Why?
Why do they persist in dumbing games down? We saw World of Warcraft turned into the type of game a blind, mute, lame monkey with a banana up it's butt can play without difficulty. In fact, he could probably lead some raids. And now, in Age of Conan, the same thing!
Mithrielle's Mansion in Tortage night time had guards in it. Those guards were mini bosses, the slaves were weaklings you could walk all over. Heck, the bosses weren't difficult but this is the mansion of the sorceress that controls all of Tortage! They should not be a walkover! Last patch? They got turned into regular mobs that still drop the same rewards.
Fucksakes. Pardon my French there. But really!
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Because, quite simply, the vast majority of mankind differs very little from a blind, mute, lame monkey with a banana up its rear in terms of capability.
The vast majority of mankind >> the non-retarded ones when it comes in terms of money available (due to sheer numbers). Game-designers want to keep earning money.
That's really all there is to it.
To attempt to entice people to come and play. And its crap. I went from level 52-53 the other nite in 35 minutes. A list of how much WoW has been dumbed down probably would never end, beacuse of the rate of dumbing down. My friend and his girlfriend went from 1-60 in about 5 days. Not /played, but played. So quickly that neither one of them know much about their classes. Hell, I was level 34 six days ago.
Its just designer's way of raking in more cash.
Leveling speed and dumbing something down are two separate issues IMO.
They needed to increase the leveling speed from 1-60 when TBC came out and from 1-70 when WotLK came out, because otherwise it would take too long for new players to catch up. They may have increased it a bit too much, but in essence I see it as a necessary change. This also means that the learning curve has shifted: you don't have to know your class completely at lv 60, because you have 20 more levels ahead of you.
On the other hand you have things like heroics which were hard in TBC and aren't now. You could call this dumbing down, but in fact it's just a decision on where they should fit with regards to the difficulty. In TBC, only raiders could do heroics. This left non-raiders with quests (which there were plenty) and a few lv 70 instances. In Wrath, they decided to make the transition into raiding more smooth, so they used heroics as a stepping stone for that. Now non-raiders also have access to challenging content and raiders can get their challenges from raids, although the first batch is too easy to really challenge top guilds.
Other example: the honor system. It was definitely 'dumbed down' from the original, where getting grand marshal required months of playing premades, but I think the current system is just plain better. It encourages more people to participate in PvP and allows access to most of the gear while allowing you to have a life. The real challenging stuff doesn't provide gameplay advantages anymore (i.e. it isn't gear), but is purely for boasting purposes (which was the main use anyway ;-). This allows more people to get the best stuff, while a select few get a way to show the world that they are the best.
All in all, I agree that parts of WoW have been dumbed down, but I also think these are positive changes more often than not.
But its a game. I don't see why making it easier to level to 60 and now 70 should be added. Or rather, in the way they implemented it. I am quite happy they decided to add in a few new quest hubs (dustwallow), but to make each level require 20% less xp, allow players to get triple xp, etc? No, I disagree with that. I don't have a problem with the10% increase in xp from mobs from the BoA shoulders. I don't agree with de-eliting mobs.
And example of why I don't like this. In Searing Gorge you have a quest chain. The second quest is Forging the Shaft. You have to get 8 Thorium Daggers, which drop off level 44-47 mobs. The next quest, The Flames Casing is to get a Symbol of Ragnaros. This used to be a difficult quest. Level 44-46 elite mobs. Now they aren't. So while the previous quest is having you *possibly* kill level 47s, this now requires you to *possibly* kill level 44s. Hmm, thats not the levels that I thought. Oh well. Point is, why change them to nonelites? That is basically the end of the quest chain. You don't NEED to complete that quest chain to get anything. Leave them as elites. Make leveling still challenging for those that want it.
Or, if they don't, then let all classes start at level 55 with an epic mount, PVP trinket, and blue gear. Either make levels 1-79 a part of the game, or just get rid of them altogether.
You are dead on about heroics. As soon as I hit 80 on my druid, I healed like 5 of them that night. There were still some I didn't do with Semunia back in TBC. And I still dont get it why they call 25 mans "Heroic". They are easier than 10 mans. I guess just finding 25 people is the "heroic" part of it. I can see why they changed the honor system around, but I still don't like it.
Of course, yall know how much I miss vanilla wow. I really think they should rename epics as "common", blues as "I haven't quested or checked the AH recently" and greens as "god I fail at this game, where's Island Kitty Adventures?"
I think they were just happy with the time it took new players to reach the endgame and didn't want to change that. Since endgame is now 20 levels further away, you have to level faster if you want to keep the time spent constant. I think the triple xp is way too much, but a 20% reduction in xp needed sounds about right. It also allows you to quest your way to 60 instead of having to grind bits, which is a good thing IMO.
The eilte thing has two sides. I also feel a pang of loss every time I see mobs that used to wear the gold dragon. It takes away part of the challenge. On he other hand, the odds of finding a group for any of those quests have dropped to below zero, so if they were still elites, the content would simply not be accessible to most players at the right level. But overall, this is one of the changes I don't like.
The heroic thing with raids is just a hack to get a 10 and 25 man mode. Players needed a way to switch between them and the heroic system was already in place, so it is the obvious deciision. Besides, all the stuff is actually harder than on 10 man (bosses have more HP etc.). You just have more buffs and more options with 25 players. The encounters that actually require focus from everyone (Thaddius comes to mind) are harder on 25 than on 10. In any case it is a big improvement over the 40 man raids, where it took ages to get everyone together and you had even more room to slack.
