He thinks that if the maximum level in an MMO is, say, 80, and someone gets there, it should really feel like an accomplishment, not just an action to be done with a shrug of the shoulders…

World of Warcraft has its latest add-on, The War Within, which also has a new system (Warbands) that has changed the way you level up, and you can reach the maximum level very quickly, and with a stackable XP buff, it’s really not that challenging for a player to reach level eighty in the latest content of what many people just call WoW, the MMO.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, a veteran designer who worked on World of Warcraft and then the MMO League of Legends (which is still nowhere to be found…) thinks that this system is too far from the old school style and he doesn’t think it’s a good direction to go. He tweeted about it several times, and to put it mildly, he disagrees with what Microsoft (they own Blizzard…) has done:

https://x.com/Ghostcrawler/status/1831530555403640894

“I’m going to be spicy. Someone asked me if it’s a mistake to streamline the leveling experience and let players get to the endgame as fast as possible because that’s what they love. My answer is yes. I think it’s the leveling experience that we all fell in love with and invested in MMOs for. I think getting to the level cap should be an accomplishment, not a blip. The endgame is very, very important and a lot of MMOs fail because they have a good leveling experience and a lame endgame. So we’re not going to give that up.

But I also think that leveling should be challenging and a little bit of an effort and not something that you just go through so you can start leveling up. I felt the same way when I was working on World of Warcraft. And like a lot of “taste” issues in game design, I understand that people have different opinions and you have different opinions. That’s fine. But we can’t be all things to all people, or we become milk toast. I don’t even mind milk toast. My mom used to make it for me a lot. But it’s a synonym for something mediocre,” Street wrote.

And there is something to that. If an MMO isn’t a leveling experience, it can be a bit forgettable later on.

Source: PCGamer