the imagination part is about when I told you don’t give feedback/your opinion.
This is patently nonsense and shows a genuine lack of understanding of progression in virtually any context. Incidentally I suspect it’s the same lack of understanding that plagues Blizzard, so let’s adress it head-on.
Not all challenges are the same difficulty, and this is obvious in the real world. If I want to build doors, then nailing a few pieces of wood together is a lot easier than creating beautiful adornments or making sure it’s rigid and sturdy by applying engineering. Me finding the latter hard does not mean that I have become worse at making doors, because the former is now easy, when it was hard to me a few years ago.
In the same way, foes in the world can have meaningful contrasts in their difficulty that are independent of my character. Today I find the blackrock warlock hard, but the grunt is easy. Yesterday the grunt was hard, but the murlocs were easy. Every day I defeat enemies, every day I grow stronger, every day I come closer to my ultimate goal of slaying a big, nasty, tentacles Old God, but until then I am progressing through the world.
You can kill that though in two major ways:
- Create so many progression steps that we run out of ideas and have us progress through the same enemies over and over again.
- Scale enemies such that they always match my strength, meaning that the giant enemy fire elemental near the volcano is as easy to me as the gnoll and, conversily, the gnoll is as easy as the fire elemental. Of course the lord of this fire elemental, Ragnaros, is easier than both of them, which obviously doesn’t help.
Correct. You reward people in proportion to the challenge they take on, and the more they progress, the bigger the challenge they can take on.
That’s right, but the baseline of your capabilities moves up over time in this system, and this is the core essence that we have to recapture, because it’s been completely lost.
The existence of easy content is a crutch. At every point they are being encouraged to take on a bigger challenge by the promise of greater rewards and faster levelling. The problem is that not everybody is interested in that, and if they’re not, we shouldn’t make the game unplayable to them. Unfortunately, scaling all mobs to the exact same difficulty means there’s only one difficulty at any given point in time, and that means that making it appropriately challenging and engaging can make the game outright unplayable to some, and then they come in here whining about it, and then the whole thing is completely destroyed for every single one of us by having it nerfed to the ground.
Scaling. bad.
But you can’t do that with scaling and massive amounts of levels, because you have to choose exactly one difficulty level, and if that difficulty level is too high or too low, and it always will be one of those two for literally everyone but the tiniest subset of players, you alienate them.
A loot bag is a very temporary reward you will soon replace, and it’s not immersive. Where does the loot bag come from, and how is it a reflection of your growth in natural power (which is what character level is, as opposed to items, which are a reflection of equipment power)
Under this proposed system, I’ll be disappointed literally every time I get a loot bag. I don’t want that loot bag, especially because, due to scaling, you’re going to invalidate the contents within less than an hour.
You’re not defending player freedom or character customisation. You may think you are, and I think Blizzard thinks you are, too. But you’re not.
Character customisation is not supposed to be skin deep, as it is in WoW now due to transmog. We’re playing an MMORPG, not a dress-up game. But here you are defending it, thinking you’re defending character customisation.
You think you’re supporting player freedom by supporting a scaling world and many character levels, but you’re not. If you make everywhere equally difficult, it’s not freedom in gameplay - it’s just a choice of backdrop.
You, and Blizzard, understand these concepts at skin deep levels. That’s why WoW continues looking amazing but the gameplay depth is completely obliterated. You think you’re making the game more open-ended and more customisable, but you’re actually damaging it, because you don’t know what you’re doing; and I don’t say that to insult you. I say that because I’m deeply disappointed and upset with where this game has been taken by Blizzard, and I am deeply upset with a playerbase who encouraged it to happen.
All the big YouTubers I followed for WoW news have quit except Taliesin and Evitel. Preach is banned because he exploited levelling, because levelling sucks and we all know it. Kelani thinks the game is hollow and he can’t find motivation to improve his character. Nixxiom just released a video explaining that the game is grindy underneath a surface level that just lets you choose a backdrop, and that he’s playing other MMORPG’s instead. The game’s dying, and all you guys can focus on is a ****ing number next to your character portrait that you don’t look at except for 10 hours every 2 years and playing dress-up.
God help us all.
Are you serious? I already agreed with you on the level squish… AND where in the quote do I refer to the level squish at all? 
No, not really. Not at all actually. Not even remotely close.
Well, this is just your opinion, the dev team clearly have a different opinion about it and we’re at 2019 and have the same talent system since MoP so again your words mean nothing but an opinion.
