The Case for Adding An Experience Gain Toggle in the WOW UI

World of Warcraft Loading Screen
World of Warcraft Loading Screen

When I first started playing WOW, during Wrath of the Lich King, the previous expansions weren’t yet bundled. This meant that I had to purchase each expansion if I wanted to enjoy them. Because both myself and my husband were playing, this was a bit expensive as it meant buying each expansion pack twice.

So, we decided that our best course of action was to play each expansion to it’s fullest before purchasing the next one. It worked out great for us. Since we didn’t yet have Burning Crusade, our level was capped at 60 until we bought it. Once we hit level 60, rather than immediately purchasing the next expansion we continued to quest and do content available to us in order to fully experience things. Granted it wasn’t exactly a vanilla experience, but it gave us time to enjoy things before moving on and being inundated with new zones, crafting, and features. It was actually quite an enjoyable experience.  We got to enjoy the storylines and dungeons without fear of quickly out leveling the content and we maxed out our characters as best we could before moving on.

I specifically remember have a blast in Burning crusade, the stories have stuck with me and the hours we spent exploring the various zones in outland were very memorable. We didn’t feel pressured to move on since our levels were capped at 70 anyway and we were able to take our time and really get a feel for that part of the game.

I don’t recall exactly when Blizzard began bundling previous expansions into the base game, however what I do know is that this bundling had the effect of removing an obvious solution to problem that some new players face, leveling too quickly & missing content.

While the option exists to go to Stormwind or Orgrimmar and disable experience gain, it is not at all obvious to new players and for players leveling alts its inconvenient. I can’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be an easier way to disable/enable leveling built into the user interface.

Personally, I know I enjoy the leveling experience and I enjoy it most when it’s not a cake walk. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Given the option the disable leveling in an easily accessible way I would most likely use it much more often to enjoy the available pve content before moving on to higher level content. Level scaling is great at giving you the option to level in a variety of more places, but it also compounds the issue of missing out on content because it’s no longer relevant to you. Recently while leveling an alt, I was able to skip the whole of cataclysm because I chose to spend that time in Pandaria. Had I been a new player I would have never really even known about those zone because they were made irrelevant to me.

I understand that a lot of players simply want to get to the most current content and that’s fantastic, however, I believe that some tools for those of us who enjoy the journey a bit more, should be made more easily accessible and explained it bit better.

Perhaps upon reaching level cap for a certain expansion you get a notification informing you that you can disable experience gain in order continue the zones with an easy to toggle option in the character panel.

WOW has a ton of content and seeing it now, even if it isn’t the most recent or current content, is still an amazing experience for new players as well as those of us who really enjoy journey, giving us the ability to disable experience gain in an easily accessible way would really go a long way to ensuring some of the content is enjoyed by at least some new players as well as those players who still really enjoy experiencing the content (even for the 50th time).

Enjoying a Week off School & Playing WOW

World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth Logo
World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth Logo

So I’m between semesters at the moment. Summer just ended, and fall starts next Monday. Lucky for me since the World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion just lunched. That means I can spend some time enjoying the game. Mark has been busy enjoying an event in Overwatch, so it’s just me. I had three Max level characters during legion, all alliance, a mage, warlock and druid. I only level my mage with Mark so I’ve been focusing on my Warlock. I haven’t started BFA with my druid yet.

Just the other day I was fishing in Boralus, and managed to fish up a Great Sea Ray, which in turn gave me the achievement We’re Going to Need More Saddles. It wasn’t necessarily something I was actively working but I’m happy about it none-the-less, the reward for getting that achievement was the Jade Pandaren Kite String Mount. Then not more then 10 minutes later, I fished up another Great Sea Ray which I decided to send to Mark.  I do enjoy fishing, so if I get another I’ll be posting it on the Auction hall.

All in all it’s shaping up to be a pretty relaxing week with some enjoyable game time.

 

Screenshot of Warlock in Wow Fishing up mounts.

Screenshot of Warlock in Wow Fishing up mounts.

 

LFG

Trying to find a tank and/or healer when your DPS is a pain in the ass. That said I do love playing….

On April 06, 2016 at 11:25PM Angel Said…

Michael Morhaime: Legacy server among World of Warcraft community
Dear Mr. Morhaime,
We are the team of Nostalrius Begins, a community dedicated to World of Warcraft’s first version, also known as “Vanilla”. We were a team of about thirty volunteers, and used to host an international legacy server for this version of WoW. For roughly one year, it was an amazing…

 

On May 30, 2015 at 03:58PM Angel Said…

Pretty cool

On January 26, 2015 at 07:29PM Mark Said…

WoW pubs its full 6.1 patch notes…

World of Warcraft unleashes its full patch 6.1 patch notes
Massively

 

On January 14, 2015 at 12:35AM Mark Said…

So who’s going to be the awesome person that buys this for me? 😉

On January 11, 2015 at 01:28AM Mark Said…

Holy shit this is awesome. I am such a nice guy I will allow any of you to buy me one. 😉

Sideshow presents Deathwing the Destroyer Statue from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft
Celebrating 10 yearsof the epic video game sensation World of Warcraft, Sideshow and the Blizzard Cinematics team are proud to present the officially licensed Deathwing Statue.

 

On November 08, 2014 at 11:35PM Mark Said…

Metallica rockin’ it out at BlizzCon. Trujillo is awesome. Could live without the Hammett guitar solo.

On November 08, 2014 at 09:40PM Angel Said…

Excited to see the Warcraft movie in march 2016.