And I love the author's reference to there being "10 people kicking around on the servers" by the time WoD comes out, as if some other game out there can even sniff the player base that WoW has. I don't even play WoW and I know enough to avoid making statements like that.
Oh, lighten up. I was kidding. Yes, they have tons of player. Also yes, they have bled consistently for years now. Interest is waning. They will continue to be the outlier of outliers but with each quarterly call, they are falling further and further from their high point
Remove levels entirely and focus strictly on content. Providing fun things to do is more important and character progression through levels and restrictions. If you think about it, progression could simply be the experience. Starting a fresh game and not having a first dungeon or a last dungeon. Just a lot of dungeons that everyone can explore and run at any time. Items that anyone can acquire. Going out on a big adventure to get that rare material required to craft an item sounds more fun to me than grinding out 1000 copper swords in order to be able to craft the bronze one that you need. Make that journey difficult and time consuming.
Then, any new content added to the game can be experienced by any individual, regardless of how early or late they've entered the game.
It is an interesting idea which works for games like Super Mario or Halo where you don't have progression. But I think that is not what RPG players want. Because you said you need to go on an adventure to craft your "Bronze Sword" which means there is different gear, some is bad, some good and some better. There will be a "best sword" in game, it will be the best forever (otherwise you have again vertical progression) and you can start with just getting that sword and you are done. If you can't because you are to weak and need to get on quests for copper sword first you again have got a progression.
For me it is really hard to imagine an RPG without progression. A lot of other games in other genres don't have it, but leveling and collecting gear is part of the fun in this genre, or isn't it?
"Expansions aren’t just for adding new levels and zones, they’re for expanding the existing game."
TSW is great in that, with regular, smaller updates, which expanding the system in the first place (as in the surgery, aux weapons, or now with the augments).
And for the content, the "old world vs. new world" as you wrote, Issues are a nice answer as well. They're usually adding new areas, but in most cases they're adding new content to the "old" areas as well, so there's no "old world" in the sense of a level-focused game, you use every part of the world all the time.
Oh, I totally agree with you, no one does world bosses in pandaria anymore. NO ONE. You have to go and painstakingly ask around in chat channels and web sites begging for a world boss raid now for Sha, oon, nalak and galleon... All anyone does is Siege of Orgrimmar Flexibles and Celestial/Ordos every single day 24/7.
So, every single gear vertical game update or expansion makes all previous content no longer desired, and anyone who comes back from taking a break for 6 months, only wants to skip all the lfr raids and go straight to the new lfrs , without bothering to get any equipment or do all the content. Even to the point where people use pvp gear from grinding battlegrounds or paying people to carry them through arenas, just so they can queue up and run higher end raids without bothering to do the lower end ones.
Everyone is just skipping all of the content that is not the newest game update patch. You can have massive problems just trying to find 1 single tank to do anything that isn't the newest game update for the highest ilvl shiniest current loot.
I wish games would stop with the gear and the levels outdating content, and simply give us more reasons to keep on grouping/raiding... Give us fun engaging storyline quests. We don't need this shiny carrot on a stick, hasn't it gotten old in the past 12 years yet?
We could just have emotes, consummables, cosmetics, house furniture, mounts, companion / battle pets, permanent clickies, new spells and abilities, new tradeskill recipes, any number of new items to group/raid for, it doesn't have to be equipment upgrades every single game update and every single expansion pack.
When I run raids what do I see ? Nothing but equipment, only mounts on a very low non-existant drop rate so that I will never actually get one, once in awhile I have gotten pets rarely, and that is pretty much it. Mostly 95% equipment, 5% pets and 0% mounts from raid zones.
Originally posted by Mirandel This is strange nobody mentioned GW2 yet. That game solved this "vertical" progression problem so elegantly. Hope THAT will be copied by the next generation of MMO.
GW2 does NOT solved anything,with the ascended item there's a gear progression based 100% on chinese style farming and also get a gear chek on fractals thanks to the agony system and so more farm.
