Pretty wild how badly designed this game is around new players

Community General Discussion
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This is just my take:

The initial thought of World of Warcraft in modern day is: the first 60 levels don’t matter.

I think what’s really making this game more and more unpopular is because the game caters towards us, the veteran players.

Chromie time was more a fix towards us players who have levelled a dozen alts and found it boring and lineair to always experience the same routes.

So they introduced scaling aswell to make it easy for everyone.

Well, for everyone but a new player that’s new to MMORPGs.

Maybe why the genre is doing so bad in general these since it has been surpassed by mobas and games like roblox and minecraft.

A new player joins an MMORPG because of the adventure, the sense of a virtual world brought before them, the setting of the game, the journey he’s about to go on.

And you’re effectively telling every new players that whatever he does, it doesn’t matter, since everything is scaled to said player where he actually becomes weaker when he levels up, not stronger. Until he reaches level 60 and the scaling disappears.

It doesn’t matter if you level up your professions, if you get better gear, none of it actually matters, at all. The newbie is just told to follow the quest arrow and turn his brain off.

I tried to get a friend into WoW again and they got bored around level 24. Because none of the things we were doing actually mattered and it was quite boring.

I think that it comes with the corporation bloat and the way they’ve been copying the system since Legion.

This is just my take, I’m curious how do other people see it? You guys think new players find it interesting and challenging that the game stays the same for the first 60 levels and that no matter what they do, none of it matters?

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The only thing i really dislike about changes is 120lvl squished to 60
It was most idiotic decision that blizzard made
we play MMORPG game and they reduce lvls

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The amount of times I’ve tried to get people into retail WoW only for them to quit on leveling or switch to Classic due to the leveling is beyond counting.

WoW’s leveling on retail is beyond junk. It’s diabolical. I wish, I so desperately wish, that Blizzard would allocate some resources to just do nothing but go around old WoW content and making sure it’s fun and engaging to consume.

And yes, the designers who made the mobs scale to the player have A LOT of this responsibility. Sure, the problem was allowed to fester for nearly a decade by constantly lowering XP requirements without cutting things out of the main quest (which they invented in Cata because they are geniuses) or doing anything about the zones themselves - but their solution only made it worse.

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I can agree wjth this statement.

However do i beleive its because of bad design, no. The games been premised on new expansions taking over current content is 20 years old.

Making old and new content relevant permanantly is pretty difficult and no games rly mamage that.

Although it would be nice if theyd go back once in a while and update lands to reflect the lore and maybe updated.

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Yeah, when I was new in BFA, I tried to level in wotlk, got extremely flamed, bc I played dps on a blood dk (the game didn’t explain, that it was a tank spec then), the pet had taunt on, and I got kicked out of the dungeon. Then I just bought a level boost lol

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I have not even felt good about getting a single piece of loot at max level since BFA during corruptions. The power progression is just way off at every point in the game. At endgame, every item just feels like a boring 0.5-1 % dps / HP increase at this point. During leveling, feels like gear just does not matter at all.

At the end of the day one of the reasons WoW was so successful was its power progression system. Doing Wailing Caverns 5-6 times was always an incredibly inefficient way to level, but you know what it allowed? For you to feel like a god for the next 10 levels.

I agree with everything Asjon, Lutia and Ishayo have said in this thread.

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Alright, here’s a fun story…

Source? Me. Just trust me bro. Or don’t, w/e - but here it is.

The reason why The Burning Crusade had all of its zones on one “map” (if you look at the new Azeroth zones they’re actually on the Outlands map) was to have it all on one server, and the reason for having it all on one server was because only ~30% of the players had a max level character, so having them all in Outlands meant the existing completely lagged out servers would lose almost half of the characters logged in at any one time (since players who got to max level played more).

Therefore The Burning Crusade would help solve stability problems. This wasn’t entirely how it played out due to Hellfire Peninsula, but after that initial shock to the servers it did turn out that way, and it was a smashing success. With the bigger server capacities the game was able to go on to 10 million subscribers pretty much seamlessly.

Even a good part into WotLK this continued to be the case, but by the time the Lich King was dying it was not the case anymore.

This doesn’t work today not because there is no content to level in, and not even because leveling is short - the reason is that most people don’t want to level characters. That’s also why they keep complaining whenever leveling takes too long. It doesn’t take too long, it’s just not fun.

And since leveling is naturally the first thing any new player is exposed to… if it sucks, that’s game over. Quite literally.

And they’ve tried so many things, with the latest being Chromie Time. And guess what? It just doesn’t help. And if they want to understand why it doesn’t help they should frankly see their old game as an example. It’s quite embarrassing, but they have to.

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Since TBC.

I’m not a launch player, I started just before Wrath prepatrch and I had a tonne of stuff to learn along the way, your average kid is not going to stick around due to the lack of instant gratification you get with newer games.

Modern WoW is a lot better with tutorial, ie they actually have some but it’s still a steep learning curve.

I think in the past Blizzard have been targeting new players and that’s there they got it wrong for the reason I sated above.

