But wait, wouldn't that mean that going from level 1 to level MoP would take months? years? That's a very long grind!
That's why there is the second part of this idea, the part that I intentionally hold by in order to cause confused outrage, much like when you tell someone, "you're pretty... UGLY!" And then they punch you because that's stupid.
Rather than explain all the details, which I worked out and are excessively long and dull, let's go with this: You can level from 80-82 in Vash'jir or Mount Hyjal. You can level from 70-80 following a path starting in Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra and ending in Icecrown or Storm Peaks. There are multiple paths, of similar difficulty, time, and at least theoretically, fun (Vash'jir was a terrible, terrible place). My suggestion is to do the same, using Azeroth, Outland, and Northrend as the equal-but-different leveling paths. Behind th3e scenes there would be a few mechanical tweaks which would allow players to, if they wished, stop leveling at 60, 70, or 80. In effect, the level 'cap' is 60 and than all of those zones are tuned to give a proper amount of experience along the journey from 1-60.
Here's a diagram which might help. Or I wasted a lot of time.
Notice how if you don't want to do Desolace you can instead do Grizzly Hills. Or if Icecrown isn't really you favorite place, you can run BRD a thousand times.
I don't know how raids would fit into this. Or gear. Maybe the level one noob gear could become green-quality heirlooms that update every ten levels, so they are always pretty awful, but you won't be running around naked if you go from Grizzly Hills to Nagrand and find yourself unable to wear your gear, or alternatively, going from Nagrand to Grizzly Hills won't leave you ten levels behind on gear. In the world this might not be too big of a problem, but I think instance groups might complain.
The real point is that I think it would be a good idea to add a mechanic or some set of changes which allow players to jump to the expansion they want and level at a reasonable pace, completing quest chains and instances, without jumping off or falling under the leveling curve. And I made a chart!
9 comments:
You made a chart, so your argument is valid!
Fascinating
I would like to see a way to slow down the leveling in a zone in order to complete all the quests and get the exploration/questing achievements.
I skipped most of Outland and Northrend because I leveled so quickly and thus I could get to the next expansion zone without completing all 60/80/100 quests in the zones.
I didn't like that, now that I'm at level cap, I am returning to all the areas that I don't have all the quests completed. it's bothersome, I like getting the achievement that shows I got all the quests completed.
They'd have to completely retool the game to give people a reason to go back like we had in Vanilla. With valor and Justice points it just wouldn't work.
I bet they won't do that because they lose too many people leveling as it is. Leveling for a new player is a long long solo grind or LFD with no talking which is not much better.
Only the pie chart has these powers.
I'll be honest and say I'm too dumb to understand your graph. It's like CDF, just more text. If at least it was a pie graph, I wouldn't be so hungry now!
I think the graph is hilarious. As for retooling all the leveling content, I firmly disagree. Not because it's a bad idea, if done well, it could be a beneficial change to the monotony of leveling. However, I don't trust Blizzard to implement it in a manner that doesn't come at the detriment of new content. Another Cataclysm expansion, where the new content is in pathetic quantities because they blew their resources retuning leveling, would be a blow that I'm not sure WoW could survive.
@Litmus_Paper: There is the option of turning on and off xp gains, but obviously that's terribly inconvenient and a bandage for bad design.
@sam: The goal isn't to get people to "go back" but instead to give people options on where they start.
@flosch: It's a continuous distribution function?
@The Renaissance Man: Maybe I should have left in my original explanations of the underlying mechanics. There would no changes to content. Instead, the xp from quests would be modified based on the content they are in, so for example, Azeroth quests, due to currently being low level, would have a larger multiplier than Outland quests, and Northrend even larger.
It's like a CDF in that I always are confused by those, too. CDFs are bad graphs, I think they're outlawed in over 20 states! At least I'm sure I read that somewhere. On the Internet, or something like that.
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