Also in GW2 the end game has a constant request of gold that must be farmed costantly and the PVE content it's so boring that when you farm dungeon or events you can't have fun.
Every new update of GW2 it's only more farm spots and events the only estetic content it's placed on the gem store.
Yes GW2 has no vertical progression but has the worst end game ever see in a mmorpg.
I haven't played GW2, since I am boycotting NCSoft over their closure of the still profitable City of Heroes, but I did play a lot of GW. Maybe GW2 improves on the model, but I found GW's lack of leveling beyond 20 to be annoying.
Ultimately, levels should be a gauge of difficulty.
I am not a person that likes to optimize my character, in terms of skills or gear. So typically, if I am on level, I usually have a rough time of things, since I am generally very much undergeared.
In games where there are a lot of levels, and the cap keeps increasing, I can overlevel stuff as I play to compensate for my lack of character op.
In games like GW, I simply can't. So I quit playing. in GW, it was sooner rather than later.
City of Heroes did a pretty good job of scaling content to people's levels. If a high level friend wanted to play with a low level friend, they could, the game scaled them.
Helm's Deep tries to do this, but the big battles system is truly awful. It's like you are a spectator in a tower defense game, not even a participant. Oh sure, you can click panels and buttons and banners, but in the end it just feels like busy work, not anything that has any effect.
Originally posted by Mirandel This is strange nobody mentioned GW2 yet. That game solved this "vertical" progression problem so elegantly. Hope THAT will be copied by the next generation of MMO.
GW2 does NOT solved anything,with the ascended item there's a gear progression based 100% on chinese style farming and also get a gear chek on fractals thanks to the agony system and so more farm.
Also in GW2 the end game has a constant request of gold that must be farmed costantly and the PVE content it's so boring that when you farm dungeon or events you can't have fun.
Every new update of GW2 it's only more farm spots and events the only estetic content it's placed on the gem store.
Yes GW2 has no vertical progression but has the worst end game ever see in a mmorpg.
To respond for GW2 they did not make the game for an end game focus. The end game is pretty much throughout. Truly, you do not need any gear that is so leet to be able to accomplish something. If you want to grind and get your legendary you are welcome to, but its not a requirement.
They did create a game where past gear is useful in future expansions/patches. Causing past areas not to become obsolete.
You also did not mention anything about tpvp/spvp. There is no gear grind everyone has access to the same gear and options and specs. Making this much more focused on skill Only thing you are grinding is different skins.
Couldn't agree with this more. Old content, equipment and skills becoming obsolete is a frustrating experience. Nothing sums that up better then Warcraft in which from level 1-80 currently levels you up so fast equipment you get becomes obsolete within the hour, all so you can rush through to whatever is the current expansion.
In Warcrafts defense I do like the idea that they are going to have dungeons that scale with level, and made heroic versions of past dungeons. This seems like a good way to add vertical progression while not removing content.
All to often in MMOs they start with a huge core game, with lots of areas to explore and quest in. Then comes the first expansion and the previous areas are no longer worth adventuring in due to the new content providing better gear, better exp, or whatever. My issue with this is the expansions are often much smaller then the core game was. So an expansion that raises the level cap may add new zones to the game, but by the time you subtract old content that is now irrelavent you end up with a smaller end game world.
This. I went back to WoW about a year ago due to some RL friends and as soon as I got in they had me install some add-on (can't remember the name) that was literally an on-screen GPS that leveled you as fast as scientifically possible. It was nowhere near fun. I quit within a week. I want an MMO that makes exploration worth it from 1-max and the biggest thing that games need to make this work is no or slow leveling.
Oh, lighten up. I was kidding. Yes, they have tons of player. Also yes, they have bled consistently for years now. Interest is waning. They will continue to be the outlier of outliers but with each quarterly call, they are falling further and further from their high point
All of which might actually be relevant if their "high point" wasn't a half dozen orders of magnitude higher than everyone else combined, thus making it inconveniently hard to dismiss the success of their model with "interest is waning" or a "I'm kidding (but not really)" joke.
