so regularly is good, i have personally no problems at all with reading numbers on the go, up to about a billion, that’s where i would draw the line, legion numbers for me were not a big deal.

But honestly, if the experience required is doubled to account for the level squish, then the fact that the abilities are closer to each other in terms of level, really does not matter, because the time to get there will still be the same, and if they don’t add new abilities like talents etc… it will not help in any way at all.

Just add new talents and abilities.

1 Like
171

Just chiming in to point out to everyone that he STILL didn’t actually bother to prove that the Level Squish does not affect the systems I have given countless examples of, because it is far easier to throw the cheese out of the box and repeat points that ESO hides it’s max level behind a max level progression system for a reason that he refuses to even try and put into words or to talk about just because you think you are correct doesn’t make you right.

Level Squish doesn’t do anything people just make me shake my head.

173

Repost because i accidentally deleted the post while instead i wanted to correct a grammar error.

Basically.

At this point caesa argument seem to be everyone else but me is wrong, so either bring some evidence about your point or it’s just your opinion, and just like every other opinion it can be wrong.

And you are wrong on the eso stuff, so it’s likely you have no real evidence to support your claims.

2 Likes
174

I did not make an argument or claim there though, beyond the argument that he is wrong for refusing to answer a simple question.

If people want to continue claiming and making the argument the level squish doesn’t accomplish anything instead of going after psychological arguments actually address whether there are mechanical consequences to less but longer levels that retain their current power. Those consequences if they exist would cause the actual effects of the level squish. I brought up an example where since more gear would and could be gained over the course of a single level there’d be more power progression, and the repeated counterargument to that was A) Gearing does not matter while leveling B) But what if people get too strong or not strong enough(too strong can’t happen, too little would still be better than current).

So yeah if people wanna continue to make that claim, please do go into detail how it would actually not change anything when it takes seconds to just look at how Secodary stats work to realise it obviously would.

Also mate don’t try to keep arguing the ESO point, you yourself admitted it is a max level progression beyond the first 160 and you have to be completely disingenous if you try telling me the 160 above 50 is not there because they did not want to raise the max level for some very relevant to this discussion reasons(also CP wasn’t in the game at launch so you can’t even try to say it was easier to make CP a req rather than higher level)

175

wish it was true.
ive been saying for a while level 120 is insanely high. thats freakin double than the original 60 levels.
i dont know who is crazy enough to start a new character today knowing they have 119 levels to go to start the endgame and begin the real game.

i personally think they should never increase the level again, instead integrate a system that rewards by performing certain activities.

176

You argument made it seem like level 50 is the max level in eso, which is wrong, just because i agree with you about the progression system does not mean that your claim is correct 100%.

Cp is both leveling up until 160 cp, and a progression system, end of story.

That’s it.

1 Like
177

Okay and why is CP 160 the max level rather than a sensible choice of 10-20 more actual levels. It is like they did not want their max level to go up endlessly, how odd. I mean you are correct in how it works and that is the end of that story, but the context in which it was brought up was “Look how high those numbers are” which is ironic when it is hidden behind a first smaller number :stuck_out_tongue:

Also love how like a good anti Level Squish guy your only choosen point to address was a nitpick on ESO, not the pretty clear main point of my post asking for proof that the mechanical effects of a level squish wouldn’t have a positive effect(I mean I’d say prove they have no effect, but I know that’d just be twisted into “Okay they have negative effects, watch me not explain them” so I went ahead and asked for proof of those too)

178

What I said was that there is no reason to implement a level squish.
No reason for something doesn’t mean that something doesn’t do anything.

My posts were about pointing out that there is no point in introducing a level squish to make leveling shorter for example, when that an entirely unrelated point that can be accomplished without a squish. So that is no reason for a level squish. Same with stat squishes. Scaling changes. Talent overhauls.

Nobody said that a level squish wouldn’t do anything, just that it wouldn’t do the things that people attribute to it that can and were in fact changed several times wihout a level squish already. And when you insisted that the level squish would be great for ‘reasons’ I pointed out that those reasons actually result in problems of their own. You seem more interested in pseudo-intellecual posturing and putting down people on the forums rather than actually presenting anything of substance yourself.

So yes, have to agree with Ryura:

1 Like
179

Yes because it is far easier to go against horrible arguments like BIG NUMBERS SCARY, than I dunno actually addressing what the level squish does and looking at the consequences as a whole.

Yet again you keep repeating yourself instead of actually engaging my points. I am only interested in putting down people who refuse to actually talk about the issue at hand and keep shooting it down without actually going over WHAT IT DOES.

So one last chance to see if you have that calcium deficency I assume you do(please recall my if you have a honest bone in your body comment to understand the pun), please go into detail WHAT the mechanical cosequences of the level squish would be and how they’d affect the overall leveling experience.