Replacing an entire talent system isn’t something that you can change ‘just like that’ without having had any real feedback on it, that’s why they didn’t replace the system we have yet. They may consider doing so now though seeing as how they’re trying to have a discussion about progression now.
Who said anything about it being replaced “just like that”? You’re twisting my words and I’m not sure whether your reading comprehension is just bad or you deliberately take sentences out of context to fit your agenda but you need stop; however, here I’ll tell you what I meant by part of the sentence you cited which was part of a whole paragraph.
If the current talent system wouldn’t have worked for them then they would have asked for feedback to change it but they haven’t, they asked feedback about level squish that both me and you seems to agree that it wouldn’t change anything.
I’ll let Blizzard decide that. They gave us back things that they removed before and they can always do so again.
Sure but again for the time being I didn’t read any post from the dev team that says “The current talent system doesn’t work for us let’s go back to the old talent system or at least let’s have an open discussion about it because we are planning to replace it in the future.”
Well that’s pretty contradictory. “If something doesn’t work then they’ll change it, but if they find that this talent system doesn’t work then that doesn’t mean they’ll change it.”
What I wrote is far from contradictory so let me elaborate, all I meant is that even in the case that they aren’t happy with the current talent system they don’t have to make radical changes and replace it completely because they might still like the system as a whole so they might adjust the system to make improvements just like someone that likes his/her car (which in our analogy represents the system) and isn’t too happy about the steer wheel or whatever and he/she would be happy to replace it with a better one but said person would still like to keep the car.
It’s actually not unless you’re playing duelist (2.1k) or higher. It’s at least twice as easy to get high ilv pve gear than it is to get high ilv pvp gear.
I never mentioned difficulty of PvE vs PvP and it has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I’m getting 385 and 400 gear from the weekly chest depends on my rating, I’m still getting 385 - 400 gear based on my conquest progress on each character and I’m still getting trophies to upgrade the gear so I know for a fact that they are actually on the same level but don’t take my word for it check the official post. do expand the conquest schedule.
So… you’re saying that they changed something because it wasn’t working as they initially intended it to work as? Sounds like the current talent system.
I know this discussion will never end and we will never agree but I’ll just say this again, you really need to stop this attitude of saying random things just to push your agenda because no one on the dev team announced that they aren’t happy with the current talent system or that they want to replace it and yes just because they haven’t doesn’t mean they wouldn’t in the future but until then it’s just your own opinion whereas the M+ change is something they announced and was discussed to death already so try to compare apples to apples because otherwise it can’t possibly sound the same but maybe in your own head comparing apples to oranges sounds about right.
p.s. What you did here with this post is called “hijacking” the discussion should have been about level squish and what it would mean but what you did was shifted the discussion from “Yes to the level squish!” to “Yes to the old talent system!” that has absolutely nothing with the topic.
We’ll see.
Boy I wish I adressed that before you wrote this long post.
O wait I did, in a way.
While I was just talking about three kinds of enemies of different power levels you seem to be wanting to go to a system in where every single mob is on a different difficulty which is never. ever. going to happen.
Not that I wouldn’t want it, though.
The only reason that Ragnaros is weaker than both of them is because Raids don’t scale which is a different conversation altogether. I’d enjoy it if they did, though.
There are two choices here.
1: We/they don’t scale the world to a players level and the player will end up out-leveling all content quite swiftly and you will also only have the choice between 2 or 3 zones at a given time as you level.
2: We/they do scale the zones (as they currently are) but we also go with my suggestion of going back to how Vanilla-tbc-wrath worked when it came to dividing the power of mobs in to three different difficulties: Normal, Rare & Elite. This way players will not out-level the zones and will have many more options when it comes to picking a zone to level in but still have the “levels of difficulty” that you mentioned.
I believe that we can go as low as a “normal” option (in the sense that some zones have little to no elites) but giving an “easy” difficulty would be going way too far. LFR is a good example of that.
Too much of a blanket statement. I believe that if you scale the zones like they are now but add 3 different difficulties of mobs then that’d work just fine but that’s speculation and it’d require an actual play-through to confirm, as would saying that it won’t work.
No you don’t. Like I said, you can have different “tiers” of mobs in the form of rares and elites. You could even add more than just those two if you really wanted. Bosses that require a group such as Hogger, for example.
Mail? or it just appears in your bags like the bag you get for completing a dungeon and yes, the bags are a temporary reward as they are meant to be.
