So I've been getting into WoW again and generally enjoying myself. I'm not a hardcore raider that needs to be world's first whenever a patch comes out with a new raid, I'm a causal player. I like doing world quests and 5 man dungeons along with doing professions. A someone who likes to level alts occasionally just to get the feel for the different classes/specs, I always come across the same problem I have had with the game since the Burning Crusade: the world part of 'World of Warcraft' is constantly changing.

Well.....duh? Right? Isn't that a good thing?

Not really. It means that content that was relevant in 2004 becomes irrelevant in 2006 and content in 2006 becomes irrelevant in 2008. Etc. Etc.

That's because end game is constantly forcing players into a certain zone and ignoring the major landmasses the art team has painstakingly created over the past 13 years. The leveling process or as I like to call it, sightseeing tour, is so trivial and easy that I'm surprised that it still exists. It doesn't prepare the player for the end game content, all it does it showcase beautiful environments that were once the central hub of the game at one point or another. You collect kill and collect quests with the occasional oddball quest thrown in and go to the next expansion pack's worth of content and do it again.

Sure there are stories and such, but it still feels all irrelevant since the quest in an MMO really is never ending.

I honestly think this throw-away design is going to eventually crush the game itself. Of course, nothing lasts forever. But I see potential in WoW that with a few tweaks, all these zones can be more than a stroll down memory lane again. I honestly think the next expansion pack should contain no new landmass, instead going through what they already have and make the world scale-able levelwise, while still maintaining a sense of endgame.

Leveling should have a decent challenge to it, rather than it existing to make the $60 lvl 100 boost feel like a decent temptation.

There should be a decent storyline that takes the player across the lands they already explored, but making it relevant and fun again. I know Cataclysm tried something to the effect, but it would need to be done on a more grander scale. Since quests are already pretty substantial in Legion, I know the talent is there to make this possible.

I have no grander ideas outside of that, but I honestly think burnout is inevitable sooner rather than later if they keep going with the current expansion mindset of raising the lvl cap with a new landmass. I understand positions like this are controversial and I respect if you don't like the idea. It's just something that if anything else, would make relevant the old perfectly good tracks of land already in the game.

As someone who played the game for around ten years, I can understand your point, but I doubt that they are going to do any sweeping changes to the game at this point anymore. Their playerbase is still so gigantic that they don't need to. I would say that right now it's more likely for them to release WoW 2 to mix things up in a major way, but I don't actually know what their future mmo plans are, seeing how Titan exploded into Overwatch.

I would be surprised, though, if we're still getting regular WoW expansions in five years from now. Maybe if they finally remove the monthly fee, it gives the game [x] more amount of years.

As someone who actively plays WoW, this is not something I want. I don't want the latest content to bring me to the places I've already spent months or even years in. I don't want to be a level 110 going back to Westfall. I've done the story in Westfall, where my level 20 hunter helped clear out the Deadmines before moving on.

This has been their model since the first expansion. They went back with the third expansion and updated the Vanilla content and added in some new zones while they're at it but other than that it's always been about new levels and new zones. Why try fix what isn't broken?

They've done a little in the latest to get you to go to some older zones depending on your class, but by and large I don't think many people would really want to have to spend even more time travelling around than they already do.

The leveling process has been trivial since TBC was released. Even in new content it's completely trivial and without any real challenge.

I would have maybe agreed with you until Legion came out. Legion is probably the best expansion they've done for WoW, at least, since Burning Crusade. There is so much content in that expansion that I really think its unfair to compare it to a roller coaster.

Also, they more than likely will not be making those drastic of changes to the main game. You'd see WOW2 before that.

WoW will never die because China.

The game lost it's appeal when sites turned up with item and quest databases. In the good ol' days you could still find awesome stuff 'by yourself' and then share it with friends or guildmates. And from what I've heard they almost build that stuff into the game now. No need to read the questgivers' text anymore. Just follow the waypoint. The next step would be a checkbox to let your character 'automatically do the quest'.

@dussck: Not sure what you're considering as the good ol' days, but Thottbot was around in the beta.

I am not a WoW guy but I have seen many games of the type later in their run do that kind of thing where they trivialize all the early content and I find it real shortsighted. But they just keep wanting to get people to the new stuff.

Some MMO's have a auto walk to the next quest objective, like Black Desert online. A game advertised as an exploration game.

I think the best thing they could do is make the zone scaling in Legion in every zone. I don't mind the fact that leveling is faster once you get heirlooms, but having to complete 50% of 20 different zones because you outlevel them so fast is a bummer.

@hunkulese:If it was (was it really?) then no one around me knew about it. But yea, beta and vanilla WoW is where the game was at it best for me. :)

@ravelle: That is sickening...

I think the current leveling system and progression through old content does discourage new players from the game. But I'm not sure if WoW is at a point anymore where its worth the investment to improve the new player experience, or if they should just focus on retaining existing/returning players for as long as possible.

For instance, for a new player it is impossible to follow the story anymore, should they be interested. The timeline jumps around way too much, especially in the pre-WoD content; the worst offender being Outland which takes place before the content players were in from levels 1-58. You also level so quickly that you never see most of the zones or finish their storylines. And some of the best quest chains in the game were either removed entirely or just get cut off at a certain point with no explanation of what happened or even that there was more content to see at one point. There's also a huge number of different game systems, some of which are completely meaningless now, with no indication to new players of what is and is not important.

