People who want to be where they are

| Monday, February 6, 2012
Why would a level 70 be in a BC heroic? Or a 74? Yesterday I decided to try something different on my mage and queued for a BC random heroic.

Surprisingly, I not only found a group, but found it pretty quickly. But that wasn't the best part. The people were.

I didn't run into a single rude or "go go go" type person. No one complained about gear except for one brief mention of a tank's gear, who had a grey belt, but no drama come from it.

We had mistakes and bad pulls. People died. But no one whined or raged. Why?

They were all people who wanted to be where they were. They could get more xp and better loot in LK instances. BC randoms don't even give points, just a bit of gold and bonus xp. They would only go there if they actually wanted to run BC heroics. Maybe it was for achievements or to see what they hadn't seen before. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it was for something other than the same three or four LK randoms. Whatever it was, the basic fact remained that they were not in places for some quick external reward, but for something in the instance itself.

I'd never tried this before. I didn't even know it was possible. And that may be the problem. People will run lower-reward, higher-fun (subjective, of course) content, if they know it is possible.

Maybe the most important thing I learned from this experience is that even with the anonymous cross-server grouping, putting like-minded people in the same place is possible and yields a better experience. But I already knew this!

My mage is now level 63* and has never been to Outland... He's found a handful of groups, most of which were populated by players above level 58. That means that players who could be running Outland for bags of useful items, higher xp, and short queues, are instead specifically queuing for older instances. There are players specifically choosing older content with fewer tangible rewards (in a virtual sense)... Players are specifically choosing to run these instances and are exhibiting unusually high levels of patience for pulling speed and tolerance for wiping... I have to give some credit to the cross-server group-making tool. Without it I'm not sure there would be the population needed to form groups at all.

This was the mage who, well here's the start of an earlier post
In the past I've complained about people skipping content with the obsolescence of every raid that isn't ICC and heirlooms to speed through leveling. I decided to go a step further and do that to an entire expansion of content.

My mage is now level 68. He has never been to Outland.


I think I might do this again on my next mage (she's the one I talk about earlier in the post). I don't like Seahorse Land much, so if Hyjal doesn't tick, that could be my plan: run BC randoms until they run out, then run LK heroics until they run out.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have had 3 level 70 twinks, and found this to be entirely true to the point where I will only run regular level 70 BC instances as the tank. I am better off waiting for a heroic to pop on my healing druid than dealing with a tank who will get overwhelmed by the pulls Magister's Terrace.

There is a small but thriving level 70 twink community, both for PvP and PvE, and they are running those instances for a reason. Sometimes it's gear, sometimes it's reputation, sometimes achievments. (Usually it's rep if it's for gear.) Then there's another group, like you and Vidyala, achievement-seekers and nostalgia seekers and people who want to do all the Outland Heroics instead of rushing off to do Utgarde Keep 30 times in a row, seriously, eff that place.

People in those instances are there because they want to be there. It isn't a rest stop on the journey to somewhere else - it's the entire point of the journey. I'm in Arcatraz or SLabs because I WANT to be there.

I'm glad you stumbled upon our little secret. Stay as long as you like. :)

Tesh said...

Great article, K. I've noted something similar, but didn't pick it out because this is my normal dungeoneering practice. In fact, I'm sometimes saddened that I outlevel the ability to LFD queue for dungeons as I go about doing my Explorer thing. I also want to Explore the dungeons, and the system doesn't want me to go back to them when I'm overleveled. Yeah, I could hit up a group in chat or something, or wait and go back and solo them (I'll hit Karazhan when I get to level 85)... but even I want to just play with others sometimes.

Klepsacovic said...

@cynwise: I really liked Utgarde! The first 29 times.

This "level 70 twink" concept intrigues me. If I stick around long enough, and with neat ideas like this I might, I think I'd enjoy playing around with a tank at that level.

@Tesh: You have to get pretty high to be out of the system entirely. You can specifically queue for places at a range of up to 8 I think. That's how my first mage had stayed in Azeroth for so long. It's at least 6 levels, because that's when he'd stopped running the late instances, but I think that was due to trash xp stopping, not the LFD system.

Tesh said...

*shrug* All I know is that when I finish a few dungeons and then go explore for a while and do some world story quests, some of the dungeons I never got to drop off the list. This was more prevalent in later vanilla content, and most obvious in Outland. Northrend has been slower, though, plunking me in the same dungeon several times. The pace is slower in the cold, apparently.

I take that to mean that it's viable to level either just out in the world or via purely dungeoneering, but combining the two means you outpace the LFD tool. I actually don't mind fast leveling, I just wish there weren't level bands on the LFD tool.

Coreus said...

Part of me considers it a failing on the developer's part that they are better rewarding things which are less fun/interesting, but at the same time I can't argue against something which segregates people who play the game explicitly for the sake of enjoyment from people who play for the sake of completion.

BC was the last time non-Heroic dungeons were made exclusive to endgame. By the time you can enter The Shadow Labyrinth you already have access to Wrath content, but you can level efficiently through Wrath and Cata without missing out on any dungeons.

For a related note, they have stated the intention for Mists is that there will be no "level 90" non-heroic dungeons-- the dungeons will be more evenly distributed across the levels, and at level cap you can go straight into to Heroics without any gear grind.

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