They’re supposed to keep you satisfied for a level until you level up again and earn a permanent talent point for your character.
It’s not ideal I admit and I would love to hear a better alternative than a loot bag but I do believe that a Classic-tbc-wrath Talent Tree is the best way to go progression-wise however like Ion said – Making it 120 points deep is impossible seeing as how we/they need to do it for every class.
The way xp works now you can level up almost twice within a hour, so the time frame isn’t really an issue.
Like 75% of this entire thread is me defending and supporting the old talent system which is definitely not “skin deep” if you design it right.
I’m not in favor of many character levels – I’m against the level squish. There is a difference. I would be totally fine with them putting a cap on it at 120 forever. I just loathe the idea of losing the levels that we have already earned. It just doesn’t feel right and it’s also purely a pointless visual thing that can be achieved with an addon. There’s no need for it.
I’ve been supportive and suggestive of more difficulties in mobs and quests from the very beginning of this thread so forgive me if I take comments like this with a grain of salt and then some.
As am I, why do you think that I’m here trying to change it? And arguing against a pointless level squish? I do not want there to be more pointless changes forced down our throats.
Yo – I’m against the Level squish. How is that not clear yet.
My bad 
That’s the same as saying “We’re in 2011 and we’ve had the same talent system since Vanilla so they’re not going to change it” Oh but they did.
I’m not.
In the context of leveling and squishing the levels so that “We get abilities/talents sooner”. It’s definitely relevant.
No, you listened to a Q&A about a Level squish in the contest of leveling up saying that the leveling process needs help and that it’s boring because we don’t get any talents or perks every single time that we level up.
…Which we did with the old system so again, it’s relevant enough for me to bring it up.
Which I had already thought about in detail but I can’t find a way to make this specific system work in such a way that it rewards us every single time that we level up except for if it gave us a talent point every single time that we did.
…But at that point you may as well bring back the old system.
Do you see my train of thought now?
I gotta admit that I completely forgot about the war trophies.
I rest my case? Find for me where I said that they said that they feel that the current system isn’t working out.
All I said is that when reading the Ghostcrawler Blog it becomes quite clear that they had a different vision of how the current system was going to pan out and it’s not how it actually did and that they might decide to change it some day.
I never did anything of the kind.
What it would mean? Nothing. The Level Squish would do nothing except for changing the number next to your portrait that nobody looks at more than twice a day and possibly mess up the low level brackets. I’ve been consistent in that.
Again, it became relevant the second that they gave “It’s no fun when you don’t get something every time that you level up” as a reason behind the Level Squish Idea because they used to have a system that did precisely that.
stat squish wont work. blizz havent and wont learn from their mistakes.
they squished Legion ilvl after AtBT from about 1000 (max legos) to 280.
but in just 2 tiers, we are going to be 435 already 
just leave the levels, increase the xp, and spread out when we get skills better.
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I’ll leave it at agree to disagree because I can’t see the point of discussing something that hypothetically can happen and in my opinion wouldn’t.
peace out. 
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Some ppl are simply against things because its in their nature, they try to stand out like that… its getting so old…
do you really think squishing the lvl would make it faster?
for me no why it would take the same amount of time.
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Yes level squish would be welcome. Most levels in this game are utterly useless at the moment and 120 levels to climb feels horrible. You people say that squish wouldn’t do anything. Well it would. It would make levels meaningful again as we would be getting new stuff super often.
Hell, we got to the point that getting to new ten levels makes us WEAKER instead of fixing us something new lol. It’s obvious that something needs to be done.
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Leveling now just feels like a chore currently i am working to level my Kul Tiran druid to 120 and at level 60 i have already losing my will to do it 1-57 was fine because “new” cataclysm questing but outland and wotlk are both so dated with running back and forth crap that its off butting because of both the slowness of leveling and that when you ding there is no feeling of reward on some levels you just get absolutely nothing.
Leveling before cataclysm never felt unrewarding because there was always something to get talent points and spells but 120 levels just feels too much.
Oh come on, don’t be like that. You fully well know that that is not the case here at all. Everyone in this particular thread has given and explained their reasons of why they are against it quite elaborately.
We’ve been through that… you won’t. It’d still be every 7-8 levels that would take just as long to get as 15 levels do now. It’s the illusion of speed.
Yeah thats an issue but its unique to 110-120 so… it feels more like a bug than anything else.