180

And again, that’s your job :slightly_smiling_face: You’re the one advocating for this change and dispelling people’s concerns, and assuring people that it would have a robust and meaningful impact on secondary stats and the leveling experience. So please, look up burden of proof and you’ll see that it’s your responsibility to support your argument, not our responsibility to disprove it.

Besides, I already listed several consequences in my replies to you, and they weren’t good reasons to implement a level squish. Such as the power difference between two level 10 characters for example, when one has freshly dinged and the other has spent 5 hours getting geared. It would also ruin progression by forcing people into cyclical power spikes and power drops. For the first half a level you’d be just as powerless as you are now when you ding (but in the new system it would last longer) and in the second half you’d accumulate gear in a twink-like manner leading to power creep. Not only would this interfere with level-based tuning but would also make leveling up far more punishing than it is currently. I also mentioned that while re-learning levels is not impossible, it is unnecessary and creates extra work for no proven benefit. The current talent and spell numbers we have are insufficient to make every level meaningful, so their distribution would be just as arbitrary as it is now even. Furthermore I voiced concerns that a more constant stream of levelup rewards could trivialize that feeling just as most of the old talent points we got were trivial, and said that perhaps the current system of having important milestone rewards gives players more to look forward to instead of desensitizing them with regular shinies. The ‘hurr-durr-big-numbers’ argument as you so lovingly refer to it wasn’t my own opinion as such, but a rebuttal to the ‘numbers are too high we can’t cope with this’ argument that I anticipated would surface - and as it indeed did in this thread several times when people mentioned that stats and level numbers are too high (even though they really aren’t and there would be just a letter difference between seeing 100 or 100k or 100m pop up on our screen). Others, though not me, also voiced concerns about losing their relative power which is an unwelcome feeling after we worked so hard to overpower lower levels, so a power curve should remain across all levels instead of squishing the difference so much that old content becomes challenging again (as we saw with some of the stat squish impacts).

So if you have any actual ‘points’ about the level squish, by all means share it with the thread. But again, it’s not our job to tell you why your idea wouldn’t be a great solution, it’s your job to support that it would be.

1 Like
181

So you know, that is already how it works right? You know that it is EXACTLY how current gearing while leveling works RIGHT? That this is how it ALWAYS worked, RIIIIIIGHT? I told you multiple times that current gearing at each level does not allow people to get extremely stronger than those just starting out at it. But even if it say does do that by I dunno 5 ilvls, why is that bad? In a PvE scenario it does not matter and PvP wise it is the least impactful thing when a level 55 is questing in the same zone as a level 22. This is also literally how max level works, with instead of levels tiers reset the gearing progress.

Blatantly false for a few obvious reasons, A) the first half is the exact same as it is now, ie calling it powerless is trying to confuse people, level 23 would be no different from 46 except you don’t get a gear reset at 47 B) How the heck would this mythical powerlessness last longer if the first half of the level(which will be shorter, but lets not bring that argument up again) is the same as the original level 46.

Power acqusition through gear is linear you dunce, ilvls available at each level are constant that means if you replace a full dungeon set from the previous level with one of the current level each item raises your power by overall the same amount, you’d not magically start ramping up quicker in the second half, stop pulling stuff out of your butt.

What tuning? How in gods name does it interfere if mobs do not get stronger within the levels, it is completely player favoured. Speaking of player favoured it will also obviously not make it more punishing since the first half would remain unchanged and the second would continue improving at the same rate.

To also use your own words against you, if the first half of level 23 would feel powerless, then 46 right now feels like that for it’s entirety AND so would 47 which would be the second half of 23, so by your own admission current leveling is bad and if I am correct then the continued linear scaling thanks to gear would overall improve the feeling of power for HALF of the current levels.

You can ignore it all you want, but people have expressed a distaste with too many of the current levels having no rewards, and expanding classes to put something meaningful in most of 120 levels is not viable(not even MoP’s bloated class design where the WoW team literally called quits on adding more stuff could be effectively split over those levels). The reduction of levels can be easily seen as a prereq to actually start redesigning the classes to to work with the leveling system rather doing that while the framework is just not suitable. If you wish to provide a solution to split classes into 120 levels please do come forward with it.

The current system is heavily disliked. I personally do not want the old talent trees and much prefer the current ones, but even then those are way too far apart and not enough other things are inbetween them to feel like you are getting consistent rewards

Where do I even start here. I never claimed you made the point about number being too big, my point was that it is a low hanging fruit that is based on armchair psychology. Trying to push it as the main reason to not do the squish as it is a stupid argument is exactly why I keep pushing for the mechanical impact to be discussed instead.

Secondly the power curve was never gonna change, and people who bring that up have no idea what a level squish is and the survey actually explained that it’d not be impacted, it just fearmongering that some are spreading to make people not like the level squish, which is a much more simpler and has no impact on old content(if we become level 60, then the legacy content becomes whatever is 6 instead of 11 levels under us, which would include everything it currently does, such as ICC which would be a level 40 raid). If you had any interest other than to attack the level squish you could I dunno actually correct the people spewing falsities instead of only going after those you disagree with.