Originally posted by Mirandel This is strange nobody mentioned GW2 yet. That game solved this "vertical" progression problem so elegantly. Hope THAT will be copied by the next generation of MMO.
GW2 does NOT solved anything,with the ascended item there's a gear progression based 100% on chinese style farming and also get a gear chek on fractals thanks to the agony system and so more farm.
Also in GW2 the end game has a constant request of gold that must be farmed costantly and the PVE content it's so boring that when you farm dungeon or events you can't have fun.
Every new update of GW2 it's only more farm spots and events the only estetic content it's placed on the gem store.
Yes GW2 has no vertical progression but has the worst end game ever see in a mmorpg.
To respond for GW2 they did not make the game for an end game focus. The end game is pretty much throughout. Truly, you do not need any gear that is so leet to be able to accomplish something. If you want to grind and get your legendary you are welcome to, but its not a requirement.
They did create a game where past gear is useful in future expansions/patches. Causing past areas not to become obsolete.
You also did not mention anything about tpvp/spvp. There is no gear grind everyone has access to the same gear and options and specs. Making this much more focused on skill Only thing you are grinding is different skins.
At level 80 if you are not interested in the legendary and ascended farm you have nothing more to do PVE side.
The PVP is terrible with costant umbalance of some classes after every patch and the WWW system got seriuos technical problems this cause a max pg cap on every map and a acces queue totally broken,SPVP it's forgettable.
People are playing GW2 for two main reasons:1 it's without monthly fee,2 the other F2P games are too bad or too complicated.
GW2 it's a game for the asian market,NCsoft put a strong development direction you can see it by the farming nature of the game,after the asian release they will concentrate on following the request of the asian players.
Originally posted by Gdemami I only wonder if anyone got paid for that "article"... I do not read articles here much but this one definitely set new low for me.
...paid by who?
He didn't endorse any titles, he referenced two as having done something her perceives to be flawed, not good.
Are there antagonists paying to bring down the industry now, or are you just blanket insulting things you didn't read?
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
A simple thought here is to think of gaming as FUN and not look at the total levels like some brick wall.That is the huge problem with most modern day gamer's,they treat these games like some wall to conquer instead of playing for FUN ,like so many claim to be playing for.
You do NOT need a whole lot of players to enjoy a game,2-3 is all you need even the toughest grouping game vanilla FFXI could be played with a 3 man group.So if you have even 1 friend,maybe find one other new player and you should be set.
I do NOT condone server to server hopping and for several good reasons but you should be able to find 1-2 people to enjoy the game.
Already mentioned often by many,if for example Blizzard deems their 1-90 as so trivial and worthless to play,why did anyone else care to support Blizzard's worthless content, i mean seriously,they don't consider it worthwhile.Truth is they are ONLY doing it to vault players to where they might buy the newest expansion,that again is reason enough to not support that type of greed.
Expansions in most every game have actually been both vertical and horizontal but more important LINEAR.All they do is raise level cap [just a number]add a few new maps and tell you there is some new bosses waiting to be looted.Also quite often is that a lot of the assets used in xpacs are rehashed from the original game so even less effort is put into it.Also quite often much of the staff that went into making the game has moved on or pushed to other venues,you only have a small portion of the team making xpacs.We can look again at Blizzard,there are SEVERAL other develooers formed from former Blizzard staff,so it is like not even the same team anymore working on Blizzard's games.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Remove levels entirely and focus strictly on content. Providing fun things to do is more important and character progression through levels and restrictions. If you think about it, progression could simply be the experience. Starting a fresh game and not having a first dungeon or a last dungeon. Just a lot of dungeons that everyone can explore and run at any time. Items that anyone can acquire. Going out on a big adventure to get that rare material required to craft an item sounds more fun to me than grinding out 1000 copper swords in order to be able to craft the bronze one that you need. Make that journey difficult and time consuming.
