The fix to leveling experience

Community General Discussion
1

Wow Leveling experience is an amazing work that got broke by people who want to speedrun their alts to the end game! We all know it! In the end we the players broke the experience to new people. Last week i tried to bring a friend to the game and it didnt took him long to realize the experience was completely broken after exiles reach. The experienced players no longer feel sympathy for the people who could give a chance to the game because most of you think it’s not so bad!
But i think i got a solution!
Make classes a NOT fixed option, changeable at any time, this way we would have no reason to ever come back to the leveling area, people would stop complain how slow it is and new players can have a nice experience that makes sense.
Other benefits include:
-Noone cares if it gonna be empty because the world always feels empty already.

  • people can retry the leveling experience because they want not because they have to
  • chromie stops being a battle between speedrunners and leveling enjoyers
    -experienced players get to be where they want to be(end game)
    -you only really have to do your leveling experience once
  • it punishes multi boxing as every new account they have to level every character
  • rewards people who stick to one character as ypu can focus on prpgressing or collecting stuff
  • reduces alt jumping and main indecision
    -it allows blizzard to add unique systems that many times punishes alt characters forcing them to repeat the system inumerous times turning the game tedious.
2

Nah.

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3

Levelling does not need to made “longer” it needs to be made engaging, fun and worthwhile.

Until then they should give us perm xp buffs and let us fly through asap

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4

Having played FF14 a little in the last few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really appreciate the feature that enables one character to learn and level every class.

It wouldn’t solve your complaint about the levelling process, but it would do this:

and this:

and this:

I also feel like it would make levelling feel less tedious for veteran players because we wouldn’t have to do all the levelling before we could (as we see it) actually play the character. To do endgame content, we’d simply switch class to one that’s fully levelled and geared.

It would also make gearing easier because there’s a considerable degree of overlap between classes. It would also work incredibly well with things like the current crest system for players who wanted to gear multiple classes on the same character.

What it wouldn’t do - before anyone screams ‘NO NO BAD’ - is force anyone to play multiple classes on the same character. Having many alts would still be a perfectly viable option for those who want to play different races and/or factions, or for roleplayers whose character is closely tied to their class.

5

I’m saying that you dont have to do it.
But what you said it implies that as long it’s fun and engaging youre happy to do it with all alts? So if you have like 6 alts youre okay doing it 6 times?
We are definitely different…

6

I don’t see that Class Change necessatily has much to do with levelling, but I will endorse Class Change.

Once upon a time, I would have been horrified by the idea, but since we can buy boosts of any class anyhow, the horse has already bolted from the stables.

I agree that

but, how to do that is a hard question.

7

If you wanted a rogue now, you would have to level one from scratch. Then you want the druid you have to repeat, then a shaman you repeat.

Unless you take joy of repeating the same experience over and over, the only thing you will want is to be over fast.

8

That is literally the worst possible way to fix it, since new players don’t have a character at all and therefore no way to change its class.

I don’t think people are giving up due to indecision. I think they’re trying out a character and not having fun, then repeating this process until they die of boredom and quit the game entirely as they realise that the reason the game isn’t fun isn’t because of the classes.

WoW’s levelling deserves better. It deserves an overhaul where Blizzard decides not to do what they have now also done in Diablo 4. It isn’t fun and it bores everybody to tears.

It’s a strange question because: “How longer”?

Note, not how much, but just how.

There are several ways to make the game longer:

  1. Slow the combat down
  2. Require players to play more content
  3. Require the players to take breaks
  4. Add timegates or other such things
  5. Adjustable difficulty
  6. More custom content based on race and class
  7. Perhaps more I haven’t thought of.

I like 1, 3, 5, and 6. 2 can be reasonable, but that needs to be considered carefully. 4 is imo horrid.

I think it’s important for variety and immersion that the world respects who and what you are. I don’t want to start out in a homogenised levelling experience - I want to start out as a young Pandaren in Pandaria and I want to have a mage as a mentor and maybe he turns out to be a blue dragon (how about the one we were just introduced to? That’d be so cool) which is revealed later on. Stuff like that. Small variations - vast majority of quest lines are shared for all players. It’s just like class quests in vanilla. Use existing lands.

Unfortunately Blizzard have given us ~190 combinations, so that’s gonna be fun.

The adjustable difficulty can come simply by choosing which quests to do when and making the game statically levelled again.

Combat in WoW is ridiculously fast now. I’d prefer to have it slowed down again - just a little. I am pressing so many buttons so fast. Breaks come in the form of flying, food, rested XP being more relevant (maybe have it affect quests with a 50% bonus?) etc.

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9

Leveling does not need to be made faster or to take longer, in my opinion. The design issue that leveling faces is elsewhere.

