In one way of looking at it, level 20 is the new “endgame” for the F2P slice of World of Warcraft. Characters are locked at level 20, and progression past that point will be largely based on gear. It’ll be an unholy grind of rerunning instances and plowing through the crafting system. I have to wonder, though…
What is the highest GearScore you can attain? What is the most difficult dungeon you can complete (solo or otherwise)? What is the highest Achievement point total you can accumulate? How many classes can you beat one-on-one? How many Exploration Achievements can you get? How many quests can you complete? How much coin can you gather and how quickly? How many unique pets can Hunters acquire and get screenshots with? How far can you get from the newbie grounds, and where can you go without dying? (Rogues and stealthy Druids might just win this one.)
Y’know, Blizzard might be missing a few tricks here.
Normalized PvP is one that I’ve always wished they had. The heirloom era makes PvP balance worse at low levels (though twinking made sure it was never really balanced), but what if the system arbitrarily set character stats (including level within a certain band, say levels 11-19 get snapped to level 20 or the like for the duration of the PvP event) to something they decided was “balanced”? Might we see more interesting PvP at lower levels? The Arena is sort of normalized in that everyone just has the best gear, but what if there were an equivalent at level 20? (And then 30, then 40 and so on…)
There are a handful of dungeons available to level 20 characters, and it’s a great learning opportunity to play those at an appropriate level for as long as it takes to learn your class, rather than counting on outleveling the content. You’d have to learn to play a lot earlier than at the now-level-85 endgame.
What if there were full-on raids at level 20 that could therefore be played by characters stuck at level 20? We might, just might, see players learning about raiding earlier and how to play their class, rather than outgear the game. That might be a Good Thing. Of course, I have other ideas about raids, too, but still, just thinking out loud here. What if these pre-endgame raids were normalized like PvP?
How else might the level 20 cap actually be a good thing for players and the game? I can’t help but think that there’s potential there to teach players what the vaunted “endgame” is all about a bit earlier than the, well… the endgame.
Of course, there are pros and cons to teaching about endgame habits early, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.
It’s also notable that with the trial restrictions on characters, they might be as close as possible to “purist” WoW play. Yes, they don’t get the multiplayer experience very easily (alleviated somewhat by the Dungeon Finder, which works just fine for trial/Starter accounts), but neither do they find their play distorted by heirloom gear (leveling is too fast, waaaa!), fairy godmother alts or the severely disjointed market via the Auction House that winds up pricing copper ore and bars at one gold apiece. That’s a pittance to level 85 characters, but a week’s wages for a low level character.
Starter characters also don’t get the guild experience, but with the new guild incentives, they aren’t the purely social animals of old anyway. Oh, and sufficiently leveled guilds will also accelerate the leveling pace of low level characters. The horror!
So maybe, just maybe, guildless and godmotherless is a nice purist way to play the game. Leave the default UI on and don’t bother with addons, and get a feel for the game as Blizzard designed it, rather than what bitter veterans complain about through distorted glasses.
…that’s not to say the game won’t have problems, of course. It will. It’s just that if you learn to accept a game for what it is and see what’s there, rather than what you want to see, you might just learn something.
I promised myself I’d never do it, but with this F2P <20 option – WoW is looking pretty tempting, even if it is just to see what all the fuss is about and widen my mmo experience.
If I WERE to try it, I'd love to find my lvl20 experience filled with at least a decent amount of level appropriate content.
One odd thing about level 20 actually being somewhere in the middle of a larger level range is that you won’t match the “median” level of the six dungeons you can get to with the Finder. You’ll be overpowered for the first two, about right for the middle two, and underpowered for the last two. Now, that might actually be useful for training especially for tanks and healers, to handle a range from “overpowered” to “underpowered”, but you won’t exactly be tackling them at “level median”.
Still, being capped at 20 within that wider range may well mean players have to adapt to circumstances rather than just outlevel a challenge. That could be a good thing.
…though that’s really more about finding things to do rather than Blizzard really building around the level 20 range. So it goes.
Interesting given that lots of people used to stop at level 19 for PvPing in lower level battlegrounds. Guess people can do that for free now.
…and conveniently, the gold cap on a Starter account seems to be 10 gold, which, if my research is correct, is just enough to get a NPC to toggle the “no XP gain” flag. You could have a perma-19 twink… that has to earn their keep the honest way instead of with heirlooms and gifting alts.
…but given the imbalance of PvP, that’s just not much of a draw for me, at least. I played one battleground (Warsong Gulch) a while back at level 15, and a level 19 Warrior with full heirloom gear and potions was one-shotting Hunter pets and two-shotting everyone else. It took our whole team to focus fire on him to take him down. He wound up with 52 kills for the fight.
I can see where PvP could be fun… if it were normalized so that skill was the key, not gear/level. Y’know, sort of like Guild Wars. As it is, WoW PvP seems broken to me.