I haven't responded to this (the first paragraph) because I've been at a crossroads with it. I think this is the first time I have heard of an argument that I actually agree with. Sort of. Yes, level 60 is nothing special anymore. Level 70 isn't either. WoW is now about level 80, the same as it was when the cap was 60. So I see your point about wanting to keep the /played equal across all different expansions to the new level cap. And I've been testing this as well. I am now level 68 with a little less than 4 days /played. iirc, I was able to hit 60 in ~7 days and 70 in ~7 days as well. Perhaps less. And it feels like I should be about the same when I hit 80. Excellent point!
I guess the biggest opposition I have is that now that I've done "endgame" in three versions of WoW (albeit not all out endgame, but raiding and pvp none-the-less), I'm a little less interested in the monotonous grind that is level cap. Vanilla there weren't very many grinds. You went out, picked your weekly dreamfoil and elemental fire, found an alchemist, and that was it. Go raid. No need to worry about factions. No need to worry about....anything. You showed up and raided. Getting to end game was the challenge. 1-60 was long and arduous. Instances were planned. Groups required thought. Dedication. Getting into an end game raiding guild required more than "I maxed out tailoring, which means Im in full epics and the few spots I couldn't fill in, I just bought off the AH or PVP'ed for an hour". It required you to spend countless nights in difficult instances hoping for that solitary item to drop for that one slot. Then another countless nights spent going for another drop. Then, once you had all that, you had to hope the few end game raiding guilds on yoru server were looking for your class. Because you couldn't start a guild, get 9 other people, and go do a raid that was equally as easy as any other instance you've been doing.
When TBC hit, 1-69 didn't matter. You couldn't gain anything useful during that. As soon as you hit 70 you either maxxed out your professions or just equipped all the epics you made from them. Then you ran the same instance over and over again. Not necessarily for gear, but for the rep. Meanwhile you pugged a raid and got covered with epics from a single run. Hell, given a choice between SLabs and kara, most people would choose kara.
And now its the same thing with wrath. Except now, its 1-79 dont matter and as soon as you hit 80, you are not only covered with raiding equivalent gear from your professions, but also from all the ones you got from running the ridiculously easy heroics, which are nothing more than doubling bosses health and making them hit a tad harder. And Naxx is (for the most part) a joke as well.
Of course, I know yall know what I just wrote. But, this is a game. Everybody plays for different reasons. I am sure 95% of the player population just wants to be at end game and covered with gear. But at the same time, I think that the leveling *could* be just as satisfying.
I still am crossing my fingers the new MMO blizz is working on is called "Vanilla WoW: Lets go see MC again".
If you want to see MC again you should buy an Atari ;-)
I'm honored to be the first one to present an argument you agree with =P and I think you are right that both raiding and gearing for raiding have become easier with every successive expansion. There weren't many people doing MC the first 6 months or so after WoW released and I remember that it was great when they added ZG, because guilds that didn't have enough geared members could finally try out raiding. Before that, you had to farm lv 60 instances for the required gear. When TBC arrived gearing up became much easier, in part because of those overpowered crafted epics, but also because the raids were easier and the rewards from high-level quests were better. WotLK stepped this up a notch by placing heroics between dungeons and raids in terms of difficulty and by making the first batch of raids very easy.
But does that mean that "endgame" is easier to reach? That depends on your definition of endgame. In vanilla, there was a huge gap between dungeons on the one hand and raids on the other. Only with the very best of dungeon gear could you enter into raiding. Clearly raiding was the endgame here and it required a large effort to be able to participate in it. In TBC this gap shifted; instead of between dungeons and raids, it was now very hard for guilds to move from Kara, Gruul and Maggie to the harder raids. I think this means that endgame shifted from just raiding to doing the harder raids. The same is happening with Wrath, where the progression curve is even smoother. This is nicely demonstrated by the loot: normal lv 80 instances -> heroics and 10 mans -> 25 mans -> hard modes are all small (13 item-lvl points) jumps. The problem with wrath atm is that the real endgame isn't even in the game yet. We only have the Kara, Gruul and Maggie from TBC, but not the raids that these are the stepping stones for.
So, yes, it has become a lot easier for people to participate in raids. But in my opinion this is a good thing, especially considering all the effort and development time put into these dungeons. It would be a waste if only 1% of the players got to experience them. I also think what counts as endgame has shifted accordingly. The real challenges (Sarth + 3D on 10 man comes to mind, as well as The Immortal achievement) still take dedication, gear and excellent teamwork to accomplish.
I absolutely agree with your leveling point though. Leveling in the old world is more of a chore atm, but I don't really know how it could be made more interesting without fully revising the old world.
PS: sorry for the walls of text ^^
Yeah - i just got outta tanking naxx 10, on Pikki, who hit 80 a week ago. Main tanking, most of it. Sorta surprised me...
I mostly agree with Stigg. But, MMOs are growing and as they grow they attract more "casual" gamers. Not casual in terms of playtime, but casual in terms of investment in the game and with regards to their attitude.
I'm casual in terms of play-time, but hard-core in terms of investment and attitude. I like challenges in my game and enjoy struggling to earn gear and rewards.