  1. Leveling is mostly a solo experience.
    This result in a false expectation that Wow is made to be experienced as a solo player. But as we all know, the solo experience is very poor and full of…
  2. The first contact with the community is made with Dungeon Rushers
    New players and Veteran players have two different goals when it comes to clearing dungeons. One does it to do it’s quest, gaining gear, experience the dungeon, learn their class in a group environment, the other is doing it for the end of dungeon XP Boost. Most of the time, it result in the new player not feeling welcomed and feeling out of touch with the community.

Blizzard need to find a way to include new players in a group activity that don’t involve the need to perform/go fast. As much as i like MM+, i should say that since they exist, we tend to consider every dungeon to be like a MM+, as we’re conditioned to.

  • Having Highly farmeable and scaled at any level Public Events in the Starting zones of each race would make this first contact be much less toxic and give to new players a glimps of the Open World endgame gameplay loop. It could also bring a good source of xp and tuned well, it could feel like Legion Invasions. Blizz need to design those event so there’s a swarm effect, where everybody follow the same trail of events in a zerg swarm. This start with a good repeatable reward structure, which renown as it is currently isn’t.
  • Dungeon Queue should prioritize murloc players (New players) to be group together
  • End of Dungeon XP should disappear and be replaced by more XP given per mobs and per Boss killed.
  • The Little murloc icon should be visible to all players, not just for guides, so people would know there’s a new player in their group at the first glance.
  • Having a little murloc near you (70-100m) should allow you to get a bonus XP(20-30% so it feel significant), so you don’t want them to fall behind and you would always be happy to have one in your group.
  • There should be an optional bonus XP in dungeon at the end of a Trash mob count (like we have in MM+)
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10

From personal experience, I would say it’s more likely that they stop playing after part-levelling several characters because they didn’t make friends and get involved in group activities. I got bored with WoW pretty quickly when I treated it as a single player game, but I play daily now that I’m in an active guild and doing group content with friends.

11

Another big part of it. This is why WoW Classic funnels players through the same zones at the same time in their adventures and add group and dungeon quests - so that as they quest near each other they group up, and then somebody might talk or attempt coordinating, and then someone writes “hey, I got these 5 quests in Waiking Caverns. Wanna do it?”

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12

I like all your points but these are ideas that should really be considered and flushed out imo.

Great to see a sensible constructive post on these forums for a change instead of “ban leavers who won’t carry me omg”

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13

well, just the other day i made an hyperbole about it in another topic and now it is being actually suggested? that would kill alts tho. maybe it’s more efficient make all the achievements and currencies account bound.

14

Yeah, that isn’t a solution, though. I mean, it must be a partial one, but it doesn’t help players who have no idea how to even communicate with others. I remember one encounter I had with another player back in TBC/WoTLK time when I was new. They talked to me, and I didn’t even know how to respond. I certainly had no idea how to use the chat channels. If I got a dungeon quest, I ignored it; if I got an open world group quest, I ignored it until I’d levelled up enough to solo it.

I hate to keep harping on about how well FF14 does things (especially when I think its combat systems suck), but the tooltips that pop up every single time you encounter something new are spot on. WoW needs something like that.

WoW also needs regular organised social events to get players interacting, and they need to be heavily promoted to everyone.

15

You needed something to tell you to press enter to write in the chatbox?

I mean I suppose if they put a little “Enter” icon on the right side of the chatbox?

I really don’t like pop-ups.

16

All of those just make it more hell

2 Likes
17

2nd and 4th one for sure.

1st and 3rd can work depending on implementation. It can bring us closer to vanilla. It can also be completely toxic though.

18

Everyone is different and I’m all for giving people voluntary ways to have a slow experience but not enforcing it on the rest of us who see levelling as a chore and don’t want it to become a worse one.

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19

You can press enter to talk to other players in the world? Really? I always use the /s command. I’ve been playing WoW for about 15 years and I didn’t know you could press enter.

See what I mean?

The game doesn’t revolve around you.

I have to agree with this.

  • Slow combat just makes it like the other game I’m prone to mention a lot (the one where I’ve already said in this thread that the combat system sucks).
  • Required content is generally despised (like Torghast).
  • Forced breaks is treating adults like children who can’t make their own decisions on how to spend their time.
  • Timegating is generally hated by the community at max level. I’m sure it would be even more so while levelling.
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20

No. In order to write /s you have to press enter. And it defaults to Say which is convenient in his case.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re telling me out didn’t know how to say anything to people yet you just admitted you knew how to talk to them. And if you couldn’t figure out the commands there was a convenient pop-up menu right next to it.

Of course not exclusively, but it does revolve around the 20 million or more people who did figure it out, Sherlock.