I agree but again a level squish won’t change that. Ion himself said that nothing else would change other than the number you see next to your portait. Everything else would remain the same: the leveling speed would not increase meaningfully, the power levels would remain the same and it’d take just as long to get a new ability as it currently does now.
You only get the illusion of speed because it seems like you are only doing 7-8 levels while in reality you are doing 15.
So is it réally worth forcing this change that brings a result that is just as achievable with an addon down éveryones throats permanently? I think not.
Agreed! …but again… a level squish won’t change that. The old talent system would.
Oh great, you talked about 3 different difficulty levels that move along with the player, and you wanted to raise the minimum and introduce even harder modes.
I’m gonna have a mental breakdown soon. Why do you think WoW shouldn’t have a proper experience and gradually harder and unique enemies, exactly? Why do you think that’s impossible? Because you say so? Because Blizzard is too full of pride to see their mistake? Whatever the reason, it’ll completely kill WoW if you’re right, and it’s already well underway.
Experience and progression is the core of WoW. You know that purple bar at the bottom of the screen? The one we’re talking about? It’s called an Experience Bar. Do you know why it’s called that?
It’s got two meanings. In Danish they’re represented by two different words, actually - maybe that’ll help explain it. They are “erfaring” and “oplevelse”. The first word means to know something because of something you’ve done, and the second means to see something new that sticks with you and makes you wiser.
The experience bar is a measure of how much your character has seen and done, and how that makes it wiser and stronger. If you just take the difficulty level and split it into 3 categories that moves up as my experience bar goes up, you’ve completely annihilated the concept of experience, which is incidentally exactly what they’ve done. I’m not forced to move to new places to see new things - I can just farm the same spot forever, so “oplevelse” goes out the window immediately, and even if it didn’t “erfaring” dies because doing the same thing over and over doesn’t get easier and put new, harder challenges into reach. The existing challenge stays equally hard.
Just making all 3 categories harder isn’t going to solve that problem. It won’t give you a sense of progression and experience, and it won’t engage the player. It’ll just make it more difficult in the most annoying way possible and alienate casuals, and therefore it’s a stupid idea.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to understand this. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to explain it to a toddler, but somehow this is a computer program and we’ve got spreadsheets to maintain and faces to save on computer forums, so let’s just shove all pretence of logic out the window so we can make “factual arguments” about what Blizzard wants to do and doesn’t want to do, even though we don’t work for them and have no idea whatsoever. Instead, let’s ask Blizzard for band-aid, shallow, stupid solutions to try and solve it, and then fail at that because, once again, it didn’t solve it.
Maybe it’s time I take a break from this. I had to delete over 60 swear words in this part before I was able to post it, because I’m genuinely that mind-blown at the sheer levels of stupidity on display in this community, including from Blizzard. There’s millions of former players all around the world screaming about the problem from rooftops, describing it in maticulate detail, and then there’s literal toddler logic, and it somehow still manages to elude the whole lot of you.
How about we go with this one and prevent people from levelling out of content by making each zone cover more time by simply reducing the amount of levels and retuning what levels each zone cover, then layer the idea from 2: on top of it for extra spice.
Oh look, it’s ****ing vanilla! But they’d never experiment with giving players an experience like vanilla; obviously. That’s outdated, and nobody wants it.
slams face into wall
LFR is not a problem because it’s easy. It’s a problem because it takes the most difficult and coordinated group content in the game and makes it easy, killing progression. Having some easy levelling content, especially early on, is fine. That’s literally the one and only place where it’s appropriate to have easy content. That’s where it belongs!
No. Your idea’s bad. I’m genuinely unsure if you genuinely think it’s a good idea because you genuinely think it’d fix the game on its own (which is a stupid position) or whether you’re just trying to convince me that Blizzard are too stupid to see it so let’s just try something.
Rares and elites aren’t different tiers of difficulty. They’re just small pockets of occationally harder mobs. It’s literally called a “rare” because you can’t find it, and elites are designed for groups, not for providing a harder solo experience, but nobody’s gonna want to do it because they can just teleport to dungeons, which is way more convenient.
Sent by whom?
It doesn’t make sense when it happens for completing a dungeon either.
THE LEVEL SQUISH
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59 levels vs 119 is only faster in your mind, if it doesn’t reduce the required XP or increased XP bonusses or sources all it will do is 1 thing, potentially introduce lots of bugs (like what happend with alot of items thanks to stat squish aswell, see MoP world drop blues which used to very powerfull pre-81 and are now weak). The only thing that would have changed is the number you see, you will still need the same time/XP to get to max level. Hence why we are against if it doesn’t come with some sort of buff to leveling.
