With WoW's The War Within Making Leveling Easier, Ex-Blizzard Dev Ghostcrawler Says It’s A "Mistake" To Streamline Leveling

World of Warcraft’s “The War Within” has been making some interesting changes to the MMORPG. One of these changes has to do with leveling, allowing players to make it to max level sooner rather than later, particularly on alt characters.

While endgame is where a lot of players want to be when playing MMOs these days, at least one person thinks it’s a “mistake” to streamline leveling. That would be former Blizzard staffer Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street – who is currently working on his own game at Fantastic Pixel Castle.

In a thread on Twitter, Street notes that someone asked him “if it’s a mistake to streamline the leveling experience and let players get to the endgame asap because that’s what they love”. His answer is “yes”. He goes on to say that he thinks “it’s the leveling experience that we all fell in love with and invested in MMOs” and that “getting to the level cap should be an accomplishment, not a blip”.

The thread goes on to talk about how a lot of games fail because the leveling experience is good, but the endgame is not, conversely, leveling should be challenging. He ends by noting that he understands people’s opinions will differ but that developers “can’t be all things to all people”.

To be fair, he’s not wrong on that last bit. Try as they might, they’re not going to please everyone and they shouldn’t try. They should figure out what their game is and make that the game. That said, when it comes to leveling, I’m of the opinion that after a game has been around for so long, the leveling experience needs to be lightened in some way.

As MMOs go on, the game only gets longer and typically adds new classes for players to level through. On games like Final Fantasy XIV, a bit of that leveling time is saved because you don’t have to do the main story all over again to level a new job, but then you don’t have the benefit of going through the main story to help with the leveling and it becomes way more grindy. With games that only allow you to have one class per character, which is a lot of them, you have to think about whether or not you want to do that story all over again.

Add to that the fact that as some players leave the game, devs will want to attract new players. Joining a game that’s been around for decades and lingering in the leveling zones while everyone else is at endgame isn’t going to help keep those new players around.

Of course, some MMOs do have solutions like buying a level skip, but if you don’t want leveling to be a “blip,” that seems like it might be out of the question.