What do you do for the guy that has everything? Well, if you’re Blizzard, you invalidate all his stuff.

Even despite some of the discussion on the boards, I was surprised when, upon the completion of my first quest in the new expansion area, I got this staff as a drop: The Staff of Twin Worlds. Previously, I’d been using a pretty craptastic dagger. I just didn’t run across another weapon that complemented my shadow priest the way I wanted, so I stuck with the Hypnotic Blade that I think I got in Scarlet Monastery (the last place I did a lot of instancing before my adventuring guild collapsed beneath the shadow of “drama”). So to say I was happy about getting something that was, objectively, about 5 times better in every way that actually matters to a priest is a vast understatement.

The gravy train didn’t end there – new robe, new pants, new pimp hat — one by one, all the new quests raise the level of gear. Why? It’s easy – it makes it POSSIBLE for the designers to actually balance the content.

See, previously, WoW had a whole bunch of people bunched around the 60, but they weren’t equal. They had:

  • A whole bunch of people who got to level 60, realized the adventuring game they enjoyed for 60 levels had fundamentally changed. We’ll call those the “Level 60s”. (Note, this is me)
  • A whole bunch of level 60s who were in smaller guilds and managed to make a couple of light runs into instances like Scholomance or Stratholme, but who didn’t get traction into the big raiding game. The Level 60+ses.
  • The insane people who were part of those ‘3 raids a week’ guilds who were decked out fully in purple Tier 2 gear a year before BC came out. The Level 60++ses.

So you’re working at Blizzard, trying to make a level 62 dungeon. How do you make a monster targetted towards all three groups?

You could aim the content at the level 60s. No good. The 60++ses will blow through the content, and then rant on the boards about how small and trivial the expansion pack was.

You could aim the content at the 60++s. This is actually much worse. Expansion packs are aimed at reaching players who currently aren’t in the game. Asking those you recapture to do raids before they can go to the outlands and see new content is probably a bad idea if they quit because they didn’t like raids in the first place. And to make matters worse, all the people who know how to do the raids will be off in the outlands.

So the designers punted – hey, just bring everyone up to a relatively level playing field before kicking them into the new content. Sure, it feels broken, and there’s definitely a mudflationary aspect to it. And while it feels broken, it seems to be working out pretty well – assuming you don’t mind the item-oriented nature of WoW and MMOs in general.

(And to make it clear, I don’t).

The real tragedy to me is the lost content. As I was making the final push on my server to get level 60 on my server, I kept an eye on the Looking For Group feature (which is a travesty, but that’s another post). There were frequently groups forming for Maraudon, Scarlet Monastery and Sunken Temple (the latter being a 45-54 instance). But all those instances that are 55+: Blackrock Depths, Scholomance, An’Qiraj, and Stratholme never seemed to have a single person looking for them, save some poor warlock who was desperately trying to find anyone who would help him finish one last class quest that was apparently vital. Why raid for a random chance at a drop when you get a sure thing if you step through the portal?

So my real question is whether or not Blizzard will at some point repurpose some of that old content – not now, everyone’s sick of it. But in a year or so, it’ll all be nostalgic, and a whole generation of denizens of Azeroth won’t have seen it. I know how hard it is to make raid content – it would be a shame to see all that work go to the dustbin.

Original comments thread is here.