There are around ~110 playable zones in the game, only 5 of which are relevant.
And by “relevant”, I mean “you travel through them to get to your next Mythic dungeon”. Maybe a bit more if you’re one of those insane people who have a profession in WoW.
All those beautiful zones are dead and empty.
Ironforge, Gilneas, Suramar, Frostfire Ridge, Grizzly Hills, Uldum, the Hinterlands…All completely irrelevant.
Because spending 15y in the same zones for slightly up to date rewards isn’t a good design ?
There’s a need for change and new content, and that’s something the community clearly expects if you look at the 8.3 world content’s feedback
Is that a shame ? Yeah sure, but it would be worse imo to keep everything up to date with end game content.
Wasn’t the biggest complaint about zone scaling in the old world about there being no progression anymore ? Can’t see that “All zones now relevant for max level” scheme being successful
That’s not wasted potential. People paid $40 to play Shadowlands, my dude.
I too think that patch 7.3.5, the one that brought scaling in the leveling is one of the worst expansions WoW has ever received. It did kill the leveling. In fact, while I think the current leveling system has potential, I think leveling is way too fast to be fun. You CANNOT finish an expansion’s campaign within 50 levels. It’s sad. I love the WoD leveling, but because you level too quick, you finish about a zone and a half and you’re done. You never get to see the rest.
But if Blizz made leveling take a bit more time, feel like a complete experience… then morons on the forums would complain that Blizz is pushing microtransactions. Hell, they complain right now. Can you imagine if leveling was longer, harder, more interesting and took you through an expansion’s entire campaign? They wouldn’t ever shut the hell up.
GW2 does this and nobody complains there.
Mostly because in GW2, it’s more tame. Even though you’re indeed scaled down, if you’re max level, you still destroy common monsters in 2-3 hits.
But they have puzzle jumps, world bosses and world events in nearly every zone and they make the world feel alive.
Hell, they even have “event trains” to cycle through for each map: https://youtu.be/B_JC0XKMdvk?t=158
You can legit apply to a group and join 40 people to do all the world events in a chronological order thanks to World boss trackers.
Even if you’re not the one partaking in this, and you’re just some guy leveling, you still get to see tons of people grouping up and traveling to the next big thing while you’re doing your own thing.
The world feels alive. Way more than in WoW.
For me, WoW started to lose it’s way after WotLK.
Wrath gave is closure on the epic tale that was started in WC3 with us (the good guys) finally getting to mete some justice (and a good spanking) to The Litch King (the bad guy).
Cata was a huge mistake IMO and removed far more from the game than it added.
Since then each xpac has moved the game a little further from it’s RPG roots with the addition of non RPG type content. Fine for a little side quest and an interesting diversion but now it seem these types of quests have taken hold and become a big part of the game. (We all know that defeating the forces of evil depends on is successfully completing a Candy Crush game, right ?).
What’s needed is some new blood in the Dev team, Ion needs to me moved to somewhere else (he had his chance and blew it IMO) and a new approach is needed.
Introducing a few more sandbox elements (Player Housing, Guild Keeps waiting to be invaded, The ability and tools for some player organized events, etc.).
Other games like GW2, RIFTS and LotRO have stuff going on in all zones that has max level toons going back to take part in and I see no reason why WoW shouldn’t get something moving on this front.
The game is 16yo and desperately needs to have some drastic changes in order to attract todays MMO players. ATM it’s mostly the same old same old with the devs introducing lots of gimmicky fluff that doesn’t quiet hit the mark for me.
While I completely agree with that it seems that the playerbase overall desired a faster leveling speed and a more alt friendly xpack, which they got in SL.
To each their own I guess, I would pretty much accept any leveling speed as long as it’s profitable, and I particularly enjoyed BC and its overpriced mats.
Story and pace of leveling aren’t really my main concerns.
Different games with different expectations. EsO player afaik don’t mind the world scaling either, but it has been a feature of the game for years now.
That said good to know for the world content, I’d love to see more of that stuff in WoW tbh. But most of the playerbase don’t seem to put much value on these things, unlike raids dungeons and PvP.