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I never said I wanted to. I personally feel that rare and Elite are plenty. I said that if you wanted to then you could.
You’ve got bigger problems than WoW if a forum thread can do that to you.
If you’re serious and not just being overly dramatic then I suggest you find some professional help. That’s not meant as taking a shot at you, it’s a suggestion made out of genuine concern.
I never said that I think that it shouldn’t, that I think it’s impossible, because “I say so”, or because Blizzard is too full of pride.
I believe that even though we can speculate on future changes that we should also remain realistic. Blizzard has been pushing scaling technology for a while now and I find it to be unrealistic to assume that they’ll stop doing so any time soon so to speculate on changes assuming that they would seems like a waste of time to me because I see it to be unrealistic.
I’m not presenting that as fact, it’s just my opinion however that does not make it incorrect.
There’s really no need to be so passive-aggressive.
We’re both talking past each other because we look at “progression” in a different way.
You seem to view progression as “Your character growing stronger with every bit of experience that you gain and therefore the world around you growing weaker because you simply out-level it”.
I view progression as “Your character grows stronger because it learns new abilities and because of the new gear and stat-increase minor talents that it builds up as it grows in level.”
So the difference in progression here is that in your case you just out-level the individual mobs in a zone or content and in my case your character actually gets stronger because he/she learns new abilities and traits.
This distinction is very important because even if in my case the mobs remain at the same power level as you level up (because they scale with you) - You do grow stronger and will still kill that mob faster than you did when you, for example, did not have a specific ability before you leveled up… This ability helps you kill the mob quicker. That does not require the mob to also become weaker because you out-level it.
At the “What’s Next” BlizzCon 2017 Panel Ion Hazzikostas states: “If you’re trying to play through, let’s say Hillsbrad, you will quickly find that about halfway through the zone alot of the quests in your log are turning green or even grey. on one hand all the mechanics of the game are telling you to get out of there, to move along for better rewards and more experience, a place where you belong – while the story is telling you to stay because you want to see what happens next.”
They deliberately made that change. Considering how recent it is I believe that it’s fair to assume that they won’t go back on it.
Experience however doesn’t go completely out of the window like how you claim because later on he states…
“So we are thinking about a structure more like imagine Westfall scales from 10 to 60, imagine Burning Steppes scales from 40 to 60. You’re never going to out-level the zone while you’re in it but there’s still some sense of progression and once you move past the entire expansion you do feel like you have surpassed it and that you’re more powerful.”
…Really? You have that hard of a time trying to have a normal, civil discussion?
That sentence up til that point is exactly what we currently have. A system that prevents you from out-leveling zones too quickly which was they intended from the start.
Lmao no it’s not. You out-leveled zones in Vanilla and there was actually a shortage of quests which made it grindy to even hit max level.
LFR is a problem because it’s receiving free epic loot for pointless content that requires 0 effort or brain activity from the players.
Okay… that’s what we currently have, though? The starter zones only scale from 1 to 20. After that you’ve out-leveled them completely. This content is hilariously easy and the mobs in these zones pose no threat whatsoever.
…then again, not a single out-door mob does in this game between lv1-90 which is, again, why they should make mobs much stronger post-lv20.
Too much use of the word “Genuinely”.
How do you mean too stupid to see it? They implemented this system specifically so that players can spend more time in the zones that they are in which is something that you said that they should do not even three paragraphs ago???
…See???
“Occasionally harder mobs” is still “An increase in difficulty”. The gravity of that increase is debatable.
Actually rares are up 100% on a short spawn timer in WoD, Legion and BfA zones. They are stronger-than-regular mobs with a unique name and loot drops in their table.
Yeah, this is an MMOrpg in case you haven’t noticed. Massively. Multiplayer. Online. i.e. a Multiplayer game. It should have places where you can only go and mobs you can only kill if you have a group.
…The Postmaster? …that’s an actual NPC you know?
I’ve never heard of this being an issue but okay.
You know what? I will go and play the devil’s advocate and do the actual math to find a way to make a Level Squish work since nobody else who is actually in favor of it seem to care enough to construct a good argument for it.
Give me a while to do so.
Just remember that this proposal for a level squish is brought to us from exactly the same people who designed us to become weaker as we level, as a part of their same philosophy.
Yeah that argument doesn’t hold up.
It isn’t an argument. It’s an observation.