Heirloom gear is insanely OP at lower levels, so much so that there’s hardly any point running Instances except for XP. Even then, given that you could wind up with a schlub or two hoping to get carried by a couple of Heirloom-geared players, even Instance Runs might not be worth the XP. Even without the Heirloom XP bonus you accrue XP at a ridiculously fast rate. I rolled a Human Hunter and within 2 hours had dinged lvl 10 and was entering Westfall.
Along with the boosted XP are assists like your Minimap now pointing the way to the quest goal/Mob of choice, and named Quest Mobs like Hogger appear as Skull targets. I actually held off on taking on Hogger until lvl 12 but it seems my caution was unwarranted, as the old fella appears to have been horribly nerfed. Within seconds of sending in my pet the encounter was over, and I mean seconds. I barely had time to launch 2-3 specials shots before the “Cut Scene” began.
I remember getting into the BC Beta when Blizzard held the speed leveling competition, and I could hit level 25 within 24 hours. With all the changes to the game I reckon you could hit the F2P cap in about 6-8 hours, maybe even less. Fortunately, as you’ve already noted, there’s more to WoW than the 85 End Game. There’s a lot you can do with a capped F2P character, too.
I always enjoyed the PvP in Guild Wars – by keeping the gear static across characters, player skill and team work became the deciding factor. Blizzard could do something similar with the F2P characters – letting them build up skill rather than gear.
Something else that I’ve noticed is that the skills required to button-mash up to 85 are different to the skills required for End Game success – so you’re really learning a different game once you’ve gotten to the level cap. Why not just spawn off the End Game as a different ‘product’ and let people start there?
Oh wait, Time = Money. I keep forgetting that part.
Tesh, this isn’t about the above post, but I didn’t see a contact email, and I wanted to say something to you, so I figured I’d leave it here (that sounds ominous, but it’s not meant to). I just wanted to say that the art you did for John P’s son was fantastic and that if more people like you invested in imagination and creativity for children, our schools would be turning out more ninjas and less robots. As a teacher, I wanted to say thank you for kids in general (though I’m sure BBB already thanked you specifically. Wonderful work and great heart, mate.
Cap’n, aye, Hogger got smooshed with the nerfbat… but then, he does appear again as the boss of the Stockade, so it’s not all bad for the guy.
I’m kinda looking forward to seeing how far I can push a level 20 character. I have a level 17 Paladin that I tanked (!) Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines with, and it was actually kinda fun for my first foray into tanking. (I’ve offtanked with my Bear before, but that’s different.) I doubt I’ll be able to tank the instances that I’d be on the lower end of, but still, I’ve gotta wonder. I’ll definitely take a Rogue or Cat Druid to sneaky places I probably shouldn’t get to as a level 20, and I’ll go Huntering for pets. Plenty to do, and I can do it when I get the itch, instead of trying to cram it all into a 30 day pass. I simply don’t want to play WoW all the time, but it’s nice to visit every once in a while.
LazyPeon, I wholeheartedly agree with everything you mention. That’s part of why I think Blizzard might be missing a trick here by not specifically catering to this potential level 20 “endgame”. And normalizing PvP. Please.
Stubborn, thanks for stopping by! I’ve toyed with the idea of being a teacher, but I can’t stand the system. If I can help kids out like this, outside of the system (and I do math tutoring, too), I’m happy. It’s awesome to see someone really “get it” and learn something… and have fun doing it.
Besides, how could I pass up the opportunity to draw something that wonderfully weird and wacky?
This is what we’re talking about, for those who don’t read BBB’s blog:
http://thebigbearbutt.com/2011/07/08/i-dont-know-what-it-is-but-it-has-aggro/
“…and get a feel for the game as Blizzard designed it”
Just a tad sad that you’d have to artificially cut an MMO at lvl 20 in order to make for this experience.
makes me wonder what that says about the rest of the game then.
Syl, I agree, and I believe that it’s pretty much inevitable that a game’s economy (and design, to a lesser extent) will be warped in short order after going live. The STO economy is really wacky, and it’s not even that old. I think that’s one reason A Tale in the Desert keeps resetting, to get a clean slate and maintain the purity of design. WoW in particular has gathered a lot of cruft over the years. Mudflation, levelflation, gearflation and the dead zone between starter areas and the “endgame” are all warping the game in one way or another. Sticking to the sub-20 game dodges some of that. (Though it might be noted that apparently Age of Conan has an even deader dead zone.)
Of course, PvP is still broken, but that’s just a choice that Blizzard has made. I believe it’s a bad choice, but it’s not like they need to consult me.
Short story long, I think that the 1-20 content is, in some ways, Blizzard’s “best foot forward”. Maybe *that* is sad in some ways, but I maintain that it’s still a good way to see the core design of WoW, sans raiding.
[...] while back, I figured the new sub-level 20 “free” World of Warcraft to be a way to get a taste of the vaunted “endgame” of an MMO, since a level-capped free trial character is effectively progress-locked on the ol’ leveling [...]