World of Warcraft is now a very broken game.
I came to this conclusion when I discovered that no one spends any decent amount of time in the old world. I know someone that uses the Recruit A Friend program, which is Blizzard's form of mentoring, to help level up a friend and new player to WoW. The new recruit started 3 weeks ago, has played very sparsely and is already level 41. He has yet to do one instance, because he out levels them so quickly. Personally, I feel he is missing out on some of the best content in the game and all because Blizzard wants to sell boxes.
Players often complain that games don't have a way to help recruit friends into the game. Eq2 has the mentoring system, CoH has the side kick program, both of which don't increase the experience structure for the new player. It either brings the character's levels down or up to that of the other party member, making it more challenging and fun.
How can you enjoy anything if your whipping past it all at neck break speeds?
Speaking of break neck speeds, what's worse is you don't even have to travel by foot anymore? With the R.A.F program, the experienced player can port his new recruit around the globe to all the flight points in a matter of days. Where is the feeling of accomplishment there? I remember running all the way to Stonetalon just to get that alliance flight point for the first time. Sure it was a task to avoid mobs and horde, but it was also fun and something I was proud of doing. We even took a small team of people just incase the opportunity to gank appeared. Now, it's done in a few seconds, where is the sport in that?
Blizzard, doesn't want new players hanging out in their old, dusty world. They want them to purchase WoTLK and play in Northrend. These new players level quickly, get to end game, but lack the skills necessary to raid or do instances. They won't find a good fit. They'll get frustrated and leave the game, because they don't understand how it's all done.
I'm sure that I'm blowing that completely out of proportion, but how many times have people gotten into PuGs and found people lacking in the basic skills necessary to participate in the dungeon? Last night, I wanted to level up my enchanting, so I asked a paladin, who had run by me, if he wanted some free enchants. After finally being able to communicate this to him, he failed to understand how to put a bound item into a trade window for enchanting. After 5 minutes of trying to help him figure it out and him still failing, I gave up, ungrouped and continued my questing.
Was that an example of someone leveling too fast to understand the complexities of the game, or someone that leveled his character the E-Bay way? I have no clue, but either way, there is a gimped Paladin on the Darkspear server and heaven help the group that needs him to tank or heal.
I'm not against easy, but just laying down and letting players romp and stomp over old content is pretty sad. It says we have no respect for what our developers did in the early years, just have your way with us, because we need the box sales. Let us be your fifteen dollar whore.
I don't think there's much motivation to visit pre-max dungeons, regardless of what the leveling rate is. It takes forever to get a group together and many of the instances are just poorly designed even if your group is reliable (which it probably will not be).
ReplyDeleteI think the CoW people had a WoW guild and were taking it "slow", doing things like "hey, let's get together this weekend and do Stockades". Doing that with a guild seems like fun.
@Boatorious - The lack of motivation is exactly what I mean. Its a cause and effect. They level so fast, that no one sticks around to do dungeons, so those people that want to do dungeons are stuck pushing through content because no one hangs around.
ReplyDeleteI should have also mentioned the fact that Blizzard has also increased quest xp in those areas in an effort to push players through that content faster. I didn't mean to lay it all at the feet of the R.A.F players
I've written several posts about this "over levelling of the content" and gotten next to no comments about it, so I was in the misbelief that I was the only one it bothered. I'm pretty sure that it will start to bother the raiding end game population only when the PUG's are filled with people who don't know jack about their class, enchants, gemming or roles in raid.
ReplyDeleteHow about changing the Old World for a change? Like wiping a dungload of quests because monsters X invaded Kalimdor?
Or something.
Copra
No, you're not the only one Copra. I'd rather they focused on changing the world over time, so people were encouraged to roll alts and play through NEW story lines (in the old world zones). Instead of the incessant treadmill of raising the level cap and gear inflation over and over again. It's because of that that increasing the levelling speed becomes necessary (and it IS necessary, although I hate it, because you aren't attracting new players if it means months before they can play where everyone else is - which is at ever increasing level cap; and veterans don't want to play through the SAME OLD grind a second time when it's exactly the same.)
ReplyDeleteBut if the old world CHANGED, raising an alt would be fun because you'd be playing a new story line. And new players would have someone to play with. So there would be no need to increase the leveling speed.
The problem is most players DON'T want that. Everytime Sony revamps an old world zone there are a very vocal contingent of players threatening to quit the game if the developers remove any quests whatsoever and QQing that they are changing it at all. God forbid random npc #55 finds the lost monocle you'd been searching all those giant rats for.
There is a lot of good to be said for having hopeless nubs in a pug with you.
ReplyDeleteOk, not much good reall unless you count reapir bills and blog fodder.
Personally I think that unless some way is devised to make the older content more interesting then it will all be over soon.
As soon as the speed of leveling for new folks is sped up to the point that they learn absoultely nothing about your class (arguably it has happened already)
Wow, like many great empires before it, will collapse under it's own weight.
Wow, I need to learn both how to spell and how to proof read.
ReplyDeleteI think that having the ability to use phasing technology might be of a lot of use in saving the old world.
Particularly older instances.
Hell, even heroic modes for some of them would be a hoot. I know I would love to see level 80 heroic deadmines =)
Either way something has to be done, and soon, or they will start bleeding players faster than they are getting new ones.