- I agree that it’s inevitable for content to fall by the wayside. My guess is that Blizzard plans to handle that with gear inflation, like we have seen in patch 3.2, to physically propel guilds out of each dungeon as they get tired of it and onto the next one. The rising tide, as it were, would allow new characters (alts or new players) to skip the bottom rungs of the content ladder, right up to wherever their guilds are with relatively limited need for backfarming. Whether it will WORK is another matter, that’s just my guess for what the plan is.

– It is pretty obvious that the current WoW staff is struggling to produce content at the same rate as in the Classic or TBC eras. Being able to leverage a whole bunch of world from Classic ought to help a lot.

– The new player experience needs some work at this point. This Cataclysm provides an opportunity to bring that portion of game content aimed at new players in line with current levelling curves, and perhaps just as important, puts noobs back in general proximity to the rest of the player base, not on some other continent/planet somewhere.

Now, yes, commenters here and elsewhere are right that this is a structural flaw in DIKU mechanics. But such a flaw can hardly be considered to refute the paradigm, as some argue, since –

– It has produced success after success, including very long running games like WoW, EQ1, and NCSoft’s grinders.

– It does not become serious until your game is already mature (and successful, or no one would be bothering to sub/resub it anyway) and thus filled with bitter old vets clustered up at the level cap.

– Mitigation is available to the developers, from the crude but sort of workable xp acceleration seen in WoW and EQ2, to minor zone revamps like those done to Duskwallow and Hinterlands, to, perhaps, these rumored changes in Cataclysm.

I’m sorry, but your memories of the old world are probably filled with nostalgia. The expansion content was designed with the mistakes they made in old world WoW in made. So, for example, there are no Shredder Operating Manual or Green Hills of Stranglethorn quests, there are no quests that sent you back and forth three times from the quest giver to the same place, like the Harpy killing quests in the Barrens, there aren’t quest chains that require you to go to the other continent to progress, like the Hammer of Zul’farrak or freeing Myzrael, hell, even the Nesingwary quests in WotLK were a lot better than the ones in vanilla WoW or TBC.

Also, yeah, your first run through Deadmines at 19 is going to be awesome and memorable, but it’s not because Deadmines is not (necessarily) superior in design or anything, but it’s because it’s your first instance run when you’re new and everything’s new and interesting to you. For me, it was Razorfen Kraul, Zul’farrak, Sunken Temple, but it’s not because they were super-awesome and well-designed here.

On the topic of revamping the old world, I don’t believe it NEEDS a revamp, say, because while it has flaws, it’s still good content, but I think there is enough wriggle room for the revamp without making quite as much work as you are thinking. Chances are they’ll probably keep the majority of the quests the same and alter, change, or remove some of the ones that could really need it. For example, something like moving Mankrik from the Crossroads to Camp Taurajo would be fairly easy and make a lot more sense.

(But I always go through Azshara on my alts because I like the zone so much )

I don’t get that. You have to examine why you are playing this game. Is it to level quickly? To what end? It isn’t as if any of the current end-game content is as coherent and well-thought-out as the original old-world content in WoW. Nothing in post-60 content can match, say, your first trip to the Deadmines instance at level 19. Why would anyone want to skip game content after they paid for it?

Frankly, as Longasc already noted, content added in TBC and WotLK have an “expansion” feel. They just aren’t as good as old-world content. So why would anybody want to skip it?

The only people who might want to do so are those levelling their nth alt. These are the guys who are banging on in forums about how long it takes to level, and asking if something couldn’t be done to make it faster – Blizzard’s response is DKs, and even that doesn’t satisfy them. Newbies aren’t asking for this. Many aren’t even aware that anybody is asking for it. They’re too busy enjoying the best part of the game!

http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=10236

Face it, 1-60 was what made WoW great, the original WoW. TBC and WOTLK already began having that “expansion” character for veterans and Karazhan plus flying mounts still top the awesome landscapes and quests of WOTLK. I also loved the exotic world of Outland, dunno why but I loved it more than WOTLK.

Oh, I am deviating from topic again…
BACK…:

Still, what does a Cataclysm do to a level 80 char?
Flying over an awesome revamped low level, say a flooded thousand needles, in a dragon is exciting for the short time you need to take a look.

It is probably more fun to start a new char and play that old yet new content again.

Maybe they plan something like Guild Wars Hard Mode: They revamped ALL zones to be max level extra hard content. So your level 80 char could enter a “phase portal” and gate back to the new Azeroth, where every zone is level 80-85.

But this sounds like too much work and so unlikely that I do not believe it myself.

Usual rant: Getting away from levels and classes and making an Ultima Online style world would not devaluate all old zones and only make the max level dungeons and the few near max level zones interesting for players. With every expansion, the percentage of playable/interesting content in WoW gets smaller through this system. The bane of the DIKUMUD, the need for neverending progression and the trail of depleted low level zones it leaves in its wake.

Good article Spinks