In DF they seem to have figured out that it’s current players they need to look after. People who started playing in their 20s are approaching middle age, some already there, they don’t have 10 hours per day to play.

One bug bear I have when people say MMORPG, it’s not a multiple player RPG as one might expect.

Adding multiple players means quite a lot of the activity has to be fair. You play Skyrim for instance and one configuration is completely OP - who cares. If you are in a WoW raid and one person can solo a boss, that’s an issue. What we do as players in this game can negatively affect other players, including our personal behaviour.

Blizzard needs to cater to existing players, (most) new players don’t actually want a MMORPG experience, existing players do!

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Indeed not, I just cannot enjoy Retail’s leveling. On the other hand, I really love it as a content in Classic.

That might explain why a former coworker fren didn’t stick around. He levelled up a shammy so we can do keys. Then we only did like… 2 of them, and we never partyed up ever again, only chat about it at work when he was around.

That too could be a reason why it was changed. Not only the times change… we as people too do, so we want to have our stuff sorted quicker.

I really loved the XP buffs we had in both game versions, but losing them, particularly in Classic, was just painful - it turns the first 60 levels into a slow slog.

Thank god I took advantage of it to level multiple toons I had both times it was up…

Old game or not, it’s much better paced that way for today’s players, while still leaving enough time to master your class.

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That’s actually usually not how it goes for me. But hey, fair enough.

Did he ever talk about how he felt about the leveling?

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I was watching 1 new player playing wow for first time.
He went to BFA zones and lore was like - hello hero, thanks for saving the world or smth silly like that :smiley:
He was like - okey,100% its mistake I have not saved nothing yet, get into lore seems like is pointless.

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lvl 12 hunter doing 5x more dmg than a 70 full epix hunter ina leveling dungeon is beyond retarded

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thats true. level 10 mage 50 % of teams dps :smiley:

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first they tried to silence non subbed people , now they are silencing keywords in this forum …what a bunch of coward losers

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The one which is darkspear warrior?

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I think the whole gearing x leveling is just broken .
It ok to just pick Chromie time and level it there , but honestly you level so fast you out-level everything before even completing the story , which by itself is stupid .
In addition to the above lots of the expansion stories are incomplete unless you playing the various “isle” hubs , and you can’t quest their story , because knock knock the story is gated behind rep .
Say you wonna learn SL story as a new player . If you somehow manage to complete the story without out-leveling it , you get into the korthia or zereth morthis quests , but you cant do that , because its all rep based/gated weekly .
So as new player your left hanging , with incomplete story , and you start of new chapter completely unrelated to your old one .

Next is the gear which simply doesn’t matter . I didn`t bother changing my gear on my dk from 60 to 70 , because why bother . 2 world quests and your gear is outdated and I could well enough do the dragon flying or pick daisies in lvl 60 gear .
Gear at low levels is completely useless and I don’t understand it at all . You do quest at lvl 20 you get piece of gear which looks good . You do quest at lvl 25 , this one looks good , but oh no it’s effects are disabled ???
Dungeons and raids are all over the place .

You que for a dungeon and you are randomly sent to deadmines , Freehold , Vault of the wardens or whatever and you are just completely lost why are you there in the first pace . Why are you killing those ? What’s the point of this thing ? Why is it dropping crap gear ? Honestly what the hell is going on ???

Its such a total and meaningless mess that yea , ever for veteran players its a mess . I can’t image how a newbie would feel .

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Mobs were always around your level as you kept moving to new zones.

The first X levels never mattered. You were new and weren’t caught by the “endgame rush”, so you could enjoy leveling. This is about you, not the game.

Then stop telling them.

We always followed markers, the only difference was back in the day they didn’t show a 3D location and were inaccurate as hell, causing a ton of frustration especially in no-fly zones. I agree quests in WoW are too many and too dumb, but adding inconvenience won’t make them better.

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fax. periodt.

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Tbh i can agree. I think theres more people who cant be bothered to level then those who have such demand.

The rising popularity of level boosting for gold, the boost itself and more defintly prove that definitively true.

And the issue is, attempting to deliever a levelling experience for those demanding it, while also preventing levelling becoming a irritation to the other side, isnt realistically possible.

While yes levelling defintly wasnt improved, i wouldnt say its solely this that is why theres more max level characters.

Remember, back in these days u either raid, or u are simply a open world player, there was so little for a non raider to do, being max level didnt hold a purpose for them.

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I think it is pretty bad experience. And of course the free experience is dog. Should be possible to level up to lv 60 until new addon!

New players start on the new leveling island which is cool and great but not enough to teach them the gameplay or rotation.
They need to teach them INGAME how to play all classes and the game. Use the class trainers for that and implement a scenario/mini dungeon or class quests.

Ok so cool they are level 10 and go back to main city and head to bfa zones. they learn how to ride mounts and later they get a quest to buy flying. Mount up in main city and maybe think cool i can fly now and quest and go back to bfa zones and ups flying isnt a thing here. WTF!