But there does seem to be a hope, expressed as an argument, we see often:
- Things are bad.
- Some separate change is proposed.
- Therefore, the completely separate change will fix the bad things.
I don’t think Socrates would rate that as a syllogism, but we do see it a lot.
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But you can’t, you see, because if you do, you remove the lower difficulty options, and that upsets people who don’t want a challenge and just wanna chill, and they won’t like it; which is completely fair, but I don’t like not having the option of making it difficulty. Your scaling is removing my ability to pick an appropriate difficulty for me!
It’s not a single forum thread that does that to me, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong that I’ve got a problem. I’ve been a fan of Blizzard games since I was 4 years old in 1994, and that ended last year. I am literally devastated at the direction Blizzard has taken this game, because, to me, it’s far more than just another game on my harddisk. It’s a significant part of my upbringing and my community, and therefore I do get extremely passionate and annoyed with people changing it into something that’s clearly worse (the game’s dropping players like never before) and, more importantly, changing it into a completely different genre. What’s the purpose of this? Why can’t WoW just be a bloody MMORPG?!
Either we’re just going to have to put up with my passion, or I am going to seek professional help, and that’s going to involve me walking away from Blizzard games forever. Is that what I want? Not really, no, but if things keep going this it’s going to be what I’ll do.
Glad we claered that up.
What do you mean realistic? You don’t know what they’ve got through their minds right now. I mean I’m literally jumping on a bandwagon started by this game’s lead designer, you know? He’s definitely been thinking about this; that’s why he asked us! Telling him not to do what he says he’s considering to do because “he’d never consider it” just doesn’t make sense to me, and I don’t think you can hide behind it just being your opinion. Nobody cares about your opinion on Ion’s pride. You know that, don’t you? We’re here discussing WoW, not Ion’s pride. I don’t care about Ion’s pride.
You call it passive-aggressive, I call it re-explaining the fundamentals, because the game’s fundamentally completely broken, so that’s where we gotta go. Sorry if it seems condescending - but I rather think that it feeling condescending is precisely the problem with pride that I was alluding to. At this point it’s not just Ion’s pride - it’s your pride in an internet argument.
I view progression as both of those, and I also view progression in terms of visual progression and/or lore progression. The idea that, as I get stronger, I get into more and more dicey locations lore-wise, with more and more deadly foes lore-wise, and I get to look cooler and cooler.
No you don’t. Their scaling system is designed to compensate for you getting new abilities as well to keep the difficulty the exact same, which means getting a new ability increases the complexity without increasing your power. Hey-oh problem #314284523 with level scaling, good to see you. xD
I completely agree with Ion on what the problem is. I disagree with the solution he proposed very strongly. The level squish was the better solution, and considering what Ion just said in the most recent Q&A, I think he’s starting to realise that, too, which is precisely why I picked this moment in time to make my move on the forums.
Yes, it had a lack of content, but the system was the same as the one I just approached precisely by combining your two enumerated ideas. Now we have the content - in fact we have so much content we can offer a huge variety of it every time you level up. So now we can have all the strengths of what vanilla offered without any of the downsides! Happy days!
Which is exactly what I said in literally the next sentence after the one you quoted.
Kindda, but not really. They’re put the scaling into some bracets. We have 1-20, 20-60, 60-80, 80-90, 90-100, 100-110, and 110-120. That’s 7 brackets. That means there are 6 times where you level past zones and move into the new one, which means WoW effectively has 6 tiers of progression for a 40 hour levelling experience.
That’s not enough. That’s nowhere near enough. And that’s essentially the point I’m making. Before we had like 120 for a 40 hour experience, and that was too many. There’s a happy medium in here somewhere, and we can find it by having less, but more meaningful levels and getting rid of scaling. That is my argument.
What do you mean? Yeah, we have a shared goal of players not levelling out zones before they’re finished delivering their story. That’s all well and good. What we disagree about is how to deliver that. My argument is that we can do it without completely destroying levelling progression, and your argument is that we can’t, and the reason you think that we can’t, is because you think Ion won’t agree to it. That’s in no way a rational position; it’s just hating Ion. I don’t get it?
I’m not saying elites and rares shouldn’t exist, you know? I literally argued in favour of them a few paragraphs ago by saying that Blizzard should combine your two ideas that you enumerated 1: and 2:. Remember that?
And why exactly that does the postmaster know or care that I have earned a level?
