Hello. I’ve recently returned from a longer break from the game, and decided to start fresh on a new server. I am currently in the throes of leveling, sitting on level 45. Having taken a break, played other games and now returned, I would like to ask you Blizzard, why are there only 2 effective ways of leveling?
My Problems
On one hand, you have questing, however I personally feel that questing has become worse than ever, primarily because of one feature: War mode. My gripes with War mode is partially due to sharding, and the imbalance between factions, I play Alliance, which aren’t in the best spot player wise.
War mode was supposed to bring a bit of sensible danger to the world when you’re out questing, you meet players from the other faction who can, if they want, pick a fight with you, and you should also be running into players of your own factions, that’s what sharding is supposed to do, it’s supposed to help balance out player count between the factions. For all intents and purposes though, this is, from my personal experience -Not- how it works.
9 out of 10 people I see are definitely horde players. And the vast majority of these people are between the levels 110-120. I have absolutely zero chance of fighting these players fairly, and it always ends in 1 of 3 ways. They either ignore, never happens. They kill me once and move on, happens mostly. They kill me and start hard camping my corpse, rare but occasionally happens.
The few times I have run into players of my own level have been scarce, and though they’ve been fun little skirmishes, I never felt like my leveling experience was halted in a frustrating way. Sure I may lose cause I suck at PvP, but that’s what I signed up for. I did not, however, sign up for the cesspool of being sharded 10:1 against max level horde players.
Sharding has its purpose, but in its current state, it serves the high level gankers who seek more pleasure in other players misfortune than playing than game, more than the average player. And I would like to see some heavy changes to the system that puts in some level ranges, or scrap it all together in certain level brackets, because as a feature that should promote a fun, warlike experience, it fails on both ends.
Now, you might say I can just turn war mode off. While this is true at a technical level, it is a choice that is far more difficult to make, because of the war mode bonus. On Alliance side, the bonus currently sits on 20%. That’s a 20% Experience boost, it is significant, and will cut down your time grinding out by a huge margin in the long run.
You are essentially not met with the question and solution of: “Do you not like to get ganked? Turn War mode off, easy.” You are met with the question; “Do you not like to get ganked? Then go grind even longer.” Your choice is between frustrating gameplay, and frustrating grinds.
Of course, if you do not want to opt into this at all, you have one other reasonable choice, and that is dungeon spamming. Of course, if you’re a pure DPS class, then you’re already screwed, but for those playing tank or healer, it is definitely an easy path to get onto.
Queues are fast, dungeons are easy, and though it does occasionally pit you with potatoes, you know what you’re getting into, it’s part of the experience. What it is though, is yet another boring grind. It’s fine for the first few alts, especially tanks and healers. But grinding dungeons from level 15-110 is an experience that also happens to become grindy to frustrating levels.
Those are the 2 only reasonable ways of leveling in WoW at this moment. Pet battling and Battlegrounds aren’t exactly a stable, effective way of gaining levels, and I do not wish to make them part of this essay.
The game is old. It’s been 15 years, and the leveling itself has hardly changed since. You can dial experience all you want, change the difficulty all you want, it’s still the same as it was 15 years ago. There’s been no big improvements or changes, other than the introduction of Group Finder and placement of quest NPCs inside of dungeons.
I beseech you Blizzard, please invest some time and effort into more, interesting ways of gaining experience in World of Warcraft. I am going to list some ideas and features I have seen in other games, because I think they could create improvements to the game overall, and maybe spark some more enthusiasm for players to level again, and make the experience overall more pleasant for newcomers.
Ideas and Features
1 - Expanding the daily dungeon system
At max level, you have a daily reward for doing a random heroic dungeon. Why not expand on this feature and create some more dynamics surrounding it? With grouped level sync, I see so many opportunities to create a reward system around high level players doing dungeons with low level players, and a chance for some fun story telling.
For the reward system. Create several new types of queues, instead of just normal / heroic.
“Leveling Queue:” The primary queue for players who are spamming dungeons to level up, and accessible for players at max level. Let it work similarly to how it does now when you’re below the previous expansion, but give it a daily reward system for players in the current expansion, with rewards enticing enough to make players do it.
To promote a more welcoming atmosphere, it would also be an idea to introduce a system that detects new accounts that do not have dungeon achievements. When a player is doing their first run, let it be announced to the group that there’s a new player and increase the rewards for the dungeon.
Make it good thing for experienced players to see new people in their dungeon, and they won’t annoyed or angry that “noobs” are slowing them down. At least it’ll create an incentive to welcome new players more than the system currently does.
“Boss Queues:” Make a selection of bosses from raids, scale them to 5 man fights and allow players to randomly queue for them. Give low level players a daily bonus to Experience and give high level players a daily reward of their own, just like “Leveling.” Let the fights be a bit challenging too, do not let it become an AFK clown fiesta like LFR. Use low level dungeons and bosses as tools to teach new players.
More types of queues could be added, but those two are the main ones I would personally like to see the most. If you don’t want the max level rewards to act as another influx of gold, then my solution would be to create a neutral faction that surrounds the idea of timewalking, because that is essentially the system that would be in use in terms of a plot point.
The best example I would give, is the fight between the Bronze and Infinite dragonflight. The daily rewards could surround tokens you can trade for various cosmetics and mounts with the Bronze Dragonflight, and also spark some more life into professions with cosmetic recipes.
It’s a chance to have fun with fun encounters too through the use of the infinite dragonflight corrupting bosses and dungeons, a little like the seasonal mythic + affixes.
2- Weekly Challenges
Create a weekly challenge / achievement system that rewards players extra for doing a set amount of activities they normally do. Do X amount of dungeons for bonus rewards, such as XP, Gold, Tokens, Reputation etcetera. Do X amount of (world)quests, dungeons through the Dungeon Finder, arenas, battlegrounds, kill x amount of mobs at your own level. A bunch of small, yet significant, extra rewards every week you get from playing the game.
Those would be my personal base editions to the game. I know this is mostly a rant and an essay, and I’ll go back to leveling regardless of what happens, but no matter how I look at it, I feel the need to raise my opinion on this, because the game could use some modernization that is 1: Not fueled by gambling, 2: Class butchering, I’m level 45, my hotbars look fairly empty, and all I really see in my spell book and talents moving forward, are mostly situational utility or passives, and 3: Eternal grinds.
What are your thoughts on the matter? What are your opinions? What would you add / Change in the core systems of the game? Of the genre at a whole?