Mate, as the opposition, it is literally your job to point out the flaws in my argument. That being said.

Your little tirade about burden of proof is nice and all, but yeah when you are making the statement that Level Squish does not have benefits, you have to prove those. You’d have a point if this was about debating me, but it isn’t you are trying to appeal to Blizzard here to not go through with it, in which sense the best you can do it actually prove that the mechanical consequences of the squish would be at best neutral at worst damaging, none of which you have even attempted.

Though I must congratulate you for engaging my point about gearing while leveling finally, because that allowed me to actual take your argument and finally take it apart and show how little logic it was grounded in. I mean complaining about that level ups would reset that progress while supporting the system where levelups happen twice as often, that is just priceless.

182

This is a game where screwing up balance is offered as content.
At a bare minimum with the start of every expansion, classes are trashed, stomped with both feet, then taken a dump on regardless whether they were okay before.

I will never forget what they turned mm legion hunters in this cancer of an expansions just for the sake of changing it.

TL;DR: balancing will never be a problem for blizz cause something you dont give a **** about cant be an issue to you.

183

Yeah, no. That’s not how it works. You currently earn enough levels fast enough for gear-based power creep to not become an issue while leveling (it’s reserved for max level when gear-based progression kicks in). Someone who spent 5 hours more ingame is 5 levels higher than you, but they’ll be relatively at the same power level since power is based on ilvl compared to lvl. If that same someone would spend 5 hours longer at your level (e.g. a twink) they’d be more powerful even though they’re technically the same level as you (doing the same dungeons, combating the same level enemies, combating you, etc). That’s where tuning comes in btw, if we presume that players can now reach double the power (i.e. if now realistically leveling people will get to an average green/blue quality level-appropriate gear before they ding and outlevel it; with twice the time they’d get to a full blue quality or even blue/purple state) you must consider how you’d balance that.

I called it that because someone here argued that the scaling system sucks because leveling up makes you more powerless (due to the ilvl/playerlevel power scaling that resulted in all those 101 lego twinks in Legion and in Antorus-geared-chars farming islands in BfA). Having twice the time to ramp up power by getting level-appropriate drops would make it twice as punishing when you come down from that power spike high every time you level up.

Currently you spend let’s say 1 hour leveling from 46 to 47. In that time frame you get 5 lvl46 blue drops. You then ding to 47 and spend 1 hour getting 5 lvl47 blue drops, and reach 48. Etc. With the squish you’d spend 2 hours at 23 and get 10 level-appropriate blues. The power difference would therefore be greater. And it’s silly that during every level the last 10% xp needed should be the most fun because you’ve grown relatively more powerful, only to reset to mediocre when you level again and look forward to the second half of the leveling (by the time you accumulated more level-appropriate gear). Leveling shouldn’t revolve around such constant gear-based progression cycles.

And I already addressed that putting something meaningful into all levels isn’t necessarily a good thing. Class abilities don’t have to revolve around player levels, we could be getting new skills every 5 levels and it would be a perfectly fine arbitrary milestone just like dividing 30-odd skills and talents arcross 60 levels would be an arbitrary milestone. We got a Draenor perk that affected our abilities every third level or so, did anybody care? No. We all got to 100 because that’s what leveling is about.

I’m sure you’re not the only one who thinks so. But when people are upset about something they generally make it known (I see outrage threads and Blizzard bashing videos all the time) yet judging by the lack of response, the vast majority of people seem perfectly okay with the way things are now. So to assert with such conviction that the level squish is a good thing, you’d have to point out what (if anything) is wrong with the leveling experience at all, how a level squish would be the most approriate fix to those issues. Besides, people also expressed not wanting a level squish, so we can agree I think that ‘some people think so’ is not evidence that a proposal is good.

They need to compact 120 levels and 400 ilvls into 60 levels. If they don’t change the ilvl then obviously every level would have a much larger ilvl bracket and stat difference than now, leading to power creep. If they do change the ilvls and stats, they are changing the power curve by reducing the difference between the lower and higher levels (as they did during the stat squish). Soloing old content (such as ICC25HC since you mentioned it) is actually noticably longer now than it was before.

Yet another post from you which just ran in circles, threw out insults, jumped to conclusions, and made presumptions, tried to conflate level squish consequences with other things, and made claims that you didn’t support. Perhaps you should try being less reactionary and start a post with a clean slate, outlining the fabled benefits of a level squish. :slight_smile: Maybe then you’d actually get to bringing up evidence and explaining the ‘mechanical impact’ that a level squish would have in your opinion. And as for the burden of proof, when I say ‘there is no reason for a level squish’ the correct counterargument would be to actually present facts of the level squish bringing some benefits (benefits that aren’t the result of something else such a scaling change or a legacy content damage buff or a leveling time decrease).