Once again to each their own and I can understand that my gameplay is left aside in favour of a more popular one. Still scaling up to end game every zone and mats doesn’t seem to be a good idea imo.
My fix for this making professions on par with endgame PVE / PVP - Old versions of professions being equal to the SL ones (only cosmetic diffrences of a thorium axe and a crafted SL wep for example)
And Weekly rotated timewalks for dungeons and raids all the way up to SL rewarding decent equipments or stuff ( Not that laughable ilvl 200 rewards for 5 timewalks and tw giving ilvl 158 gear ) and 50 - 60 forced SL must go. its bad.
WoW is a 3D chatroom for mythics and raids for years. The sooner you realize this the sooner you decide whether you’re keep playing this game as an adventure game or not. The world outside the instances is only relevant for leveling, nothing more.
They tried to make old zones more relevant with cataclysm and it was a disaster.
Seems like they got no resources for SL because during halfway through the NF covenant campaign there was actually some involvement of old zones but after that it was just boring.
More relevant to what? end game content? cause this is what’s discussed here. In this case this is clearly false. The low level zones kept their low levels, they were just redesigned.
They just made us go back to Uldum 
Nice, that’s one more zone. 109 left!
And it was just one expansion. Now it’s irrelevant again.
It didn’t really feel that amazing to go back. I was surprised, a zone slapped on top of another one with lots of lag was just not all that fun. Rather they did new stuff.
God I hated those dailies 
I’d say most zones maintain a pretty healthy degree of relevance in the game. Whether players go to a zone to complete achievements, hunt for mounts, do pet collecting, or level alts, travel through them to get to an instance for transmog collecting, or visiting them whenever there’s a Holiday Event or Micro Holiday, and so on. It ain’t many zones that are completely obsolete.
Just on top of my head I can’t quite name a zone that isn’t relevant to players for some obscure reason.
its ironic because a lot of the features that people claim eroded wow ( transmog, pet battles.etc.) is one of the few reasons to actually go back to these old zones.
if anything transmog/pets/mounts keep old content more relevant than anything blizzard could do
The thinking behind this thread has all the hallmarks of a player that doesn’t get how WoW works, and would benefit immensely from NOT having WoW in their life.
More needs to be made of why some of the newer players thought even starting to play WoW was a great idea… WoW will never be a game with a definitive end point; wanting it to is a waste of ‘want’.
Wanting WoW to be more like “insert game of choice” mean that as much as you protest to the contrary, you STILL have an unbreakable connection TO said game & would get more enjoyment from playing it.
There’s some aspect of “producing Cataclysm was cheaper than designing a new game engine” to me; how many MMO-RPG’s are still around from 2010 that had more pleasing aesthetics than WoW…?
A popular ‘meme’ about running WoW is that it only needs a potato; well, guess what? If WoW looked a heck of a lot ‘prettier’ you can bet your life that sub. numbers would hit an all-time low, 'cos a lot of players wouldn’t be able to LOAD the game, n/m RUN it.
True MMO-RPG players of the like that WoW appealed to in 2004 are all in their late 40’s/early 50’s - barely anyone, by comparison, born since the mid 1990’s truly ‘gets’ any gaming genre that isn’t designed around trade the old game in for the newest edition with zero continuity.
I’m not talking about graphics or the game engine but about content with regards to story and quests. What the game looks like is totally irrelevant to what I said.
Add that mid to late 60’s and 70’s (I’m 63 and when I started in 2004 there where a heck of a lot of players my age and older.
You see, when you hit 65ish you get hit with retirement, the kids have grown up and left home and you, all of a sudden have lots of time on your hands, so hey ! guess what, a lot of these people want to get back into playing WoW. I wouldn’t describe that group as ‘barely anyone’ and there’s a huge untapped market of older gamers looking for that ‘old school’ MMO to occupy their time.
We need a dev team that will start putting the ‘RPG’ back into the game instead of removing it.
I’m 56 myself (started WoW in 2008) & my wife was 60 when she decided that playing WoW (2010) was the only way she could get to ‘talk to her children’ (all three played).
…meaning the younger/console generations