Then, any new content added to the game can be experienced by any individual, regardless of how early or late they've entered the game.
It is an interesting idea which works for games like Super Mario or Halo where you don't have progression. But I think that is not what RPG players want. Because you said you need to go on an adventure to craft your "Bronze Sword" which means there is different gear, some is bad, some good and some better. There will be a "best sword" in game, it will be the best forever (otherwise you have again vertical progression) and you can start with just getting that sword and you are done. If you can't because you are to weak and need to get on quests for copper sword first you again have got a progression.
For me it is really hard to imagine an RPG without progression. A lot of other games in other genres don't have it, but leveling and collecting gear is part of the fun in this genre, or isn't it?
Why does that have to mean some items are objectively better than others? Why can't they simply be different and cater to different playstyles? Copper sword vs bronze sword is probably a bad example. What about a fire sword that burns your enemy vs an ice sword that freezes or slows your enemy? If you have a character focused on slow but powerful attacks the latter might be a lot better for you, but if you focus on DoTs the fire sword might be better.
But then again, I'm not a game designer and the system I've described might be boring as hell to actually play.
<childish, provocative and highly speculative banner about your favorite game goes here>
90 day tours? Even if you take it slow, you are lucky if you get a month out of leveling in WoW now. Having a massive world with more and more content is a huge positive IMHO. It means you have something to look forward to, another area to explore and a sense of direction for longer. Max level just isn't that interesting because you go from new and exciting to monotonous repetition. WoW had a huge advantage in the amount of content they had, but they more or less pissed that advantage away by speeding everything up so much it has all become meaningless.
There is nothing wrong with vertical expansions. It is the implementation, and the same can be said about horizontal expansions. But realistically even "horizontal" expacks aren't truly horizontal you are generally talking about increased gear strength even if you aren't gaining new levels, and that can be a bigger limiter than the levels are. I am not sure how successful an expack would be if it didn't offer any sort of progression what so ever.
Burning Crusade introduced two new races, two new starting areas, Horde got access to Paladin and Alliance got access to Shaman. SO there were tons of people playing through old content when that expansion launched.
Wrath of the Lich King introduced a new class you could start at 55 as well as epic chain quests which toured you through old zones and old starting cities. So there was still a lot of traffic going through old zones and content.
Cataclysm completely revamped all the old zones, added two new races and starter zones as well as more class/race unlocks. Practically everyone was in the old zones doing new content.
Mists of Pandaria introduced yet another race and starting area with all races having access to a new class. Plus the main storyline took players through Azeroth with new content in old zones.
So this new expansion brings a new continent and the ability to skip to 90. Storyline flows through a new continent, and it doesn't appear there will be new races or classes to encourage going through old content. Since this is literally the first time this has ever occurred in a WoW expansion, doesn't seem kind of silly to write an article about some sort of pattern?
Burning Crusade introduced two new races, two new starting areas, Horde got access to Paladin and Alliance got access to Shaman. SO there were tons of people playing through old content when that expansion launched.
Wrath of the Lich King introduced a new class you could start at 55 as well as epic chain quests which toured you through old zones and old starting cities. So there was still a lot of traffic going through old zones and content.
Cataclysm completely revamped all the old zones, added two new races and starter zones as well as more class/race unlocks. Practically everyone was in the old zones doing new content.
Mists of Pandaria introduced yet another race and starting area with all races having access to a new class. Plus the main storyline took players through Azeroth with new content in old zones.
So this new expansion brings a new continent and the ability to skip to 90. Storyline flows through a new continent, and it doesn't appear there will be new races or classes to encourage going through old content. Since this is literally the first time this has ever occurred in a WoW expansion, doesn't seem kind of silly to write an article about some sort of pattern?
How dare you toss logic and facts into the mix!