But revamping all that would either mean a huge new investment from Blizzard or a content drought for max level players while that's all fixed. Neither of which is probably appealing to the dev team.

I think @fezrock hit the nail on the head. I came back to World of Warcraft for the Legion expansion and, as usual, was utterly burned out after about two months. The level scaling for the new zones was a nice change of pace, but the new quests were done after a month and then it was back to the gear and faction treadmill. Running the same heroic dungeons, day after day. Trudging through the same raid, week after week, for six months until the next raid to trudge through. Completing a small litany of random daily quests which, while a lot more fun than the Warlords of Draenor daily content, were too few in number to stay engaging for very long. So much repetition, each little chore slowly filling some bar or counter (faction points, artifact power, totals on the currency page). Ugh.

I wondered why they didn't level scale all zones like they did with the Legion ones so that we could at least do some old quest content without everything being a pushover. Maybe get some random dailies in those zones too that tied with the on-going stories each had. Mix things up.

Then again, why bother? Players that didn't like the current expansion cycle of all relevant content for two years being isolated to one particular new continent have already left. Players tired of the gear grinding and/or faction grinding have already left. Players who grew weary of the absolutely horrid storytelling and writing clichés have already left. At this point, the players World of Warcraft retains are fine with the old zones being irrelevant. They're fine with a cooldown-based combat system with an ever diminishing number of buttons to press. They're fine with the story being hamfisted, because the game isn't about the story. It's all about the endless loot treadmill (just like with their younger cousin, Destiny).

I like @shivermetimbers 's ideas, and I've kind of seen them done... in Elder Scrolls Online, which I'm now playing instead of World of Warcraft. :-P I'm not a big fan of ESO's obsession with loot boxes and $100 player houses in lieu of new content packs like The Dark Brotherhood, but you gotta pay the bills somehow I guess. At least they don't have the same miserable gear treadmill tiers that WoW relies so heavily on; it's more of a Guild Wars 2 emphasis on armor motifs, which I'm much happier with. (I'm a second class citizen in terms of aesthetics instead of the WoW thing of being in "looking for raider" baby tier armor that is 50 gear levels lower than the heroic raider armor, thereby making me statistically worse at everything forever unless I'm willing to dedicate three nights a week to a raiding guild and schedule my life around a freaking video game).

I think if you're looking for World of Warcraft to do a Tamriel Unlimited, "make all zones relevant for adventuring" thing, you're going to be disappointed. Their model for retaining the people that are left revolves around a very different concept.

Yeah the speed of leveling takes away from the content for me, it goes too fast and it's too obviously a grind to the next objective.

I tried to play Star Wars The Old Republic recently and it put me off there too. I so quickly out levelled all the content that even doing just the core main quests meant I was running around invincible. Kills the story when the big bad boss can be killed by a strong gust of wind. Shame really... so much content that's robbed of any meaning.

@dussck: I guarantee you someone you talked to that helped you with quests in Vanilla was just relaying info to you they looked up in Thottbot, it was just as prevalent then as WoWhead and things are now.

On topic, I don't really want them to reuse old zone for a lot of the same reasons others have said. I've spend thousands of hours there before, I don't wanna go back, I'd rather go forward. It's just the curse game design of an MMO, leaving the old stuff behind. I can't think of one MMO game that has reused it's old content in a fulfilling away once expansions or DLC packs have added new zones.

I can think of one MMO (and I'm sure there are others out there, I just don't go around trying them all out) that's made its world and its content meaningful to everyone regardless of progression and that game is (old) Runescape. I'm not saying Runescape is a good game, but it did have that going for it. New content added to the game didn't make other skills the player leveled up redundant and it was still worth going around the world completing quests. RuneScape isn't really a game built from the bottom up with loot grinding and raiding in mind like WoW so it can get away with this. But yeah, I can understand what people here are saying. It would be hard to do and the overall design WoW has doesn't really support it.

I dropped out of WoW after WotLK. But I got into ESO recently after their free week and price drop and I gotta say, I didn't think I would like the level scaling they have done as it would kill the power fantasy but it's actually been very nice for me as a new player. I can group with max level players and farm world bosses with them and still feel like I'm contributing since everything is scaled (it was weird to realize that I was losing max hp at first as I was leveling and not putting points into my health but I got over it). And there are players everywhere instead of just having them funneled into the "high level" zones and I think that's pretty important for an mmo, to have that communal aspect, to have it "feel" massively multiplayer.

At some point around burning crusade when blizzard saw this game was a hit, they made it noob friendly and causal friendly. I went back and played some vanilla WoW on nostalrius. Totally different game. Would actually prefer playing vanilla then what they have done to it.

@shivermetimbers: I wouldn't really count Runescape as comparable though, even though it is in fact an MMO (one I still love and spent many hours doing). Yes you can do stuff anywhere in Runescape, but the way skills work and how your level is just a combination of your combat skills make it a strange outlier. Combine that with there not really being a natural progression in Runescape (since outside quests it's really a make your own adventure leveling system) like WoW has(where it's zone based, level in a zone to move to the next zone up, etc) and I don't think it really fits the mold of comparison. Talking this specific sort of MMO I'd probably group TOR, FF14, ESO, GW2 in the same boat as WoW.