Well, you have now 
I mean honestly, it’s not a big issue for me at all. I just don’t really think it’s a particularly good answer to how to reward players.
Fair enough! By the way, I already did, and you can find it in my post history, but I won’t stop you from trying to come up with your own. xD
Then don’t. It’s that simple.
Well Blizzard clearly disagrees. It’s a fairly recent update and they’re definitely not going to go back on it anytime soon.
I think that counts for all of us who play this game in more than just a casual capacity, man. We’re all incredibly passionate about it, however if this is really taking a toll on your actual health then I suggest that you just stay away from the forums. It’ll be better for you in the end.
I honestly have no answer for that. I wish it would be and i’m trying to steer it back to its roots but ultimately it’s up to Blizzard.
With “realistic” I meant to not expect them to do something that is out of character for them to do e.g. things like removing zone scaling after they only just implemented it.
I have never once mentioned Ion’s pride. That has nothing to do with anything. There are only good decisions and bad decisions. I am going to point out what I believe those decisions to be regardless of anyone’s pride.
The only thing that my pride has anything to do with are my characters that I have played for well over a decade and I am going to try and secure their future as best I can as long as that does not go at the cost of civil discussion and fact.
I would never propose a change if I did not believe it to healthy for the game.
Currently leveling from, say, level 19 to lv20 grants a warrior Overpower or Raging Blow. Both of them make me generate rage five times quicker than I did at level 19 and thus kill mobs way faster.
Well I hope that you end up being correct with that statement and that whatever the future holds for us that that will be a part of it.
Must’ve missed that. I have to admit that I get slightly lost in the sea of text sometimes.
I’m doing my best to find that right now.
I meant “see” as in that you wrote that previously but nevermind – it’s not important.
My reason has nothing to do with Ion. My reason for being against a level squish is because I’m afraid that they’ll mess it up because they (probably) do not keep in mind the existing PvP brackets.
I have to admit that a big reason for this is my level-60 characters. I’ve spent over a decade working on these characters. Imagine if they revamp lv60 to be Lv30 and then re-make the PvP brackets so that we’re in the same bracket with what are now Lv35s (pre-level 70s).
We would get utterly and completely destroyed in PvP as a result assuming that there is a meaningful power upgrade everytime that somebody levels up.
You may go “Meh that’s just twinks who cares” but the exact same would apply to a normal level 30 (current lv60) leveler that has to try and beat a lv35 or lv39 in PvP combat (current lv70-79s)
Surely you can see why I am extremely worried about that.
Oh right, yeah that’ll work. Man… I miss being afraid of roaming Elite mobs…
…Because he’s a nice guy? 
He does find all the items that you “lose in the nether” and sends them back to you in the mail, after all!
It’s just some random reward to incentivize players to use the LFG system.
I mean like figuring out literally all of the numbers of level milestones and PvP brackets that we currently have and what they’ll turn in to after a proper level squish.
But then everybody with a slight amount of experience is bored.
You see, you can’t win this with a one size fits all solution, which is what scaling enforces (unless we wanna get into silly things like giving people a difficulty menu option in the open world. Please don’t do this…)
I don’t care what you think they think. I care what you think and what they think.
It’s not.
No you’re not! You’re actively pushing against it by claiming it’s what Blizzard wants. Concern yourself with what you want.
Sometimes you make a mistake, and you have to revert it quickly. I think they’ve realised the mistake, you think they haven’t. Ultimately we’re at an impasse because none of us know. All we know is what we want.
Yes you did, and you keep doing it in this very post. You’re suggesting that Ion won’t change his mind because he made the current system recently, as if he’s proud of it and won’t let it go even though new YouTube videos are coming out every month with millions of views calling the system terrible. Asmongold quit, Preach quit (well he got banned because he hates levelling so he tried to exploit it), Sodapoppin quit, Kelani quit, Jontron quit, and so on, and every single one of these people making videos raking in millions of views, each having a huge following who completely agree with their reasons for quitting. Rant and QQ posts showed up on reddit.com/r/wow with tens of thousands of upvotes and millions of views.
How obvious does it have to get? The community backlash against scaling and titanforging and a few other systems along those lines is so big they literally collected almost a million signature and left it on Blizzard’s CEO’s desk to get vanilla, just to get away from these systems.
I will agree that your idea won’t hurt the game per se, but it also won’t help much. If you combine it with the removal of scaling though, it helps a ton.