Well except for the Cataclysm bit. The revamp was part of a pre-expansion patch not the actual expansion. And people were leaving the game in droves after the first 3 months. You did see some people go back and level because of how short the leveling content was and how toxic the heroic dungeons were at the time, but to insinuate that it was a significant number of players is a bit disingenuous.
You can do Big Battles at any leve, with any level make up.
The system will up-level your character to the maximum level of the player in the group.
Is very much doable to do Big Battes with one level 10 character paired with a couple level 30 players with a level 50 and level 95, doing a level 95 Big Battle.
Thats what makes HD Expansion in LOTRO much less vertical than the previous ones...
Not near as bad in the AAA games as in the ftp games. Item shop games live for level expansions so they can sell more levels of play-to-win. At least in the AAA games you can catch up without spending a lot of money.
Vertical expansion is a major problem not just for new players but the veterans as well. Remember all the effort you put into put into that super epic class defining weapon and then a few weeks later the devs release a patch that makes it worth doo-doo squat. To me that seems a kin to deleting my character. When that happens it is time to move on another MMO where there is less vertical treadmill.
What the industry badly needs is to learn to make meaningful side grades and horizontal expansion. Look at how EVE pulled it off. The most powerful ships in EVE are titans and they have been in game for almost ten years. They released new titans but they didn't obsolete the old ones. Instead progressing A ->B->C->D it becomes pick A, B, C, D depending on what best fits what you want to do. This makes the game feel extremely deep.
Additionally I always recommend MMO designers watch these two videos by Extra Credits.
Comments
the only way is down and all that.
It is an interesting idea which works for games like Super Mario or Halo where you don't have progression. But I think that is not what RPG players want. Because you said you need to go on an adventure to craft your "Bronze Sword" which means there is different gear, some is bad, some good and some better. There will be a "best sword" in game, it will be the best forever (otherwise you have again vertical progression) and you can start with just getting that sword and you are done. If you can't because you are to weak and need to get on quests for copper sword first you again have got a progression.
For me it is really hard to imagine an RPG without progression. A lot of other games in other genres don't have it, but leveling and collecting gear is part of the fun in this genre, or isn't it?
"Expansions aren’t just for adding new levels and zones, they’re for expanding the existing game."
TSW is great in that, with regular, smaller updates, which expanding the system in the first place (as in the surgery, aux weapons, or now with the augments).
And for the content, the "old world vs. new world" as you wrote, Issues are a nice answer as well. They're usually adding new areas, but in most cases they're adding new content to the "old" areas as well, so there's no "old world" in the sense of a level-focused game, you use every part of the world all the time.
Oh, I totally agree with you, no one does world bosses in pandaria anymore. NO ONE. You have to go and painstakingly ask around in chat channels and web sites begging for a world boss raid now for Sha, oon, nalak and galleon... All anyone does is Siege of Orgrimmar Flexibles and Celestial/Ordos every single day 24/7.
So, every single gear vertical game update or expansion makes all previous content no longer desired, and anyone who comes back from taking a break for 6 months, only wants to skip all the lfr raids and go straight to the new lfrs , without bothering to get any equipment or do all the content. Even to the point where people use pvp gear from grinding battlegrounds or paying people to carry them through arenas, just so they can queue up and run higher end raids without bothering to do the lower end ones.
Everyone is just skipping all of the content that is not the newest game update patch. You can have massive problems just trying to find 1 single tank to do anything that isn't the newest game update for the highest ilvl shiniest current loot.
I wish games would stop with the gear and the levels outdating content, and simply give us more reasons to keep on grouping/raiding... Give us fun engaging storyline quests. We don't need this shiny carrot on a stick, hasn't it gotten old in the past 12 years yet?
We could just have emotes, consummables, cosmetics, house furniture, mounts, companion / battle pets, permanent clickies, new spells and abilities, new tradeskill recipes, any number of new items to group/raid for, it doesn't have to be equipment upgrades every single game update and every single expansion pack.
