The Leveling game within MMOs

After close to 15 years of playing MMOs (and probably close to 25 in RPGs in general), I thought it was finally time to "ink" my thoughts on the genre, from what mechanics were great to some horrible design flaws.  For my first post, I thought I'd venture into the leveling experience.

When I was introduced to the genre, I loved the feeling of starting a new character. I thrived on the experience of traveling exotic lands, growing your character from humble beginnings to a wrecking ball, immersing myself with the stories of everybody I met along my travels (both NPCs and players alike), and being mesmerized by the new inventions every MMO added to the genre.   This feeling started with Ultima Online, but just recently ceased to be "fun."  (At times it felt more like hard work, but that's for a different blog, i thinks...)

I tried really hard to look back on what changed.  The stories were still interesting in most online games.  The character creation seemed to grow in leaps and bounds, customizing the shapes of every little spot on your character.  Vibrant scenery also increased dramatically.  Even the armor and weapons had the tiniest details.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks...

The challenge of leveling had vaporized.  The enemies stopped feeling like adversaries.  Its not the enemy's fault.  They're usually programmed very well... well, most of the time.  They still pursued your character.  They still attacked.  They just stopped offering any real resistance after that.  I took a trip down memory lane to see if I can remember when this all started...

The first time I remember this happening was during my first alt leveling in World of Warcraft after the Cataclysm expansion. The mobs really didn't change - they were exactly the same as before.  The rewards stayed the same.  Blizzard had reduced the amount of experience (quite a few times, if I recall correctly), so the quests didn't matter as much.  It was somewhere in my first few low-level dungeons that I noticed the signs.  Healers really didn't actually have to heal.  Tanks didn't really need healing at all, unless they weren't actual tanks.  Heck, with a healer that actually had a heal spell mapped to a keybind, a DPS could tank the dungeons.  With good DPS, tanks didn't even really have to tank.  Enemies just exploded.

I decided that I'd try to figure out why.  I don't mean that I looked into DPS charts to see how much more damage people were doing then compared to the start of WoW.  I wanted to see why players were given so much power so early in the game.  Part of it was the changes to spells and abilities, as they seemed to be significantly stronger with gear.   Part of it was the gear, as heirlooms offered a better stats than what was available at the beginning.  And part of it was that leveling really didn't matter anymore.

Ever since Wrath of the Lich King, their major end-game goal was to give everybody the opportunity to experience all of the end-game content.  I'm not simply referring to raiding, but actually killing every boss in a raid.  (Note:  I'm just focusing on PvE at the moment.  PvP, especially early game, is a whole new can of worms.  Or squirrels.)  Let me get this straight, I don't have a problem with everybody seeing the death of the final boss of an expansion as it offers closure to the story.  I just have a problem with what they damaged to achieve such a goal.  They wanted everybody to reach that goal, which meant getting people up to max level quicker.  That meant everybody had to do less for every level on its way up.  Now back to the changes in Cataclysm...

Cataclysm, with the changes to scaling at lower levels in addition to availability of better gear meant that everything was blowing up quickly.  So quickly that a person wouldn't be able to finish a zone before they "outgrew" it.  So quickly that, at times, you could out level a dungeon before you finished your first trip through it.  Again, the challenge vaporized before you finished the actual challenge.  I didn't notice it at first because I was just having too much fun blowing things up.  Once that novelty wore off, it became a chore.  The threat of death disappeared.  Failure ceased to exist.

Recently, Blizzard announced that it would start offering a free upgrade to level 90 for a single character with the purchase of Warlords of Draenor.  Players are now speculating if they'll offer it as a paid service.  They already confirmed that they'll sell experience boosts to help speed up the process.  I wonder when they'll decide that leveling is no longer needed and characters will just start off at max level.  Its a shame to see such an integral part of most MMOs wither and die in the most popular game of the genre.

Next time:  I'll post my thoughts on how this has affected the MMO scene in general.