Conveniently, level 19-20 is one of the few breakpoints where you actually get to go to new areas, so you got that one, but actually generating rage faster just means you need to press more spells. Take a look at what the spells actually do and how much HP enemies have. Maybe you’ll have a small surge of power, but it quickly reverts back to being around 12 seconds to kill a mob (before they nerfed them, now it’s probably 4-5 seconds). Blizzard literally said they wanted it take 12 seconds or so - no more and no less.
Fair enough.
So the concern is twinking? I gotta be honest man, I really don’t care, but at least it’s something. Why didn’t you say this instead of deferring to Ion’s supposed position? This is way more interesting to discuss. Now personally, I think twinks are a blight upon the game, excepting precisely arena gameplay at low level. That’s pretty cool, and I’d hate for you to lose that.
First and foremost, I don’t think just cutting the levels in half is going to be the correct answer anyhow, so I’m not sure they’re end up in the same PvP bracket as level 70’s. What I think they should do is add up all the experience you’ve earned, rescale all the levels and figure out what the new cap is gonna be for each level, then keep subtracting from the total as we apply levels until we don’t have enough to level. It’s perfectly possible that the level 60 will end up being level 33 or 34 or whatever, or it might just be 30. Whatever the case, we can place an arena bracket that’s completely unique right there just to avoid killing arena twinking. As for BG twinking? I Just don’t care. Sorry.
Me too. And the best part of it is when you’ve levelled through that zone and several others and then come back and murder them.
This is literally just because the server has bugs. Ideally he shouldn’t send you anything, but he does…
Anyway, I just don’t like the idea of getting sent a gear reward for character experience. To me, the experience of the character is entirely separate to the magical properties of my items, and I’d like for it to stay that way. I don’t see why the postmaster should care that I get a level, and I don’t think getting a level should lead to a gear upgrade. I do, however, think that items can have level requirements on them, implying it takes a certain amount of experience to use an item.
Did that, too. 
I’ll just repeat it here. Generally, I want each zone to cover around 3-5 levels of content, depending on how late it is. The first zone should cover 10 levels though. After that,
1-10 - Starter zone
10-40 - Cataclysm zones, including what used to be 80-85, like Hyjal.
30-40 (yep, that’s an overlap) - Outland and Northrend. This makes them both entirely optional.
40-50 - Pandaria or Draenor
50-60 - Broken Isles, Kul’Tiras, Zandalar
60-70 - Whatever comes next
Current XP should be changed to reflect this. That is the total amount of XP points to get level 80 today should equal the total XP required to get 40 after this change. 60 is 30. 70 is 35. That’s what you expected, but then it gets a little weird; 85 is around 43, 90 is around 47, 100 is around 50, 110 is around 55, and 120 is obviously 60.
We do this by setting the XP requirements of the levels we want to align to be equivalent to the new XP requirements in total, as I explained above.
In most cases we have so many zones that we can offset the start of each zone by 1-2 levels from each other, and even then have multiple choices. At most points in the game, there will be 6+ different zones you can go to that are relevant to your level, and no matter what level you finish a zone at, there will be a zone that fits with where you’re going to begin.
But not only is the zone relevant in terms of the quests being yellow at the level you walk into it, but we go even further. You should be able to go to a zone 4 levels before you’re due to be ready for it, with it providing standard experience from 2 levels before it begins, to 2 levels after it ends, and the quests should continue granting small amounts of XP for up to 8 levels after the span of the zone ended, meaning that each zone spans a total of around 16 possible levels, and gives optimal XP for 8 possible levels. In the current game, that’d be 16 levels per zone where it’s optimal, and 32 where it’s relevant in some way. There is literally no way in hell you’ll outlevel a zone before you have to leave it, and you still get the progression. Many zones will also have elites and rares with higher levels - in some cases much higher. (Felreavers, Devilsaurs, etc.)
As far as when abilities arrive, well most classes have around 20-30 abilities per spec, so that makes it really easy. Every second level we give a spell, every level from 10 we give a talent point, and for the first 10 levels we give a spell every level. Running out of spells? A few of them have ranks. Increase the amount of slow on the frostbolt, give rake a stun from stealth, give sprint a lower cooldown, etc. etc.
That’s how I would do it.
The exact math can probably be worked out in a spreadsheet, but honestly there isn’t far from that idea to an implementation. The hardest part is coming up with the talent system again and actually modifying the mob records, which is a huge amount of manual labour.
Ideally a stat squish could go along with this, but I can live without one. We’ll get one sooner rather than later anyway.