When I run raids what do I see ? Nothing but equipment, only mounts on a very low non-existant drop rate so that I will never actually get one, once in awhile I have gotten pets rarely, and that is pretty much it. Mostly 95% equipment, 5% pets and 0% mounts from raid zones.
GW2 does NOT solved anything,with the ascended item there's a gear progression based 100% on chinese style farming and also get a gear chek on fractals thanks to the agony system and so more farm.
Also in GW2 the end game has a constant request of gold that must be farmed costantly and the PVE content it's so boring that when you farm dungeon or events you can't have fun.
Every new update of GW2 it's only more farm spots and events the only estetic content it's placed on the gem store.
Yes GW2 has no vertical progression but has the worst end game ever see in a mmorpg.
I haven't played GW2, since I am boycotting NCSoft over their closure of the still profitable City of Heroes, but I did play a lot of GW. Maybe GW2 improves on the model, but I found GW's lack of leveling beyond 20 to be annoying.
Ultimately, levels should be a gauge of difficulty.
I am not a person that likes to optimize my character, in terms of skills or gear. So typically, if I am on level, I usually have a rough time of things, since I am generally very much undergeared.
In games where there are a lot of levels, and the cap keeps increasing, I can overlevel stuff as I play to compensate for my lack of character op.
In games like GW, I simply can't. So I quit playing. in GW, it was sooner rather than later.
City of Heroes did a pretty good job of scaling content to people's levels. If a high level friend wanted to play with a low level friend, they could, the game scaled them.
Helm's Deep tries to do this, but the big battles system is truly awful. It's like you are a spectator in a tower defense game, not even a participant. Oh sure, you can click panels and buttons and banners, but in the end it just feels like busy work, not anything that has any effect.
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
To respond for GW2 they did not make the game for an end game focus. The end game is pretty much throughout. Truly, you do not need any gear that is so leet to be able to accomplish something. If you want to grind and get your legendary you are welcome to, but its not a requirement.
They did create a game where past gear is useful in future expansions/patches. Causing past areas not to become obsolete.
You also did not mention anything about tpvp/spvp. There is no gear grind everyone has access to the same gear and options and specs. Making this much more focused on skill
Only thing you are grinding is different skins.
This. I went back to WoW about a year ago due to some RL friends and as soon as I got in they had me install some add-on (can't remember the name) that was literally an on-screen GPS that leveled you as fast as scientifically possible. It was nowhere near fun. I quit within a week. I want an MMO that makes exploration worth it from 1-max and the biggest thing that games need to make this work is no or slow leveling.
All of which might actually be relevant if their "high point" wasn't a half dozen orders of magnitude higher than everyone else combined, thus making it inconveniently hard to dismiss the success of their model with "interest is waning" or a "I'm kidding (but not really)" joke.
At level 80 if you are not interested in the legendary and ascended farm you have nothing more to do PVE side.
The PVP is terrible with costant umbalance of some classes after every patch and the WWW system got seriuos technical problems this cause a max pg cap on every map and a acces queue totally broken,SPVP it's forgettable.
People are playing GW2 for two main reasons:1 it's without monthly fee,2 the other F2P games are too bad or too complicated.
GW2 it's a game for the asian market,NCsoft put a strong development direction you can see it by the farming nature of the game,after the asian release they will concentrate on following the request of the asian players.
So a one-time jump to level 90 is "throwing away 3/4s" of the game? Is Blizzard forcing people to do this level jump?
This article just seems more bashing on Blizzard for the sake of bashing...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
...paid by who?
He didn't endorse any titles, he referenced two as having done something her perceives to be flawed, not good.
Are there antagonists paying to bring down the industry now, or are you just blanket insulting things you didn't read?
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
A simple thought here is to think of gaming as FUN and not look at the total levels like some brick wall.That is the huge problem with most modern day gamer's,they treat these games like some wall to conquer instead of playing for FUN ,like so many claim to be playing for.
