This post came about from a discussion I had with my daughter of the holidays. I was playing WoW Classic and she was asking about WoW. She has given the game a miss, stopping WoW during her senior year of high school and avoided it during college. That was probably a good thing and I admire her fortitude.
Now, as a college senior watching me play, she wondered aloud how long it might take her to get a level a new character up through retail. She thought she could manage that over a few months.
I suggested she could probably get to Shadowlands with a week of focused effort based on my own past experience… and then I had to explain the whole level squish that went in with Shadowlands that managed to both over complicate and trivialize all of the earlier content in one fell swoop.
That meant going back to some old diagrams, like the parallel expansions path where you can play from 10 to 50 through one expansion.
And then I had to mention the still existing layer cake model which you might find yourself playing through… and leveling out of in any given expansion in just a few swift levels.
The horizontal stack with level caps on each expansion
All of this got a sour reaction from her as I explained Chromie and how Demon Hunters have a different path when they start and how couldn’t recall how Death Knights fit into these leveling paths. (They, and allied races, start at level 10 I seem to recall.)
This got us off onto who this change was for? Who benefited from this?
Clearly, people who want to play in the current level cap expansion benefit in that there is now a fairly quick path from starting a new character to getting to… well, Shadowlands I guess. But that isn’t so bad. The overland content is easy to progress through and probably takes about the same time it gets from character creation to level 50. That isn’t a bad grind and you don’t have to spend $60 on a level boost.
Except, of course, now with the third post-level squish expansion arriving, Blizz is back in the same boat and are handing out a level 70 boost (and the whole Dragonflight expansion) with every purchase of The War Within expansion
Buy it now… or not
So we’re back to the same problem. Sure, it is still quicker to go from a new character to level 70 for The War Within that it would be if Blizz hadn’t done the level squish and The War Within started at level… what would it have been, 140?
But the level squish was a lot of work… a LOT of work… and ended up with a convoluted system where you still get to the end of an expansion long before you finish the content (always a problem, but now more so) and there is a “best” path forward (Battle for Azeroth) and you can accidentally find yourself in the old layer cake model if you are not proactive.
So the the question needs to be asked; could they have done something else? Could they have spent less time on an overly complex system that only serves the need to bypass old content and get to the new stuff?
Of course they could have.
I mean, for starters, they could have just reduced the price of character boosts. $60, or four months of subscription time, is a punitive price. It is a sign that they don’t want you to skip the old content, that they want you to work for it, that if you’re going to bypass it then you need to pay a hefty toll.
Except, of course, when they give it away with new expansions… though they aren’t giving it away, because expansions with a character boost are $10 more, which makes you wonder why they couldn’t just sell the boost for even $20.
Another alternative is that they could have stuck to the level squish template for old expansion every time a new expansion showed up. This seemed so intuitive that I was almost sure this would be the plan, that with Dragonflight the Shadowlands expansion would become a level 10-50 option… maybe replacing Battle for Azeroth as the quickest option… and Dragonflight would be level 50 to 60 so that the latest content was always exactly the same distance away for every new character.
The reason I assumed this was the plan was because I couldn’t imagine Blizz, having just worked their way out of their perceived problem of the level cap being too hard to get to because of all the levels, jumping themselves back into the exact same problem two expansion after Shadowlands. I mean, how freaking idiotic would that be?
And yet, here we are.
They could have gone down the path that they use over in EverQuest II, where once you have a character at level cap, subsequent characters get an xp boost through the leveling content. Or they could have figured out another way to identify and help alts less onerous to level up… maybe make heirloom gear less annoying to obtain and upgrade… though with that I am starting to stray from the original proposition, that getting a new player just joining the game into the current expansion content is a desirable outcome, a goal that Blizzard is striving to achieve.
The level squish didn’t help with that. Technically, it made the race into the latest content shorter, but in a convoluted and annoying way that still required quite a bit of investment simply to get into the “good” stuff, as the new content is always assumed to be by, in part, making the old content, if not worse, then considerably less satisfying to get through.
My hypothesis here is that, in hindsight, it would have been easier to just give out a character boost with every expansion… Shadowlands and Dragonflight included… and just worked out a better way to deal with the desire for alts, for which there are probably a lot more options than I covered above, because I cannot really figure out the audience for the still remaining yet completely trivialized content in its current form.
I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, and maybe we were due for another item squish to keep numbers from hitting ludicrous level again, but the level squish doesn’t seemed to have solved any issues in the long term.
Maybe I am missing something, but the effort and the upheaval caused didn’t seem to be worth the end result… unless it was a ploy to drive more people to WoW Classic.