You do NOT need a whole lot of players to enjoy a game,2-3 is all you need even the toughest grouping game vanilla FFXI could be played with a 3 man group.So if you have even 1 friend,maybe find one other new player and you should be set.
I do NOT condone server to server hopping and for several good reasons but you should be able to find 1-2 people to enjoy the game.
Already mentioned often by many,if for example Blizzard deems their 1-90 as so trivial and worthless to play,why did anyone else care to support Blizzard's worthless content, i mean seriously,they don't consider it worthwhile.Truth is they are ONLY doing it to vault players to where they might buy the newest expansion,that again is reason enough to not support that type of greed.
Expansions in most every game have actually been both vertical and horizontal but more important LINEAR.All they do is raise level cap [just a number]add a few new maps and tell you there is some new bosses waiting to be looted.Also quite often is that a lot of the assets used in xpacs are rehashed from the original game so even less effort is put into it.Also quite often much of the staff that went into making the game has moved on or pushed to other venues,you only have a small portion of the team making xpacs.We can look again at Blizzard,there are SEVERAL other develooers formed from former Blizzard staff,so it is like not even the same team anymore working on Blizzard's games.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Why does that have to mean some items are objectively better than others? Why can't they simply be different and cater to different playstyles? Copper sword vs bronze sword is probably a bad example. What about a fire sword that burns your enemy vs an ice sword that freezes or slows your enemy? If you have a character focused on slow but powerful attacks the latter might be a lot better for you, but if you focus on DoTs the fire sword might be better.
But then again, I'm not a game designer and the system I've described might be boring as hell to actually play.
<childish, provocative and highly speculative banner about your favorite game goes here>
90 day tours? Even if you take it slow, you are lucky if you get a month out of leveling in WoW now. Having a massive world with more and more content is a huge positive IMHO. It means you have something to look forward to, another area to explore and a sense of direction for longer. Max level just isn't that interesting because you go from new and exciting to monotonous repetition. WoW had a huge advantage in the amount of content they had, but they more or less pissed that advantage away by speeding everything up so much it has all become meaningless.
There is nothing wrong with vertical expansions. It is the implementation, and the same can be said about horizontal expansions. But realistically even "horizontal" expacks aren't truly horizontal you are generally talking about increased gear strength even if you aren't gaining new levels, and that can be a bigger limiter than the levels are. I am not sure how successful an expack would be if it didn't offer any sort of progression what so ever.
How dare you toss logic and facts into the mix!
Well except for the Cataclysm bit. The revamp was part of a pre-expansion patch not the actual expansion. And people were leaving the game in droves after the first 3 months. You did see some people go back and level because of how short the leveling content was and how toxic the heroic dungeons were at the time, but to insinuate that it was a significant number of players is a bit disingenuous.
You can do Big Battles at any leve, with any level make up.
The system will up-level your character to the maximum level of the player in the group.
Is very much doable to do Big Battes with one level 10 character paired with a couple level 30 players with a level 50 and level 95, doing a level 95 Big Battle.
Thats what makes HD Expansion in LOTRO much less vertical than the previous ones...
Vertical expansion is a major problem not just for new players but the veterans as well. Remember all the effort you put into put into that super epic class defining weapon and then a few weeks later the devs release a patch that makes it worth doo-doo squat. To me that seems a kin to deleting my character. When that happens it is time to move on another MMO where there is less vertical treadmill.
What the industry badly needs is to learn to make meaningful side grades and horizontal expansion. Look at how EVE pulled it off. The most powerful ships in EVE are titans and they have been in game for almost ten years. They released new titans but they didn't obsolete the old ones. Instead progressing A ->B->C->D it becomes pick A, B, C, D depending on what best fits what you want to do. This makes the game feel extremely deep.
Additionally I always recommend MMO designers watch these two videos by Extra Credits.
- Power Creep
- Spectacle Creep
These pretty much define the problem in a nut shell.